New Mueller indictment spells trouble for Breitbart and Steve Bannon


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It has been previously reported that the FBI was scrutinizing conservative websites, including Breitbart News and InfoWars, to determine whether they may have assisted Russia’s cyber influence operation during the 2016 campaign.

More recently, in November 2018, the Washington Post reported that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team had interviewed Bannon about Stone — specifically, whether Stone had privately admitted to knowing in advance about WikiLeaks’ plans to release hacked emails during the 2016 presidential campaign.
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In addition to communicating generally about future WikiLeaks releases, the emails released by The Times show an apparent effort to coordinate messaging, as well as a discussion about a “targeted” campaign that Stone said he raised money for using a political organization structured to keep its donors secret.

In the final email sent from Stone on Oct. 4, 2016, he told Bannon to direct Trump campaign surrogates to spread his conspiracy theory alleging, without evidence, that Bill Clinton had a love child named Danney Williams. At the time, websites including InfoWars and Russian propaganda outlet RT were pushing the conspiracy theory referenced by Stone.

Stone also directed Bannon to “tell Rebecca [Mercer] to send us some $$$,” mentioning that he had developed a “targeted black digital campaign.”
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While Friday’s indictment doesn’t allege any wrongdoing on the part of Bannon, Breitbart, or Boyle, it does show that Mueller is aware that they were apparently involved in efforts to obtain information about WikiLeaks’ plans to release hacked Clinton campaign emails — and potentially to coordinate the Trump campaign’s messaging so it would align with the document dumps.

The involvement of a Breitbart editor also calls into question whether the media outlet coordinated with the Trump campaign to unofficially push out campaign messages.

Such coordination is among the issues that the FBI is reportedly investigating in its probe of whether right-wing outlets in America and/or Russian propaganda outlets were involved in Russia’s campaign to influence the election by strategically pushing disinformation aimed at hurting Hillary Clinton.- ShareBlue