Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was told during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday that his presidential campaign was likely derailed by Russian government efforts to influence the outcome of the election.
Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, made the claim during opening remarks at a committee hearing entitled, “Disinformation: A Primer in Russian Active Measures and Influence Campaigns.”
“Russia’s overt media outlets sought to oppose it with adversarial views of the Kremlin. They were in full swing during the Republican and Democratic primary season that may have sinked the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed,” Watts said.
“Senator Rubio, in my opinion, you anecdotally suffered from these efforts.”
Watts, a former FBI special agent, also discussed research on Russia’s use of automatic bots to disseminate disinformation to “unwitting” Westerners.
“American-looking social-media accounts, the hecklers, honeypots, and hackers described above, working alongside automated bots further amplify and disseminate Russian propaganda amongst unwitting Westerners,” said Watts, who also serves as a senior fellow for the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University.
“These covert, ‘black’ operations influence target-audience opinions with regards to Russia and undermine confidence in Western elected leaders, public officials, mainstream-media personalities, academic experts, and democracy itself.”
Watts did not provide additional information about why he believes Rubio was targeted by the disinformation campaign. Rubio was considered a favorite to win the GOP nomination last year, but he dropped from the race in March after failing to win even his home state.
In the hearing, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, claimed that the committee has evidence that the Russian government deployed thousands of bots to spread disinformation aimed at influencing the election.
“The Russians employed thousands of paid Internet trolls and botnets to push out disinformation and fake news at a high volume focusing this material onto Twitter and Facebook feeds and flooding social media with misinformation,” Warner said.
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