Trump Quotes Russian Propaganda To Rally Crowd

At an Oct. 10 campaign rally, Donald Trump read what he told his audience was an email excerpt from Hillary Clinton’s confidant Sidney Blumenthal and spoke to her responsibility in the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya. But he was actually reading a piece of Newsweek commentary mislabeled by a Russian news source.

“This just came out a little while ago,” Trump said, holding up a piece of paper at the Pennsylvania event, reports NPR. “I have to tell you this.”

He then read from what he described as an email from Blumenthal to Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta.

“One important point has been universally acknowledged by the nine previous reports about Benghazi: The attack was almost certainly preventable,” the Blumenthal email about the 2012 terrorist attacks reportedly says, according to the Washington Post. “Clinton was in charge of the State Department, and it failed to protect U.S. personnel at an American consulate in Libya. If the GOP wants to raise that as a talking point against her, it is legitimate.”

Trump then dropped the document to the floor and said that Blumenthal is “now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi.”

In an article that has since been taken down, Russian government-run Sputnik News published the quote on Oct. 10, describing it as “a major revelation from the second batch of WikiLeaks emails” from Podesta’s inbox, according to a screenshot from the Washington Post.

“Sidney Blumenthal believed that the investigation into Benghazi was legitimate because it was ‘preventable’ and the result of State Department negligence,” the article said.

The text did come from a Blumenthal email to Podesta, though the context was somewhat different — Blumenthal had, in fact, sent Podesta a Newsweek article by Kurt Eichenwald containing those words.

Eichenwald responded to the incident later in the day, writing in a follow-up article that it “should raise concerns about not only Moscow’s attempts to manipulate this election but also how Trump came to push Russian disinformation to American voters.”

“The Russians have been obtaining American emails and now are presenting complete misrepresentations of them — falsifying them — in hopes of setting off a cascade of events that might change the outcome of the presidential election,” he wrote. “The big question, of course, is why are the Russians working so hard to damage Clinton and, in the process, aid Donald Trump?”

The Trump campaign has not commented on the matter.

Sources: NPR, Washington Post, Newsweek / Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr