19 Feb 2018 3:04 pm
Did they know?Trump Campaign Staffers Pushed Russian Propaganda Days Before the Election
Some of the Trump campaign’s most prominent names and supporters, including Trump’s campaign manager, digital director, and son, pushed tweets from professional trolls paid by the Russian government in the heat of the 2016 election campaign.
The Twitter account @Ten_GOP, which called itself the “Unofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans,” was operated from the Kremlin-backed “Russian troll farm,” or Internet Research Agency, a source familiar with the account confirmed with The Daily Beast.
The account’s origins in the Internet Research Agency were originally reported by the independent Russian news outlet RBC.
@Ten_GOP was created on Nov. 19, 2015, and accumulated over 100 thousand followers before Twitter shut it down.
The Daily Beast independently confirmed the reasons for @Ten_GOP’s account termination.
The discovery of the now-unavailable tweets presents the first evidence that several members of the Trump campaign pushed covert Russian propaganda on social media in the run-up to the 2016 election.