BUT the core answer to Russian political warfare which is definitely being directed right now at this very moment the US ...I could show you if you were in Berlin an attack ongoing since early morning US time against a power grid in the US coming out of deep Russia via four different cutouts....which is successfully being deflected from here and out of Europe BTW not the US.
This is the real world of kinetic activity that the previous quote refers to....and that is daily now...and silence out of Trump WH...
I have my biases and it is one of having the earned right to those biases when it comes to the defense of democracy.....and if I recall correctly I warned about Trump being elected. I took and still take the sentence in the oath....defend against domestic and foreign enemies seriously..
I like that I no longer have to ask permission to respond....as I own the response and it is my decision....
We spent the last week basically blocking Russian control servers handling a massive botnet which was supporting Le Pen on the info war front...so yes there was a hardcore hand at work....and no support came out of the US for these efforts....
So on the European populist front....Wilders blocked in the Netherlands...Le Pen down 26 points and will not make it....Austrian FPO lost even though winning first time around...German AfD down in polls to 7% from a high of 14% and going even more far right since yesterday.....
Europe is doing a rather good job of pushing back on the far right populism and the US response has been?
BTW...26 US proTrump twitter accounts were identified by us as being involved in this active Russian influence operations botnet effort....which had supported Trump in his campaign and now are suddenly "involved in France"???
We tracked a series of Russian started comments into the US and then suddenly watched them being picked up by these US proTrump accounts and fired back into France...coincidence...hardly....
Is it not strange that the majority of efforts to track/stop Russian influence ops with their fake news and fake/info war social media messaging comes out of Europe and not the US.....why is that?
Why is it that the democracies of Europe are far more involved in this "kinetic fight" than the democracy of the US?
This goes BTW to your political warfare thoughts...and not carried much in the US MSM was it?
They generate black cash for black ops; they carry out assassinations.
They smuggle weapons; they carry out cyberattacks.
And they run all sorts of errands the Kremlin wants to keep its fingerprints off.
Meet Russia's nationalized and weaponized organized crime syndicates -- a deadly tool of statecraft for a highly criminalized state.
On this week's Power Vertical Podcast, we discuss co-host Mark Galeotti's new report for the European Council on Foreign Relations:
Crimintern: How The Kremlin Uses Russia's Criminal Networks In Europe.
http://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summ...orks_in_europe
Quoted in the article..by a Russian criminal who claimed to have quit in 2016...
"In Russia we have power and safety...in Europe we have wealth and comfort"...
BTW here is a chart of some of those proTrump accounts supporting actively this week Le Pen.....up through mid day yesterday French time...:D
So explain to me why a GOP Tennessee twitter account under Ten_GOP is supporting a far right anti Semitic nationalist French political party which has nothing to do with US politics?
BTW...this twitter account had been relatively "quiet" then suddenly spiked in tweet numbers starting the morning time for Paris...coincidence?
Or were they just out there supporting Trumps' own Le Pen tweet?