The mere act of reporting that Democratic voters are worried about presidential candidate Joe Biden catching the coronavirus – after President Donald Trump tested positive – apparently amounts to Russian meddling in US elections.
“Russian state media is amplifying concerns that Trump could have exposed Joe Biden to coronavirus at the debate,” wrote Dustin Volz of the Wall Street Journal on Friday.
“Public health experts have said this scenario is unlikely,” Volz notes, adding that US intelligence agencies have “assessed Russia is interfering in the election to harm Biden's campaign.”
The actual story Volz was tweeting about simply reported on the concerns shared on social media by a number of prominent Democrats.
Does that make comedian Kumail Nanjiani or actress Patricia Arquette “Russian assets”? If so, NYT contributor Wajahat Ali is certainly KGB, and former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul has finally been unmasked as a sleeper agent of the Kremlin!
In its article, RT quoted actual people who were concerned about Biden’s health. About an hour later, ABC News merely asserted that “new concerns surfaced” that Trump may have exposed Biden to Covid-19 during the debate on Tuesday, no sources provided. By the Wall Street Journal reporter’s logic, apparently that would mean ABC is run by Russian President Vladimir Putin personally. Those are the rules.
Volz, whose Twitter bio notes he writes “about a lot of three-letter agencies” (which means spies), feels the need to highlight a US intelligence “assessment” alleging Russian interference in the 2020 election.
That’s a strange thing to amplify in this context, given that a similar “assessment” said the same thing back in 2017 and also had an obsession with RT. That assessment then fueled the evidence-free ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory, which has since been repeatedly debunked – except in the minds of US journalists embedded with “three-letter agencies,” obviously.
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