Trump Campaign Asks Staff to Stop Leaking Already in Desperate Memo (2024)

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance still follows a self-proclaimed historian who this week claimed that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of World War 2”—not Adolf Hitler.

Vance follows Darryl Cooper from both of his accounts on X (formerly Twitter).

Cooper drew increased attention Tuesday after X CEO and fascism enthusiast Elon Musk promoted Tucker Carlson’s interview with the controversial figure on his podcast, calling it “Very interesting. Worth watching.” After the interview was criticized by figures on the right and left, Musk deleted his tweet, but not before both he and Carlson were attacked for giving pro-Nazi propaganda a platform, especially since Carlson said Cooper “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”

As more scrutiny was focused on Cooper’s views, particularly his white nationalist sympathies, X user @styledape discovered two prominent followers of Cooper’s @martyrmade X account: @JDVance and @SenVancePress.

The fact that Vance follows such a personality suggests that he may hold similar views to Cooper but begs the question of why the Ohio senator would continue to follow him on two major social media accounts. Then again, Vance’s addition to Donald Trump’s presidential ticket has been followed by some damaging revelations from the past few years.

A website called KBSF-San Francisco News painted a horrible picture: According to the site, then–California Attorney General Kamala Harris hit a 13-year-old girl with her car in 2011, fleeing the scene before she could be caught or identified. The site included a video, credited to KBSF-TV, of a young woman in a wheelchair—the alleged victim, Alicia Brown—recalling the harrowing moments after their vehicles collided.

Except none of it appears to be real.

There is no KBSF-TV in San Francisco, and, according to a BBC Verify investigation, the original website that published the story was registered less than two weeks ago. The photograph attached to the article, which supposedly depicted the crash itself, was actually snapped in Guam in 2018. And the video of Brown—whom the article and video misname several times—also appears to be a deepfake. The x-ray images of Brown’s spine, allegedly taken after the accident, can be traced back to medical journals that have no relation to the supposed crash.

Strangely, it’s not the only recent instance of a wildly fabricated story taking root against Democrats. Behind the operation is John Mark Dougan, a former Florida cop who has since relocated to Moscow to work full-time inventing fake news sites in an effort to spread misinformation among American voters ahead of the 2024 election, according to the BBC.

Another site launched by Dougan, The Houston Post, accused the FBI of illegally wiretapping Donald Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. Other sites bore equally American names, including the Chicago Crier, Boston Times, and DC Weekly. According to the BBC, most of the stories posted on the sites were not necessarily fake, but rather poor copies of actual news items that had been reworked by A.I. engines. Some of the articles still sported the user’s instructions to the bot at the bottom of the text, at the time of the BBC’s investigation: “Please rewrite this article taking a conservative stance.”

“Russia will be involved in the U.S. 2024 election, as will others,” Chris Krebs, who oversaw election integrity during the 2020 presidential election as director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, warned the BBC.

“We’re already seeing them—from a broader information operations perspective on social media and elsewhere—enter the fray, pushing against already contentious points in U.S. politics,” he said.