Harris Targeted in Insane Russia-Backed Crime Conspiracy

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.

Many Republicans would be fine with, and even hope for, Donald Trump’s defeat on Election Day, according to a report from Politico.

Some of the GOP’s elected representatives and commentators don’t want a second Trump term, fearing a shift away from fiscal conservatism and free-market economics, disagreeing with his mercurial stances on in vitro fertilization and abortion rights, and seeing his foreign policy stances as dangerous, the report states.

“There’s a lot of anxiety about what Trump does to Republican ability to win in 2028—and what he also may do to the party in terms of policy long-term,” one of these conservatives said to Politico. “There is just this concern that like, ‘OK, if the party just goes in that direction, then what kind of party is it going forward? And can conservatives, then, have a home going forward?’”

According to Politico, it’s not only Never Trumpers who would be fine with the convicted felon losing, but also some of the leaders in the party’s mainstream who don’t want to oppose Trump publicly but who see a Trump loss as a chance for the Republican Party to move on from the Trump era.

“I think a lot of old-school conservatives might hope that if he loses, there’s an opportunity to just completely forget the last eight years happened,” the same conservative leader said. “I think this battle’s coming in the party no matter what.”

But even if Trump loses, the GOP may not be able to move on. He could still get involved in politics with a simple Truth Social post or phone call from Florida, or he might want to run for president a fourth time in 2028. He would have to lose big to also hurt his stature and diminish his future political prospects, and to undercut his inevitable claim that yet another election was stolen from him. 

There’s also the fact that the MAGA ideology Trump created will persist even without him, which would still give many Republican leaders headaches. Trump’s acolytes in Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, will probably still be around, along with devotees in state politics around the country. The Republican Party may be stuck with Trumpism, even if Trump is defeated in November.

When it comes to targeting and correcting misinformation on social media, X users are totally on their own—even, or maybe especially, when that misinformation is coming from Elon Musk, the company owner.

On Monday, Musk shared an A.I.-generated image of Vice President Kamala Harris dressed in a red uniform with a hammer and sickle insignia, the symbol of the Soviet Union.

“Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?” Musk captioned the image that he distributed to his 196 million followers.

Musk was responding directly to a post made by Harris’s official account that misquoted Donald Trump from a December town hall, in which Trump said he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day One.” And yet, regardless of Musk’s political messaging, his decision to broadcast a realistic, fabricated image of the Democratic presidential nominee to millions of Americans is troubling—especially considering that the site’s content safety net, Community Notes, was conveniently not working for the misleading post.

Comments underneath Musk’s post attempted to serve their own community note, given the failure of the site’s moderation services.

“COMMUNITY NOTE: This is an AI generated photo and misinformation,” wrote one user who received 23,000 likes on their comment.

Others were highly critical of how Musk was leveraging his massive platform.

“You don’t think this type of extreme manipulation at best, flat out lie at worst isn’t dangerous coming from the richest person on earth that happens to own one of the largest platforms? Doesn’t all the money and power come with more responsibility?” wrote former Florida Senate candidate Mike Harvey.

“Are you testing community notes?” asked political commentator Ed Krassenstein.

The billionaire purchased the social media behemoth for $44 billion, with the help of massive bank loans. Under his control, Musk has introduced radical changes to the site, including laying off 75 percent of its employees, crippling its verification system, and changing the algorithm to promote more advertisements, irrelevant content, and antisemitism. Over the weekend, major stakeholders in X began to share their discontent with Musk’s leadership, arguing that the 53-year-old and his spontaneous decisions had created a “tremendous amount of wealth destruction” for the site’s investors.

A group of Christian nationalists will be working the polls across the country this election season.

A group called “Lion of Judah,” led by self-described Republican opposition researcher Joshua Standifer, is traveling the nation to recruit Christians to “key positions of influence in government like Election Workers.” The group plans to stop what they believe will be widespread election fraud in November as “the first step on the path to victory this Fall.”

The Guardian obtained the Lion of Judah’s election worker training program, featuring a series called “Fight the Fraud: How to Become an Election Worker in 4 Easy Steps!” In it, the group asks poll workers to report “suspicious activities or irregularities” to the Lion of Judah’s “fraud hotline” first, and then tell their local authorities.

To spread the gospel during his “Courage Tour,” Standifer has traveled with Christian nationalist preachers and pro-Trump figures to sow fear about election fraud in swing states, including Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan.

The group’s work has gone largely unnoticed, even as local officials in those states make it easier to challenge election results. Last month, for example, the Georgia state election board made it simpler for county election officials to delay or refuse to certify election results.

“Just imagine: it’s election night. Chaos is happening. The polls are closing—they go and volunteers are getting kicked out,” said Standifer on one of his Courage Tour stops. “But what if we had Christians across America, in swing states like Wisconsin, that were actually the ones counting the votes?”

In the same speech in Wisconsin, Standifer described the strategy to train Christians as election workers as “a Trojan horse.”

“They don’t see it coming.”

For the past week, Donald Trump has been repeating the same story about a Venezuelan gang supposedly taking over a residential building in Colorado—but everyone, from the residents to the police, says that the story is complete fiction.

Residents of The Edge at Lowry Apartments in Aurora, Colorado, held a press conference Tuesday to hit back at right-wing claims that their building has been taken over by a violent Venezuelan gang.

Last week, a video that appeared to show armed gang members speaking Spanish and storming into an apartment complex began circulating online. The video was boosted by City Council member Danielle Jurinksy and Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, who took to Facebook to call for an emergency court order to clear the building. The story was promptly picked up by conservative media outlets and then dutifully regurgitated by Trump as an anti-immigrant talking point.

During his chaotic messaging event in Potterville, Michigan, on Friday, the Republican presidential nominee referred to the “skit” video as evidence of a worsening immigration crisis, which he argued has led to an increase in violent crime. In reality, violent crime is at its lowest levels in five years.

“You haven’t seen even the beginning of this migrant crime,” Trump said, according to KFOX14. “And you know, they have a hat that said, ‘Trump was right about everything,’ and I have to say, I pretty much was right about everything.”

The Aurora Police Department posted a video statement Saturday that debunked the outrageous story.

“We’ve been talking to the residents here, and learning from them to find out what exactly’s going on, and there’s definitely a different picture,” said Interim Chief Heather Morris.

“I’m not saying that there’s not gang members that don’t live in this community, but what we’re learning out here is that gang members have not taken over this complex.”

Morris said she’d also been told that residents were not paying rent to gang members, as some on the right had speculated.

On Monday, Coffman, following up on his blatant fearmongering, also visited The Edge and said that although conditions were bad, residents weren’t afraid of gang violence. Instead, they just wanted the building to be maintained. He baselessly suggested that the building was run down because management had been “chased” off the premises.

During their press conference to set the record straight, Edge residents disputed the right-wing claims that their building had been taken over by a Venezuelan gang. Residents said that they were living in uninhabitable conditions as a result of neglect from CBZ Management, which was also responsible for another Aurora building where there was a mass eviction last month, according to Denver7.

Oscar Rojas, a tenant who is from Venezuela, told Denver7 that the right-wing firestorm made him feel targeted. “I’m scared to go out. They’re accusing all of us at the complex of being in gangs, and this is completely false,” Rojas told the outlet. “It’s completely false. There are good people here, families. There’s always going to be crime everywhere.”

Even though the story has proved to be false, there is little indication that Trump will stop telling it. Even after the police came out with their statement, Trump referred to “tough young thugs” who were “taking over buildings” with their “big rifles” during a conspiracy theory–laden podcast interview on Tuesday.

“We’re not going to let this happen,” Trump said. “We’re not going to let them destroy our country.” He then seamlessly transitioned into his stand-by line about immigrants coming from foreign prisons, jails, and mental institutions.

The same day, Trump started pushing another story that turned out to be fake. On Monday, a 911 call alleged that 32 Venezuelan gang members had overrun an apartment building in Chicago, bringing motorcycles into the courtyard, filling the stairwells, and flashing firearms at residents. Several far-right social media accounts boosted the outlandish call, including Libs of TikTok and Elon Musk.

When officers arrived at the building, they found no migrants with guns or motorcycles, a source told The Chicago Tribune’s Armando L. Sanchez. Residents in the area and migrants living at the building confirmed to the Tribune that the claims in the call were completely unfounded.

Trump’s wild, ultimately baseless stories about migrant crime are likely to continue, and reproduce into more and more unsupported claims to fit the former president’s anti-immigrant narrative.