I talked to two people Russia recruited to help Trump. It's no hoax. | Opinion
Russia's role in the 2016 presidential campaign has been resuscitated by President Donald Trump in a desperate effort of deflection.
We here in Palm Beach County, Florida, have firsthand information that what President Donald Trump calls the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” was no hoax at all.
Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential campaign has been resuscitated by Trump in a desperate effort of deflection, as his own supporters call for transparency in the mountain of crimes against teenage girls still hidden in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
So, lately, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been bolstering the specious claim that Russian interference in the election of Trump in 2016 was mostly a fantasy cooked up by his political opponents in the United States.
Gabbard blames the Obama administration for changing the intelligence assessment to focus on, as she put it, “not if but how Moscow attempted to influence the outcome of the U.S. election.”
This would be a good time to point out to anybody who imagines Gabbard is being truthful that there is no “if” in Russia’s attempt to support Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.
There is only a “how” – and to acknowledge that isn’t treasonous. It’s historically undeniable.
Here's one way Russia got involved
If you don’t believe me, consider this: We here in Palm Beach County got a firsthand look at how Russian operatives used unwitting locals in an attempt to sway voters toward Trump.
In the summer of 2016, Anne Marie Thomas, a choir singer in Jupiter, and Harry Miller, a retiree from Leisureville in Boynton Beach, were recruited over the telephone to be key players in a political rally held at CityPlace in West Palm Beach a few months before the election.
These two politically active Trump supporters thought they were talking to college students from Texas who were organizing campaign events in Florida on that day. But according to a subsequent FBI investigation, the alleged U.S. college students were really operatives working out of a troll farm in Russia, organizing pro-Trump rallies in America.
The Russians used a Facebook group called “Being Patriotic” and a Twitter account called “March for Trump” to organize pro-Trump flash-mob rallies in about 20 Florida cities, the FBI later found.
"On August, 20, we want to gather patriots on the streets of Floridian towns and cities and march to unite America and support Donald Trump!" the Russian trolls posted on another social media site called "Florida Goes Trump.”
"Our flash mob will occur in several places at the same time."
Russian operatives paid these Florida residents hundreds
The Russian operatives sent Thomas a script and about $500 to $600, she later told me, to come up with a Hillary Clinton mask and a costume for herself.
Miller was likewise paid hundreds of dollars by the Russians, which he used to buy materials from Lowe's to build a cage in the back of his pickup, which would hold the imprisoned “Hillary” in the Russian-provided script.
Thomas and Miller were eager stooges for this political pageant.
“It was fun,” Miller later told me.
And it didn’t bother Miller, he said, that he was duped by Russians meddling in the U.S. election.
“How would I know the guy was Russian?” he told me. “He had an accent, but I thought he was one of those Muslims, and I figured, he was a new immigrant and I’d work with him because he wants to be involved.”
Thomas recruited her boyfriend to play Bill Clinton in their script, and came up with some of her own script enhancements in addition to the lines provided by the Russians.
“I wore a shirt that had prison number 09112012 on it,” Thomas told me about the date when a terrorist attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. “That was my idea.”
Russian election interference: There is no 'if,' only 'how'
The script had Thomas (Hillary) with a skillet in her purse, which she was supposed to use to clobber her boyfriend, dressed in a Bill Clinton mask, as he was trying to grope young women passing by.
“In the script I was supposed to say, ‘Where are my emails?’ and they gave me some jokes,” Thomas said.
Their little sidewalk pageant at CityPlace culminated in trying to get the crowd to chant “Lock her up!” and having Thomas being placed in Miller’s makeshift jail cell on his pickup.
The Russians that masterminded this CityPlace event asked for pictures and videos. I’m guessing they wanted a keepsake for their handiwork, and probably a chance to show off their election-meddling skills to their coworkers over celebratory shots of vodka.
This event came to light in 2018 when special counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies with interfering in the 2016 presidential elections through fake social media accounts that helped Trump.
Thomas and Miller were interviewed for hours by FBI agents, who found them to be unaware of their puppet masters.
"They're trying to connect Trump to Russia," Miller told me. "But I was the guy dealing with the Russians, not Trump."
So don’t let Trump and Gabbard – who has been called “our girlfriend Tulsi” on Russian state TV – get away with rewriting history to whitewash Moscow’s attempts to subvert our elections.
There is no “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax."
Russian campaign interference to help Trump happened right here in Palm Beach County. We have the receipts.
There is no “if.”
Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, where this column originally published. He can be reached at FCerabino@pbpost.com