Russian disinformation campaign helped spread political conspiracy theory

now to an example of why Russian interference in our campaigns is such a big worry ed O'Keefe tells us how a senseless murder in Washington quickly spiraled into a high level political conspiracy which today we learned was all due to Russian trolls CBS News has confirmed a Russian disinformation campaign helped push a bogus theory that Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign had paid to murder a Democratic National Committee Stanford police believe the victim 27 year-old Seth rich was killed after an attempted robbery three years ago in Washington details of Russia's involvement are outlined in a new report

by Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News who spent a year investigating we found that Russian trolls in st. Petersburg tweeted and retweeted about set more than two thousand times the story resonated with conservative commentators and Russian media outlets a brand new bombshell in the murder of DNC staffers Seth rich in the middle of the night and police have no leads and it also found its way to the White House Steve Bannon a former senior advisor to President Trump in March 2017 text to the 60 minutes producer about the rich case calling it a huge story and

claiming that it was a contract kill obviously the 60 Minutes producer confirmed receiving the texts but 60 minutes never pursued the story the theory has been debunked by local police and the FBI it shows just how easy it is to manipulate news in this new era of social media so we should expect to see attempts to do this again during the 2020 campaign anybody that wants to manipulate American public opinion planting phony stories on social media is the way to do it whoever killed Seth rich remains at large his is one of more than 200

unsolved murders here in Washington in the three years since he was killed Jim thank you very much