Samantha Vinograd, a former senior national security advisor under President Obama, intoned Monday on CNN that in light of the previous week’s indictment of 13 Russian trolls, “We are under live attack and we’re doing nothing.”
Now, we know about these semi-hapless Russian trolls because Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Friday announced they had been indicted for “conspiracy to defraud the United States” over their meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Solemnly stating they’d committed “information warfare” against America, Rosenstein’s statement and the actual indictment made it apparent that the 2016 Russian effort was very limited in size and scope, with roughly 80 Russians in total, who together had managed to spend several million dollars.
Rosenstein’s announcement, with its pointed use of “unwitting” to describe any interaction with the Russians, was yet another nail driven in the coffin of the Trump-Russia collusion fairytale.
If one were taking the Democrats and their allies in press at their word for the the last 14 months you would have thought there was collusion at the very highest levels of the Trump campaign and a literal invasion of Russians meddling with the American elections: “The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming! We’re under live attack!” Amazingly the Russian footprint was so small in 2016 that were it not for the “helpful” screaming of bloody murder by those hoping to distract from Democrat malfeasance, we’d likely never even have known about it.
The Russian “information warfare” as it pertained to Facebook ads was a whopping total of $46,000 before Election Day 2016. That included targeted buys of $300 in Pennsylvania and $832 in Michigan—or basically what a B-evel actor would spend on a promoted post for a day.
Some of the Russians’ ads were so bad they got a total of 14 clicks. With the Clinton and Trump campaigns spending $81 million combined on Facebook ads, and the total expenditures in the 2016 election between presidential and congressional campaigns coming to almost $6.5 billion, we’re somehow expected to believe that this is really warfare? It’s like the Russians threw a pebble into the great monetary ocean of the U.S. elections and the Left and mainstream media screamed that it caused a tsunami.