‘Twitter Files’: Democrats were warned Russian bot theory was false

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Democratic lawmakers insisted Russian bots had overtaken Twitter and were being used to boost Republican talking points,despite warnings by platform executives that the claim was untrue, according to the latest installment of the “Twitter Files.”

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Twitter employees warned several top Democrats that their theory of a Russian troll takeover on the platform lacked evidence. The lawmakers peddled the assertion in an attempt to swat down the Republican-led House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s memo in 2018 that detailed FBI surveillance abuses against Trump insiders.

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Those warnings were outright ignored, Elon Musk’s latest batch of files revealed Thursday.

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Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat, wrote a separate open letter denouncing the Nunes memo adding that he found it “reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans.”

Those open letters were coupled with hit pieces by media outlets widely dismissing the Republican-led memo as a joke.

The lawmakers and media outlets uniformly pointed to a single source to back up their claims that Russian trolls were behind the flood of posts on Twitter calling for the release of the memo.

That source was the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s (ASD) “Hamilton 68” dashboard created by former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts.

Internal emails show Twitter executives widely dismissed the dashboard, calling it “a comes play for ASD.” Another employee said the lawmakers were “putting the cart before the horse assuming this is propaganda/bots.”

“I just reviewed the accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with #releasethememo and … none of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, wrote in an internal email.

One Twitter employee attempted to waive off a member of Mr. Blumenthal’s staff from making the claim because the company didn’t “believe these are bots.”

“It might be worth nudging Blumenthal’s staffer that it could be in his boss’ best interest not to go out there because it could come back to make him look silly,” another Twitter worker wrote in an internal email.

Mr. Blumenthal published his letter despite the warnings.

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