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Thread: Watching the government shitting themselves and engineering story after story to try and dilute the coming Russia Report revelations is really quite funny. But this method of flooding the compliant media with other news DOES work ... and it's dangerous. 1/
2/ They know that the majority of the public are just far too busy trying to earn money, pay the mortgage, bring up children, drinking themselves to death ... news to most is just a noise in the background unless the story is huge. They have so much support from most newspapers
3/ But they do stuff online too. Clever stuff. Do you remember when Boris did that interview where it looked like he'd gone mental and rambled incoherently about building buses out of cardboard boxes? That interfered with the keywords Boris and Bus on social media algorithms.
4/ That was right a a time when people were citing his 350 million for the NHS lie on a bus and Brexit was forefront of the news. It was so bizarre that people started talking about it a lot (inc online) - and that affected the online results for searches for Boris + Bus.
5/ Today they have tried this by using their position to create an alternative story about Russian Interference in our Democracy the day after they lost control of the release of the #RussiaReport which will reflect very badly on the Conservative Party.
6/ Their story, prompted by the Foreign Secretary's statement in parliament announcing an investigation in to what is 6 month old news, that details of the UK-US trade talks were leaked. They are framing it as Russians interfering in the 2019 election by giving Corbyn information
7/ It wasn't "given to Corbyn" ... it was leaked on the internet for anyone to find. But this is a clear attempt again to meddle with search engine results for (Russian, Interference, Report, Democratic, etc.) such that it dilutes the focus on the well documented ...
8/ ... uncomfortable closeness between the Conservative Party, current elected and non-elected members of government and Russian oligarchs with close links to Putin. A short recap of this dangerous connection to a dangerous country will follow.
9/ Introducing Sergey Nabolin. This man describes himself as "good friends with Boris Johnson", the son of a former KGB general Nikolai Nabolin who is suspected of being responsible for the death of Litvinenko. This was part of a group called Conservative Friends of Russia.
10/ More details about Johnson's Russian connections via Conservative Friends of Russia can be found here ... there is a lot about it on the internet. https://www.businessinsider.com/suspected-russian-spy-pictured-with-his-good-friend-boris-johnson-2018-2?r=US&IR=T
11/ Then there's Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of one of Vladimir Putin's ex-ministers who has paid a staggering total of £1.6 million to the Tory party in exchange for several games of tennis with Johnson (and David Cameron) and dinner with Johnson. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/27/lubov-chernukhin-tories-tennis-record-donor-uk-russia
12/ Chernukhin's donations include £325,000 earlier this year just after Johnson refused to release the Russia report. She's not the only one by a long shot though. This article has a good list of the donations to Tories from Russian oligarchs. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/revealed-russian-donors-have-stepped-tory-funding/
13/ So back to Conservative Friends of Russia. Launched in 2012 by Matthew Elliott who is interesting. He was CEO of Vote Leave when Dominic Cummings was running the campaign and was parachuted in to the treasury before Savid Javid was sacked. More here https://twitter.com/squeezyjohn/status/996290883694878721?s=20
14/ On the face of it this group was set up to promote closer ties with Russia. There were already large numbers of Russian oligarchs and millionaires living in London. However its closeness to the Russian regime became unpalatable to parliament and it was short lived.
15/ And then there's Dominic Cummings ... there's always Dominic Cummings. What was he really doing in Russia for a 3 year gap in his CV between leaving university and coming back to the UK to work in politcal campaigning? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dominic-cummings-russia-whistleblower-boris-johnson-investigation-labour-a9183236.html
16/ Are we really to believe that it was to set up an airline? A history graduate just going to post Soviet Russia to set up an airline and then coming back and immediately getting involved in politics? He expects us to believe he drove to Barnard Castle to check his eyes!!!
17/ This thread is rambling on and on because there's just so much to say. But as I'm writing it, I've just heard another keyword-diluting news story that Russia are trying to steal Coronavirus scientific research from us. Hmmm... I wonder why that story broke today?
18/ Keep your eyes on the prize and don't let the Tories pull the wool over your eyes. We've been demanding they release the #RussiaReport for a year now. It's going to be released next week. Shout about it.
