US Republicans Orchestrated Smear Campaign To Win California Congressional Seats

Local US media is report­ing on how what are described as “polit­i­cal smears” helped to win four Cal­i­for­nia Con­gres­sion­al seats for Repub­li­cans. Accord­ing to the Cal­Mat­ters report, the infor­ma­tion cam­paign was orches­trat­ed by the Nation­al Repub­li­can Con­gres­sion­al Committee:

March 30, 2021 The sto­ry twist­ed facts and omit­ted con­text to fit a par­ti­san nar­ra­tive. It implied then-Cal­i­for­nia Rep. Gil Cis­neros engaged in crim­i­nal insid­er trad­ing and know­ing­ly prof­it­ed from con­fi­den­tial con­gres­sion­al coro­n­avirus brief­in­gs in the ear­ly days of the pandemic.Cisneros’ oppo­nent, now-Rep. Young Kim, issued a press release fea­tur­ing the sto­ry that was pub­lished Sept. 17 by the Cal­i­for­nia Globe, a par­ti­san news site. Kim also tweet­ed a link lat­er that day that was retweet­ed 32 times and post­ed the sto­ry on Face­book, where it was shared 52 times and gen­er­at­ed 40 com­ments attack­ing Cis­neros. She nev­er retract­ed the press release or the social media posts — not even when the Globe removed the sto­ry from its web­site in response to a let­ter from Cis­neros’ attor­neys. Not when Cis­neros pub­licly called on her to do so. Nor would her spokesper­son answer repeat­ed Cal­Mat­ters’ ques­tions about it.The dam­age was appar­ent once the votes were counted.Last fall, Repub­li­cans flipped four Cal­i­for­nia Con­gres­sion­al seats pre­vi­ous­ly held by Democ­rats. In addi­tion to Kim’s win in Orange Coun­ty, David Val­adao defeat­ed T.J. Cox in the San Joaquin Val­ley; Michelle Steel beat Harley Rou­da in Orange Coun­ty, and Mike Gar­cia defeat­ed Christy Smith in north­ern Los Ange­les Coun­ty. Although the races var­ied in their rhetoric, they had one thing in com­mon: the Nation­al Repub­li­can Con­gres­sion­al Com­mit­tee tar­get­ed all four Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates in dossiers post­ed pub­licly that were filled with infor­ma­tion, some of it false, used by some can­di­dates for neg­a­tive campaigning.

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Recent  Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ing on US infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions has included:

• A March report on how pro-Trump forces blamed “Antifa” for the vio­lence at the US Capitol.

• A Jan­u­ary report on the “QAnon Cau­cus” inside The Repub­li­can Party.

• A Jan­u­ary report on how the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion politi­cized intel­li­gence on for­eign elec­tion influence.