Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

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The Daily 202: Trump gets tied to two forces targeting America: Russia, domestic extremism

By Olivier Knox
March 18, 2021 at 3:50 p.m. GMT
with Mariana Alfaro

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/18/daily-202-trump-gets-tied-two-forces-targeting-america-russia-domestic-extremism/

Welcome to The Daily 202 newsletter! Today, we look at the Biden administration's sharp criticism of Donald Trump's rhetoric. But don’t miss the latest on the former president's legal woes, and House action on immigration. Send me links to politics or policy stories you think deserve more attention! And tell your friends to sign up here.

Without calling Donald Trump out by name, President Biden’s administration this week has blamed racist language he used about the coronavirus for a surge in violence against Asian Americans, connected his entourage to Russian election meddling and tied some of his supporters to a rise in domestic extremism.

Hours after a 21-year-old man allegedly shot and killed eight people, including six Asian women, in the Atlanta area, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said rhetoric of the sort Trump has frequently used fed a surge in hate crimes.

“There's no question that some of the damaging rhetoric that we saw during the prior administration … calling covid … ‘the Wuhan Virus’ or other things, led to, you know, perceptions of the Asian American community that are inaccurate, unfair, [and] have … elevated threats against Asian Americans,” Psaki told reporters. She did not say that’s what motivated the suspect.

Trump, who dubbed the coronavirus “kung flu” during the 2020 campaign to the delight of his rally-goers, referred to the “China virus” as recently as Tuesday night in an interview with Fox News and a week ago in a written statement.

In the pandemic’s first 11 months, Asian Americans reported nearly 3,800 hate-related incidents in all 50 states, according to a report released Tuesday by Stop AAPI Hate.

Psaki’s comments came shortly after Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, joined by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, released a report warning of an “elevated threat” in 2021 from domestic violent extremists.

The report said extremists feed on traditional grievances — racism, hostility to government — but also other causes including “narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the US Capitol.”

It did not call out Trump by name, but he waged a months-long campaign to convince his supporters the only way he could lose in November 2020 was through fraud, and he egged on the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. He has yet to accept the legitimacy of Biden’s victory.

My colleague Ellen Nakashima notes: “[T]hat the White House has convened a process to deal with the challenge is significant, officials say privately, and stands in contrast to the previous administration, in which President Donald Trump was reluctant to condemn white-supremacist violence. He notably told the far-right Proud Boys group, which Canada last month declared a terrorist group, to ‘stand back and stand by.’”

On Tuesday, Haines released the intelligence community’s unclassified assessment of foreign threats to the 2020 U.S. election, accusing Russia of spreading disinformation about Biden and his family partly through Trump allies.

“A key element of Moscow's strategy this election cycle was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to launder influence narratives — including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden — through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration,” the assessment said.

As Nakashima reported: “The report does not identify those individuals by name, but it appears to reference Trump’s onetime personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose repeated meetings with a suspected Russian agent came under scrutiny by U.S. officials.”

It also does not explicitly say whether people around Trump knew they were being used by Russian intelligence to undermine Biden.

The report says “Russian proxies met with and provided materials to Trump administration-linked US persons to advocate for formal investigations” and “helped produce a documentary that aired on a US television network in late January 2020.”

The report did not name the documentary, but fiercely pro-Trump One American News Network ran “One America News Investigates — The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, And Mass Murder With Michael Caputo” in January 2020.

“Throughout the election, Russia's online influence actors sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud,” the report said. These activities continued after Nov. 3.

Despite the clamor from Trump and Republicans coast to coast, investigations have turned up no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Still, GOP-held state legislatures are pushing a wave of laws to restrict access to voting.

The ODNI election report also had what amounted to a warning to Biden: That Moscow views continuing influence operations against the United States “pose a manageable risk to Russia’s image.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/18/daily-202-trump-gets-tied-two-forces-targeting-america-russia-domestic-extremism/