CYBERSPACE—A fake Hillary Clinton “porn” video that was posted multiple times on the internet forum Reddit was actually created by the same Russian “troll farm” that was behind a multimillion-dollar social media propaganda campaign during the 2016 presidential election campaign, according to a report Tuesday by NBC News.
The video that purported to portray the Democratic candidate engaged in a sex act with a black man was posted to the Reddit forum /r/The_Donald, an aggressively pro-Donald Trump forum that has spread various conspiracy theories, including the fabricated “Pizzagate” story which claimed that Clinton in involved with a child sex ring run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza joint.
On the Reddit forum, the phony Clinton sex video was initially posted under the heading, “This is How Hillary gets black votes.” But the doctored “porn” tape was also posted to the tube site PornHub, where it received 250,000 views, according to NBC News. On Pornhub, the tape was labeled, “Leaked Hillary Clinton's Hotel Sex Tape with Black Guy.”
On Tuesday, Reddit announced that it had deleted 944 accounts that it had linked to the Russian organization known as the Internet Research Agency, including the account "Rubinjer," which originally posted the bogus Clinton “sex tape” on /r/The_Donald.
In February, Trump-Russia investigation Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals who worked for the Internet Research Agency, including the group’s chief financier Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch so closely linked to the country’s president Vladimir Putin that his is known as “Putin’s Chef.” The nickname stems from the fact that Prigozhin had been a well-known Moscow restaurateur who frequently served meals to Putin and quickly rose into Putin’s inner circle, becoming a billionaire.
Prigozhin has been under United States sanctions since December of 2016, for providing financial backing to Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine. He has been described by The Financial Times newspaper as “a shadowy figure whose resume reads like a grab bag of dirty tricks carried out in the name of Russian president Vladimir Putin… known for extensive pro-Kremlin side projects, doing everything from posting puerile memes about Barack Obama’s farts to involvement with the Russian military.”
Experts on Russia often assume that Prigozhin simply carries out Putin’s wishes, backing the various dirty tricks and other covert operations as a way of providing “plausible deniability” to Putin himself. The close tie between Prigozhin and Putin raises the possibility that the Russian leader may have actually approved or at least been aware of the bogus Hillary Clinton porn video.
The revelation from Reddit on Tuesday, however, was not the first time that the Clinton fake porn video has been publicly linked to Russian government-linked trolls. In October of last year, Alan Baskaev—a former Internet Research Agency paid “troll” who became a whistleblower—told a Russian independent TV station that the troll farm itself had produced the sex tape, hiring a lookalike to play the role of Clinton and a black man to perform as her co-star in the porn video.
Photos: Kremlin.ru/Lorie Shaull/Wikimedia Commons
