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You are here: Home / Archives for Dirty Tricks

Robocall Warns Detroit Voters of Mail Voting

August 27, 2020 at 4:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) is warning Detroit voters of a “racially charged” and false robocall that appears to be discouraging mail-in voting ahead of the November election, the Detroit News reports.

The recording tells voters that their personal information will be part of a public database that will then be used by police to track down people with warrants or debt.

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Dirty Tricks

The Real Backstory of Jerry Falwell’s Trump Endorsement

August 24, 2020 at 3:50 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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Filed Under: 2016 Campaign, Dirty Tricks, Members

College Democrats Plotted to Sink Primary Candidate

August 12, 2020 at 8:35 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

The Intercept: “The leadership of the University of Massachusetts Amherst College Democrats began discussing an operation they believed could sink the campaign of Alex Morse for Congress as far back as last October, a plan they then helped engineer and which came to fruition on Friday, after the College Democrats sent a letter regarding Morse to the Daily Collegian, the school’s student newspaper.”

“The letter, sent three weeks before his primary challenge to Rep. Richard Neal, informed Morse that he was no longer welcome at College Democratic events, alleging he used such opportunities to socialize with students and later connect with them on social media in ways that made them feel uncomfortable.”

“Leaders of the College Democrats group went beyond merely plans to leak. They also explicitly discussed how they could find Morse’s dating profiles and then lead him into saying something incriminating that would then damage his campaign.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Dirty Tricks

Roger Stone Accounts Banned From Facebook

July 8, 2020 at 3:05 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Facebook took down a network of more than 100 pages and accounts on Wednesday it said was affiliated with convicted felon and former Republican operative Roger Stone for ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’ dating back to around the 2016 election and its aftermath,” the Washington Post reports.

“Facebook officials said Stone, a longtime friend of President Trump and adviser to his first presidential campaign, used fake accounts and other deceptive measures to manipulate public debate. He also, in at least a small number of occasions, drew attention to posts made by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.”

Filed Under: Dirty Tricks

Right Wing Groups Fall for Internet Hoax

July 5, 2020 at 11:12 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“For weeks, a mysterious figure on social media talked up plans for antifa protesters to converge on this historical site on Independence Day to burn American flags, an event that seemed at times to border on the farcical,” the Washington Post reports.

“As word spread, self-proclaimed militias, bikers, skinheads and far-right groups from outside the state issued a call to action, pledging in online videos and posts to come to Gettysburg to protect the Civil War monuments and the nation’s flag from desecration. Some said they would bring firearms and use force if necessary.”

“On Saturday afternoon, in the hours before the flag burning was to start, they flooded in by the hundreds — heavily armed and unaware, it seemed, that the mysterious Internet poster was not who the person claimed to be.”

Filed Under: Dirty Tricks

Montana GOP Violated Campaign Laws In Dirty Trick

June 29, 2020 at 1:11 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“The Montana Republican Party and two minor party qualification committees violated state campaign finance laws in a successful effort to qualify the Green Party of Montana for the primary ballot without the Green Party’s knowledge,” the AP reports.

“The Montana GOP has acknowledged paying Advanced Micro Targeting $100,000 to gather signatures to certify the Green Party for the ballot. The money was also listed as an in-kind contribution to a group called Montanans for Conservation, which didn’t register as a minor party qualifying committee until after the Green Party was certified for the ballot on March 6.”

Filed Under: Dirty Tricks, Republicans

Dark Money Networks Pour Money Into Fake News

May 22, 2020 at 10:03 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“At a time when trustworthy journalism is more important than ever, political operations are pouring millions of ‘dark money‘ dollars into ads and digital content masquerading as news coverage to influence the 2020 election,” Open Secrets reports.

Filed Under: Dirty Tricks

Hackers Claim They Have ‘Dirty Laundry’ on Trump

May 15, 2020 at 9:19 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Page Six: “The ransom demand for the secret files of a cyber-attacked lawyer to A-list stars has doubled to $42 million — as the hackers now threaten to reveal ‘dirty laundry’ on President Trump in just a week if they are not paid in full.”

“Hacking group REvil got into his firm’s server and stole 756 gigabytes of confidential documents, including contracts and personal emails from a host of Hollywood and music stars. They also deleted or encrypted the firm’s backups. The only way they can be decrypted is to pay the criminals for a key.”

Filed Under: Dirty Tricks

GOP Accused of Sending Misleading ‘Census’ Forms

February 20, 2020 at 8:23 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

The Republican National Committee is sending documents labeled “2020 Congressional District Census” to people in California and across the country just weeks before the start of the official nationwide count of the country’s population, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Critics say the misleading mailers — in envelopes labeled “Do Not Destroy. Official Document” and including a lengthy questionnaire on blue-tinted paper similar to the type used by the real census — are designed to confuse people and possibly lower the response rate when the count begins in mid-March.

Filed Under: Dirty Tricks

Deepfake Video Surfaces In U.K. Election

November 12, 2019 at 7:23 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

A deepfake video shows Prime Minister Boris Johnson appearing to endorse Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for prime minister, and vice versa.

Filed Under: Dirty Tricks, Foreign Elections

RNC Paid to Tie Up Phones of Democratic Lawmakers

November 5, 2019 at 2:22 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

The RNC paid to generate thousands of calls to the congressional offices of nearly three dozen House Democrats in recent weeks, an effort that was aimed at both shaping opinion around the impeachment inquiry and tying up the phone lines of the elected officials, the New York Times reports.

Filed Under: Dirty Tricks

The Backstory on Katie Hill’s Nude Photos

October 31, 2019 at 12:33 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

The Los Angeles Times got the back story on how the nude photos of Rep. Katie Hill (D-CA) wound up online — and it includes GOP operatives who had previously worked for Steve Knight (R), her opponent for Congress.

“Conservative websites soon revealed that they had obtained some of Hill’s private texts and nude photos of her, including one with a campaign aide. The main authors of the articles, it turns out, were former campaign advisors to Steve Knight, the Republican congressman ousted by Hill a year ago.”

Filed Under: Dirty Tricks Tagged With: Katie Hill

Are Democrats Ready for What’s Coming In 2020?

September 20, 2019 at 10:15 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

First Read: “If this is what this looks like — and again, we don’t know the actual substance of the July 25 call — then it’s arguably worse than Watergate, when the dirty tricks were being conducted by Americans against Americans.”

“But this time, is the dirty trick a sitting president dangling aid to a foreign country to get it to investigate a rival campaign?”

“We learned from 2016 that the Trump campaign will do whatever it takes to win. Do national Democrats — who believe defeating Trump in 2020, not impeaching him, is the best way to remove him from office — understand what else we might see over the next 14 months?”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Dirty Tricks, Political History

How Assange Used Embassy for Election Meddling

July 15, 2019 at 4:06 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“New documents obtained exclusively by CNN reveal that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 US election, during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.”

“The documents build on the possibility, raised by special counsel Robert Mueller in his report on Russian meddling, that couriers brought hacked files to Assange at the embassy.”

“The surveillance reports also describe how Assange turned the embassy into a command center and orchestrated a series of damaging disclosures that rocked the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States.”

Filed Under: 2016 Campaign, Dirty Tricks

Study Suggests Russian Trolls Impacted Election

July 1, 2019 at 2:01 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“A new study found that for every 25,000 retweets that a known Russian troll account received during the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s poll numbers jumped 1%,” Axios reports.

“Retweets did not have a similar effect on Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.”

“Caveat: Correlation does not always mean causation. If a Trump talking point encouraged a particularly viral Tweet, for example, it may have also encouraged a change in Trump’s polling on its own.”

Filed Under: 2016 Campaign, Dirty Tricks

Trump Campaign Worker Behind Fake Biden Site

June 29, 2019 at 2:33 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

New York Times: “All the site says about its creator is buried in the fine print at the bottom of the page. The site, it says, is a political parody built and paid for ‘BY AN American citizen FOR American citizens,’ and not the work of any campaign or political action committee.”

“There is indeed an American behind the website — that much is unambiguously true. But he is very much a political player, and a Republican one at that. His name is Patrick Mauldin, and he makes videos and other digital content for President’s Trump’s re-election campaign. Together with his brother Ryan, Mr. Mauldin also runs Vici Media Group, a Republican political consulting firm in Austin whose website opens with the line ‘We Kick’ followed by the image of a donkey — the Democratic Party symbol often known by another, three-letter, name.”

Filed Under: Dirty Tricks

The GOP’s New Dirty Tricksters

June 5, 2019 at 11:05 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

The Washington Post profiles GOP operatives Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, who see their mission as smearing critics of the president.

“As it turns out, the truth or falsity of a Burkman-Wohl-concocted story is merely an inconvenience. Let the media’s ‘puritanical’ fact-checkers puzzle it out: That’s the view of this twosome who fancy themselves as sub rosa players in the 2020 presidential contest and busy themselves trafficking in Internet rumors they hope will damage Democratic candidates. Like notorious dirty tricksters before them, they operate in a realm where it matters little whether their claims are proved — they hardly ever are — but only whether they somehow slip into a corpuscle or two of the national bloodstream.”

“But today it’s a more dangerous game: They operate in an era when notions about truth and fiction have been upended and in which many Americans get their information from self-affirming, partisan silos, making their brand of political cyberwarfare hyper-relevant.”

Filed Under: Dirty Tricks

Schiff Warns Russia Will Unleash Fake Videos

June 4, 2019 at 3:21 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) said the Russian government “is likely to try to influence the 2020 presidential election, not through the release of stolen emails and other documents but through faked videos,” the New York Times reports.

He said that a carefully crafted, controversial fake video would be “hugely disruptive and hugely influential.”

“The risk is amplified because if a video is executed carefully, it can be hard to both prove it is fake and show where it came from.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Dirty Tricks, House of Representatives Tagged With: Adam Schiff

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About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

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