In an early Friday morning statement posted to his Twitter account, Donald Trump blamed protests against his nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court on a conspiracy backed by the 88-year-old billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros. But the source of Trump’s conspiracy theory appears to be the Russian state media propaganda outlet RT .
In his Twitter post, Trump also referenced two women who confronted Republican Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator on Friday, as The Hill reported, telling him that they were sexual assault survivors. The women, Trump said, were “paid professionals.”
“The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad,” Trump wrote on his Twitter account. “Don’t fall for it! Also, look at all of the professionally made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love!”
Trump’s Twitter post was time-stamped at 8:03 a.m. on Friday, October 5. But Trump’s claims in the statement appear strikingly similar to an article that appeared on RT Thursday afternoon. The headline on the RT article, which appeared online without a byline, read, “Grassroots outrage? Soros-funded activists behind anti-Kavanaugh campaign.”
The alleged link between anti-Kavanaugh protests appears to date back even further than the Russian media claim, however, as conservative journalist John Fund seems to have originated the conspiracy theory on September 24, when he accused that Kavanaugh accuser Deborah Ramirez of links to Soros, according to the legal site Law & Crime .
But Fund quickly retracted that claim and apologized, according to The Wrap .
The conservative writer was not finished with the Soros conspiracy theory, however, publishing a National Review article reprinted by The New York Post — linking the two women who confronted Flake in an elevator, Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher, to Soros.
The two women told Flake about their own experiences as sexual assault survivors and pleaded with him to oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination, as Gallagher herself described in a New York Times op-ed essay published on Thursday.
PART 2: @AnaMariaArchil2 @CPDAction and hero Maria shared their powerful personal stories with @JeffFlake to demand that he vote no on Kavanaugh. #StopKavanaugh #KavanaughHearings @BeAHeroTeam @AdyBarkan pic.twitter.com/6b0xF9VNZX
— Make the Road Action ? (@MaketheRoadAct) September 28, 2018
The New York Post is owned by billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who is also a friend of Trump, as The Guardian reported, saying, “Trump has been good business for the media mogul, but their association goes back decades and stems from one thing: ‘These men value only power.’”
The RT article claimed that viral videos of Gallagher and Archila’s confrontation with Flake, have been “framed as grassroots activism, but they were actually made by an organization that receives massive funding from George Soros.”
