Donald Trump hits the panic button after Facebook begins cooperating with Trump-Russia investigation
After months of denials, Facebook has acknowledged that it sold political ad space to Russia during the election. Moreover, Facebook is now cooperating with the investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. It’s just a matter of time before the identities are revealed of the specific Russians who bought those ads, and any connections to the Trump campaign are exposed. So it’s notable that Donald Trump himself hit the panic button today over those ads.
As part of his Friday morning Twitter bender, Trump tweeted “The Russia hoax continues, now it’s ads on Facebook. What about the totally biased and dishonest Media coverage in favor of Crooked Hillary? The greatest influence over our election was the Fake News Media ‘screaming’ for Crooked Hillary Clinton. Next, she was a bad candidate!” This tells us a lot. Not one word of it is accurate, of course. But it tells us that Trump has specific reason to fear Facebook’s cooperation with investigators.
For one thing, there’s the embarrassment factor. The American public is about to see hard evidence that Trump only “won” the election because Russia was running fake ads pushing false information which misled voters. But there may be more to it. Trump’s level of consternation here suggests that he believes these ads will be traced back to his own people. Otherwise, why bring further attention to the story by preemptively denying it?
Donald Trump is behaving as if he expects the Russian Facebook ads to eventually become a much, much bigger story. He’s trying to preemptively taint the narrative by spinning it into a rant about the media and his opponent. Whenever Trump does this, another shoe usually drops before long. Mark Zuckerberg seemed spooked this week when he spoke about the matter in an online video he posted to Facebook. He now seems more than willing to give investigators whatever they need. This story is just getting started – and Trump just helped confirm it.
