I AM Sidney Blumenthal. At least, that is what Russian President Vladimir Putin—and, somehow, Donald Trump—seems to believe. And that should raise serious concerns not only about Moscow’s attempts to manipulate this U.S. presidential election, but also about how Trump wound up pushing false information from an altered document to American voters.
An email purported to be from Blumenthal—a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man at the center of many conservative conspiracy theories— turned up in the October 7 document dump by WikiLeaks. American intelligence has repeatedly warned that Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the election, and many records stolen from multiple Democratic Party organizations have been fed to WikiLeaks, but now that I have been brought into the whole mess, Newsweek has more evidence suggesting that the Russians are involved in this cyberwar...and are really dumb.
All this emerged due to the incompetence of Sputnik—the Russian online news and radio service established by the government-controlled news agency Rossiya Segodnya—which took words written by me for Newsweek over a year ago and attributed them to Blumenthal.