A panelist at the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s hearing shocked the room Thursday when he claimed Republican Sen. Marco Rubio was also a target of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Clint Watts, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute Program on National Security, said most of the Kremlin’s disinformation efforts were targeted at candidates who had strong anti-Russian views.
“Sen. Rubio, in my opinion, you anecdotally suffered from these efforts,” Watts told the Florida senator.
Rubio was a well-known Russia hawk during his campaign for the presidency before abandoning his bid in March.
In the afternoon session, Rubio said that just after announcing his run for reelection to the Senate in July of 2016, he was made aware that many of the computers of his campaign associates who had access to critical databases and information were “targeted by I.P. addresses with an unknown location within Russia,” Rubio said. “That effort was unsuccessful,” he added.
“I’d also inform the committee that within the last 24 hours, at 10:45 A.M. yesterday, a second attempt was made, again, against former members of my presidential campaign team who had access to our internal information — again, targeted from an I.P. address from an unknown location within Russia, and that effort was also unsuccessful,” Rubio added.
During his testimony, Watts also talked about fake news or stories had some truth to them but also contained other falsehoods. Those stories would then be amplified in social media through the use of social media profiles built up by the Russian propaganda machine.
