Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker and former Democratic Attorney General Eric Holder called Friday for a federal investigation into an apparent effort by Russian-backed Twitter trolls to stoke racial divisions in Milwaukee following an August 2016 police shooting in the city’s Sherman Park neighborhood.
Twitter accounts linked to a St. Petersburg entity called the Russian Internet Research Agency, including one named @TEN_GOP — apparently created to confuse people into thinking it was the official account for the Tennessee Republican Party — published tweets claiming that Black Lives matter activists were boasting of having killed a National Guardsman after the shooting sparked riots, according a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report. No guardsman had been deployed, however.
Eric Holder, former President Barack Obama’s attorney general, said the government should probe the incident. “I think it’s incumbent upon people both at the state level and the federal level to hold hearings, to find exactly who was behind that and what was the impact of that effort,” he said.
Walker spokeswoman Amy Hasenberg said the governor would like to see a federal probe into the incident. “We believe it is outrageous that any foreign interests would try to cause disruption in our communities and hope the federal government will spend time looking into this interference.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller issued an indictment against the Russian Internet Research Agency last month on charges of conspiracy to interfere in the U.S. elections.
