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Revolver’s own Darren Beattie recently raised a valid question to Team DeSantis seeking clarification concerning Ron’s stance on the debunked Russia Hoax — specifically regarding the hacking of the DNC. Here’s the question Darren posed along with a clip of DeSantis appearing on Fox News.

The official Team DeSantis communications team responded very angrily and publicly:

The official DeSantis War Room account chimed in:

The talking point was selected and then widely distributed among DeSantis followers: Darren Beattie was being “dishonest.” Click here to see the flood of Tweets to Darren Beattie accusing him of being “dishonest.”

Whether this was astroturfed or simply an organic response that followed the lead of the official DeSantis communications team is perhaps not important, but it is an interesting question. Here’s a sampling of the responses, which tend to adopt a leftist framework to attack Beattie, and sometimes Trump:

This dishonest trash is extremely disappointing coming from you. Someone I’ve had a lot of respect for.

DeSantis is not stupid enough to waste his time with your dishonest nonsense. It’s not going to work.

That’s a lie!! So dishonest, community notes!!!

Nope, this issue is settled. Play the rest of the clip, and read The Courage To Be Free. It’s all there. DeSantis defended Trump when few would. You are a dishonest hack

Actually you have been posting dishonest videos of him and getting noted in the process. But when you worship the Orange narcissist you apparently forget about reality

Very dishonest Mr Beattie. You left out a lot that shows DeSantis did not believe in the Russian collusion hoax. You should be on CNN and MSNBC where all the dishonest people go.

You guys are such dishonest bufoons. The Trump brand just stinks like hell to me because of this constant idiocy.

The fired Trump speechwriter turned dishonest media hack still trying to defend a deceptively edited video that has received a Community Note on @alexbruesewitz quote tweet of it.

Was it a conscious decision to go from fired Trump speech writer to dishonest media hack?

Never expected you to be dishonest. Trump ruins people.

No, we get it. You are dishonest. The video was from when DeSantis was in congress, he defended Trump and used the text of the report to show that the spearfishing and hacking attempts were 3rd rate at best.

this is just gaslighting you low iq dishonest prick

Gee Darren what’s so dishonest? You didn’t post the full clip? You are pathetic.

Is every ‘former white house official’ this dishonest?

We won’t condemn DeSantis for his supporters, but the array of responses does seem to show the double-bind that the DeSantis campaign is in: they overwhelmingly hate Trump and his supporters, but need to steal votes away from Trump’s base to win the GOP primary. Perhaps the entire strategy of the DeSantis campaign is to hope the DOJ throws Trump in jail and silences him forever so that DeSantis can step forward and claim the GOP crown.

In any case, Team DeSantis made sure to flood Community Notes, claiming Darren was somehow being deceptive by posting the Fox News clip of Ron and simply asking for clarification.

However, despite what Team DeSantis says, other videos appear to show DeSantis validating the Comey/Clapper claim that Russia “hacked” the DNC.

 

Perhaps even worse is that the longer clip doesn’t really do any favors to DeSantis’ old position, despite claims by DeSantis backers that the clip was deceptively edited.

DeSantis: “I personally think the that the intel report and the indictment are credible in terms of assigning blame and culpability to Russia.”

Of course, we applaud DeSantis for having the discernment, or at least the political judgment, not to endorse the discredited collusion claim. But it is concerning that, at least in the past, he seemed to endorse another, equally dangerous component of the Russia hoax. The footage shows DeSantis was backing Trump while also endorsing the dubious indictment against “Russian hackers.” Does he still believe the Mueller narrative that Russia “spearfished” the DNC and Podesta? As he clearly states in the clip, he found the Mueller indictment credible at the time.

It’s important to discern whether or not DeSantis still has faith in conclusions drawn by the intelligence community. DeSantis’ support for the intelligence community’s thus-far unsupported conclusions surrounding things like the supposed DNC hack and Wikileaks matters because Russian meddling has been used as a key pretext by the national security state to abuse its powers and go to war against Trump and his supporters domestically. For instance, the intelligence community used the same pretext to smother the crucial Hunter laptop story; falsely portraying Hunter’s laptop files as either doctored, or the fruit of a Russian hack-and-leak operation, and therefore censorable.

The intelligence community, or “Deep State,” added a great deal of fuel to the fire of the President Trump delegitimization effort, bolstering the left-wing talking point that “Russia hacked our election” and thus, by extension, the level of popular support for Trump’s grassroots, populist “Make America Great Again” movement was somehow artificial and manufactured.

We know now there isn’t really any good evidence that Russia did the hacking, and the DOJ was forced to drop the case against the Russian “troll farm” once the defendants unexpectedly decided to fight the case in court — a development the DOJ was not prepared for.

Fox News:

In a striking and unexpected abandonment of a once-heralded prosecution initiated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Justice Department moved Monday to drop charges against two Russian companies that were accused of funding a social media meme campaign to further their “strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 presidential election.”

Late Monday, with jury selection in the case set to begin in just two weeks, a federal judge granted the DOJ’s motion to kill the prosecution for several counts of conspiring to defraud U.S. agencies tasked with combating election interference. The government acknowledged the Russian companies were never likely to actually face punishment anyway and cited possible national security risks with going forward to trial.

[…]

The company, with the help of a high-powered law firm, filed a series of motions over the last two years, including to dismiss charges and to exclude certain evidence from the case.

[…]

Dubelier, who has referred to the case as involving a “made up” crime, has made allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and even once accused the judge of bias.

“The real Department of Justice” never would have brought the case,” Dubelier said at one 2018 hearing. At another point, he curtly rejected a DOJ summons, saying prosecutors “are already behaving in a manner that is inconsistent with the practices of the DOJ.”

He also accused the DOJ of having “indicted the proverbial ham sandwich.” And, the Twitter user Techno Fog observed that Dubelier also flatly accused one of Mueller’s prosecutors of being a liar.

The extremely sensitive DeSantis Internet Defense Force is on a hair trigger over this issue, throwing around accusations of dishonesty instead of answering the question. This plus their obsession with gaming the Community Notes system only feeds into criticism that the DeSantis operation is too online, too robotic, and not artful enough to win the votes of Americans who will be deciding the primary election.

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