You're reading: Washington Post: Hill tells Nunes to his face that his Ukraine conspiracy theory is ‘harmful’

One reason that Russia’s interference effort in 2016 was successful was that it leveraged a powerful source of energy: partisanship.

The information released by WikiLeaks, which even at the time was linked to Russian hacking, provided fodder for endless conservative-media coverage and conspiracy theories targeting Democrats generally and Hillary Clinton specifically. Russia’s social media content, like the TEN_GOP Twitter account, threw out meme-ish content that occasionally struck enough of the right political note to go viral. Americans, particularly Americans who supported Donald Trump or disliked Clinton in 2016, were less concerned with where the river originated than what happened on the flood plains.

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