Well, Vladimir Putin certainly has a sense of humor, when the joke's on America.
On Saturday, the ministry posted on its Facebook page an audio file of the purported new automated telephone switchboard message for Russian embassies.
"To arrange a call from a Russian diplomat to your political opponent, press 1," the recording begins, in Russian and English. Press 2 "to use the services of Russian hackers," and 3 "to request election interference."
While some believed that their social media account had gotten hacked, a ministry duty officer told The Associated Press that -- guess what? -- the post was an official national joke.
So, did Russia hack the U.S. presidential election? National Review doesn't seem to think so:
No, and the use of that term to describe what Russia did needs to stop. The Russians hacked a few computers, but they did not “hack” an election. The media’s persistent insinuations otherwise are leading millions of Americans to believe that the Russians actually meddled with the election process itself, including with voting machines. There is zero evidence that occurred. None. Zilch. Nada.
However, all is obviously not well between the United States and Russia. They did "sow confusion and chaos," and there’s strong evidence they sought to help Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton:
Their most infamous move was the theft of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee, which were likely passed to WikiLeaks before becoming the basis of a slow drip of damaging information about Clinton and the Democratic party released into the news cycle. At the same time, Russia was allegedly using “trolls” and “bots” to impact the news cycle by creating artificial “surges” of commentary online. They also used propaganda outlets such as RT to try to affect the national debate, and intentionally tried to plant certain ideas and themes into the American electorate’s consciousness, including the notion that the election was “rigged” against Trump (a theme Trump himself picked up).
The bottom line is that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 Presidential after a terribly-run campaign and being a horrible candidate. However, the Democratic paranoia about Russian influence has led to an enormous amount of National Security staffers leaking illegal information about the President, and now it's led to this.
This April Fool's joke makes it clear: Russia is still trying to get in our heads.
Photo Credit: Twitter
