Weaponizing Social Media
How the 2016 Trump Campaign’s Pizzagate Conspiracy Led to the QAnon Movement
(Editor/Author’s note) This story was first written October 2020, and published on my Medium account
With the July 2019 Epstein arrest, stuff came out. Big stuff, terrifying stuff for Trump enough to warrant a mid-flight return of Vice President Pence to the White House and cancelation of whatever he was dispatched to do.
And you missed it.
So did the media.
What was it?
It starts with this tweet from Lisa Bloom, the attorney who represented Katie Johnson in a dropped rape case involving both Donald J. Trump and Jeffery Epstein from 2016.
“I represent a new Jeffery Epstein accuser and am talking with several more. This case is a legal morass on the criminal and civil side, but justice is attainable. I encourage everyone to reach out for legal advice as to options to bring this monster to justice. Harrowing stories.”
Lisa Bloom
July 9, 2019 6:27 PM
Seems pretty straightforward. The response though was epic and game-changing in the scope of how this simple action-reaction imperils the Presidency by fully exposing several facts that had directly caused the President’s bad behaviors spike precipitously in a defensive mechanism.
It was this thread by @soychicka on July 9, 2019, 8:58 PM that really dropped the hammer of what was conflicting and terrifying the current occupant of the White House regarding his association with Jeffery Epstein:
“So, Lisa — I was told that you never gave the information I gave your assistant Marcelino to Katie Johnson, and that you instead sold it to Dylan Howard at AMI within hours… and Pizzagate started within hours of that targeting the pizza place owned by the ex-bf of someone who gave you $250k to handle the safety of the women who accused Trump… but you never gave a penny of that to Katie or to ensure her safety. And your mother’s office never contacted anyone about the C&D about the same missing persons case that was sent on Election day 2016, which was a direct contradiction of assertions made by Trump’s attorneys in the Zevos case, & would have opened up lots of avenues for discovery.”
“That’s really weird, isn’t it?”
“Until you convince me ALL of those statements are untrue, I am encouraging all Epstein victims to stay far away from your representation, because if you can’t convince me, that would mean that YOU are responsible for the launch of Pizzagate, or at least that you profited from it. And to be clear, I’ve attempted to contact you via less public channels, but to no response. And I’ve dedicated the past 3 years of my life to cleaning up the mess that you caused by misusing the information I provided to your office, and to ensuring these women get justice.”
“So, I have all my receipts for everyone I’ve spoken with for the past 3 years. Do you have any comment?”
“Oh- to be clear, the information was the identity of the as the 12 year old girl known a “Maria” via a cold missing person case from Waterbury, CT: actionable evidence that lent credibility to Katie’s story. Mari was abducted from a pizza parlor 1 year earlier, when she was 11”
“SDNY is aware of this, so…At bare minimum, I’m fairly sure you’ll be speaking with them. But most likely NOT as an attorney representing any of Epstein’s victims. That would probably end up being a conflict of interest.”
The scope of this is thread is huge. First AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer had an illegal catch and kill scheme in place with the Trump campaign at the time of all this going down, which occurred on November 4, 2016. That deal involved Trump, Cohen, Dylan Howard, and David Pecker. Any story damaging to the Trump campaign brought to the National Enquirer resulted in the rights of the story being purchased with an exclusive publishing agreement, then the story would go into a vault to be buried. The non-destroyed contents of that vault were acquired by the FBI during the Mueller investigation when an investigative thread of Cohen exposed the deceit. Potential crimes uncovered by the Mueller team that didn’t align with the narrow-focused outline of obstruction and Russian interference such as the ones involving the National Enquirer had to be turned over to other investigative units. The National Enquirer crime files ended up in the SDNY for further investigation including the one involving Jeffery Epstein, Donald Trump, and a missing girl case.
In order to definitively prove my next point, that Q Anon is a functional apparatus of the Trump campaign and not some random Trump-loving and Hillary hating sweaty dude sitting in his mother’s basement plucking away at a keyboard in his underpants, we will need to establish how the @soychicka files wound up with Q Anon that formed the basis of the Pizzagate narrative.
The above thread indicates that the documents were given on November 4th to Lisa Bloom by @soychicka. That same day Q Anon hatched the Pizzagate conspiracy several hours later. That isn’t much time for a conspiracy to be organically created, as even the GRU Seth Rich lie blaming him for the DNC hacks took a couple of days to root and take form, and that one had Mack Truck sized holes in it making that easy to disprove. With that short time-frame to work with, the players had to synch rapidly. The second step was from Bloom to AMI.
The likely identity of Maria, is colossally big as it lends credibility to Katie Johnson’s accusations. Johnson’s lawyer knows it. As the first part of the story was paid for but wasn’t published by AMI it is a smart bet (and legally prudent considering exclusive rights deals) to go right back to them as they paid the last time as this added piece should guarantee the story finally gains traction and media attention that the case so far had not gotten. This all seems like a major assumption at this point, however, that changes considering Lisa selling the story can be considered as an established fact.
How do I know Lisa sold the story besides @soychicka’s words? In a very much related story published by The Hill on December 12, 2017 Bloom addresses her deal-making regarding her selling the stories of her clients likely including the one @soychicka provided her:
“Our standard pro bono agreement for legal services provides that if a media entity offers to compensate a client for sharing his or her story we receive a percentage of those fees. This rarely happens. But, on occasion, a case generates media interest, and sometimes (not always) a client may receive an appearance fee.”
“As a private law firm we have significant payroll, rent, taxes, insurance and other expenses every week, so an arrangement where we might receive some compensation to defray our costs seems reasonable to us and is agreed to by our clients.”
The Hill article had asked specifically regarding the two women Bloom had represented against Donald Trump including Katie Johnson, as they had time-stamped evidence including emails, phone logs, and other documents that suggested that this had happened. Bloom’s on the record response is confirmation, that she had indeed sold the story. That places the files with AMI, the company with the catch and kill scheme on behalf of candidate Donald J. Trump. While not asked directly, her response that the selling of stories is standard procedure strongly suggests that AMI had the original story dating back to mid-July of 2016.
Further in the Twitter thread was this @soychicka response to a question asking her to be getting information to the right people:
“No worries, I have been. Lawyers, law enforcement, folks at DOJ, members of congress on both sides of the aisle…but I’m always happy for anyone else who wishes to share this info with their own MOCs.”
10:39 PM July 9, 2019
It is a pretty safe bet to say where The Hill got the tip for the story after that response.
Lisa Bloom at the point of this Twitter exchange was a well-respected famed Civil Rights Lawyer at this point with a stellar reputation. In early September of 2019 it was reported Bloom had reached out to Harvey Weinstein during 2016, and had offered to work with him to discredit Rose McGown.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/09/she-said-book-weinstein-lisa-bloom/597679/
Bloom dropped the case versus Epstein and Trump at clients request November 5th, the day after Pizza was added to the Qanon child-sex trafficking conspiracy against liberals, citing new threats against her clients.
Why did they cut and run after being relatively out in the open for most of the year? What made the threats more dangerous now than before?
Bloom publicly stated her firm’s website and emails had been hacked on November 2. A hack could result in addresses and phone numbers of her clients being known, allowing them to be targeted directly.
There is also a possibility Waterbury PD visited one of the accusers family after soychica called them on the fourth (She posted her phone logs for the 4th-7th which includes outbound calls to Waterbury, the DNC, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a November 7th inbound call from ABC). Additionally, I would expect Trump’s lawyers as well as AMI were working to dig up information on the accusers and possibly got their private information.
While there are plenty of credible possibilities of why the level of harassment increased, the date this all happened coincides to the same twenty-four hour window as the missing person case file being known, presented to Bloom then possibly sold to AMI hours before the Pizzagate launch. The story though was definitely within the vault along with sixty other Trump stories as Ronan Farrow who wrote Catch and Kill states as such on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. (Start watching at 7:20)
https://www.newsweek.com/national-enquirer-60-trump-damaging-stories-ronan-farrow-catch-kill-1467445
So how does this all connect back to Trump?
Let’s assume that Trump already had the original Johnson story going back to early June of 2016 and knew that the case was being refiled in New York after getting tossed in California over jurisdiction issues. It isn’t that much of a leap to assume this as Trump is the kind of guy who always shows his poker hand by wearing mirrored glasses. He gave a “tell” that indicates he had fore-knowledge a few days before the case against him was again initiated. All we would need to prove this is for Trump to say something incredibly obvious, such as the following quote reappearing everywhere on social media to establish that he knew of the impending lawsuit against him:
“Nice guy. Uh, Got a lot of problems coming up in my opinion with the famous island with Jeffery Epstein. A lot of problems.”
Don was on stage in late February of 2015 being interviewed by Fox pal Sean Hannity who asked him about what he thinks about Bill Clinton. It was an obvious question-response set-up in hindsight. At this point, no one was talking about Epstein outside of a single dutiful reporter in Miami, Julie K. Brown. So why bring up Epstein?
Trump sought to attack Hillary using what he knew personally about Epstein having partied with him for the better part of three decades, that Epstein was a child rapist and Bill must be too because he was associated with Epstein. He also likely knew of a 2011 interview of Virginia Guiffre the chief victim of Epstein dangled as a honeypot for luminaries targeted for blackmail, stating Bill with his Secret Service detail was seen on the island, a revelation that Clinton still denies, as the interview had reemerged and recirculated weeks earlier during January on multiple rightwing and British outlets.
Beginning June 11, 2016, just when Trump needed to have it spread wildly, the twelve-second clip of he and Hannity replicated everywhere on social rightwing media. I stumbled on well over fifty such postings using the clip back when I wrote my first book on Trump and assumed the clip had originated in June 2016 instead of February 2015. Now, these posts are mostly gone, having likely been purged by the various platforms they were originally published on such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter for spreading misinformation, QAnon, and other conspiracies.
While that week’s social media postings are gone the following video launched on the 12th still exists showing extensive RT material winding the same conspiracy that Clinton and Epstein were a fixture. RT is a Russian “media” outlet targeted for US consumption known to propagate conspiracies on behalf of the Kremlin.
That week’s effort to flood social media with the Bill Clinton/Epstein smear coincided with the refiling of his own lawsuit as a codefendant with Jeffery Epstein that entered the court filing system on June 20, 2016, in New York where the alleged 1994 rapes of two girls Katie Johnson and fellow victim Maria occurred at the Wexler Estate where Epstein was domiciled.
http://thememoryhole2.org/blog/doe-v-trump
Trump can’t help it when he knows he is about to be in big trouble, triggering his defensive instincts to kick in trying to deflect whatever his problem is onto other people.
As an example, if Trump had taken actions that undermined confidence in a vaccine, he would say that Biden had taken actions to undermine confidence in a vaccine and surprise, surprise, the media would then make Biden the story instead of he! Worried about his own corruption, Trump would spin a tale of how corrupt Biden is. The media would bite. The whole schtick of pointing the finger and crying wolf, while immature and consistent with Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, highlighted in my book as the reason for Trump’s incompetence, has worked incredibly well with Trump continually fooling the media into telling the story he wants them to tell instead of the factual one about him.
These behaviors are so predictable and repetitive one must question why the mainstream media continually falls for what Trump is doing and invariably help the charlatan smear others and avoid accountability.
Going back to that original February 2015 clip of Trump telling Hannity about Bill having problems with Jeffery Epstein, there was no logical explanation for why Trump would say such a thing, other than an obvious tell that Don was in the process of setting up a smear he would use later. He and his allies spread that clip extensively just days before he was sued, and those accounts and the material they pushed no longer exist after social media purged most of the QAnon material.
Back to November 4.
Trump was in trouble, serious trouble. He already had a court date to give a recorded deposition next month in regard to his alleged rape of Katie Johnson who was thirteen at the time of the attack. He had just received word that a possible identity of the second rape victim Maria had a credible lead via a missing person’s case of a girl whose last known whereabouts were at Nash’s Pizza and Grocery in Waterford, Connecticut on March 20, 1993. He needed to hit back before the story of the missing girl emerged, which brings in the connection of someone high in the Trump campaign to bad actor Q Anon.
At the end of October 2016 an online persona that would later be identified as Q began posting on various chat rooms such as 4Chan and 8Chan. Like many of the technological aspects of the Trump campaign, Q Anon was created to influence a fairly substantial part of Trump’s most loyal base using lies, conspiracies, and subterfuge to create an underground movement in social media supporting Trump. While it isn’t certain who created the influence campaign known as Q Anon, elements of it suggest someone highly intelligent in manipulation with a military background. The followers of the movement believe intently that it is an insider within the White House that has the inside track on everything, especially the taking down of an international child sex-trafficking scheme involving some very powerful players.
The persona had already been posting various threads on rightwing chatrooms about Trump suggesting he would expose the deep state in Washington and drain the swamp. These had so far failed to gain widespread traction as the campaign had only just begun. Then on November 4, Q Anon was given a second conspiracy to push, one that would elevate the persona and cause it to spread like a virulent disease. That conspiracy, Pizzagate, claimed that the Clintons, George Soros, Podesta, and other prominent Democrats and celebrities were involved in a large-scale sex cult selling children held at two pizza parlors’ basements in the DC area.
The Pizzagate conspiracy was a well-timed suppression campaign as its farcical nature and outlandish claims juxtaposed against the factual evidence of the actual missing person case of Maria, made the media steer clear of the story even further. No one covered the missing person case connection. Bloom dropped the case the next day, November 5, 2016. Q Anon effectively silenced the threat that the lawsuit represented and kept most people in the dark that Trump and Epstein were codefendants allowing his conspiracy to have more power.
The thing about pizza, besides it being a favored Trump delight, is that it always leaves behind greasy fingerprints revealing Trump’s hands in this mess. With the timing and context of the events now known, it is clear that the Trump Campaign was likely behind the creation of Pizzagate and QAnon. This actually isn’t all that surprising. Trump’s schemes are pretty easy to piece together because of such connections that manifest themselves at a later date. Take the examples of his uses of two aliases, John Miller and John Barron, whom he used to con media into writing a favorable story and to get placed on the Forbes 400 when his net worth was significantly less than stated. Donald “John” Trump sticks with what he knows. He even named his youngest Barron. Simple but effective tactics.
We also know that Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime fixer made multiple contacts with David Pecker and Dylan Howard of AMI that November 4 in a flurry of activity starting at 4:30 in the evening. In court filings dealing with Cohen’s cover-up of stories involving Trump’s affairs with two Porn Stars, Stormy Daniels and Jessica Drake as well as the affair with Playboy Bunny Stephanie Clifford. Exhibit 1 pages 52–55 detail what is known to have transpired. While many of these calls and texts placed are attributed to dealing with a story printed that evening in the Wall Street Journal revealing the cover-up by AMI of the affairs, there is little to no reason for Cohen to involve two AMI executives for the same purpose.
Dylan Howard received the @soychicka files from Lisa Bloom, making it more likely that some of the conversations he and Cohen had had were directed entirely on that much larger issue of child rape allegations. What was most interesting to me in this section of the files is that the lawyer representing Clifford and Daniels, Keith Davidson sent an audiotape recording of Clifford discounting the plausibility of Jessica Drake’s allegations titled stormy.mp3.
Why would the title be Stormy if it had nothing to do with Stormy rather Jessica Drake unless the recording was unspecific in addressing who Clifford was speaking about in order to give plausible deniability of Stormy’s affair claim? That kind of muddying the waters, using some truth to misrepresent, or rather lie has been a hallmark of the people connected to Trump. Kind of like using a fact about a pizza place to combat an allegation that Trump was somehow involved in a missing child case by making it less credible through a coordinated social media attack campaign.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/unredacted-documents-released-cohen-case
At this point, I need to apologize. I was dead wrong about Katie Johnson’s credibility in my previous book, Donald Trump Explained, a Special Education Perspective of the Forty-Fifth President of the United States. At the time I saw the strong suggestions that Q Anon was internally created and run by the campaign, but had no hard evidence. E. Jean Carroll had not yet voiced publicly her violent rape nor had I read the violent rape account Ivanna claimed in her own book. I discounted that one too because Ivana retracted as Katie had done. Most importantly, Q Anon’s story about children being held for prostitution at pizza places in an international child sex ring really sounded ridiculous, other than to distract from Epstein-Trump connections without added context.
Yes, some truths were in Pizzagate after all. That was intentional as mixing some facts with falsehoods sweetens the lies. Marisella Pino, the possible Maria of the Katie Johnson case who went by her mother’s name Maria, is still technically missing after twenty-five-plus years was last seen at a pizza shop. There is also truth that pedophiles if Maria is indeed is the same person, were involved in a child sex ring where Jeffery Epstein was the head. While Trump tried to get the media to bite on that sex ring being run by Democrats much like he always projects his own behaviors on his political enemies, his association with Epstein, a convicted pedophile, Ghislaine Maxwell who presently awaits her own trial, and his ring of recruiters sent out to procure young girls suggests that indeed there was a child sex-ring instead comprised instead of his own known associates. It doesn’t help Trump that many of his pals are either accused or convicted of such crimes involving children.
Gaslight Nation’s Sarah Kendzior had this to say on Twitter on the ever-growing list of friends and associates connected to sex crimes:
“Donald Trump is friends with at least five pedophiles, most of whom were involved in sex trafficking or blackmail schemes. There’s Epstein, Casablanca, Arif, Nader, Cohn. Who the hell is friends with five pedophiles?!”
Sarah Kendzior
December 5, 2018 3:07 PM
George Nader was nabbed by authorities when he stepped on US soil much like Epstein on June 3, 2019, roughly a month before Epstein was. Nader was a central figure in the first half of the Mueller Report and had a sealed indictment awaiting him for child porn on his phone involving boys, having already been convicted of similar crimes years earlier. Casablanca is deceased. He gave Ivanka her modeling gig at Elite Models and was one of those rich and powerful men who allegedly ruined a lot of young girls’ lives to satiate his predatory instincts. Roy Cohn was Trump’s disgraced lawyer probed by the CIA for links to a child porn network. I don’t know who Arif is. These aren’t the only people involved with children or child porn in Trump’s orbit sadly. Lower-level officials on the campaign state levels have had a small number of these reveals as well since Trump came into power.
With a cadre of former associates involved in child sex crimes and a couple more like Alan Dershowitz who are facing allegations pointing a finger at Clinton for such things is pretty much what one would expect Trump to do. Dershowitz, Epstein’s lawyer had one of those Rudy Giuliani moments when on camera in 2015 when he said he kept his underwear on when he got messages at Epstein’s from an older Russian woman. I would wager that getting messages at a place that girls are known to be trafficked is okay for Alan so long as he wasn’t naked. It was bad enough Dershowitz got Epstein off with barely a slap on the wrist, his finagling with future Trump Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta to seal off records making it impossible others connected to the trafficking schemes might face until a judge declared the whole arrangement illegal and ordered the documents unsealed.
https://www.theroot.com/alan-dershowitz-sure-i-got-a-massage-at-jeffrey-epstei-1836314016
It is that sort of growing storm Trump needed to quell even if it meant saying the most racist things, announcing false ICE roundups, and causing as much distraction as possible to keep the media from digging. He did it back in 2016, and again in 2019. It is pretty predictable.
By creating the Pizzagate narrative Trump again committed at least two additional felonies by interfering with an open investigation into a missing person’s case and disrupting the proceedings against him in Johnson’s case. That is before considering what possibly happened with either Johnson or Maria. If those are true Trump is facing the rest of his life in prison, similar to if they dig into his schemes at Trump Models, a child trafficking scheme or get to the bottom of his dubious financial schemes.
So why lie and commit additional felonies by creating Pizzagate? How bad is this for Trump? Is this the threat that would cause him to lose the election and immunity making him vulnerable to all the known felonies he will face after leaving office?
For most of the charges and allegations levied against Trump he has been able to deflect and confuse enough to keep his base loyal. A great deal of that is because of his covert social media campaign added with Russian bots, Fox News, and other loyal media influencers and by how easily he baits the mainstream media into covering other topics with a simple tweet. Trump can still beat this one, at least while in office as he can’t be charged, but this one is on an entirely higher disgust and discomfort level that if widely known only the most loyal of his base would remain. It is that bad. This excerpt was taken from the court filing signed on June 16, 2016, by Johnson.
“Both defendants had let me know that each was a very wealthy and powerful man and indicated that they had the power, ability and means to carry out their threats. Indeed, defendant Trump stated that I shouldn’t ever say anything if I didn’t want to disappear like Maria, a 12-year old female that was forced to be involved in the third incident with defendant Trump and that I had not seen since that third incident, and that he was capable of having my whole family killed.”
Would it bother a Trump supporter knowing that he was accused not only of raping two juveniles, of causing the disappearance of one of them and using that to threaten the other? Some probably would come back and say they were happy with the size of their 401K, and that it was just more fake news. That is how badly desensitized Trump’s base has become, though the middle would surely turn away from him at that point. Once Trump is dislodged from office, he will face an onslaught of charges including ones connected to Pizzagate and QAnon. That means he will try anything to keep power as long as possible.
An additional side note, Michael Cohen sent this to reporter Tim Mak. (H/T @soychicka)
“You’re talking about Donald Trump a private individual who never raped anybody and understand that I know where you’re going with this story, and I know what you’re doing”
“I know where you’re going with it because the daily beast and yourself you’re a bunch of disengenuous bastards ad mark my words todate it’s 4/17 — this will be the day that you regret”
“I know where you’re going with this stupid story and I know what you’re planning on doing”
“If there’s any interference whatsoever whether it’s in the headline, any aspect of your article that indicates a rape, and I don’t care if it’s a small fucking line that you’re going to throw in somewhere”
“Mark my words for it, I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse…”
“Do not even think about going to where I know you’re planning on going.”
Then on August 10, 2019, Jeffery Epstein, the man who recruited girls at Mar a Lago and did run an international sex trafficking ring involving many prominent individuals was found dead in his cell of an apparent suicide.