US intelligence says Russians created fake California news site to fabricate Harris scandal

[quaint]

OCRegister

A website posing as a nonexistent San Francisco news outlet, called KBSF-TV, published a story on Sept. 2 claiming Harris was involved in a hit-and-run in the city while serving as California’s attorney general in 2011. The story included a video in which a woman alleged that Harris was involved in the incident, leaving her paralyzed.

The story was entirely fictitious, as was the website, registered in Iceland and created just a few weeks prior to the story’s publication. But the fabrication nonetheless spread quickly across right-wing social media.

Officials with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI told reporters Monday that the U.S. intelligence community “assesses Russian influence actors were responsible for staging a widely reported video in which a woman claims she was a victim of a hit-and-run car accident by the vice president.”