Dmitri Mehlhorn, the top political adviser to Democrat megadonor and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, reportedly pushed “sympathetic journalists” to consider that the shooting of former President Donald Trump might have been “staged.” In an email sent to “sympathetic journalists,” including Semafor, Mehlhorn wrote.
one ‘possibility — which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally — is that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash. This is a classic Russian tactic, such as when Putin killed 300 civilians in 1999 and blamed it on terrorists to ride the backlash to winning power. Others who have embraced this tactic of committing raw evil and then benefitting from the backlash include Hamas on October 7. If any Trump officials encouraged or knew of this attack, that is morally horrific, and Republicans of decency must demand that Trump step down as unfit.” [Emphasis added.
Mehlhorn suggested another possibility for Saturday’s shooting is that “some crazy anti-Trumper in this chaotic moment decided to assassinate the former President.
Hoffman’s top political adviser, who created the “Investing in US” fund with the LinkedIn cofounder, suggested that his theory was more toward the false flag theory. A false flag is a “military action carried out with the intention of blaming an opponent for it,” according to BBC News, and experts have told USA Today that conspiracy theorists regularly misuse the term to claim major events were a hoax.
Mehlhorn referred to the shooting as a “classic [Vladimir] Putin play.
Look at the actual shot. Look at the staging. Look at how ready Trump is to rally; this pampered baby shit his pants when an eagle lunged at his food. Look at how quickly Trump protects himself at the expense of others, but showed few of those lifelong instincts in this moment. And consider how often Putin and his allies run this play,” the Hoffman political adviser wrote.
I know it feels yucky to discuss such a possibility. But in this case, the odds are so high, and the stakes so consequential, we must as[k] the question,” he added.
Mehlhorn even doubled down on his contention, taking issue with the media for not raising this question, writing, “Ask the question, people. If it proves wrong, we should respond appropriately to a non-staged act of political violence, as outlined above. But your credibility and that of your profession will have been permanently destroyed if you don’t ask this question.
But Hoffman’s shady political activity doesn’t end there. He also funded a series of pro-Doug Jones ads in Alabama that were modeled on the much-decried Russian propaganda peddled on Facebook and Twitter in 2016. The project’s operatives posed as conservative Alabamians on Facebook and tried to use the platform to divide Republicans, pushing them toward a write-in candidate and away from Roy Moore, the GOP’s nominee for Senate. They also ran a scheme, according to the New York Times, “to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.
Hoffman is also an occasional collaborator with communist China on a direct level. As Peter Schweizer reported in his #1 bestselling book, Red-Handed, LinkedIn is the most China-friendly American-owned social networking site and Hoffman is known as “the most connected man in Silicon Valley.” LinkedIn managed to stay operational in the authoritarian country by remaining in compliance with Chinese censorship rules until 2021. By comparison, Facebook and Twitter have been banned by the CCP since 2009.
Marlow said Hoffman comprises just part of the “American oligarchy” in his New York Times bestselling book Breaking Biden.