Thread by @MichaKobs

Is it possible that #Bellingcat Grozev is spinning up a whole #Navalny Conspiracy Theory here because he didn't understand the problem with timestamps?
cgrozev.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/pro…

According to him, a Russian LifeNews article was only online for one hour and then deleted.
This article is timed 8:58 (presumably Moscow time) and was saved on archive.is at 8:08 UTC. That a) proves that the timestamp is not UTC and would be 11:08 Moscow time.

Here are several versions of the deleted article archive.is/http://lifenew… and of the republished version archive.is/http://lifenew… with a 13:22 timestamp.

Grozev goes on to say that a Russian official sent himself a note on Gmail long before publication, allegedly proving that the Kremlin planted the story.
...but he doesn't show the raw data of the email.

The fact is that the time code saved by Gmail depends on the user settings and in 2014 it was probably internally saved as Pacific Standard Time.
So, without the Google raw data it might have been converted first by the hackers and second by Grozev's user settings.

But sure, in Master Detective Grozev's mind, the Russian state invents a story to delete it before anyone could read it, then republishes it so it doesn't look like censorship and, finally, denies the story.
And why should they do that?

...so that the Navalny-follower believes that Navalny is financed by the Kremlin. That's logical, isn't it?

Be warned! This is the Biden era of unfettered BS, Russiagate-a go go, Nimmo as FB truth warrior and Higgins as political correctness filter.
Grozev is just a harbinger.

To add to that: The point of the article (as far as I got it) is that the wife of Navalny's financier took millions in official cultural funding, and some official found this questionable because because she used the money to have all the critics give state-funded readings.

An interesting detail is the list Grozev added to his conspiracy theory. This list does not look like a Kremlin document. Someone has removed all the metadata except for the title. The document doesn't even contain a creation date, let alone an author.

This list is a GoogleDocs export. In this respect, the metadata were not removed by "someone" but may never have existed. At least it is not some secret list of potential poisoning victims, as Mr. Grozev would have us believe.

So the question is what the "defenders" are defending while the opposition is against it. Medvedev is hardly to describe as a "blogger", even though he had 3m followers on Twitter. In his tweets he wishes happy holidays or congratulates athletes. What is he defending, Mr Grozev?

The strongest opposition figure is, of all people, the daughter of Putin's political mentor. What was she against in 2014? She was critical of Crimea. There are also funny conspiracy theories about Ksenia Sobchak that Grozev could incorporate into his absurd construct.

In short, Grozev's article proves that he has long been a defender of Navalny, which has more to do with his anti-Russian convictions than with Navalny's goals. And it shows that Grozev is capable of seeing pink elaphants in the clouds when it fits his view.

But maybe Grozev is playing a completely different role in this whole Skripal / Navalny 10times stronger that VX poisoning game with no fatalities***, full of strange millennial coincidences and no evidence to show the Russian side. Is he the PR game master in this farce?

*** Dawn Sturges died from a (planted) bottle that is NOT connected to the Skripal-case and/or the alleged GRU-poisoners except for the super secret poison.
The rest is PR or as Hollywood put it "make believe".