The Left’s Safe Space: Where Consequences Go to Die
Let’s start with a universal truth: Leftism is the only ideology where you can openly fantasize about punching Nazis (read: anyone right of Karl Marx) while simultaneously clutching your pearls if someone dares to disagree with you. Ah Leftism: the magical realm where hypocrisy isn’t just tolerated—it’s celebrated.
Take my recent conversation with a conservative friend who, like many, has adopted the “live and let live” approach to his Leftist acquaintances. His reasoning? “She’s not that bad.”
Really? The classic conservative cop-out.
She only wants to dismantle the nuclear family, not the entire Western legal system. She only supports Antifa when they’re firebombing federal buildings, not when they’re (allegedly) firebombing your federal building.
This is the modern Democrat Party in a nutshell: a coalition of useful idiots who’ve convinced themselves that their side is merely “passionate” while the other side is “violent extremists.” But let’s be real—when was the last time you saw a conservative hunt down a Leftist in the streets? Meanwhile, Antifa’s resume includes shooting at ICE officers and ambushing cops. But sure, both sides.
The Myth of the ‘Reasonable’ Leftist
My friend’s argument hinges on the idea that his Leftist pal isn’t “one of the bad ones.” She just posts memes about conservatives being fascists—harmless stuff, really. But here’s the rub: silence is complicity. If she’s not actively condemning the worst of her side (spoiler: she’s not), then she’s enabling it.
Brigitte Macron: A Case Study in Leftist Absurdity
Speaking of delusion, let’s talk about France’s First Lady, Brigitte Macron. Two women were acquitted after being sued for claiming Brigitte was born male. Now, one of them is turning the tables and suing her for fraud. The rumor? Brigitte is actually Macron’s father, who transitioned. Now, I don’t care if Macron married a sentient baguette—just own it. But Leftists can’t handle the truth. They’d rather litigate it into oblivion.
Astroturfing 101: How the Left Manufactures ‘Grassroots’ Outrage
Then there’s Zohran Mamdani, the New York socialist who—shockingly—isn’t actually supported by New Yorkers.
*“Once more, with feeling (and for about the 1000th time): There are NO grassroots movements on the Left. It’s ALL top-down, astroturf funding and organizing. BREAKING: Campaign finance records reveal 72% of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign cash came from out-of-state donors — not local supporters. His donors? Hollywood elites and tech billionaires.”*
Even John Fetterman—a man who dresses like he’s perpetually mid-Napoleon Dynamite cosplay—called Mamdani out for not being a “real Democrat.” The Left is so fractured they’re eating their own. And this is before the 2024 election cycle, where we’ll undoubtedly uncover a decade’s worth of Leftist election “irregularities.”
The Conservative Conundrum: Why We Lose by Playing Nice
Here’s the kicker: Leftists post their insanity because they can. There are no consequences. Meanwhile, conservatives self-censor because we actually have jobs to lose. The asymmetry is the point.
So, the next time a Leftist friend posts some inane drivel about “fascist Republicans,” ask them: Are you cool with Antifa’s violence? The persecution of the unvaxxed? The fact that your ‘movement’ is bankrolled by coastal elites? Watch them squirm.
Because at the end of the day, the only thing worse than Leftist idiocy is conservative silence in the face of it.
Final Thought: The Left isn’t just wrong—they’re dangerously stupid. And until conservatives start treating them like the existential threat they are, we’ll keep losing. So speak up. Or get ready to live in their delusional world.
On Thursday, Special Counsel David Weiss unsealed an indictment charging a longtime confidential human source (CHS) with making false statements. But it wasn’t Christopher Steele, the CHS who threw the country into turmoil for four years by peddling the fraudulent Steele dossier. Former CHS Stefan Halper, who helped further the Russia-collusion hoax, also wasn’t the subject of the indictment. Nor was CHS Rodney Joffe, who sought to destroy the Trump presidency with the Alfa Bank hoax.
No, it was the CHS who, on June 26, 2020, told his handler that the owner of Burisma claimed he had paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes in exchange for protection from being investigated by the Ukrainian prosecutor.
Thursday’s indictment revealed the name of that CHS for the first time — Alexander Smirnov — and alleged that Smirnov’s aforementioned statements, which were memorialized in an FD-1023 report, were false.
False Statements Allegations
Since news first broke of the existence of that FD-1023 last summer, House Republicans championed the CHS’s reporting as further evidence of Biden family corruption, while Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley focused on the Department of Justice’s apparent failure to investigate the veracity of the FD-1023 as part of their probe into Hunter Biden’s business affairs.
Weiss’s indictment presents a powerful case that Smirnov lied on June 26, 2020, when the CHS told his handler he’d had conversations with Burisma executives in 2015 and 2016: An investigation by Weiss’s team concluded Smirnov did not meet the Burisma executives until March 1, 2017, meaning the earlier conversations could not have occurred. The indictment references introductory emails that established the alleged accurate timing of events, as well as travel records of other individuals, which contradict Smirnov’s claims. That evidence, the special counsel’s office concluded, was sufficient to charge Smirnov with making false statements and creating a false record.
If Smirnov lied to his handler in June 2020 about his conversations with Burisma executives, the indictment is well deserved. Not only did Smirnov’s alleged lies violate the federal criminal statute that prohibits false statements, but they also proved especially damaging to society as a whole by interfering in the House’s impeachment inquiry.
The harm here is not merely that investigators wasted time chasing apparently false leads, or that Hunter and Joe Biden suffered from Smirnov’s allegedly false accusations, but also that Smirnov’s lies may overshadow the other unrelated — and substantial — evidence implicating the Bidens in a pay-to-play scandal, rendering it more difficult to obtain justice.
What About Other CHS Lies?
Smirnov, however, is but one CHS whose alleged lies have created havoc for our country.
Consider the lies peddled in the Steele dossier to our FBI. CHS Christopher Steele represented his sourcing as trusted, reliable, and well-placed when it was none of those things. That dossier led to the DOJ obtaining four unconstitutional surveillance warrants against an innocent American, resulted in our government spending millions investigating a hoax, and impaired the functioning of the Trump administration. Yet even after Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham referred the matter to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation, Steele reaped no consequences for the lies he sowed.
Then there was CHS Stefan Halper who, according to an electronic communication, told the FBI the Russian-born Svetlana Lokhova had “latched” onto Michael Flynn at a Cambridge academic gathering and then, after the dinner, “surprised everyone and got into [Flynn’s] cab and joined [Flynn] on the train ride to London.” Halper, however, never attended the dinner, so he could not have witnessed any of the happenings, and the supposed cab ride was completely fictional.
The FBI’s summary of his debriefing also memorialized Halper claiming Trump volunteer Carter Page asked Halper during a July 18, 2016, meeting whether he “would want to join the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser.” In an exclusive interview with The Federalist in 2020, however, Page, “unequivocally denied asking Halper ‘to be a foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign.’”
Add to those two sources Rodney Joffe, the CHS who helped concoct the Alfa Bank hoax. That fairytale went that the Trump organization had a secret communication channel with Putin operating through the Russian-based Alfa Bank. Joffe peddled that tale to the FBI and, with the help of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, pushed the CIA to investigate this second Russia hoax just as the Trump presidency was beginning.
While the double standard is infuriating, assuming the allegations against Smirnov are true, charges are eminently justified. Also justified? Impeaching David Weiss.
Thursday’s indictment established that no one in U.S. Attorney Weiss’s office investigated Smirnov’s serious claims against Hunter and Joe Biden until after Grassley released a copy of the FD-1023 on July 20, 2023. It would be over a month later before FBI investigators would speak with Smirnov’s handler about the FD-1023. And, according to the indictment, it was not until Sept. 27, 2023, that the FBI interviewed Smirnov. That timeline confirms the incompetence of Weiss in handling the investigation into Hunter Biden because in October 2020, Weiss’s Delaware office received “a substantive briefing” concerning the FD-1023 from the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, then-Attorney General William Barr tasked then-Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney Scott Brady with screening evidence related to Ukraine. Last year, Brady testified before the House Judiciary Committee about that screening process, including how his team handled the FD-1023.
Brady explained the Pittsburgh FBI office sought to corroborate anything they could from the FD-1023, but he noted that his office lacked the authority to use a grand jury for the screening process. Brady’s team nonetheless succeeded in obtaining travel records of the CHS and “interfaced with the CHS’s handler about certain statements relating to travel and meetings to see if they were consistent with his or her understanding.”
What they were able to identify, Brady testified, was consistent with the CHS’s representations in the FD-1023. Additionally, the CHS was a longtime source for the FBI and considered “highly reliable” — something the indictment confirms given his length of service and the government authorizing Smirnov to commit crimes while operating as a CHS.
Brady further testified that his office had vetted the FD-1023 and the CHS “against known sources of Russian disinformation.” To conduct that analysis, his team worked with the Eastern District of New York. “It was found that it was not sourced from Russian disinformation,” Brady told the House Judiciary Committee.
Then when his team finished screening the FD-1023 and other evidence related to Ukraine, a Pittsburgh assistant U.S. attorney briefed Weiss’s office on the evidence, explaining how they had screened it, and noting they concluded it had “some indicia of credibility” and should be investigated further.
Thursday’s indictment of Smirnov suggests the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office sat on the FD-1023 for nearly three years, until after Grassley released a copy to the public. Instead, Weiss’s office offered Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea agreement, which fell apart only because the federal judge assigned to the case inquired into the strange arrangement that appeared to give Hunter Biden blanket immunity in a pretrial diversion agreement — something she had never seen before.
Special Counsel Weiss clearly knows how bad this looks because, in the indictment, he tried to spin the assessment into the FD-1023 as being closed out by the Pittsburgh FBI office, implying that is why his office did not conduct any further investigative steps.
“By August 2020, FBI Pittsburgh concluded that all reasonable steps had been completed regarding the Defendant’s allegations and that their assessment, 58A-PG-3250958, should be closed,” Weiss wrote. “On August 12, 2020, FBI Pittsburgh was informed that the then-FBI Deputy Director and then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States concurred that it should be closed.”
However, as former Attorney General Barr has made clear numerous times, the Pittsburgh office was merely charged with screening the evidence, and the investigation into the FD-1023 “wasn’t closed down.”
“On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”
No further investigation occurred, however. That alone should justify Weiss’s removal — and not merely for what he failed to do, but also because the country can’t trust that his special counsel team will follow all the leads, including the ones we don’t know about.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The U.S. Intelligence Community asked fellow members of the “‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance to surveil Trump’s associates and share the intelligence they acquired with US agencies,” sources told a small team of independent reporters who broke the story yesterday.
In “CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy on Trump Team, Triggering Russia Collusion Hoax, Sources Say,” journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag reported that top-line takeaway, along with several other key details. According to the authors, “multiple credible sources,” said that “the United States Intelligence Community (IC), including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), illegally mobilized foreign intelligence agencies to target Trump advisors long before the summer of 2016.”
The article, published on Shellenberger’s Substack, noted, “Until now, the official story has been that the FBI’s investigation began after Australian intelligence officials told US officials that a Trump aide had boasted to an Australian diplomat that Russia had damning material about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.” That probe, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane, launched on July 31, 2016, although Special Counsel John Durham would later conclude the Australian tip failed to justify the investigation into the Trump campaign.
Spying on Trump
However, British intelligence sources began targeting Trump on behalf of American intelligence agencies possibly as early as 2015, according to Tuesday’s blockbuster article. Several outlets had previously reported that the British Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, had discovered “alleged ties between Trump and the Russian government.”
According to the British-based Guardian, “a source close to UK intelligence” claimed, “GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious ‘interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents.” Yet the Guardian reported:
GCHQ was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information. The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets. Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the US.
Not so, according to Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Gutentag’s sources, who were familiar with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s investigation. “In truth, the US IC asked the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance to surveil Trump’s associates and share the intelligence they acquired with US agencies,” the journalists reported their sources as saying, with the Five Eyes nations being the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
Sources also claimed, according to Tuesday’s article, that “President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had identified 26 Trump associates for the Five Eyes to target.” According to the journalists, a source confirmed the IC had “identified [those associates] as people to ‘bump,’ or make contact with or manipulate,” and claimed the individuals were “targets of our own IC and law enforcement — targets for collection and misinformation.”
A source close to the investigation reportedly told the team of journalists that “[t]hey were making contacts and bumping Trump people going back to March 2016,” and “sending people around the UK, Australia, Italy — the Mossad in Italy. The MI6 was working at an intelligence school they had set up.”
Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Gutentag further reported their sources’ claim that “[u]nknown details about the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign and raw intelligence related to the IC’s surveillance of the Trump campaign are in a 10-inch binder that Trump ordered to be declassified at the very end of his term.” The three journalists stressed that this new information “is supported by testimony already in the public record.” In fact, much of the article confirms theories developed from the evidence gleaned over the years.
Years of Evidence
For instance, in “All The Russia Collusion Clues Are Beginning To Point Back To John Brennan,” I highlighted Brennan’s testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017 that he had “encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about.” Brennan told the committee back then that he didn’t know whether there was collusion with Russia, but that he passed the information on to the FBI. As I wrote at the time:
The evidence suggests, however, that Brennan’s CIA and the intelligence community did much more than merely pass on details about ‘contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign’ to the FBI. The evidence suggests that the CIA and intelligence community — including potentially the intelligence communities of the UK, Italy, and Australia — created the contacts and interactions that they then reported to the FBI as suspicious.
The known entities of this apparent conspiracy included Stefan Halper, an American confidential human source (CHS) informant for the FBI who, as I wrote at The Federalist, “worked at Cambridge University alongside Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of the British intelligence service MI6, and Christopher Andrew, the official historian for the British counterintelligence group MI5.”
It has long been known that Halper reached out to several members of the Trump campaign as a CHS for the Crossfire Hurricane team. But Halper’s efforts to ingratiate himself began before the official launch on July 31, 2016. In mid-July 2016, Halper approached Carter Page at a conference at Cambridge. American Steven Schrage, who organized that conference, detailed the happenings in the article “The Spies Who Hijacked America.”
As Schrage told it, “For most of the conference, Halper couldn’t be bothered with Page, about whom he made snarky comments about behind Page’s back.” But that changed after Dearlove arrived at the conference and spoke with Halper. Halper then “seemed desperately interested in isolating, cornering, and ingratiating himself to Page and promoting himself to the Trump campaign,” Schrage wrote.
While Halper’s outreach to Page came only a couple of weeks before the launch of Crossfire Hurricane, the apparent targeting of Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos first occurred in March 2016. Open-sourcematerial reveals that “on March 14, 2016, George met London-based college Professor Joseph Mifsud while traveling in Italy.” At the time, “Mifsud, then director of the London Academy of Diplomacy, claimed connections to the Russian Government.”
According to Papadopoulos, he had traveled to Italy, specifically Rome, at the encouragement of “a woman in London, who was the FBI’s legal attaché in the U.K.” That initial meeting of Mifsud led to several more, including the fateful one where Mifsud supposedly told Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton — the conversation the FBI claimed justified the launching of Crossfire Hurricane.
As has been detailed at length, most comprehensively by Lee Smith at RealClearInvestigations, Mifsud has numerous connections to Western intelligence services and has taught at the Link Campus University in Rome, a university whose “lecturers and professors include senior Western diplomats and intelligence officials from a number of NATO countries, especially Italy and the United Kingdom.”
Confirming Theories
These details closely match the information that sources revealed to Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Gutentag. And should the raw intelligence reports exist, as those sources claim, there will be concrete confirmation that foreign intelligence services targeted the Trump campaign, which in turn will confirm many of the theories posited about the real start of the Russia-collusion hoax.
It seems unlikely there will be anything in writing to establish John Brennan or another member of the U.S. Intelligence Community solicited assistance from the other members of Five Eyes. Nonetheless, Americans deserve to know what was in that 10-inch binder and which foreign intelligence services interfered in our 2016 election by “bumping” members of the Trump campaign to craft the Russia hoax.
The now-known significance of that binder also raises the specter that the search of Mar-a-Lago wasn’t to protect classified materials but to protect intelligence agencies — American and foreign.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Corporate media have gotten every single major story of the last decade wrong, in big and little ways. Whether it’s the 2016 election, the Russia-collusion scam, the threats posed by Covid and response to the same, the effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s life and family, accurate discussion of the Biden family business, immigration, abortion, crime, racism, guns, hate crime hoaxes, the economy, inflation, education, the relationship between the sexes, the radical trans agenda, or a thousand other stories, the media haven’t just been bad. They have been absolutely irredeemably awful.
A record-high percentage of Americans (39 percent) have literally no — as in none, zilch, nada — trust in corporate media to “report the news in a full, fair and accurate way,” according to Gallup. Another large percentage (29 percent) has “not very much” trust in the media to get the story right. Only 11 percent of Republicans trust the media, compared to nearly 60 percent of Democrats. The gap between the parties is because corporate media overwhelmingly shape news and information to support Democrats and their policy goals.
If The Washington Post were doing journalism instead of propaganda, its reporter who covers the news media might be focused nonstop on the fact that trust in the media is extremely low. But Paul Farhi thinks there are more important problems. Namely, he’s worried that some unwashed masses might be practicing their First Amendment right to do journalism without a license.
“Someone invented the phrase ‘citizen journalism’ a few years ago to describe amateurs doing the work of pros. Yes, it occasionally works, but probably no more often than ‘citizen cop,’ ‘citizen attorney’ or ‘citizen soldier,’” he wrote on social media.
First off, and definitely most importantly, someone needs to take Farhi aside and gently explain to him the meaning of “citizen soldier.” Our armed services were created around the idea of a broad swath of citizens working together to defend the nation’s values. The notion is fundamental to Western civilization and has routinely been shown to achieve better results than armies made up of professionals.
Even now, “citizen soldier” is how military reserve and National Guard members throughout the country think of themselves. In fact, the National Guard’s publication is called “Citizen-Soldier.” There is no need for Farhi to disparage these citizen soldiers or the many successful citizen-soldier armies throughout time and history.
Heck, while we’re at it, let’s go ahead and note that it was a “citizen attorney” with an eighth-grade education who wrote a handwritten appeal to the United States Supreme Court in the case that found that the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires states to provide attorneys for criminal defendants who are impoverished. But of the three groups he mentions, attorneys are the best for his case for professionalism on account of the intense education top lawyers receive.
But journalism? Journalism needs credentialing? Really? Farhi has been on this kick about the need to keep the lower castes out of journalism for a while now. Seven years ago he wrote, “Is there any other profession in which more people think they can do the job better than the pros than journalism? Medicine? Teaching?”
Again, one of these things is not like the others. There is a reason why people generally respect surgeons and don’t try to do their jobs. And there is a reason why people have taken to reporting real news and information since those at corporate media outlets such as The Washington Post are so bad at doing actual journalism.
The Washington Post, we might recall, launched the Russia-collusion scam by having one of its longtime journalists launder an information operation against the American people. The criminal leak against the Trump administration remains one of the great uninvestigated and unsolved crimes of recent memory. That the Post gleefully and willingly took part in an information operation against the country is reprehensible. The paper perpetuated the Russia-collusion hoax with hundreds of stories based on anonymous sources from the intelligence bureaucracy. This scam was no minor thing. It was the lie that Donald Trump was a traitor who had stolen the 2016 presidential election by colluding with Russia. It caused massive amounts of damage to the republic.
Farhi, for his part, seemed to think that many things in the invented “Steele dossier” were true. Falling for a completely false and unsubstantiated claim from fellow Russia hoax outlet McClatchy, Farhi wrote, “If this is accurate, put another check mark next to the Steele Dossier.” Another? ANOTHER? Way to showcase the bare minimum of skepticism and do real professional journalism there, guy.
After finding out the absolutely jaw-dropping news that the Steele dossier was an information operation, bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, Farhi wrote, “Most surprising thing abt Clinton’s involvemnt w/Steele Dossier (aside from paying for it) is why her campaign didn’t make more of it.” Citizen journalists knew enough to be even more suspicious about the quality of the shoddy product after realizing its provenance, but not the “professionals” at The Washington Post! In fact, Farhi seemed to be bitterly clinging to the Russia-collusion scam as of a month ago, even after the Post begrudgingly corrected some of its fake news on the matter.
One citizen on social media replied to Farhi’s smug arrogance about the superiority of professional journalists, “The media’s track record in the last 5 years is like a prostitute’s track record on being a virgin.” A bit too kind, but the point is made.
As one of the exceedingly few “professionals” — to use Farhi’s parlance — to do actual journalism on this story and thereby debunk the information operation the Post pushed relentlessly for years, I have nothing but respect for the many “citizen journalists” who did the work corporate media refused to do. I frequently relied on them and their detailed research in the Herculean task of taking on the Post, The New York Times, CNN, and every other media outlet that participated in the intelligence agencies’ information operation against Americans.
In addition to the many articles the full-time professional team at The Federalist researched, reported, and published, we also published many articles from some of these citizen journalists who researched details far better than the entire “professional” journalism class combined.
The Federalist and citizen journalists may not have the corporate sponsorship that Farhi and his cohorts have, but we are wealthy in something few if any at The Washington Post have: a desire to find the truth and share it with others.
Pure Propaganda
The same goes for another information operation run by The Washington Post. In 2018, that paper ran the effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s family and life by publishing an absolutely disgusting and unsubstantiated series of stories alleging he was secretly a serial gang rapist roaming the streets of suburban Maryland. This was a redo of a playbook The Washington Post and other Democrats had used in 1991 in an attempt to derail Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ nomination.
While the Post carefully edited out exonerating details, shaded information to help the Democrat operation, and amplified some of the flimsiest claims on record, The Federalist got to work reporting the real story. We were aided in this effort by tips from community members who were aghast at what The Washington Post was willing to do in pursuit of its political goals. Some of them gave us information they said they tried to share with The Washington Post but were shut down over.
Farhi, for his part, wrote a tendentious article asserting that the obvious collusion between Democrats in and out of the media was a “conspiracy theory.” Quoting — and I’m not joking here — Jane Mayer (yes, really, Jane Mayer), he said there was absolutely no coordinated effort to run the smear operation everyone witnessed against Kavanaugh. (For an alternate fact-based and fact-filled perspective, feel free to read the best-selling book I co-authored with Carrie Severino on the matter.)
A few years later, when The Washington Post was brutally deriding Sen. Tom Cotton for suggesting the U.S. government should look into the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a potential source of the Covid-19 pandemic (the Post called it a “debunked conspiracy theory”), The Federalist was publishing citizen experts who were arguing that maybe the paper owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos didn’t have the story right.
At every step of the way, the Post didn’t do journalism so much as uncritically regurgitate claims from “experts,” about the pandemic and the response to it. Because we at The Federalist published truthful information and hosted debates from citizen experts about the proper response to a global pandemic, we were throttled by the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Those who misled the public as The Washington Post did on the Wuhan Institute of Virology were rewarded with awards and algorithmic amplification.
The “professionals” of The Washington Post continue to republish every unsubstantiated claim coming out of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. For example, a disinformation group called “Center for Countering Digital Hate,” which attempts to get governments and Big Tech to shut down political speech it dislikes, is routinely quoted by the “professionals” over at The Washington Post. So are many other groups that work to censor political speech. Few “citizen journalists” are as gullible as the average Washington Post reporter when it comes to such mindless participation in disinformation operations.
Real Journalism
We could go on and on and on. Who did better on the stories involving Jussie Smollett, Covington’s Nick Sandmann (for which the Post settled a $250 million defamation lawsuit), or the Biden family business? No, citizen journalists probably wouldn’t describe Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as an “austere religious scholar,” as The Washington Post did.
The Washington Post and other media outlets aren’t “failing” to get the story right. They are doing exactly what they set out to do: frame news and information in a way that advantages their political allies.
They have massive corporate backing and establishment support in their efforts. Stop thinking that they’re salvageable. That was silly thinking decades ago. By now, it’s suicidal. Start shunning them for their propaganda and thinking instead about how to support and amplify journalism that cares about the truth.
The same FBI field office covering the Hunter Biden investigation lost Russian Igor Danchenko “in plain sight,” John Durham’s special counsel report revealed. Yet when Danchenko’s FBI handler pulled details of that prior espionage investigation mere days after Danchenko was opened as a confidential human source (CHS), the agent failed to document Danchenko’s suspicious history or alert the Crossfire Hurricane team to the fact that Danchenko could be a Russian spy. These facts and more add to the already outrageous details disclosed during Durham’s failed prosecution of Danchenko — such as that the FBI paid Danchenko hundreds of thousands of dollars for the fraud he helped perpetrate on the country.
While Durham failed to convict Danchenko of lying to the FBI, the October 2022 trial of the man who served as Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source exposed extensive malfeasance by both the Crossfire Hurricane team and later Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff. Among other things, the evidence and court filings revealed that agents opened Danchenko as a CHS even though the FBI had previously launched an espionage investigation into the Russian. However, the special counsel’s report added more details, greatly expanding the scandal.
For instance, after noting the previously reported fact that Danchenko had been the subject of an FBI counterespionage investigation from 2009 to 2011, Durham detailed the basis for the launch of that probe. As Durham explained, a researcher from the Brookings Institution — the D.C. think tank at which Danchenko worked at the time — informed a government contact that Danchenko had commented he “had access to people who would be willing to pay money for classified information.”
The FBI later interviewed the Brookings Institution researcher who repeated Danchenko’s apparent espionage outreach. Durham also revealed that a second Brookings employee stated he had harbored suspicions that Danchenko was connected to Russian intelligence because, notwithstanding the fact that Danchenko held multiple advanced degrees, he stayed at Brookings in a low-level research assistance position.
“The implicit assumption,” Durham concluded, was “that Brookings unwittingly provided Danchenko access to information of high value to the Russians.”
The information provided by the Brookings employees led the FBI’s Baltimore field office to launch a preliminary espionage investigation into Danchenko, with agents later converting the probe into a full investigation. While Durham did not stress the point here, the FBI’s decision to originally launch only a preliminary investigation against Danchenko furthers the special counsel’s conclusion that the immediate opening of a full investigation into the Trump campaign was unjustified and contrary to how the FBI handled other investigations.
The special counsel did, however, highlight several more aspects of the initial investigation into Danchenko, such as that agents interviewed several people at Georgetown University who knew Danchenko. One individual questioned by the FBI explained she had recently interned at an intelligence agency and that afterward, Danchenko quizzed her on her “knowledge of a specific Russian military matter.” The former intelligence agency intern also revealed that Danchenko claimed his Russian passport listed him as GRU, which is the Russian military intelligence service.
These additional details make the decision by the Crossfire Hurricane team to hire Danchenko as a CHS even more troubling.
Durham’s report also found disquieting what Danchenko’s handler, FBI Special Agent Kevin Helson, told investigators. According to Durham, the special counsel’s office determined that Helson became aware of the investigation into Danchenko shortly after he opened Danchenko as a source. Yet Helson failed to update the CHS paperwork. Here, Durham noted that data showed Helson had conducted a “Sentinel” search, querying the counterespionage case file on Danchenko. But when confronted with that fact in an interview by the special counsel’s team, Helson claimed he had no recollection as to why he had searched Danchenko’s case file.
Durham dinged Helson on several other facts related to Danchenko, suggesting the special counsel didn’t believe Helson’s version of events. But either way, Durham explained, “Helson and the Counterintelligence Division missed another opportunity to make any needed course corrections to Crossfire Hurricane and the use of Danchenko as a CHS.”
Besides his scathing summary of the FBI’s use of Danchenko as a CHS, Durham also revealed several new aspects of the initial botched investigation of Danchenko that was headed out of the FBI’s Baltimore field office. While Durham had revealed during Danchenko’s trial that the FBI had mistakenly closed out its investigation against Danchenko, wrongly believing he had left the country, Monday’s report showed how bush league that mistake was: All it took was for the special counsel’s office to review the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Person Encounter List for Igor Danchenko to determine he had not departed the U.S. on a one-way ticket to London, as the Baltimore field office believed.
But that was not the only mistake. According to Durham, in 2012, after the FBI had closed out the investigation into Danchenko, another FBI agent informed the Baltimore field office that Danchenko may not have left the United States as had been believed. Yet the investigation into Danchenko was never reopened. And when interviewed by Durham, the Baltimore field office agent admitted that “certainly a lot more investigation” of Danchenko should have occurred.
Given that the FBI’s Baltimore field office covers the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office — the office conducting the investigation into Hunter Biden — one can’t help but wonder what investigative steps were botched by agents in that case.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Antony Blinken represents neither the beginning nor the end of the info ops run to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Revisiting the contemporaneous coverage of the laptop story in light of last week’s revelations about Blinken reveals the scandal extends far beyond the Biden campaign and involves government agents.
Last week, news broke that a former top CIA official, Michael Morell, testified as part of a House Judiciary Committee investigation that Blinken, now-secretary of state and then-Biden campaign senior adviser, had contacted Morell to discuss the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Blinken and Morell reportedly “discussed possible Russian involvement in the spreading of information related to Hunter Biden.” According to Morell, Blinken’s outreach “set in motion” what led to the public statement signed by 51 former intelligence agents that falsely framed the laptop as Russian disinformation.
This revelation is huge — but it’s only a start to understanding the scope of the plot to interfere in the 2020 election by framing the laptop exposing Biden family corruption as foreign disinformation.
The First Clue
The first hint that Blinken’s outreach to Morell was a single spoke in the wheel of the Biden campaign’s deception came from a follow-up email Blinken sent Morell on Oct. 17, 2020. In it, Blinken shared a USA Today article that reported “the FBI was examining whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a ‘disinformation campaign.’” The very bottom of Blinken’s email contained the signature block of Andrew Bates, then a Biden campaign spokesman and the director of his “rapid response” team, suggesting Bates had sent the article to Blinken for him to forward to Morell.
Blinken forwarding an article claiming the FBI was investigating the laptop as a potential “disinformation campaign” is hugely significant because we know the FBI was doing no such thing. The FBI knew both that the laptop was authentic and that John Paul Mac Isaac had possession of the hard drive, just as the New York Post had reported, albeit without identifying the computer-store owner by name.
The USA Today article nonetheless furthered the narrative that Morell and the other former intelligence officials would soon parrot in their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” — that the emails have “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
For those who lived through the Russia-collusion hoax, it was the USA Today article and the presidential campaign’s use of Russia to deflect attention from the Biden scandal that bore the “classic earmarks” of an information operation — one that mimicked Hillary Clinton’s ploy four years prior. Given the similarities between the two Russia hoaxes, it seemed likely the Biden campaign worked with the press to push the Russian-disinformation narrative.
USA Today Didn’t Start the Falsehood
Sure enough, the legacy press began pushing the narrative days before Blinken emailed Morell the article on Oct. 17.
On Oct. 14, 2020, the same day the New York Post broke the first laptop story, Politico ran an article, co-authored by Russia-hoaxer extraordinaire “Fusion Natasha” Bertrand, raising questions about the authenticity of said laptop. “This is a Russian disinformation operation. I’m very comfortable saying that,” Bertrand quoted former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Biden adviser Michael Carpenter.
At the time, Carpenter also ran the Penn Biden Center — the same place a cache of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president and senator were discovered in a closet.
Politico also quoted Bates, whose signature block would later appear on Blinken’s email to Morell. Bates spun the scandal as one about Rudy Giuliani, who had provided a copy of the hard drive to the Post, and Giuliani’s supposed connection “to Russian intelligence.”
Intel Community Helped Peddle Russia Hoax 2.0
As was the case with the Russia-collusion hoax, the Biden campaign received an assist from the intelligence community. On Oct. 14, 2020, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence analysts “had picked up Russian chatter that stolen Burisma emails” would be released as an “October surprise.”
Burisma, of course, was the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter Biden nearly $1 million to sit on its board during his father’s final year as vice president.
The chief concern of the intelligence analysts, the Times reported, “was that the Burisma material would be leaked alongside forged materials in an attempt to hurt Mr. Biden’s candidacy.”
Lying Leakers Advance the Narrative
The next day, another foundational Russia-collusion hoaxer, Ken Dilanian, published an “exclusive” at NBC. Citing “two people familiar with the matter,” Dilanian claimed that “federal investigators are examining whether emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation.” Dilanian also quoted Bates, who again focused on Giuliani and his alleged connection to Russia.
The Washington Post also embraced the narrative on Oct. 15, reporting, “U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence.” Based on “four former officials,” The Washington Post reported that Giuliani had interacted with people tied to Russian intel.
More Lies Leaked to USA Today
This brings us to USA Today’s Oct. 16, 2020, article, “FBI Probing Whether Emails in New York Post Story About Hunter Biden Are Tied to Russian Disinformation.”
“Federal authorities are investigating whether a Russian influence operation was behind the disclosure of emails purporting to document the Ukrainian and Chinese business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden,” USA Today opened its article, citing “a person briefed on the matter” and immediately bringing up Giuliani.
According to USA Today, that person “confirmed the FBI’s involvement but did not elaborate on the scope of the bureau’s review.”
The next day, Oct. 17, USA Today followed up with the article, “A Tabloid Got a Trove of Data on Hunter Biden from Rudy Giuliani. Now, the FBI is Probing a Possible Disinformation Campaign.”
It began by saying the New York Post portrayed the laptop contents as a “smoking gun.” “Enter the FBI,” USA Today interjected, reporting that “federal authorities” are investigating whether the laptop is “disinformation pushed by Russia” and claiming there are many questions about the laptop data’s authenticity.
“Experts say the story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign,” it continued, using language strikingly similar to what the former intel officials would use days later.
Blinken Uses Reporting to Prod Morell
It is unclear which of the two USA Today pieces Blinken forwarded to Morell because both articles included the FBI investigation claims. It seems likely, however, that Blinken sent Morrel the second article because USA Today’s Oct. 17 coverage included a quote from supposed “experts” who said the New York Post “story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign.”
That language tracked near-perfectly the wording used by the 51 former intelligence officials in their infamous Oct. 19 statement, which claimed the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
That’s Not All
Morell’s contact with Blinken reportedly went beyond the phone call and email. According to CNN, following his conversation with Blinken, “Morell had conversations with other former intelligence community officials, which is what led to the letter,” and then Morell “circled back to the Biden campaign to let them know that the letter efforts were underway.”
In testimony to House oversight investigators, Morell told how Biden’s campaign helped strategize releasing the statement, according to a letter Reps. Jim Jordan and Michael Turner sent to Blinken last week. Specifically, “Morell testified that he sent an email telling Nick Shapiro, former Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Director of the CIA John Brennan, that the Biden campaign wanted the statement to go to a particular reporter at the Washington Post first and that he should send the statement to the campaign when he sent the letter to the reporter.” Shapiro was another signatory of the statement.
Politico, however, eventually first broke the story and published the statement, under the headline “Hunter Biden Story is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say.”
Mission Accomplished
In his testimony to House investigators, Morell “explained that one of his two goals in releasing the statement was to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election,” Jordan and Turner wrote. In fact, according to attorney Mark Zaid, who represents several of the signatories, “when the draft [statement] was sent out to people to sign, the cover email made clear that it was an effort to help the Biden campaign.”
Both parts of the ploy worked. When the final presidential debate arrived on Oct. 22, 2020, and then-President Trump confronted Biden with the details revealed in Hunter’s “laptop from hell,” Biden responded by telling the American public:
There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the … five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.
Biden Campaign Thanks Morell for the Assist
Morell testified that after the debate he received a call from Jeremy Bash, who was one of the 51 signatories of the statement. Bash asked Morell if he had a minute to talk to Steve Ricchetti, head of the Biden campaign. Bash testified that he said “yes,” Bash got Ricchetti on the line, and the Biden campaign representative thanked Morell “for putting the statement out.”
More Than Dirty Politics
Morell’s testimony revealed Blinken and the Biden campaign’s role in prompting the bunk statement from the former intel officials. But the contemporaneous media reporting exposes a larger scandal: Representatives of our government helped promote that narrative by falsely telling media outlets the FBI was investigating whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian-disinformation campaign.
The FBI’s role in assisting the Biden campaign’s plot transforms this case from one about dirty politics to a scandal involving government interference in the 2020 election. Accordingly, the House oversight committees need to determine which members of the FBI or intelligence agencies were responsible for the false media leak and whether anyone working on behalf of the Biden campaign collaborated with those government actors.
The committees thus need to gather evidence and question not merely Blinken, but every signatory of the statement, especially Bash; members of the Biden campaign, such as Bates and Ricchetti; and Biden advisers, including Carpenter.
While Blinken provides an entry point to unraveling the Russian-disinformation hoax, there is much more to learn.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
While federal funding is not solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the Censorship Complex, it is the most troubling because our government is using our money to censor our speech.
While the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s coverage of the Global Disinformation Index have revealed an expansive Censorship Complex that seeks to silence Americans for money, politics, ideology, and power, much still needs to be unraveled.
A search of government contracts and grants for the eight fiscal years from 2016 through today for the keywords “misinformation” or “disinformation” reveals 538 federal government grants and 36 contracts were awarded to a wide range of academic institutions and non-governmental organizations.
Mapping out the connections among the various award recipients, the government, and the pro-censorship left will require more work. But this simple snapshot confirms taxpayers’ money is funding the expansion of the Censorship Complex, as the prior eight fiscal years, from 2008 to 2015, reveal the federal government awarded only two federal contracts and seven federal grants for “disinformation” or “misinformation” research.
Likewise, an initial investigation into the nonprofits and academic institutions mentioned in the “Twitter Files” reveals government grants, donations from other liberal nonprofits, and money from leftist billionaires funded the expansion of the Censorship Complex. Research also shows the non-governmental organizations pushing the disinformation narrative are uniformly directed and run by former government employees, left-wing media types, and left-leaning or anti-Trump individuals.
Alliance Securing Democracy
Of the think tanks identified in Twitter communications, Alliance Securing Democracy (ASD) might be the most notorious thanks to Matt Taibbi’s exposé on ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard.
Devised by former FBI agent Clint Watts and launched in August of 2017, Hamilton 68 proclaimed its digital dashboard an aid to “help ordinary people, journalists, and other analysts identify Russian messaging themes and detect active disinformation or attack campaigns as soon as they begin.” Based on some 644 accounts that Hamilton 68 claimed it had “selected for their relationship to Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigns,” ASD maintained its dashboard allowed users to track online Russian influence.
The problem is, as Taibbi wrote: “The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham.”
Apparently unbeknownst to ASD, Twitter had reverse-engineered how Hamilton 68 supposedly tracked online Russian influence and found “No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.” The entire methodology was flawed.
Yet ASD played a key role in the push to censor speech as supposed “disinformation,” with the dashboard serving as “the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years” by “virtually every major news organization.” In addition to the media spreading disinformation about disinformation, Watts testified before Congress, telling senators that the Hamilton 68 dashboard provided the means for the U.S. government “to have an understanding of what Russia is doing in social media.”
Watts further revealed in his testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, that he “tried to provide to the U.S. government directly through multiple agencies” the Hamilton 68 information, telling the lawmakers they should “want to equip our intelligence agencies, our law enforcement agencies, and the Department of Defense with just an understanding … of what Russian active measures are doing around the world.”
Whether any of those “multiple agencies” relied on the inaccurate information included on the Hamilton 68 dashboard is unclear.
Members of the House and Senate did rely on Hamilton 68, however. As I reported earlier this month: “Rep. Adam Schiff and Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, and Sheldon Whitehouse, among others, not only pushed the unfounded claims that Russian bots were behind the trending hashtags, but they also demanded that Twitter and other tech companies investigate and stop such supposed interference.” Democrats pushed this false narrative even when Twitter executives warned staffers that the Russian-interference story didn’t stand.
In addition to Watts, the ASD advisory council includes a cornucopia of former government bigwigs from Democrat administrations: Michael McFaul, a former ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration; Michael Morell, former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama; John Podesta, former chair of Hillary for America and an official in the Clinton and Obama White Houses; and Jake Sullivan, former deputy chief of staff to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key adviser for both Clinton and Obama during their general elections.
Laura Thornton, who previously worked at the National Democratic Institute, a nonprofit loosely affiliated with the Democrat Party, currently oversees ASD. And Rachael Dean Wilson serves as the managing director for ASD. Wilson previously worked for the late Sen. John McCain for six years, serving as his communications director and adviser to his 2016 re-election campaign.
German Marshall Fund
According to its website, ASD is a project of the German Marshall Fund, which “is heavily funded by the American, German, and Swedish governments.” The fund has also received grants from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. The ASD likewise receives financing from left-leaning foundations, such as the Craigslist founder’s Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
The Election Integrity Partnership
Another prominent organization the “Twitter Files” revealed as pushing for censorship — including multiple censorship requests flowing through that group to the tech giant — is the Election Integrity Partnership, which is run out of Stanford’s Internet Observatory.
Stanford’s Internet Observatory launched on June 6, 2019, to “focus on the misuse of social media,” and within two years, the project grew from an initial team of three to a full-time team of 10 assisted by some 76 student research assistants. In 2020, Stanford announced the creation of the Election Integrity Partnership, which “brought together misinformation researchers” from across four organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
As a private institution, Stanford University is not funded directly with tax dollars, but it receives millions in government grants. Private grants also flow into the California university and directly fund the Election Integrity Partnership, including money from the same foundations that funded the nonprofit behind Hamilton 68, such as money from the Craigslist and eBay founders.
Atlantic Council Project
Further research on the other members of the Election Integrity Partnership reveals the Atlantic Council receives donations and federal grants, including from Facebook, Google, and the U.S. Department of State. And as will be shown shortly, the Atlantic Council is also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.
Graphika
Another member of the Election Integrity Partnership, Graphika, describes itself as a “network analysis company that examines how ideas and influence spread online.” Graphika’s chief innovation officer, Camille Francois “leads the company’s work to detect and mitigate disinformation, media manipulation and harassment.” Francois was previously the principal researcher at Google’s Jigsaw unit.
According to CNBC, one of Francois’ first projects at Graphika was a “secretive” assignment for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Working with a team of researchers from Oxford University, Graphika analyzed data provided by social media firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee to assess Russia’s exploitation of “the tools and platform of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to impact U.S. users” and influence elections.
As a private organization, Graphika’s funding details remain obscure, but in congressional testimony, Dr. Vlad Barash he “oversee[s] our work with DARPA and with our colleagues from leading academic institutions on developing and applying cutting edge methods and algorithms for detecting the manipulation of 21st Century networked communications.”
According to government data, Graphika — also known as Octant Data, LLC and Morningside Analytics — received numerous Department of Defense contracts. Additionally, Graphika received a $3 million grant from the DOD for a 2021-2022 research project related to “Research on Cross-Platform Detection to Counter Malign Influence.”
Graphika received a second nearly $2 million grant from the DOD for “research on Co-Citation Network Mapping.” The organization had previously researched “network mapping,” or the tracking of how Covid “disinformation” spreads through social media.
The Center for Internet Security
The “Twitter Files” also made mention of the Center for Internet Security. In 2018, that nonprofit launched the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), which “it claims supports the cybersecurity needs of election offices.” As part of those efforts, the Center for Internet Security crafted a one-page document for election officials, with directions for reporting misinformation or disinformation to the EI-ISAC. The federal U.S. Elections Commission would link to the CIS flyer on its government webpage.
The CIS flyer directed election workers to submit supposed “misinformation or disinformation” to the EI-ISAC, stating it would then “forward it to our partners at The Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).” CISA would then “submit it to the relevant social media platform(s) for review,” including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, TikTok, Nextdoor, and Snapchat.
CIS further said it would share reports of misinformation or disinformation with the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University. And from the “Twitter Files,” we see examples of the Election Integrity Partnership providing the Twitter team CIS’s reports of misinformation or disinformation, prompting the censorship of speech.
The Center for Internet Security is heavily funded by government grants. According to Influence Watch, the nonprofit “provides cyber-security consulting services to local, state, and federal governments,” and has been awarded $115 million in federal grants by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense since 2010. It has received $3.6 million in cybersecurity contracts from numerous federal agencies, according to its webpage, and a $290,000 grant from the eBay founder’s left-leaning Democracy Fund.
The president and CEO of the Center for Internet Security is another former high-level government adviser, John Gilligan. Gilligan “previously served in senior advisory positions in intelligence and security for the United States Airforce, Department of Energy, and White House Cyber Security Commission under the Obama administration.”
Clemson University
Other emails released as part of the “Twitter Files” reveal Clemson University’s role in the push for censorship at Twitter. And as was the case with Hamilton 68’s dashboard, Twitter’s team had concerns about Clemson’s disinformation research.
In one email, Twitter noted that Clemson’s center had asked the tech company to review its “findings regarding the latest list of accounts.” Internal communications show the Twitter team noting that while they saw “some inauthentic behaviors,” they “were unable to attribute the accounts to the IRA,” the Russian “troll” farm.
After noting that Twitter had already shared information with Clemson researchers, the tech giant’s head of safety, Yoel Roth, sent another email. “There is nothing new we’ll learn here, analytically,” Roth said. “We’re not going to attribute these accounts to Russia … absent some solid technical intel (which Clemson have not ever been able to provide).”
Defending Democracy Together
Clemson’s research was used by another group joining the “disinformation” trend, Defending Democracy Together (DDT). In 2018, DDT launched the RussiaTweets.com project to supposedly provide “the evidence of Russian interference in American politics.”
This evidence, according to DDT, came from a list of tweets “compiled and published by Professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren,” which purportedly all came from the Russian troll factory, Internet Research Agency (IRA). Both Linvill and Warren hail from Clemson University, raising the question of whether it was the list they provided to Defending Democracy Together that Twitter executives “were unable to attribute” to the IRA.
Defending Democracy Together was founded in 2018, and its leadership consists of Never Trumpers, William “Bill” Kristol, Mona Charen, and Charlie Sykes, as well as DDT’s co-founder and director Sarah Longwell, who has promoted advertisements “to advocate against the policies of the Trump administration and to weaken public support for the Trump presidency.”
Funding for DDT, according to Influence Watch, includes money from left-wing mega-donor and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar through Democracy Fund Voice and from the Hopewell Fund, which is “part of a $600 million network of left-wing funding nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors in Washington, D.C.” Additionally, OpenSecretsreported that DDT was “the biggest ‘dark money’ spender of 2020,” with DDT spending “$15.4 million in ‘dark money’ during the 2020 election cycle on supporting presidential candidate Joe Biden and opposing former President Donald Trump for reelection.”
The University of Buffalo, Lehigh University, and Northeastern University are likewise involved in the disinformation project, with a Clemson News release revealing that faculty at those universities, along with researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, launched a project titled “Disinformation Range to Improve User Awareness and Resilience to Online Disinformation.” The government, through a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, is supporting those efforts.
The Aspen Institute
The Aspen Institute is also entwined in the Censorship Complex, having hosted in the fall of 2020 “a series of off-the-record briefings to help prepare every major US newsroom and tech platform for potential hack-and-leak operations and a contested post-election environment.” One of the briefings involved a tabletop exercise facilitated by Aspen’s Garrett Graff that posed a hack-and-leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden.
Twitter’s Yoel Roth attended that event just two weeks before the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. And soon after that story broke, Graff and his Aspen Institute colleague Vivian Schiller took to Twitter to frame the story as “crap” and “nonsense.” Schiller’s former jobs include CEO at NPR, head of news at Twitter, general manager at The New York Times, and chief digital officer at NBC News.
Soon after Graff and Schiller pushed the Hunter Biden story as misinformation, Twitter blocked the Post’s story and froze the conservative outlet’s account, even though internal communications revealed the Post had not violated Twitter’s terms of service. Despite its extensive coordination with the FBI to prepare to combat foreign election interference, Twitter didn’t ask the bureau if the scandal was Russian disinformation. Instead, Twitter representatives testified to Congress that the company “relied on the tweets of supposed experts, making the tech giant’s decision to censor the Post’s story even more outrageous.”
After the Post broke the Biden family pay-to-play scandal, several left-leaning “journalists” spent the day speaking of “misinformation,” while uniformly ignoring the substance of the story. One must wonder how many of those so-called journalists had attended Aspen’s training session.
Since then, Aspen has expanded its focus on disinformation and misinformation, launching a “Commission on Information Disorder” to develop what the institute calls “actionable public-private responses to the disinformation crisis.”
The Global Disinformation Index
Another nonprofit, the Global Disinformation Index, has already begun pushing an “actionable response to the disinformation crisis,” by pressuring advertisers to dump news outlets based on GDI’s view of their “disinformation risk.” However, as the Washington Examiner revealed in Gabe Kaminsky’s investigative series, the GDI’s December 2022 report, prepared in partnership with the University of Texas-Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab, brands only conservative outlets as the top “riskiest.” Conversely, the “least risky” outlets all lean left, other than The Wall Street Journal, and are also the same outlets that got the most significant news stories of the last decade wrong.
Like the “disinformation” nonprofits named in the “Twitter Files,” GDI has received federal grants and is connected to other left-leaning nonprofits and individuals seeking to censor speech. Its advisers likewise hew left, such as “journalist” Anne Applebaum, who said Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings were not interesting, and Finn Heinrich of the leftist George Soros’ Open Society group.
The composition of GDI’s “advisory panel” is also noteworthy because the same individuals guiding GDI’s mission to starve conservative sites of advertising dollars are connected to three of the organizations behind the Election Integrity Partnership’s push for censorship at Twitter. That fact would be difficult to discover today, though, as GDI scrubbed its “advisory panel” section of its homepage after the blacklist scandal broke.
According to the archived GDI homepage, advisory panel members include Ben Nimmo, the global lead at Meta; Franziska Roesner, a University of Washington professor; and Camille Francois of Niantic. Nimmo was a founding member of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and a senior fellow for that lab. He was also “the first director of investigations at Graphika.” Francois also serves as the chair of Graphika’s advisory board and is identified on Graphika’s webpage as its chief innovation officer. Roesner is a faculty member at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Together then, three of the four organizations that partnered with Stanford to run the Election Integrity Partnership, which pushed Twitter to censor speech in advance of the 2020 election, were also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.
Global Engagement Center
A strong connection also exists between GDI and the U.S. government through an arm of the State Department, the Global Engagement Center, which has also made several appearances in the “Twitter Files.”
The Global Engagement Center, which proclaims itself “a data-driven body leading U.S. interagency efforts in proactively addressing foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine U.S. interests using disinformation and propaganda,” awarded the Global Disinformation Index a $100,000 grant as part of the U.S-Paris Tech Challenge. The State Department sponsored that “Tech Challenge” in “collaboration” with, among others, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Park Advisors, and Disinfo Cloud. According to a State Department spokesman, the Global Engagement Center began funding Disinfo Cloud in 2018 and also awarded approximately $300,000 to Park Advisors to manage Disinfo Coud to fight “disinformation, terrorism, violent extremism, hate speech.”
The “Twitter Files” revealed that, in addition to funding private organizations pushing for censorship, the State Department’s Global Disinformation Center attempted to insert itself into Twitter’s review and censorship process. When those efforts failed, the Global Disinformation Center pressed its unsupported claims of disinformation to the media.
Additional research is needed to understand the full scope of the Global Engagement Center’s role in the Censorship Complex, but what little is known now suggests the State Department provides load-bearing support for the project. A recent report from the Foundation for Freedom Online also exposes the National Science Foundation as a key funder in “the science of censorship.”
While federal funding is not solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the Censorship Complex, it is the most troubling because our government is using our money to censor our speech.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Unlike the military-industrial complex, the Censorship Complex affects all aspects of governance, controlling the information available to you on every topic.
The Biden administration may have abandoned plans to create a “Disinformation Board,” but a more insidious “Censorship Complex” already exists and is growing at an alarming speed.
This Censorship Complex is bigger than banned Twitter accounts or Democrats’ propensity for groupthink. Its funding and collaboration implicate the government, academia, tech giants, nonprofits, politicians, social media, and the legacy press. Under the guise of combatting so-called misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, these groups seek to silence speech that threatens the far-left’s ability to control the conversation — and thus the country and the world.
Americans grasped a thread of this reality with the release of the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s reporting on the Global Disinformation Index, which revealed the coordinated censorship of speech by government officials, nonprofits, and the media. Yet Americans have no idea of the breadth and depth of the “Censorship Complex” — and how much it threatens the fabric of this country.
In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned against the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” via the new sweeping military-industrial complex. Its “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — [was] felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.” Replace “military-industrial” with “censorship,” and you arrive at the reality Americans face today.
Origins of the Censorship Complex
Even with the rise of independent news outlets, until about 2016 the left-leaning corporate media controlled the flow of information. Then Donald Trump entered the political arena and used social media to speak directly to Americans. Despite the Russia hoax and the media’s all-out assault, Trump won, proving the strategic use of social media could prevail against a unified corporate press. The left was terrified.
Of course, Democrats and the media couldn’t admit their previous control over information converted to electoral victories and that for their own self-preservation, they needed to suppress other voices. So instead, the left began pushing the narrative that “disinformation” — including Russian disinformation — from alternative news outlets and social media companies handed Trump the election.
The New York Times first pushed the “disinformation” narrative using the “fake news” moniker after the 2016 election. “The proliferation of fake and hyperpartisan news that has flooded into Americans’ laptops and living rooms has prompted a national soul-searching, with liberals across the country asking how a nation of millions could be marching to such a suspect drumbeat. Fake news, and the proliferation of raw opinion that passes for news, is creating confusion,” the Times wrote, bemoaning the public’s reliance on Facebook.
“Narrowly defined, ‘fake news’ means a made-up story with an intention to deceive, often geared toward getting clicks. But the issue has become a political battering ram, with the left accusing the right of trafficking in disinformation, and the right accusing the left of tarring conservatives as a way to try to censor websites,” the Times wrote, feigning objectivity. But its conclusion? “Fake and hyperpartisan news from the right has been more conspicuous than from the left.”
Two days later, Hillary Clinton repeated the narrative-building phrase, condemning what she called “the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year.” But then, as if to remind Democrats and the legacy press that he had wrestled control of the narrative from them, Trump branded left-wing outlets “fake news” — and just like that, the catchphrase belonged to him.
Disinformation Is Scarier if It’s Russian
That didn’t deter the left in its mission to destroy alternative channels of communication, however. The media abandoned its “fake news” framing for the “disinformation” buzzword. “Misinformation” and “mal-information” were soon added to the vernacular, with the Department of Homeland Security even defining the terms.
But silencing conservatives would require more than merely labeling their speech as disinformation, so the various elements of the Censorship Complex deployed what they called “the added element of Russian meddling” in the 2016 election, with Clinton amplifying this message and blaming the spread of social media misinformation for her loss.
Priming the public to connect “disinformation” with Russia’s supposed interference in the 2016 election allowed the Censorship Complex to frame demands for censorship as patriotic: a fight against foreign influence to save democracy!
The Censorship Complex Expands
The Censorship Complex’s push to silence speech under the guise of preventing disinformation and election interference hit its stride in 2017, when FBI Director Christopher Wray launched the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) purportedly “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States.”
The “most widely reported” foreign influence operations these days, Wray said, “are attempts by adversaries — hoping to reach a wide swath of Americans covertly from outside the United States — to use false personas and fabricated stories on social media platforms to discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” Wray’s statement perfectly echoed the claims Clinton and Democrats had peddled ad nauseam in the press, and it foreshadowed how the Censorship Complex would soon mature.
The launch of the FITF in 2017 brought together numerous representatives from the deep state. The FBI’s Counterintelligence, Cyber, Criminal, and Counterterrorism Divisions worked closely with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and other intelligence agencies, as well as “state and local enforcement partners and election officials.”
Significantly, the FITF viewed “strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, including threat indicator sharing,” as crucial to combatting foreign disinformation. That perspective led to the FBI’s hand-in-glove relationship with Twitter, which included monthly and then weekly meetings with the tech giant, some of which CIA representatives attended. This symbiotic relationship also led to the censorship of important — and true — political speech, such as the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, which exposed the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandal right before a critical presidential election.
State Department Renovates Its Wing
In 2011, by executive order, the Department of State established the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications to support government agencies’ communications “targeted against violent extremism and terrorist organizations.” While renamed the Global Engagement Center in 2016, the center’s counterterrorism mission remained largely unchanged. But then at the end of that year, Congress expanded the Global Engagement Center’s authority, directing it “to address other foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation activities.” And with language straight out of the Russia hoax playbook, the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 further refined the Global Engagement Center’s mission:
The purpose of the Center shall be to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and foreign non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.
Together, the State Department and the many intelligence agencies behind the FITF worked not just with Twitter but with the array of tech giants, such as Google and Facebook, pushing for censorship of supposed mis-, dis-, and mal-information. But the deep state was not alone. The “disinformation” contagion also reached the Hill, nonprofits, think tanks, and academic institutions with both politics and a desire to suckle at the federal teat driving a frenzied expansion of the project. Together these groups pushed for even more silencing of their opponents, and the Censorship Complex boomed.
The danger Eisenhower warned the country of in 1961 is mild in comparison to the threat of the Censorship Complex. Unlike the military-industrial complex that reached only one function of the federal government, the Censorship Complex affects all aspects of governance, controlling the information available to you and your fellow Americans on every topic.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Anonymous sources were once rarely used in journalism. They would only be cited when trying to preserve someone’s physical safety or report on the most sensitive national security matters, and there was an expectation that such unusual sourcing be reviewed by editors and carefully corroborated whenever possible.
Now anonymous sourcing has become the norm in reporting and is frequently used as a political weapon to disseminate Democrats’ talking points and smear their enemies. The illicit use of anonymous sources to launch libel against Democrats’ enemies ballooned after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, and the tactic was used to develop the Russia-collusion hoax and multiple other smears.
The most recent example may be the Chinese spy balloon news cycle. When word reached the public that Red China spent days hovering over the United States collecting sensitive information, public outrage ensued. Dozens of legislators and governors and Trump demanded President Joe Biden shoot down the balloon as soon as possible.
The Biden administration refused, claiming that neutralizing the airborne threat could cause harm to civilians. This initial claim aired in corporate media, sourced to an anonymous “official” who offered no evidence, that “the balloon did not pose a military or physical threat” to the United States. This decision, once again, drew ire from Americans.
Once the administration finally did shoot down the balloon over the Atlantic, the Biden administration pointed fingers. An unnamed official at the Department of Defense allegedly told reporters at an off-camera press briefing on Feb. 4 that Chinese balloons like this one “transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration.”
That admission kicked off a corporate media frenzy. The press took the Pentagon’s word for it and accused Republicans of a “double standard.” Those who called for the end of the balloon, the press claimed, were hypocrites and Trump even more so because he “failed” to shoot down the spy equipment while in office.
Less than one day later, Trump and several high-level Trump national security officials who would have been briefed about a security breach during their tenure went on the record, with their names behind their statements, to deny any knowledge of Chinese spy balloons surveilling the United States under their watch. https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/109812699029727017/embed
“I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States,” Mark Esper, who was defense secretary from 2019 to 2020, told CNN.
Christopher Miller, who was acting defense secretary from 2020 to 2021, admitted “the first time I ever heard of anything like this was this weekend.”
“Had not a clue,” Miller said. “If something like that had happened, that’s like a national security threat.”
“I certainly never became aware that there was a three-bus-sized floating device coming across our country for five days, either as CIA director or secretary of state. [And] I’ve talked to others who are on my teams — they don’t know anything about it either,” said Mike Pompeo, who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency and secretary of state under Trump.
Robert O’Brien, another former Trump national security advisor, said, “Unequivocally, I have never been briefed on the issue.” Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe outright stated the Biden administration’s anonymously sourced claim was “not true.”
Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe reiterates his statement that there were not 3 Chinese spy balloon incidents under Trump:
Even former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has a history of fabricating intel and smears about Trump, said the Biden administration’s conveniently timed revelation was news to him.
“I don’t know of any balloon flights by any power over the United States during my tenure, and I’d never heard of any of that occurring before I joined in 2018,” Bolton told Fox News. “I haven’t heard of anything that occurred after I left either.”
Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, “clarified” two days after the Pentagon’s initial accusation that “we did not detect those threats” at the time Trump was in office. The Narrative™ that Trump failed to shoot down Chinese spy balloons had already made its way onto the pages and TV screens of millions by the time the Biden administration decided to walk back its smears against the previous administration filtered through an anonymous source to compliant media outlets.
On Feb. 7, days after Trump staff denied on the record and one day after the Pentagon claimed Red China’s repeat airborne espionage was only discovered retrospectively, corporate media still insisted spy balloons were “spotted on several occasions during President Donald Trump’s administration, including three instances where they traveled near sensitive US military facilities and training areas.”
The source? “People familiar with the matter” who worked under Trump. The people making these claims were conveniently not named, giving them cover to make any accusations they liked and media to air them with no accountability for either entity.
The Smear Operation Playbook
Classic journalism ethics state anonymous sourcing should be rare because the “public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources’ reliability.” Yet the practice of relying on unnamed information suppliers to communicate breaking news has become commonplace, especially when fronting smears against Democrats’ opponents. As a matter of fact, anonymously sourcing what later prove to be complete lies is often rewarded by the journalism industry today.
The most notable example of anonymous sourcing as a weapon was the Russia hoax. That is a years-long coup led by Democrats and intelligence agencies with the eager help of the corporate media to disqualify Trump from the White House and prevent his presidency from being effective. The Russia hoax also resulted in failed impeachments. It’s fair to say it never could have been pulled off without outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more using unnamed sources to discredit their political enemies.
The Trump years were rife with media manipulation involving anonymous sources. In one dramatic episode, the media claimed to prove that Donald Trump Jr. was sent an email by Wikileaks giving him early access to leaked emails from top Democrats. Not only was the report untrue — CNN never saw the source email to Donald Trump Jr. and instead relied on the word of two anonymous sources who got the date on the email wrong — but the botched CNN report dramatically exposed how anonymous sources can lead to misinformation.
CNN’s faulty reporting was immediately “confirmed” by MSNBC and CBS. Of course, confirming erroneous reporting is an impossibility unless all three news outlets were relying on the same sources, confident that their anonymity would create the false impression that multiple sources could verify the story. In this case, the sources appear to have come from the office of Rep. Adam Schiff, a known liar and key perpetrator of the Russiagate hoax. This issue of multiple news outlets citing the same anonymous source has happened more than once, and it continues to be a problem.
But that failure was just the tip of the iceberg. During the Trump years, the media also claimed Trump’s national security adviser illicitly reached out to Russia’s government before Trump took office; that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was linked to the Russian Direct Investment Fund; that Trump attorney Michael Cohen confessed that Trump “directed” him to lie about contacting a Russian official; that Russia offered members of the Taliban bounties in exchange for killing American soldiers and Trump knew about it; that Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state’s office to “find the fraud”; and many, many more complete fabrications relying on sources who hid their smears behind anonymity.
All of these claims were unvetted, untrue, and should have never been published. Instead, some were showered with praise and status. Others were barely corrected long after the coverage served its political purpose.
Real reporting requires due diligence. Corporate media, desperate to aid Democrats in their conquest of any Americans who disagree with them, have become pipelines of government information manipulation, especially from intelligence agencies. As a result, anonymous sources are easily duplicated and repackaged as “independent confirmation,” and so-called “news” sites are plagued with unverified intelligence and information — or, worse, allegations they verifiably know are untrue.
And they are happy about it. In 2019, then-New York Times Public Editor Liz Spayd denounced her employer for being “too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had” quickly about Trump’s nonexistent connection with Russia.
“The idea that you only publish once every piece of information is in and fully vetted is a false construct,” she wrote. “If you know the FBI is investigating, say, a presidential candidate, using significant resources and with explosive consequences, that should be enough to write.”
Her call to normalize the unprofessionalism of partisan actors in newsrooms received amplification from fellow journos. The ubiquitous use and elevation of this unethical practice may have been popularized during the rise of Trump, but it has far outlived his presidency, something that independent media have routinely observed for years.
Today’s media complex relies on readers to keep trusting what it says, regardless of its extremely tainted records. The press doesn’t deserve that kind of benefit of the doubt.
Americans are still unclear on how many Chinese aircraft have compromised U.S. airspace and who let them. What they shouldn’t be unclear about is that the corrupt, untrustworthy, and democracy-threatening corporate media use anonymous sources to advance disinformation operations and push political narratives that often have no relationship to the truth.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk fired Jim Baker, the company’s deputy general counsel, on Tuesday after an “unconvincing” explanation of the terminated employee’s role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
On Sunday, independent journalist Matt Taibbi posted a link to an article from attorney Jonathan Turley published in the New York Post which connected Baker’s work at Twitter with his prior operations peddling the Russia hoax at the Department of Justice. In 2016, Baker was the Clinton campaign’s “go-to, speed-dial contact” to plant false claims about Kremlin collusion and the Trump White House effort. Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann picked Baker to give junk intelligence about a purported connection between President Donald Trump and the Russian Alfa Bank.
“He was effectively forced out due to his role and reportedly found himself under criminal investigation. He became a defender of the Russian investigations despite findings of biased and even criminal conduct,” Turley wrote. “After leaving the FBI, Twitter seemed eager to hire Baker as deputy general counsel.”
The first batch of “Twitter Files” out on Friday revealed how Baker went on to play an instrumental role in suppressing blockbuster stories from the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Biden family business ventures — stories containing emails that implicated then-candidate Joe Biden in the dealings.
“Baker soon weighed in with the same signature bias that characterized the Russian investigations,” Turley wrote. Internal documents made public last week show Baker pressed colleagues at Twitter for more information that Biden’s emails had been hacked.
“Caution is warranted,” Baker wrote, despite there never being evidence the emails were illegally hacked.
Musk responded to Taibbi’s post on Tuesday with the announcement that Baker had been fired.
“In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today,” Musk wrote.
“Was he asked to explain himself?” inquired a user.
“Yes. His explanation was …unconvincing,” Musk replied.
In a “Twitter Files Supplemental” thread, Taibbi explained that last week’s delay in publishing the first round of files was due to Baker reviewing them without new Twitter leadership knowing.
“Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of ‘Twitter Files’ — without knowledge of new management,” Taibbi wrote.
The post suggests Baker was running interference behind Musk’s back to minimize the fallout over the reveal of Twitter’s behind-the-scenes operations to elect Joe Biden in 2020.
While general counsel at the FBI, Baker was central to the agency’s deep-state operations to undermine Trump as an agent of the Russian government. According to former FBI Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson in her testimony before House lawmakers in 2018, Baker “personally reviewed and made edits to the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]” warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The ex-FBI counsel would later defend the agency’s conduct, telling Yahoo News that officials took “seriously” the uncorroborated dossier commissioned by the DNC that alleged collusion, but “we didn’t necessarily take it literally.”
The agency’s legal chief, however, took it seriously enough to sign off on warrants to spy on political opponents. At least two of the warrant applications to conduct government surveillance on Page were declared illegal by a federal judge.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
On Thursday, Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder decided it was the time to bring the subtext of the Jan. 6 show trials and related domestic security state activities into the open.
“My guess is that by the end of this process, you’re going to see indictments involving high-level people in the White House, you’re going to see indictments against people outside the White House who were advising them with regard to the attempt to steal the election, and I think ultimately you’re probably going to see the president, former president of the United States indicted as well,” Holder told SiriusXM host Joe Madison.
Holder noted that the U.S. Department of Justice he formerly headed is working with the illegally constituted Jan. 6 Commission towards this goal. We know these entities are also working with the FBI, whose head bit his thumb at congressional oversight repeatedly in a public hearing last week.
Locking Up Opposition Politicians Is What Putin Does
An indictment of former President Donald Trump would be a breathtakingly authoritarian turn. It would amount to the U.S. security state refusing to accept “no” from America’s voters yet again. An indictment would be an unelected and unaccountable federal agency overruling voters’ two-time rejection of impeachment through their elected representatives.
This is the core danger of the administrative state: Its now open propensity to go rogue. It is apparently hellbent now on turning the United States into a banana republic.
Democrats called Donald Trump a fascist, authoritarian, and wannabe dictator for chants at his rallies of “Lock her up,” referring to his opponent Hillary Clinton. At the time, leftists pointed out that imprisoning, interrogating, investigating, and otherwise using government resources to harass and prosecute one’s political opponents was the mark of tyrannical regimes such as Vladimir Putin’s and Adolf Hitler. “Democracies don’t lock up political opponents,” the Washington Post editorial board told us in 2016.
That is still true when the ones pushing the interrogations, investigations, entrapments into committing felonies, show trials in unusual venues with no cross-examination or due process, early morning home raids, excessive detainment, and asymmetrical punishments are Democrats. Democrats are trashing republican institutions, expectations, and guarantees for political purposes, most visibly now in their Jan. 6 effort to destroy the lives of protestors largely charged with misdemeanors and to expand Spygate tactics more broadly.
Spygate Is Setting Up Field Offices In Swing States
It’s not just the de facto head of the opposition party whom powerful government agencies are putting in their sights, it’s down-ballot party leaders. The FBI has gone from using its spy resources to affect the results of presidential elections with Spygate and its Hunter Biden laptop disinformation to using its police powers to affect gubernatorial elections. And these are just the operations we know about.
In Michigan, the FBI openly meddled in the upcoming election by affecting the selection of candidates, arresting and charging the formerly leading Republican candidate for governor for misdemeanors. The FBI raided Ryan Kelley’s home while polls showed him leading the primaries. In the primary election last week, he came in fourth.
The Jan. 6 Committee is now demanding documents and interviews with Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally. The sole allegation against him is that he walked past “police lines,” which could mean anything, as the scene was chaotic and police were woefully understaffed.
This means Mastriano is being targeted for peacefully exercising his rights to free speech and public assembly. The Jan. 6 Committee won’t allow him to record their planned interrogation, a basic feature of legal self-defense and impartial justice. In fact, selectively excerpted video clips and quotes from these secret interrogations have been a constant feature of the commission, further reinforcing its use as a political weapon against the right rather than a pursuit of justice.
Of the 120,000 people the FBI alleges were present on Jan. 6, 2021 — perhaps 1 percent of whom entered the Capitol building — the vast majority were garden-variety Trump supporters, which include numerous state and local officials. State and local lawmakers are a party’s farm team. Subjecting them to investigation for peacefully protesting is a way to kneecap their entire party.
Weeks before the 2020 election, the FBI announced it had foiled an alleged plot to kidnap the Michigan governor.
But now, in 2022, the story is VERY different. What happened, who authorized this operation, and is this typical of the DOJ's domestic terrorism unit?
Put all of this against the systematic refusal of Democrat DAs, judges, and juries to prosecute people who openly engage in political violence from the left. In 2020, leftist rioters who coordinated across state lines and in far greater numbers and criminal activity than Jan. 6 attendees firebombed federal buildings, murdered people, looted, burned down downtowns, and assaulted police officers. Of course, essentially nobody involved in perpetrating the Spygate setup of an American president has been brought to justice, most recently including Michael Sussmann.
This summer, a leftist group has allegedly attacked two dozen pro-life maternal care centers in multiple states and a congressional office and promises to continue, but Wray couldn’t provide almost any information on alleged FBI investigations into it. Despite an assassination attempt on one Supreme Court justice this summer, the DOJ has still not filed charges against the people harassing and threatening justices and their families at their homes. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland failed for weeks on end to enforce laws against such harassment of justices, creating the conditions for the aggression to intensify.
This is unacceptable, and Wray and Garland should be fired. They won’t be, though, and that’s the problem.
The @FBI is too busy hunting down every grandma and goofball who trespassed and took selfies on January 6th.
And too busy harassing Loudoun County parents who dared to speak up at public school board meetings.
Amplifying pre-existing double standards of justice is far beyond troubling, it’s a destruction of the justice system. A country that harshly prosecutes people or lets them off Scot-free based on their political affiliation is a banana republic.
A two-tier justice system is not a justice system. It is a totalitarian system. Its purpose is not justice but population control. The more people see that moving into place, the more likely it is that some guy gets raided by the FBI for political reasons one morning and — God forbid — goes postal because he has no hope for a fair trial after they take him in.
Certainly even more ordinary Americans are realizing through all of this that the entire federal deck is prejudiced against them. Desperation makes people do wild things. Whatever happens, Republicans can be sure it will be wrapped around their necks with ropes of lies to further subjugate them and everyone who votes for them with the further erasure of our constitutional rights and way of life.
Equality Under the Law Is the Nonviolent Way Out
Remember, 75 million people voted for Trump in 2020. This isn’t some fringe Davidian cult, it’s half of the nation’s voters. Democrats are scaring them, for good reason. And Republicans are doing jack nothing to calm things down.
We’re watching federal agencies use their powers not to catch criminals but to criminalize peaceful political views and actions. We’re witnessing a growing campaign to lock people up for their opposition to the ruling political party, which is not only profoundly un-American but profoundly dangerous societally. This is the prosecution of a political cold civil war that could very easily heat up again in another January 6-like outburst, or worse.
As Mike Anton writes, Democrats may want that. But do Republicans? Any who thinks he might after what we’ve been through in the past seven years is either fool or quisling.
If Republicans think this is all going to blow over just because they haul in the FBI director for another no-consequences hearing, or even if they promise yet another goes-nowhere, punishes-nobody investigation of agencies we know are meddling in elections, framing elected officials, and telling elected members of Congress what to do instead of the reverse, they’re idiots. Their only hope of averting even worse political circumstances is to make damned sure they kneecap these scary federal agencies as their top priority ASAP.
We aren’t in business-as-usual Kansas anymore, Toto. We’re in crisis times that call for serious leadership, not LARPing as leaders on screens.
Sending billions to Ukraine while China grows stronger and every domestic sector is on fire isn’t serious. Lambasting Joe Biden for inflation while not pledging to pass the policies that reverse it, starting with slashing the federal government’s spending, isn’t serious. Yelling at the FBI director Republicans helped confirm isn’t serious (get better vetting staff, folks). Confirming a Supreme Court justice who obviously hates the Constitution isn’t serious. Not going on a crusade to clean out the FBI and DOJ Agean-stables-style isn’t serious. And pretending the Jan. 6 commission is anything but a miscarriage of justice is disqualifying.
We need the GOP to provide serious leadership, because Democrats are a serious threat to equal justice for all, and that’s going to destroy the country for good if it’s not stopped post-haste. Americans desperately need swift and prudent action to avert even more unthinkably dangerous events. Those who refuse to plan and take that action despite accepting from voters the responsibility to do so will be infamous to history as cowards and traitors.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
After the terrifying ransack of the U.S. capitol Wednesday during a Donald Trump “stop the steal” rally, big tech companies are joining leftist elites in the media and government in their effort to squash the Trump movement once and for all. Seizing on the backlash from the riot, they have seamlessly banned President Trump from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
What happened at the capitol was an embarrassment for our country. Now, the hypocritical outcries from Democrats, who proudly condoned left-wing Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters as they terrorized American cities all summer, are ushering in a great reckoning.
The Jan. 6 demonstrators, the vast majority of whom were peaceful, were there to protest legitimate claims of election irregularities and voter fraud. But Google-owned YouTube doesn’t want you to know that. They announced Thursday that they will ban all videos about voter fraud in the 2020 election.
The one free speech haven, Parler, Apple is keying up to ban from its app store and bar from iOS devices, claiming content on the website contributed to the capitol unrest. Google has already jumped the gun, banning Parler yesterday.
Every corner of the Trump movement is being publicly purged from the internet. Thursday, Shopify stripped all online stores for President Trump, including the Trump Organization and Trump’s affiliated campaign account.
Anyone who has supported the president is in for it, as well. Rick Klein, the political director at ABC News, in a now-deleted tweet said that getting rid of Trump is “the easy part.” The more difficult task will be “cleansing the movement he commands.” Democrats have already created a “Trump Accountability Project,” an enemies list to ban, cancel, or fire anyone who staffed, donated to, endorsed, or supported President Trump and his administration.
Trump subverted the elites who run our country. He took on big pharma and China. He negotiated, renegotiated, and destroyed trade deals in his mission to put America and American workers first. He went to war with critical race theory institutionalized in our schools and in government.
He stood for things that those who run our biggest corporations and hold our highest government positions detest. For virtually his entire presidency, they tried everything to delegitimize his administration, beginning with the now-debunked Russiagate. Trump showed their corruption, and now he will pay.
The man, the administration, and his supporters will likely go down in history books as delusional and dangerous. Why? Because the left has a monopoly on power, so they can control what people see and therefore think.
As the left’s arbiters of “truth,” big tech has been banning users they don’t agree with and suppressing stories like The New York Post’s blockbuster investigation into Hunter Biden‘s laptop and sketchy deals with foreign governments and companies with ties to the Communist Chinese government. With the help of their partisan “independent fact checkers,” big tech and the media made sure average Americans never knew about this before they went to the polls.
Following the riot among Trump supporters in the capitol, Facebook removed President Trump’s video calling for peace and rule of law, claiming it instigated violence. Then Facebook de-platformed him. Trump’s speech didn’t fit the narrative that he was a pro-violence, lawlessness insurrectionist.
This disturbing reality we live in, where one political party now has the power to control the narrative in all aspects of our lives — school, work, social media, and government — might make us feel eerie echoes of living under Chinese Communist Party influence instead of in the United States of America.
Perhaps what’s most troubling, and something that we might not have even considered in the chaos of the last few days, is the long-term impact this will have on American children. Generation Z or Zoomers, aged 13 to 21, may be one of the first generations that is more influenced by what they see and read on social media and the internet than what they hear at the dinner table from mom and dad.
A Business Insider’s poll found that 59 percent of Zoomers listed social media as their top news source. While technology used to serve as a way to make information accessible, a way to have the world at your fingertips with just a quick search, it has become something much different. It is teaching the youngest and most impressionable among us that suppression is normal and personal censorship is an important survival mechanism.
Children are being taught to watch what they say and think, lest they be labeled a racist, white supremacist, homophobe, or xenophobe. Indeed, making a pro-Trump TikTok video can get your college admission rescinded and subject you to intense personal harassment. A three-second insensitive or politically incorrect Snapchat video from 2016 can get you featured in a New York Times article and your college admission rescinded, and subject you to bitter bullying.
For young people today, it’s becoming normal to see political leaders in our country deemed “dangerous” to be ousted from public platforms and ostracized from society. They watch their parents self-censor at work, fearful of backlash from employees or coworkers that could get them fired.
Americans used to support the right of people to hold and express opinions others disagree with. Yet the newest generation believes feelings are more valuable than freedom. Study after study finds that younger people are more supportive of limiting speech than are older generations.
A recent survey found that an overwhelming majority of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison think the government should be able to punish “hate speech.” Of course, “hate speech” is simply the left’s ambiguous term for anything veering from the leftist orthodoxy on issues such as abortion, sex, race, and immigration.
Silicon Valley oligarchs have an agenda. They aren’t platforms, they are publishers, which should nullify the privileges they enjoy under Section 230. Will the Democrats who are now running our government do anything to stop big tech tyranny? Of course not.
This problem is not going away. America’s ethos of free speech and expression is going extinct at the hands of big tech and the leftists controlling media and government.
The U.S. Capitol riots are over, thanks to law enforcement. However, the censorship that followed has created a dangerous precedent.
For young people, their “normal” is beginning to feel increasingly like it’s heading towards life in China. It’s less free and tolerant than the America their parents grew up in. Imagine how much worse things will be when today’s youths are running the country.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Evita Duffy is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at the University of Chicago, where she studies American History. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, & her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1
House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) during an interview on Sunday recalled how Republicans tried to hold a public hearing on the China threat in mid-2018, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) hijacked it to call for a subpoena of a Russian translator.
“The House Republicans have been running an investigation into China on the Intelligence Committee for many, many years…so we’ve been on this for awhile, and remember, we were dealing with the Russian hoax in Congress at the same time the House Republicans were trying to run an investigation into China,” he said on Fox and Friends.
“And the Democrats — finally we had a public hearing on this — and they hijacked the hearing to try to subpoena whatever Russian of the week they were looking after. So this has been a challenge for us, to get Russia on the forefront, and now, both Republicans and Democrats realize this,” he said.
Nunes was referring to the July 19, 2018, hearing on China held by Nunes, when he was the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. The hearing’s topic was “China’s threat to American government and private sector research and innovation leadership.” During the hearing, then-Ranking Schiff began his opening remarks, not on China, but with his concerns about President Trump meeting alone with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, earlier that month, and then raised a motion to subpoena the interpreter who attended the meeting. The hearing then devolved into confusion over whether Schiff was able to raise that motion, forcing Nunes to call for a recess. The witnesses — four top China experts — were left to talk to committee staff and among themselves, as Breitbart News reported at the time.
After the recess, Republicans voted to table the motion. Schiff demanded a recorded vote.
“Schiff has decided to turn this hearing into a Russia clown show,” a house staffer said.
Schiff, or his staff, later tweeted about his failed attempt to subpoena the interpreter at the China hearing.
“BREAKING: @RepSwalwell and I just made a motion in House Intel Committee to subpoena the American interpreter during the summit — the only witness to Trump’s meeting with Putin. This is an extraordinary remedy, but Trump’s actions necessitate it. Republicans voted it down.”
Republicans also say Democrats’ singular focus on impeaching Trump also distracted Congress earlier this year, when the coronavirus spread. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) scheduled a vote on impeachment articles on Trump the same day the first person from Wuhan, China, arrived to the United States, on January 15. She passed out commemorative signing pens and encouraged Americans to watch the House impeachment managers bring the articles over to the Senate.
The White House stood up its coronavirus task force on January 29, and ordered a ban on travel from China on January 31, the same day the World Health Organization acknowledged that the coronavirus was a global health emergency. However, the Senate impeachment trial continued until February 5.
Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on Twitter or on Facebook.
CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge obtained an April 2 letter responding to Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley over four key footnotes in IG Horowitz’s report.
As TGP previously reported, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee Ron Johnson and Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee Chuck Grassley Tuesday sent a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr asking him to declassify four footnotes in Horowitz’s report on FISA abuse.
The Senators stated that the classified footnotes contradict what is publicly available in Horowitz’s report related to Crossfire Hurricane, the CI investigation opened into Trump’s campaign in July of 2016.
Grassley and Johnson wrote, “The American people have a right to know what is contained within these four footnotes and, without that knowledge, they will not have a full picture as to what happened during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
The DOJ declassified 3 footnotes with minimal redactions and kept the fourth footnote completely blacked out citing, “unique and significant concerns. The redacted information refers to information received by a member of the Crossfire Hurricane team regarding possible previous attempts by a foreign government to penetrate and research a company or individuals associated with Christopher Steele,” Herridge reported.
One declassified footnote revealed Comey’s FBI knew the Hillary Clinton-funded dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele was bogus Russian disinformation — but they used it anyway to spy on Trump’s campaign.
“The (redacted) stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and ASSESSED that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations” — Catherine Herridge said.
Catherine Herridge
✔@CBS_Herridge
#FISA READ footnote 350 FBI effort to verify Steele Dossier “The (redacted) stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and ASSESSED that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations”
Herridge: READ FULL footnote 302 Steele dossier sub-source “According to a document circulated among Crossfire Hurricane team members and supervisors in early October 2016, Person 1 had historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to RIS (Russian Intel)
Catherine Herridge
✔@CBS_Herridge
#FISA READ FULL footnote 302 Steele dossier sub-source “According to a document circulated among Crossfire Hurricane team members and supervisors in early October 2016, Person 1 had historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to RIS (Russian Intel)…
In addition, in late December 2016, Department Attorney Bruce Ohr told SSA 1 that he had met with Glenn Simpson (Fusion GPS) and that Simpson had assessed that Person 1 was a RIS (Russian intel) officer who was central in connecting Trump to Russia.”
…In addition, in late December 2016, Department Attorney Bruce Ohr told SSA 1 that he had met with Glenn Simpson (Fusion GPS) and that Simpson had assessed that Person 1 was a RIS (Russian intel) officer who was central in connecting Trump to Russia.” @CBSNews#MyHighlighter
Attorney General Bill Barr told Fox News host Laura Ingraham there was ‘no basis’ for the FBI’s ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump.
Barr said what happened to Trump was one of the greatest travesties in American history.
Even more alarming was the pattern of events after the campaign to sabotage Trump’s presidency.
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