Tag: conspiracy theories

The Russia-Obsessed Media Does Its Best to Ignore Clinesmith’s Guilty Plea

As news broke Friday that John Durham’s criminal probe into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation had resulted in a former FBI lawyer being charged with doctoring FISA evidence used against the Trump campaign, the formerly Russia-obsessed mainstream media did its best to look the other way.

Kevin Clinesmith, who first worked on the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team and then under special counsel Robert Mueller — only to be fired in February 2018 after it was revealed he sent anti-Trump messages — will plead guilty to one count of making false statements. Clinesmith’s admission came after Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz faulted him in a December report for doctoring an email to state that former Trump-campaign national security adviser Carter Page was “not a source” for the CIA — when in fact the email from a CIA official stated the opposite.

Clinesmith’s plea is not an indictment, but a “criminal information,” in which the defendant seeks to avoid being charged by a grand jury. As National Review’s Andy McCarthy has pointed out, such a move is often made under a cooperation agreement, suggesting that Clinesmith could be working with Durham.

Despite the plea’s status as the first major development in Durham’s investigation, the media barely batted an eye, abandoning the Russia saga after providing wall-to-wall coverage of Michael Flynn’s plea deal with Robert Mueller in December 2017.

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CNN Claims, Without Evidence, Trump ‘Promoted’ Kamala Harris Birther Theory

CNN claimed on Sunday that President Donald Trump had “promote[d]” the “birther lie” that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) might be ineligible for the vice presidency because her parents may not have been citizens when she was born in Oakland, California, in 1964….

The president said he knew “nothing about it,” and went even further, saying that it was something he would not be “pursuing.” CNN spun that by reporting that the president “did not dismiss the conspiracy theories as false.”

Thus far, it would appear to be the media, and not Trump, promoting the Kamala Harris “birther” theory. The theory first appeared in an op-ed by professor John Eastman in Newsweek, for which the publication issued an apology on Saturday.

Other media outlets have made similar false claims about Trump promoting or “encourag[ing]” the idea that Harris is ineligible — and they have contrasted that supposed claim to Joe Biden’s supposedly more responsible leadership…

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In 1967, the CIA Created the Label “Conspiracy Theorists” … to Attack Anyone Who Challenges the “Official” Narrative

Conspiracy Theorists USED TO Be Accepted As Normal

Democracy and free market capitalism were founded on conspiracy theories.

The Magna Carta, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and other  founding Western documents were based on conspiracy theories. Greek democracy and free market capitalism were also based on conspiracy theories.

But those were the bad old days …Things have now changed.

The CIA Coined the Term Conspiracy Theorist In 1967

That all changed in the 1960s.

Specifically, in April 1967, the CIA wrote a dispatch which coined the term “conspiracy theories” … and recommended methods for discrediting such theories.  The dispatch was marked “psych” –  short for “psychological operations” or disinformation –  and “CS” for the CIA’s “Clandestine Services” unit.

The dispatch was produced in responses to a Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times in 1976.

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The Brookings Hand Behind Russiagate Points Back to Rhodes Trust Coup on America

An incredible report on Real Clear Politics by Paul Sperry on July 24 has revealed a new dimension to the Russiagate frenzy that contaminated American politics for the last four years. While all claims of Russian collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin have been thoroughly debunked over recent months, it was believed that the culprits of this coup effort were merely swaths of deep state operatives in the DNC alongside British Intelligence assets like Christopher Steele, and Sir Richard Dearlove.

All of these things are still very true, but the story has just become significantly more interesting.

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The Spies Who Hijacked America

Global scandals now labeled Russiagate, Spygate, and what President Trump calls “Obamagate” shook the political world, but hit me closer to home. I’m the reason the so-called FBI “spy” at the center of Spygate, Stefan Halper, met Carter Page, the alleged “Russian Asset” in Russiagate’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. 

On May 19, 2018, this realization blindsided me in London as I was about to fly out for my wedding. The New York Times, NBC News and other sources had outed my PhD supervisor, Stefan Halper, as a spy known to the UK’s MI6 intelligence service as “The Walrus.”

It didn’t seem real. Could a former professor I once trusted as a mentor have betrayed his word, profession, and country to start these disasters? I had moved to England to pursue an academic career and leave DC’s politics behind, only to have my PhD supervisor throw me back into the most outrageous political firestorms I could imagine. Just my luck. Then an even worse question began nagging at me. Did I unintentionally light the match that started it all?

As I started to piece together what happened over the next few months, I realized something. The stories that The New York Times, Washington Post, and others were pushing didn’t add up. Many seemed planted to cover up or advance the agendas of several individuals whose tentacles secretly ran through these scandals, and who each had longstanding ties to intelligence services like the FBI, CIA, and MI6. I call these individuals the Cambridge Four. 

Strangely, all four were linked through that sleepy British academic town thousands of miles from the alleged “ground zeroes” of Russiagate’s conspiracies, Moscow and DC. In addition to the central “Spygate” figure Halper, they include the central source of “Russiagate’s” fake conspiracy theories, Christopher Steele; former MI6 Director Sir Richard Dearlove; and Halper’s and Dearlove’s partner in a Cambridge Intelligence Seminar linked to titillating — but false — tales of a “Russian spy” seducing Trump’s top national security advisor. My years of work with Halper provided an inside view of how their four networks interconnected.

The more I dug up new pieces of this puzzle, the more I saw how these individuals’ seemingly separate acts might fit together in an absurd picture of how these scandals really started.

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