Tag: politicians

Twitter Files: Sen. Angus King Targeted ‘Suspicious’ Americans for Blacklisting

According to the latest drop of the Twitter Files, Sen. Angus King (I-ME) flagged accounts his office disliked to the social media platform, accusing Americans of being “suspicious” for reasons including being excited by a Sen. Rand Paul visit, mentioning immigration in their tweets, or being followed by a political rival.

Twitter users have been sharing their ideas, opinions, and thoughts on the platform for a long time. But in recent years, the government’s role in policing this content has come under scrutiny. An intricate system of government involvement in Twitter moderation has been exposed by the Twitter Files, with journalist Matt Taibbi compiling a collection of thousands of moderation requests.

The Twitter Files have revealed a number of details about the internal workings of the social media platform in recent months. According to the latest batch released over the weekend, it has been discovered that government officials frequently misidentify Americans as fictitious Russians. Further complicating the role of governments in online content moderation is the discovery that Twitter has given the “U.S. intelligence community,” moderation authority.

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These Five Lawmakers Received Over $50,000 From Railroad PACs Last Year

Atrain carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3, leading to the evacuation of about 5,000 people.

Rescue workers blew holes in five railway cars carrying vinyl chloride, a potentially dangerous gas, allowing it to be destroyed via controlled burning.

The crash sparked a renewed interest in lobbying and campaign donations from railway-associated political action committees (PACs). It has emerged that the Trump administration rescinded a safety rule in 2017 following pressure from the industry. Steven Ditmeyer, a former senior figure at the Federal Railroad Administration, told investigative news outlet The Lever that this could have increased the “severity” of the accident.

PACs and individuals associated with the rail industry donated $3,190,763 in total to political candidates in 2021-22. This data comes from OpenSecrets, a non-profit organization that tracks the impact of money on American politics. Of this total, $1,764,695 was given to Republican candidates, $1,408,068 to their Democratic rivals.

OpenSecrets identified 16 railway-related PACs that had been donating to candidates, of which three gave at least $500,000 in total. These were the Union Pacific Corp, Norfolk Southern and BNSF Railway.

Newsweek has gone through the OpenSecrets data to list the five members of Congress who received more than $20,000 from railway-related PACs and individuals, during 2021-22. The analysis is based on statistics from the Federal Election Commission, which recorded all campaign donations of $200 or more.

There is no suggestion that any of these lawmakers behaved improperly, either in receiving or recording these campaign donations.

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Russian oligarch keeps showing up in the most inconvenient places for FBI, Washington elites

The bombshell indictments this week alleging that a former senior FBI counterintelligence agent had an inappropriate financial relationship with Oleg Deripaska focused fresh light on an uncomfortable truth: Washington elites have simultaneously demonized and cozied up to the controversial Russian oligarch over the last two decades.

Deripaska, a protégé of Russian president Vladimir Putin and once owner of the country’s largest aluminum company Rusal, has been courted over the years by a prominent Democrat senator seeking help from his lawyer and FBI agents seeking dirt on Donald Trump, enlisted by the bureau to spend his own money to find a missing FBI agent in Iran and lured into hiring Christopher Steele for a legal project before the former MI-6 agent penned his famous dossier.

Even Hunter Biden once crafted a plan to make money off Deripaska by seeking a handsome $80,000 fee to dig up dirt on the Russian businessman for an American aluminum company.

The efforts to court, cajole and cash in on Deripaska occurred at the same time the U.S. government was casting the Russian as a potentially nefarious actor who should be kept from U.S. shores.

In the early 2000s, it was the State Department alleging, with scant public evidence, that the Russian was tied to organized crime or brutal killings. In 2016, he became a focal point of the FBI efforts to prove Donald Trump colluded with Russia to hijack the 2016 election, an allegation that proved spurious. And in 2018, he was sanctioned by the Treasury Department as an ally of Putin and Russian influence campaigns and later indicted by the Justice Department.

Throughout the saga, Deripaska has always maintained his innocence, while his accusers have sent a tantalizing mixed message by courting his help at the same time they were vilifying him.

In a 2019 videotaped interview with this reporter for The Hill newspaper, Deripaska said his on-again-off-again relationship with the American government was symbolic of the larger drifting apart of Russia and the United States as allies after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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