Tag: russiagate

New York Times hires the reporter who brought Steele dossier to BuzzFeed to cover ‘right-wing media’

The New York Times announced on August 18 that Ken Bensinger is joining its politics desk and will report on right-wing media for the section’s so-called “democracy team.” Bensinger previously worked for BuzzFeed, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

David Halbfinger, the Times’ politics editor, suggested in the announcement that Bensinger is well prepared to report on right-wing media. His recent work on the Oath Keepers (an anti-statist militia group, some of whose members were present at the January 6, 2021, Capitol protests) and on the Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case in Michigan were cited as evidence of the reporter’s understanding of “the rising threat of armed militant groups,” which Halbfinger intimated is relevant to the reporter’s new beat.

In the announcement, Halbfinger omitted any mention of Bensinger’s most impactful work.

Bensinger was the individual responsible for bringing the Steele dossier to BuzzFeed, which the organization released on January 10, 2017.

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Mystery solved: DOJ secretly thwarted release of Russia documents declassified by Trump

In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, and the agency then defied a subsequent order to release the materials after redactions were made, according to interviews and documents.

The previously untold story of how highly anticipated declassified material never became public is contained in a memo obtained by Just the News from the National Archives that was written by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows just hours before Trump left office on noon of Jan. 20, 2021.

Meadows’ memo confirmed prior reporting by Just the News that Trump on Jan. 19, 2021 declassified a binder of hundreds of pages of sensitive FBI documents that show how the bureau used informants and FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign and misled both a federal court and Congress about flaws in the evidence they offered to get approval for the investigation.

The declassified documents included transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

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Fake News Board (Commonly Known As Pulitzer Prize) Defends Award To 2018 Russia Hoaxers

The Pulitzer Prize Board last weekend defended its 2018 award to a team of New York Times reporters who devoted story after story to a Democrat-concocted conspiracy framing President Donald Trump as a foreign agent.

On Sunday, the board released a statement saying the organization stood by its 2018 presentations after years of criticism provoked an “independent” review.

“The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed,” the committee wrote, highlighting multiple submissions received over its joint reward to The New York Times and The Washington Post over the Russia hoax four years ago. The board explained that the entries, including from Trump, led the center to commission two reviews probing the credibility of the outlets’ work.

“The separate reviews converged in their conclusions,” the board wrote, “that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”

Except the central premise of each paper’s reporting, which sought to undermine the democratically elected president, proved entirely fabricated in the publication of the Mueller report, the product of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

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How the Media Used Russiagate Conspiracy Theories to Create a News Cartel

In the fall of 2019, Facebook announced that it would be writing selected media outlets some very big checks. The launch of Facebook News was billed as a way to give consumers more access to information, but it was actually an attempt at appeasing big media companies.

Facebook, with its older and more conservative user base, had become the epicenter of election conspiracies from the Clinton campaign and its media allies. While Hillary Clinton and her associates were eager to shift the blame for her defeat by relaunching their existing Russiagate smears with false claims that Russian Facebook ads had tilted the election to Donald Trump, the media’s obsession with Facebook was even more corruptly self-interested.

About a third of Americans regularly get their news through Facebook. The tech giant’s algorithms had the ability to make or break the news media, and would go on to break the digital media empires of the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and others in the lefty clickbait brigade.

While Hillary wanted someone to blame for her failures, the media wanted leverage over the company that controlled its fate. The invention of a “fake news” or “misinformation” crisis, the term that the media pivoted to once President Trump made “fake news” his own, was used to persuade Big Tech companies to censor conservatives and promote media content.

Facebook News was a walled garden that pushed the content of the major papers behind Russiagate conspiracies and misinformation alarmism while profiting massively from it. The Russiagate Facebook conspiracy theories provided the rationale for censoring conservatives and for rewarding the media outlets spreading them with special promotions and lots of money.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook paid over $20 million to the New York Times and $15 million to the Washington Post in annual fees. Even more valuable than the big checks was Facebook’s ability to push media content to its users. Last year, sources at several publishers were crediting Facebook News with massive traffic surges, but not everyone was equal.

“Many other U.S. news publishers are getting payments from Facebook to have their content featured in its news tab, but they only get a fraction of the sums paid to the Washington Post, the New York Times,” the Wall Street Journal noted.

Facebook and the media had created a cartel in which media sites created paywalls to raise the value of their content and gain better deals with the social media monopoly. Zuckerberg’s company offered its biggest media critics big checks in exchange for exclusive deals. Both sides claimed that they were “fighting misinformation” with what was really a shakedown and a cartel.

Now that the deal between Big Tech and Big Media is set to lapse, there’s panic in the presses.

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Why the FBI Dismissed Claims of Secret Trump–Russia Link

FBI agents, just weeks before the 2016 election, opened an investigation into allegations of a secret communication channel between Donald Trump and Russia. The bureau closed the probe after several months but did not make public that it had dismissed the claims, which came from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a group of researchers.

Details of the FBI’s analyses, and CIA treatment of the claims, emerged during the trial of ex-Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann.

‘Jumped to Conclusions’

The white paper and data handed over to the FBI by Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016, asserted there was a “secret email server” used by the Trump Organization that was communicating with Alfa Bank in Moscow through “another unusually-configured server” at Spectrum Health in Michigan.

“These servers are configured for direct communications between the Trump organization and Alfa Bank to the exclusion of all other systems,” researchers wrote. “The only plausible reason,” they claimed, “is to hide the considerably recent email traffic occurring between the Trump organization and Alfa Bank.”

Scott Hellman, an agent who specializes in investigating cyber crimes, took the first crack at the allegations with Nathan Batty, a colleague. The pair spent inside of a day examining the data, and quickly concluded that whoever penned the white paper “had jumped to some conclusions that were not supported by the technical data,” Hellman testified.

The allegations were based on purported “look-ups,” or Domain Name System requests, between mail1.trump-email.com, the server allegedly controlled by Trump’s business, and servers belonging to the Russian bank. DNS lookups are a way for a computer to find another computer’s Internet Protocol address (IP address), a unique number needed for communication between computers.

The researchers said they tried to connect with the Trump server and that the server would not accept mail from their IP address, or returned what was essentially an error message, Hellman said. The researchers used that, among other data, to suggest the Trump server would only communicate with certain devices, such as those linked to Alfa Bank.

“That didn’t make sense to me. It was sort of like if I knocked on your door, and you told me to go away—I don’t want to talk to you—I’m then going to assume that you’re only willing to talk to other people. I can’t make that assumption. I don’t know if you’re willing to talk to anybody. But that’s what they had done,” he said. “When they received an error message, they assumed that that computer wasn’t willing to talk to them, but it was willing to talk to others, and there was no evidence to suggest that. So assumptions like that is what I was referring to.”

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The FBI knew RussiaGate was a lie — but hid that truth

The FBI knew the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was utter bunk even as it suggested otherwise to Congress, the courts and the public early in 2017. Evidence revealed by special counsel John Durham proves it beyond dispute.

At RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry lays out the case.

Declassified for Durham’s probe, a March 2017 memo prepared by Lisa Page for FBI head James Comey’s meeting with Congress’ “Gang of Eight” — the bipartisan House and Senate leaders who oversee the most classified stuff — was a total cook-up job. 

It advised Comey to present accusations that Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser Carter Page were working with the Russian government as coming from a confidential Russia-based source with real intel-community chops. In fact, the FBI had already established that the root source was US-based former Brookings flunky Igor Danchenko’s utterly speculative gossip with an ex-girlfriend and a Democratic Party hack.

That, plus publicly reported info, was all Christopher Steele (a retired British spy who doesn’t even speak Russian) ever had to back up his “dossier.” And the FBI knew it since at least January 2017, when it interviewed Danchenko.

Comey hid all this during his meetings, and after. Yet the public only learned it years later, once the Durham probe began.  

The Comey meeting where he served up these nonsense stories prompted both House and Senate Intelligence committees to open probes. But that was hardly the only poisoned fruit. 

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Why Won’t The Pulitzer Board Answer Trump On Whether Its ‘Review Process’ Is Legit Enough To Revoke Prizes For Russia Hoax Propaganda?

Despite previously claiming it “has a standing process for reviewing questions about past awards, under the guidelines of which complaints are considered by an appointed committee,” the Pulitzer Prize Board won’t say if it is still reviewing the awards it granted to corporate media outlets guilty of promoting the Russia collusion hoax.

In his most recent letter, former President Donald Trump threatened to sue the board unless it discloses whether it plans to rescind the awards given to “blatantly fake, derogatory, and defamatory news.”

“You have an obligation to share with me the status of that supposedly ‘appointed committee’s’ review following its alleged ‘standing process,’” Trump wrote on May 27.

Trump also said the board worked with “the publications that have obsessively promulgated disgustingly false attacks against me” and “done all you can to destroy my reputation.”

“[H]ow can I get my reputation back?” Trump asked.

Both The New York Times and The Washington Post received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for amplifying claims that Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. Despite years of evidence proving that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for and peddled the narrative in an attempt to sic the government on her political enemy Trump, the Pulitzer Prize Board has yet to rescind any of its prizes for reporting that was based on the debunked Steele dossier.

As a matter of fact, the Pulitzer webpage still legitimizes the false reporting implicating Trump in a conspiracy to undermine the integrity of U.S. elections.

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How Did Mueller’s $40 Million Trump-Russia Investigation ‘Miss’ Hillary’s Hoax?

One of the public revelations created by the trial of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann is that Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Hillary Clinton’s lawyers, and Hillary Clinton’s contracted opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, manufactured the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.  How did Robert Muller not find this?

The Clinton hoax is the key takeaway within the testimony of Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, during the Sussman trial.  Of course, every intellectually honest person who watched events unfold already knew that.  However, the DC politicians, institutions of the DOJ and FBI, and the entire corporate media world have been pretending not to know the truth for almost six years.  Now they are in a pretending pickle.

Mr. Mook was legally forced to put the truth into the official record, ironically because the Clinton lawyers needed him to in order to save themselves.  A stunned Jonathan Turley writes about the revelation HERE.  Meanwhile the journalists who received Pulitzer Prizes, for pushing the manufactured Clinton lies that Mook now admits, must avoid any mention of the testimony in order to maintain their ‘pretending not to know things‘ position.

Special Prosecutor John Durham found the truth behind the creation of the Trump-Russia hoax, and through the trial of Sussmann is now diligently passing out the bitter pill ‘I toldyaso’s’ to the small group of rebellious researchers who found this exact trail of evidence years ago.

The Clinton campaign lying is politics.  The Clinton campaign selling lies to the media is slimy, but nonetheless politics.  The media pushing those lies only showcases how corrupt they are in supporting their political allies.  However, the Clinton campaign selling those lies to the FBI is a bit more problematic; thus, the trial of Sussmann.

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The Clownish Disinfo Czar Got The Boot, But Biden’s ‘Ministry Of Truth’ Hired Monster Replacements

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hired the co-author of the PATRIOT Act, arguably the harshest crackdown on civil liberties in modern American history, and an official under former President Bill Clinton to head the Disinformation Governance Board during its “pause.”

The DHS shut the board down Monday after just several weeks and its head, Nina Jankowicz, wrote a resignation letter Tuesday, according to The Washington Post. Jankowicz was scrutinized for pushing disinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the now-discredited Steele Dossier, which Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA officer, said was possibly “part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot.” She also called Republicans who criticize critical race theory (CRT) “disinformers.” Videos of her singing as the “Mary Poppins of disinformation,” “fucking her way to the top” and satirical, sexualized renditions of Harry Potter themes have also raised eyebrows.

The department announced Wednesday former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former U.S. Deputy Secretary General Jamie Gorelick under Clinton “will lead a thorough review and assessment” of the board that was “grossly and intentionally mischaracterized.”

Chertoff reportedly pushed disinformation about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, claiming Russians were behind the emails found inside, according to the Free Beacon. Chertoff served as the secretary of the DHS from 2005-2009, investigated the 9/11 attacks and co-authored the PATRIOT Act, which gave the government authority to tap phones to surveil for terrorism and conduct searches without a warrant.

Gorelick worked for the Clinton administration and was a member of the 9/11 Commission. She was also reportedly rumored to be failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s top choice for attorney general, and has worked for a wide range of clients, including Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, BP after its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and Duke University after three lacrosse players were falsely accused of rape.

The review of the Disinformation Governance Board will determine how the board can monitor disinformation while “protecting free speech, civil rights, civil liberties and privacy” and how it can increase “transparency” with the public. It will be conducted by the “bipartisan Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC).”

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It Took FBI Less Than A Day To Discover Trump Conspiracy Theory Was Bogus

An FBI agent said Tuesday that it took him and another agent “less than a day” to determine the allegation about former President Donald Trump having ties to a Russian financial institution was false and pushed by Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman.

FBI Supervisory Special Agent Scott Hellman said “it took him and another agent less than a day to ascertain the data and ‘white papers’ on two thumb drives Sussmann gave Baker did not support the Trump-Alfa Bank ‘secret connection’ allegation,” according to The Epoch Times’ national affairs reporter John Haughey. Hellman was on the stand during the first day of Sussman’s trial for allegedly lying to the FBI.

Sussman is on trial for telling FBI General Counsel James Baker months before the 2016 election. Sussman claimed that he wasn’t working for “any client” when he presented him with “white papers” and purported data that were supposed to show Trump had a “covert communications channel” with Russian-tied financial institution Alfa Bank. The indictment against him states he was working for the Clinton campaign and Tech Executive-1, not independently.

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