Tag: russiagate

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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One lie that hides an enormous conspiracy: Inside the trial that exposes Clinton’s plot to slander Trump

Special Counsel John Durham appears to have methodically built a case of historic consequence. It’s just not the case he has brought against bigshot Democratic Party lawyer Michael Sussmann.

Jury selection begins in Sussmann’s trial on Monday, in Washington, DC. It will be the first trial to arise out of the Russiagate probe, which began over three years ago. That’s when former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr assigned Durham, a longtime Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut, to investigate how, in the middle of a heated presidential campaign and based upon scant evidence, the FBI came to suspect one of the candidates of being a clandestine agent of the Kremlin — to the point of opening counterintelligence and criminal investigations targeting Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

According to court filings in the Sussmann case, Durham has fingered the Hillary Clinton campaign as the culprit. The problem is that Durham has not charged that fraudulent scheme. Yet, he wants to offer evidence of the sweeping scheme in order to prove a comparatively minor and narrow offense — namely, that Sussmann lied to the FBI at a single meeting, on September 19, 2016.

Durham theorizes that the Clinton campaign concocted a political smear that Trump was a Putin puppet, then peddled the tale to a compliant media and to the FBI. This would enable Clinton to tout the “evidence” of corrupt Trump-Russia ties as so serious that the Feds were investigating.

Durham contends that the Clinton campaign left most of the scandal-mongering to its lawyers. Thus did Sussmann become central to the scheme, as did his law partner, Marc Elias. (Both attorneys have since left their white shoe international law firm, Perkins-Coie.) The deployment of lawyers in their schemes and scandals is a time-tested Clinton modus operandi, enabling them to claim attorney-client privilege to cover their tracks when controversy erupts and investigators start snooping around — a frequent occurrence over the last 30 years.

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Timeline of alleged “sabotage” of Trump in 2016 by Democrats, Ukraine

The heads of two Senate committees are asking the FBI and the Department of Justice for records related to a reported scheme by Democrats to get “dirt” on the Trump campaign from Ukraine in 2016.

According to reporting in Politico in 2017, the alleged efforts by Democrats and Ukraine to “sabotage” the Trump campaign in 2016 did impact the race, even though Trump won in the end.

Both Politico and Yahoo News interviewed a Democratic National Committee (DNC) consultant named Alexandra Chalupa.

Democrats have repeatedly claimed the reporting on Chalupa, her work for the DNC, her meetings with Ukrainians, and her meetings with reporters in Ukraine and the U.S., is “debunked” and a “conspiracy theory.” In public accounts since the original news articles, Chalupa has claimed her role and intentions have been misrepresented.

A Ukrainian-American, Chalupa reportedly acknowledged in a 2017 interview with Politico that she worked as a consultant for the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 campaign to publicly expose Trump campaign aide Paul Manafort’s links to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine.

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Former Intelligence Officials, Citing Russia, Say Big Tech Monopoly Power is Vital to National Security

A group of former intelligence and national security officials on Monday issued a jointly signed letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the power of Big Tech monopolies — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — would jeopardize national security because, they argue, their centralized censorship power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy. The majority of this letter is devoted to repeatedly invoking the grave threat allegedly posed to the U.S. by Russia as illustrated by the invasion of Ukraine, and it repeatedly points to the dangers of Putin and the Kremlin to justify the need to preserve Big Tech’s power in its maximalist form. Any attempts to restrict Big Tech’s monopolistic power would therefore undermine the U.S. fight against Moscow.

While one of their central claims is that Big Tech monopoly power is necessary to combat (i.e., censor) “foreign disinformation,” several of these officials are themselves leading disinformation agents: many were the same former intelligence officials who signed the now-infamous-and-debunked pre-election letter fraudulently claiming that the authentic Hunter Biden emails had the “hallmarks” of Russia disinformation (former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Obama CIA Director Michael Morrell, former Obama CIA/Pentagon chief Leon Panetta). Others who signed this new letter have strong financial ties to the Big Tech corporations whose power they are defending in the name of national security (Morrell, Panetta, former Bush National Security Adviser Fran Townsend).

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Re-Visiting Russiagate In Light Of The Ukraine War

It’s hard to believe that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet.

A lot of anti-empire commentary is rightly going into criticizing how the Obama administration paved the way to this conflict in Ukraine with its role in the 2014 coup and support for Kyiv’s war against Donbass separatists. But what’s getting lost in all this, largely because Trumpites have been using their mainstream numbers to loudly amplify criticisms of the role of the Obama and Biden administrations in this mess, is what happened between those two presidencies which was just as crucial in getting us here.

Though it’s been scrubbed from mainstream liberal history, it was actually the Trump administration that began the US policy of arming Ukraine in the first place. Obama had refused forceful demands from neocons and liberal hawks to do so because he feared it would provoke an attack by Russia.

In a 2015 article titled “Defying Obama, Many in Congress Press to Arm Ukraine“, The New York Times reported that “So far, the Obama administration has refused to provide lethal aid, fearing that it would only escalate the bloodshed and give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a pretext for further incursions.”

It wasn’t until the Trump presidency that those weapons began pouring into Ukraine, and boy howdy are we looking at some “further incursions” now. This change occurred either because Trump was a fully willing participant in the agenda to ramp up aggressions against Moscow, or because he was politically pressured into playing along with that agenda by the collusion narrative which had its origins at every step in the US intelligence cartel, or because of some combination of the two.

In all the world-shaping news stories we’ve been experiencing lately, it’s easy to forget how the narrative that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government dominated news coverage and political discourse for years on end. But in light of the fact that today’s major headlines now revolve around that exact same foreign government, this fact is probably worth revisiting.

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The Media Campaign to Protect Joe Biden Passes the Point of Absurdity

Burying the lede just a bit, the New York Times on March 16th published a long, spirited piece about the federal tax investigation of Hunter Biden. This is the 24th paragraph:

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020. 

Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed via some creepy homage to Severance, or a next-gen algorithmic witch-hunt, or whatever other federally contracted monstrosities are being readied for deployment somewhere far up the anus of Silicon Valley.

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Democratic staffer on Jan. 6 committee was part of intel effort to help Biden out of Hunter jam

The top Democratic staffer on the Capitol riot select committee was among dozens of former intelligence officials who signed a letter in October 2020 claiming without evidence that the Hunter Biden laptop story was part of a Russian operation.

David Buckley, who was formerly the CIA inspector general, is the staff director for the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Despite offering no proof, President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, along with many in the media, dismissed the laptop story as being part of a Russian disinformation operation, including by pointing to the letter signed by Buckley.

Buckley is one of the signatories of the letter by former intelligence officials that was published and released by Politico in October 2020 following the New York Post revelations about emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Buckley is among the few signatories to have returned to government.

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SpyGate 101: A Primer On The Russia Collusion Hoax’s Years-long Plot To Take Down Trump

As Special Counsel John Durham continues to expose more details of the “SpyGate” or “Russia collusion” scandal, it can be difficult for any apolitical, non-news-junkie member of the public to grasp the ongoing developments.

After all, for more than five years, the corrupt legacy media has refused to report on scandal or done so with a slanted portrayal of the facts. So most Americans remain unaware of the Democrats’ years-long duplicity that sought to destroy first candidate and then President Donald Trump. Add to that reality the overlapping conspiracies and sprawling cast of characters involved, and it can be difficult to follow the story.

That the scandal is dense, however, does not mean it should be ignored. To the contrary, the duplicity must not be disregarded because what Trump’s political enemies tried to accomplish over the course of five years represents the biggest threat our constitutional republic has seen in the last century.

So for those who care about our country and her future but don’t want to be buried in the minutia of the scandal, here is your big-picture primer.

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