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Keir Starmer-tied think tank paid PR firm to target The Grayzone

By Kit Klarenberg | The Grayzone | February 16, 2026

Leaked files have revealed that Labour Together, the shadowy think tank run by disgraced former top Keir Starmer aide Morgan McSweeney, paid the Washington DC-based corporate intelligence firm APCO Worldwide to spy on journalists who reported on their corrupt handling of campaign finances.

The reporters named appear to have been targeted for their efforts to investigate how the UK’s Labour Party elites spent 730,000 pounds in undeclared donations to install Starmer as their leader.

The files show APCO used those funds to oversee the fabrication of a dodgy, evidence-free dossier claiming that Russia was behind damaging disclosures about Labour Together, which it submitted to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) of Britain’s GCHQ — London’s equivalent to the US National Security Agency.

The “significant persons of interest” listed in APCO’s McCarthyite casebook included The Grayzone and myself.

According to my APCO dossier, “While a self described ‘investigative journalist,’ he is an author for the Gray Zone. The site has been described as a ‘conspiracy blog’ and ‘Wagner propaganda channel.’ In 2023,” the dossier reads, I “was arrested by counter-terror police after [I] arrived in the UK.”

APCO bills itself as “a trusted and strategic advisor… that drive[s] our clients’ missions and objectives forward.” Despite its massive contract with Labour Together, the files show the PR firm struggled to identify its targets, and proved unable to establish the most basic facts about them.

When APCO branded The Grayzone as “Wagner propaganda,” it seemed to have confused us with “Grey Zone,” an entirely unrelated and now-defunct Telegram channel affiliated with the Russian military contractor. APCO also claimed I was “arrested by counter-terrorism police” in May 2023 upon returning to Britain. In fact, I had been detained, not arrested.

APCO also targeted journalists Matt Taibbi and Paul Holden, who led investigations into Labour Together’s potentially criminal activities, based on leaks and Freedom of Information requests. The PR firm had sought to secure “leverage” over Holden in order to sabotage his work.

The spying scandal began in November 2023, when Britain’s Sunday Times revealed that Keir Starmer’s campaign manager, Morgan McSweeney, had failed to declare £730,000 in campaign donations which he diverted to advance Starmer’s rise to Labour leadership. One month later, APCO prepared a memo for Labour Together outlining a strategy to blame the damaging disclosure on Russian hackers and attack the journalists who dared to publish details of the offending documents.

The story was given new life in February 2026, when British journalist Peter Geoghehan exposed a secret contract showing Labour Together paid APCO £30,000 to investigate the journalists it blamed for exposing its legally questionable activities.

It has now gone mainstream, with the Sunday Times publishing a lengthy report branding the Labour operation as a “dirty smear” based on a “lie” about Russian hacking.

However, the Times article omitted any mention of this reporter or The Grayzone, even though we were prominently targeted by Labour Together. In the following investigation, we explain why The Grayzone was targeted, tracing the origins of the slimy spying operation to a network of Labourite operatives who have sought to destroy us since well before Starmer came to power.

“Familiar with masters of the same drivers”

Labour Together was founded in 2015 by McSweeney, Starmer’s longtime svengali. After several failed campaigns for establishment candidates, McSweeney managed to transform his organization into a propaganda juggernaut, soliciting large donations from the UK Israel lobby’s most significant moneyman, Trevor Chinn.

While presenting his campaigning outfit as a plucky little think tank, he wielded it against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the movement behind him. To neutralize the ecosystem of alternative media outlets supporting Corbyn as Labour leader, Labour Together contracted a political operative named Imran Ahmed to spin out a censorship front called “Stop Funding Fake News.”

After weaponizing dubious charges of antisemitism to defund one of the most influential pro-Corbyn outlets, Canary UK, the organization folded, then resurfaced as the much bolder Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Based inside the office of Labour Together, CCDH relied on the funding from Chinn and, as The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal revealed, secretly coordinated with the Israeli embassy in Washington.

McSweeney entered Downing Street as Starmer’s Chief of Staff just one month before Trump’s re-election. Among his most important tasks was repairing relations with the US President. At the time, Trump’s aides were bristling over reports that McSweeney met with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris during the Democratic National Convention to plot strategy. One of Trump’s top donors, the transhumanist mega-billionaire Elon Musk, also had his knives out for McSweeney after journalists Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker revealed that CCDH’s top priority for 2024 was to “kill Elon Musk’s Twitter.”

McSweeney’s solution was to dispatch one of Labour’s most seasoned – and scandal-stained – fixers to Washington. He was Lord Peter Mandelson, the architect of the neoliberal New Labour wave whose notoriously transactional tendencies seemed to make him the perfect match for Trump. Mandelson made himself a fixture at Butterworth’s, a favorite Capitol Hill haunt of MAGA operatives, and insinuated himself into Trumpist social circles.

In June 2025, the restaurant erected a plaque honoring Mandelson during a ceremony overseen by Raheem Kassam, a close associate of former Trump chief of staff Steve Bannon. There, a mirthful Mandelson raised a toast and proclaimed a special kinship with the MAGA elite: “Although we don’t have identical politics, we are familiar with masters of the same drivers that brought our respective figures to power — President Trump in your case and Keir Starmer in mine.”

But Mandelson was also dogged by the same sex trafficking figure who constantly inhabited the personal lives of both Trump and Bannon: Jeffrey Epstein. Both McSweeney and Starmer had been keenly aware of the ambassador’s friendship with Epstein, but they dismissed the concerns, even ignoring a warning from UK security services.

However, when a series of emails confirming Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein poured forth as part of a release by the US Department of Justice, the ambassador’s position became untenable. Following his firing in September 2025, a new tranche of emails published this January provided an even more damning portrait of their friendship. They showed, for instance, that Epstein channeled money to Mandelson’s husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, for a specious initiative which was never completed. Even worse, the communications exposed Mandelson providing Epstein with advance notice of the impending collapse of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government in 2010, as well as sensitive information about the UK’s “saleable assets.”

McSweeney’s scheming had finally caught up with him. Though Starmer initially praised and defended his longtime campaign guru in parliament, he caved soon after, forcing McSweeney to resign his post on February 8.

In the days since, Starmer has been unable to fill the vacancy. Meanwhile, another senior Labour official is reportedly considering leaving his role as well. Amid the chaos, British media has begun to speculate that the Prime Minister will be next to go.

Will the revelation of Labour Together’s media enemies list, and its secret contract with APCO, be the weight that finally sinks Starmer?

Labour Together’s misdirection ploy: blame Russia

McSweeney was aware that Labour Together had secretly contracted APCO to spy on journalists; however, he didn’t carry out the dirty work himself. That job appears to have been commissioned by his successor at the think tank, Josh Simons, who’s now a senior minister in Starmer’s government.

Simons has dismissed reports that the PR firm was tasked with spying on reporters as “nonsense,” insisting that APCO was merely “asked to look into a suspected illegal hack.” Simons’ disingenuous claims are undermined by newly-leaked documents related to the probe, however.

Perhaps most damning is a December 2023 memo prepared by APCO for Labour Together which shows investigators fretting about “recent articles and blog posts” which threatened to draw attention to the political group’s questionable funding schemes. Information published by these meddling journalists, particularly Paul Holden, “[raised] concern about the source of his information and what more he may choose to publish in the future,” the memo continued.

It was therefore deemed “important to identify the source of the information and to ascertain what additional information could be published.” Labour Together tasked APCO with probing several journalists, dubbed “significant persons of interest.”

The memo speculated that Holden and others may have received leaks from inside Labour Together, Labour party headquarters, parliament, or “illegally-gathered information collected” from a purported “hack” of Britain’s Electoral Commission in 2023. APCO concluded it was “essential” for Labour Together to concoct a strategy to counter the critical reporting.

Its response was to blame the organization’s woes on a Russian hack. But rather than hiring a cyber-security firm to investigate the supposed data breach, it contracted a corporate intelligence firm to attack the messengers.

In February 2024, The Guardian contacted Holden to alert him that the paper was preparing a hit piece alleging he was under investigation by the NCSC for receiving illegally obtained information from Russia. The Guardian had clearly been influenced by briefings from Labour Together, as well as by APCO’s report. Yet the outlet backed off when Holden promised to sue them for defamation.

APCO is now under formal investigation for potential standards breaches by Britain’s Public Relations and Communication Association.

How did The Grayzone wind up on Labour Together’s enemies list?

It is unclear how and why I became a “significant person of interest” in APCO and Labour Together’s secret smear campaign. However, their operation dovetailed with another surreptitious attempt by intelligence-tied actors to smear The Grayzone as Russian agents.

I have never spoken to Paul Holden or other journalists named as the firm’s targets, or conducted any journalistic investigations into Labour Together’s corrupt financial dealings. When APCO initiated its probe, I had mentioned Labour Together in a single article months prior that focused on the organization’s censorship-obsessed spinoff, the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Such sloppiness and paranoia is the hallmark of Amil Khan, a veteran British government psyops warrior turned “disinformation expert” involved with Labour Together and Starmer’s Labour.

Khan cut his teeth running covert British-funded psychological warfare operations during the Syrian dirty war, supporting violent extremist groups armed and financed by the CIA and MI6. He subsequently founded Valent Projects, which “specializes in addressing online manipulation.” Khan’s outfit produced a paper on social media ratfucking strategies for Labour Together entitled, “Power and Persuasion: Understanding the Right’s Playbook.”

In December 2021, The Grayzone exposed how Valent Projects covertly produced Covid vaccine propaganda funded by the British monarchy’s Royal Institute, using then-popular “BreadTube” personality Abigail Thorn as the front person for its campaign. The investigation apparently placed this outlet in the crosshairs of Khan and his information warfare network.

Less than a year later, The Grayzone exposed Khan again – this time, for his role in a covert conspiracy to destroy us. Enlisted by celebrity former leftist journalist Paul Mason, Khan helped coordinate a harebrained scheme to demonetize and deplatform The Grayzone. The pair discussed going “full nuclear legal to squeeze [The Grayzone] financially,” and proposed publishing intelligence agency-sourced smears to delegitimize this outlet.

As their revenge plot approached its paranoid apogee, Mason and Khan fantasized about hosting an anti-Grayzone summit with some of the most rabid, intelligence-tied opponents of our reporting. Among those they pitched for the gathering was Imran Ahmed, director of the censorship-obsessed Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which was founded by Morgan McSweeney and shared an office with his Labour Together.

While it is unknown if the anti-Grayzone summit ever took place, we have since learned that Mason enlisted a team of high-priced London lawyers to sue this outlet just days after our article exposing his secret smear campaign appeared. In May 2023, I was detained at the UK’s Luton International Airport and interrogated about The Grayzone’s activities by counter-terror police. Six months later, APCO initiated its covert investigation of me, The Grayzone, and others whose reporting had wound them up on the Labour Together enemies list.

APCO has so far remained silent about the scandal. The Grayzone has submitted a request for comment to Tom Short, the PR firm’s London chief. We received an automated response revealing he conveniently slipped away to the US. Upon Short’s return to Britain, APCO will no longer be able to hide behind bogus allegations of Russian hacking.

February 16, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Top Misinformation Article Attributed to Chicago Tribune

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | September 2, 2021

According to Facebook’s content transparency report for the first quarter of 2021, released in mid-August 2021, the most popular article shared on the platform between January 2021 and March 2021 was about a 56-year-old Miami, Florida, obstetrician who died two weeks after his first Pfizer injection.1

The story initially ran in the South Florida Sun Sentinel 2 April 8, 2021, and was republished by the Chicago Tribune that same day.3 The doctor, Dr. Gregory Michael, received his first dose December 18, 2020.

Three days later, he developed small spots on his hands and feet, which prompted him to go to the emergency room, where they found he had an abnormally low blood count. Platelets stop bleeding by clotting, and when platelets drop too low, internal bleeding can occur, resulting in what looks like blood blisters on the skin.

Michael remained in intensive care for two weeks, but no matter what they did, his platelet count refused to budge. During the night of January 3, 2021, he died of a massive stroke. According to the coroner, the COVID injection could not be ruled out as a contributing or causative factor.

In a Facebook post, Michael’s widow stated he’d been “very healthy” and that he’d been a COVID-19 vaccine advocate. His death caused her to question the safety of the shot, however.

“I believe that people should be aware that side effects can happen, that the vaccine is not good for everyone and in this case destroyed a beautiful life, a perfect family and has affected so many people in this community.” she wrote. “Please do not let his death be in vain please save more lives my making this information news.”4

Even Viral Content Has Minor Reach

According to The New York Times,5 Facebook held off on publishing the first-quarter report for fear the findings might “look bad for the company.” Executives decided they wanted to make some “key fixes to the system” before releasing it. That’s why it wasn’t published until August.

Interestingly, the report reveals that even when something goes viral, the total number of views is still a tiny fraction of the overall content. Even the biggest accounts make up but a small portion of overall content views. Combined, the top 20 accounts with the most views during the first quarter — which included UNICEF, The Dodo and LADbible — accounted for only 1.18% of all U.S. content views.

As noted in the report, this “shows that, even though it may seem like a page or post has extensive reach on the platform, that isn’t the case when measured against the total amount of content available on the platform.”

Facebook Calls Out CCDH for Manufacturing ‘Faulty Narrative’

As you may know, an obscure one-man organization funded by dark money called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has published several reports, including “The Anti-Vaxx Playbook,”6 “The Disinformation Dozen”7 and “Disinformation Dozen: The Sequel,”8 in which the founder, Imran Ahmed — an unregistered foreign agent — claims to have identified the top most influential “anti-vaxxers” in the U.S.

In a completely unexpected turn of events, Facebook is now calling out the CCDH for having manufactured a faulty narrative without evidence against the 12 individuals targeted in its reports (myself included).9

This is important, seeing how the CCDH reports have been the primary “reference” source of authority used by media and government officials to smear, threaten and infringe on American citizens’ right to free speech.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security even lists promulgating “false narratives” around COVID-19 as a top national security threat, which basically puts a “domestic terrorist” target on the backs of those of us who have been identified by the CCDH as the most prolific “superspreaders” of COVID misinformation.

As reported by GreenMed Info :10

“Google now shows an astounding 84,700 search results for CCDH’s defamatory phrase ‘disinformation dozen. ’Amazingly, this includes 16,000 news stories within the international press, approximately 100% of which are word-for-word amplifications of CCDH’s claims/defamatory statements and reported uncritically as fact.

In addition, the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, and president Biden all used CCDH’s report as the sole source for their own defamatory accusations, reaching a dangerous rhetorical climax on July 20th when Biden stated that these 12 individuals are literally “killing people” [by spreading misinformation].”

No Evidence to Support ‘Misinfo Superspreader’ Claim

In an August 18, 2021, Facebook report, Monika Bickert, vice president of Facebook content policy, sets the record straight, and in the process, demolishes the CCDH’s claims:11

“In recent weeks, there has been a debate about whether the global problem of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation can be solved simply by removing 12 people from social media platforms. People who have advanced this narrative contend that these 12 people are responsible for 73% of online vaccine misinformation on Facebook. There isn’t any evidence to support this claim …

That said, any amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violates our policies is too much by our standards — and we have removed over three dozen Pages, groups and Facebook or Instagram accounts linked to these 12 people, including at least one linked to each of the 12 people, for violating our policies.

We have also imposed penalties on nearly two dozen additional Pages, groups or accounts linked to these 12 people, like moving their posts lower in News Feed so fewer people see them or not recommending them to others. We’ve applied penalties to some of their website domains as well so any posts including their website content are moved lower in News Feed.

The remaining accounts associated with these individuals are not posting content that breaks our rules, have only posted a small amount of violating content, which we’ve removed, or are simply inactive.

In fact, these 12 people are responsible for about just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on Facebook. This includes all vaccine-related posts they’ve shared, whether true or false, as well as URLs associated with these people.”

It’s worth restating the key point in this quote: Combined, the top 12 individuals and organizations identified by the CCDH as being responsible for a whopping 73% of vaccine misinformation on Facebook, are in fact only responsible for 0.05% of vaccine-related content — 1,460 times lower than the CCDH’s outrageous claim. That’s no small discrepancy.

CCDH Claims Blasted as Unjustified and Biased

Bickert goes on to refer directly to the CCDH report “The Disinformation Dozen,”12 stating:

“The report13 upon which the faulty narrative is based analyzed only a narrow set of 483 pieces of content over six weeks from only 30 groups, some of which are as small as 2,500 users.

They are in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people have shared about COVID-19 vaccines in the past months on Facebook.

Further, there is no explanation for how the organization behind the report identified the content they describe as ‘anti-vax’ or how they chose the 30 groups they included in their analysis. There is no justification for their claim that their data constitute a ‘representative sample’ of the content shared across our apps.”

CCDH Meets Definition of ‘Hateful Extremists’

Ironically, while the CCDH claims to “counter hate” online, and Ahmed sits on the Steering Committee of the U.K. Commission on Countering Extremism, CCDH itself actually meets the Commission’s definition of hateful extremists.14 In the 2019 Commission document, “Challenging Hateful Extremism,” the term is defined as:15

“Behaviours that can incite and amplify hate, or engage in persistent hatred, or equivocate about and make the moral case for violence; And that draw on hateful, hostile or supremacist beliefs directed at an out-group who are perceived as a threat to the wellbeing, survival or success of an in-group; And that cause, or are likely to cause, harm to individuals, communities or wider society.”

In addition, in the forward of the report, lead commissioner Sara Khan notes that “Hateful extremists seek to restrict individual liberties and curtail the fundamental freedoms that define our country.”

All of these definitions and clarifications of what hateful extremism is fit the CCDH to a T. Ahmed manufactured data to create a false narrative that 12 individuals pose a threat to the well-being and survival of the whole world, and then used that narrative to incite hate against us and curtail our freedom of speech.

Who Fact Checks the Fact Checkers?

In related news, the self-appointed arbiter of factual truths, NewsGuard, has had to backpedal in recent months and issue dozens of corrections to “fact checks” in which they’ve labeled the Wuhan lab leak theory as a debunked conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.

Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, NewsGuard has wrongly down-rated 225 websites for articles mentioning the lab leak theory.16 In reality, there’s far more evidence to support the lab leak theory than any other theory, but it took over a year before the weight of this evidence became too obvious for the media to ignore.

NewsGuard’s erroneous fact checks were recently highlighted in an August 11, 2021, report by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).17

AIER decided to take a closer look at NewsGuard after receiving a request for comments on a NewsGuard fact check article regarding AIER and the Great Barrington Declaration — a statement written by public health experts from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford that calls on government to implement focused protection rather than lockdowns and self-isolation. AIERS investigation found that:18

“… NewsGuard falls far short of the very same criteria for accuracy and transparency that it claims to apply to other websites. Most of the company’s fact checkers lack basic qualifications in the scientific and social-scientific fields that they purport to arbitrate.

NewsGuard’s own track record of commentary — particularly on the Covid-19 pandemic — reveals a pattern of unreliable and misleading claims that required subsequent corrections, and analysis that regularly conflates fact with opinion journalism in rendering a judgement on a website’s content.

Furthermore, the company’s own practices fall far short of the transparency and disclosure standards it regularly applies to other websites … NewsGuard’s staff primarily evaluates scientific claims by appealing to the authority of public figures who they designate as ‘experts’ on the subject in question.

Their approach generally avoids direct examination of the evidence surrounding contested claims, and instead cherry-picks a figure to treat as an authoritative final word … many of their preferred authorities are political officeholders rather than persons trained in scientific or social-scientific methods.

By selectively curating cherry-picked political authorities rather than evaluating evidence directly, NewsGuard’s approach to fact-checking effectively sidesteps the scientific method. This strategy is rendered even more problematic by the general lack of scientific expertise within NewsGuard’s team of writers.

We examined the educational credentials, including the highest degree listed, for 28 publicly identified staff members on NewsGuard’s website. The company’s staff page reveals shockingly little expertise in either the hard sciences such as medicine or social sciences such as public policy, economics, and related fields …

Most NewsGuard articles on Covid-19 topics and policies are written by [NewsGuard Deputy Editor for Health, John] Gregory, whose only identified qualification is a bachelor’s degree in Media Arts … Gregory would not qualify as an expert in most of the fields he is responsible for fact-checking …

Of course, non-experts have every right to offer opinions on scientific and social-scientific matters. Whether or not they should be taken seriously as fact checkers or act as arbiters of scientific disputes is another question entirely.”

NewsGuard Staff by Field and Highest Degree Attained

newsguard graph

NewsGuard Apologizes for Erroneous Fact Checks

After being confronted about its erroneous fact checks on the lab leak theory, NewsGuard offered the following apology in a statement sent to AIER:19

“NewsGuard either mischaracterized the sites’ claims about the lab leak theory, referred to the lab leak as a ‘conspiracy theory,’ or wrongly grouped together unproven claims about the lab leak with the separate, false claim that the COVID-19 virus was man-made without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated, and the other was false.

NewsGuard apologizes for these errors. We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels.”

AIER commented on the apology:20

“Gregory and his colleagues appear to have simply decided that their own premature dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis equated to ‘fact’ and proceeded to penalize other sites not for factual errors, but rather for diverging from NewsGuard’s own editorial position on the same subject.

When this position turned out to be mistaken, NewsGuard pivoted to remove the errors — albeit in non-transparent ways that downplay the significance or pervasiveness of their mistake.”

NewsGuard Fails to Fulfill Its Own Credibility Criteria

In their report, AIER goes on to apply the criteria NewsGuard uses to evaluate a website’s credibility to NewsGuard itself. It’s ranking? A paltry 36.25 out of 100. According to AIER:21

“This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards, and should be used with extreme caution as a source for verifying the reliability of the websites it purports to rate …

When we see fact checkers like NewsGuard, who not only fail to uphold their high-sounding principles but even publicly encourage working with the government to suppress speech, we should raise red flags.”

The NewsGuard ratings are meant to influence the reader, instructing them to disregard content with cautionary colors and cautions. That it would serve as the thought police of the technocratic establishment that seeks to silence dissent and bury information that doesn’t help move the Great Reset agenda forward is no surprise.

Especially considering its primary startup capital came from Publicis Groupe,22 a PR group that represents most of Big Pharma, including vaccine makers, and Big Tech. NewsGuard is also backed by Microsoft23 and Google.

The Publicis Groupe has been manipulating what people think about commercial products for nearly a century. Over that century, this advertising and communications firm bought or partnered with targeted advertising avenues, beginning with newspapers, followed by radio, TV, cinema and the internet.

With revenue avenues secured, Publicis’ clients and partners built a global presence that dominated the advertising world. Be it tobacco or sugar, Publicis Groupe found a way to promote and strengthen big industries. Publicis was recently sued24 for its deadly and illegal marketing of Purdue Pharma’s opioid products.

When you consider that Publicis describes its business model approach as putting clients and their needs and objectives at the center of all they do so their clients can “win and grow,” it’s easy to see what’s driving NewsGuard.

Overall, NewsGuard is just another big business aimed at keeping the chemical, drug and food industries, as well as mainstream media, intact by discrediting and eliminating unwanted competitors and analysts who empower you with information that runs counter to any given industry’s agenda.

If you’re as disturbed by censorship as I am, be sure to contact your local library today to find out if they’re one of the more than 700 libraries using NewsGuard. If they are, then ask them if they’re aware of NewsGuard’s censorship of truthful news that is now encroaching on scientific freedom and threatening the very roots of our democracy.

If your local library is using NewsGuard, it would be helpful to start a campaign to get it removed. Contact your neighbors and let them know what is happening so they can kick out this public health threat. Likewise, whenever you see someone referencing reports by the CCDH, call them out on it.

Sources and References

September 2, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Twitter suspends vaccine skeptic group after it obtained another 3,000 pages of Fauci emails in FOIA request

RT | June 4, 2021

A vaccine skeptics group was temporarily locked out of its Twitter account after claiming that it acquired thousands of new emails from White House Covid-19 adviser Anthony Fauci, with the site labeling the post “disinformation.”

The Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) took to Twitter on Thursday to announce the upcoming release of 3,000 pages of Fauci emails it said it obtained in a Freedom of Information request, after media outlets published a massive trove of the health adviser’s correspondence earlier this week.

“The Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) is dropping 3,000 new pages of FOIA’d Fauci emails TODAY, providing further insight into Anthony Fauci’s actions on Covid, vaccine safety and more,” the group said in the now-deleted post, which was preserved in a screenshot shared by conservative activist Michelle Malkin.

The screencap shows that Twitter deleted the post for breaking its policy on “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to Covid-19,” though the platform did not specify what aspect of the tweet was false or deceptive.

While Twitter’s Covid-19 disinformation policy states that it will remove content that makes “a claim of fact, expressed in definitive terms” that is “demonstrably false or misleading,” the ICAN post does not appear to meet that standard, making no factual assertions beyond claiming to have the emails. Twitter, which did not respond to RT’s request for comment, has given no indication about whether it contacted ICAN to determine if it really possessed the emails as claimed.

Asked about the authenticity of the alleged 3,000 pages of messages by a Twitter user on Thursday evening, ICAN creative director Patrick Layton said the emails were “requested and produced through the Freedom of Information Act,” and that ICAN’s “legal team is compiling them” for release. Neither Layton nor ICAN itself has revealed any other details about the purported new trove, which remained unpublished at the time of writing.

On its website, ICAN says its main goal is to disseminate “scientifically researched health information” to the public to allow them to make their own informed medical decisions. However, the group has also come under fire for spreading disinformation [sic] on vaccines, identified as a “key anti-vaxxer organization” in a recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Obtained by Buzzfeed and the Washington Post, the previous Fauci email dump was published on Tuesday, prompting criticism of the Covid-19 czar from Republican lawmakers, some demanding his firing.

On Thursday, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said one email exchange suggested Fauci may have lied when he claimed his agency – the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – never funded controversial ‘gain-of-function’ research at a lab in Wuhan, China – the city where Covid-19 was first detected.

In the emails in question, Fauci asked his top deputy, Hugh Auchincloss, to review a 2015 study that discussed gain-of-function work at the Wuhan lab. Auchincloss later replied that the study was conducted prior to a US government ban on funding for gain-of-function research, and that another staffer would “determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.” It is unclear whether the deputy ever followed up after that message.

“The emails paint a disturbing picture, a disturbing picture of Dr. Fauci, from the very beginning, worrying that he had been funding gain-of-function research,” Paul said in an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “He knows it to this day, but hasn’t admitted it.”

Gain-of-function work aims to increase the virulence and lethality of viruses so that scientists can better understand them, but has been deemed risky by some experts, who say the suped-up pathogens could accidentally escape into the world.

Later on Thursday, GOP representatives Steve Scalise (Louisiana) and James Comer (Kentucky) also penned a letter to two Democratic committee heads demanding that Fauci be called to testify before Congress about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, saying the emails make the request “even more urgent.”

June 4, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment