FBI accused of leaking private data to NYT after Project Veritas raid
RT | November 12, 2021
The New York Times has obtained ‘privileged communications’ of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, raising suspicions that an FBI source might have leaked the newspaper confidential data obtained during recent raids.
FBI agents raided the home of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe last Saturday as part of an investigation into the acquisition of a diary purportedly written by President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley. On Thursday, less than a week after the raid, the New York Times published an article claiming to have obtained “internal documents” from Project Veritas’ attorney.
The article sparked outrage among conservatives, who accused the FBI of leaking private communications from the organization to the newspaper.
“The FBI raided Project Veritas on a pretext and is now leaking their privileged communications to the New York Times. This is a scandal,” tweeted lawyer and Human Events co-publisher Will Chamberlain, who called for the article’s co-author, Adam Goldman, to be “subpoenaed tomorrow and forced to reveal his criminal source.”
Chamberlain also raised further legal concerns, noting that Project Veritas “is currently in litigation with the New York Times” over a separate issue, which would make any leaks to the newspaper an even bigger scandal.
“This isn’t journalism, this is straight up theft,” he concluded.
Attorney Harmeet Dhillon – who is currently representing Project Veritas and O’Keefe – also accused the New York Times of publishing a “private, privileged correspondence” which “they have no legal right to possess,” while political commentator and lawyer Mike Cernovich wrote, “This is not a grey area. It’s black letter criminal felonies committed by the FBI and the New York Times.”
A federal court ordered the US Justice Department to stop extracting information from O’Keefe’s devices on Thursday.
The FBI took two of O’Keefe’s phones during its raid on his home and the Project Veritas founder said his devices contained confidential material, including information relating to his journalistic sources.
“This is an attack on the First Amendment by the Department of Justice,” said O’Keefe this week, adding, “I’ve heard ‘the process is the punishment.’ I didn’t really understand what that meant until this weekend.”
O’Keefe said he “wouldn’t wish” the situation “on any journalist.”
Wanted US Capitol insurrectionist asks Belarus for asylum
RT | November 8, 2021
An American man wanted in the US on charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds after taking part in the infamous January 6 riot in Washington is now in Belarus, and has asked Minsk to grant him asylum.
In an interview with Belarusian state media, Evan Neumann claimed that the accusations against him are “unfounded.”
Neumann is also charged with “assaulting, redirecting, or impeding” law enforcement officers and “knowingly entering or remaining in” a restricted building.
The American says he moved in March from California to Ukraine, where he stayed for four months. He claims that, after just two weeks, he saw Ukrainian Security Service officers following him, which eventually led to his decision to move to Belarus and seek asylum.
On his journey to Belarus, he trekked across swamps of northern Ukraine before reaching the border near Pinsk.
According to the FBI, Neumann was a part of the mob of supporters of then-President Donald Trump that stormed the United States Capitol in Washington on January 6 this year. The attack, known commonly as ‘the insurrection’, sought to disrupt and delay the Electoral College vote count that would confirm Joe Biden’s election as the 46th US president. The rioting led directly to five deaths and has since been blamed for four police officers committing suicide.
Speaking to Belarusian TV, Neumann claimed that he was innocent.
“I’m charged, I believe, with six cases. And I think all of them are felonies. A felony is a very serious charge. It means you hurt somebody or something,” he explained. “I don’t think I committed any crime. One of the charges was very serious. The allegation is that I hit a police officer. It is completely unfounded.”
Neumann doesn’t deny that he was at the riot.
In the words of TV channel Belarus 1, Neumann “sought justice” and “asked uncomfortable questions,” and is now “being persecuted by the US government.”
According to Belarus’ Ministry of Internal Affairs, three US citizens have applied for refugee status, protection, or asylum in Belarus in 2021.
Neumann’s trek through Ukraine’s swampy forests wasn’t his first trip to the country. According to the FBI, he took part in the Western-backed Orange Revolution in 2004 and 2005, which led to a pro-NATO/anti-Russian government in Kiev.
As evidence emerges of provocateurs inciting the Jan 6 Capitol riot, was an asset working on behalf of the FBI to stir up trouble?
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | October 27, 2021
The bureau has form for this modus operandi, after all. Just what was the role of mysterious ex-Marine Ray Epps in fomenting the invasion? And why’s he been removed from the list of suspects and not been arrested?
Ever since January 6, speculation has abounded that the US authorities either knew what was going to transpire in advance and allowed it to happen, or undercover state infiltrators played some role or other in orchestrating the upheaval.
While acknowledging that FBI informants were on the ground that day, and, indeed, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – two far-right groups that played prominent roles in the Capitol break-in and preceding protests – both have intimate ties to the Bureau at the highest levels, the latter theory has been universally dismissed as conspiratorial nonsense.
Yet, given the agency’s history, the notion isn’t so far-fetched. After all, for decades during the Cold War, the FBI operated a dedicated counter-intelligence program, known as COINTELPRO, that sought to infiltrate, undermine and discredit activist groups and protest movements from within. A key tactic engaged in by undercover provocateurs was marshalling others to engage in violence.
More recently, in October 2020, the bureau foiled a deranged plot hatched by the Wolverine Watchmen militia group to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. It’s been revealed that 12 of the individuals involved in the doomed conspiracy were FBI informants.
Now, pro-Trump website Revolver has offered the most compelling evidence yet that undercover provocateurs of some distinction were pivotal to the events of January 6.
The website records how, by January 8, the FBI had assembled mugshots of its first 20 ‘most wanted’ Capitol rioters, offering cash rewards for successful identifications and fruitful leads. It took just three days for resourceful Antifa activists to pinpoint ‘Suspect 16’ as Arizona resident Ray Epps, a former high-ranking US Marine. Swathes of evidence supported the identification, including, somewhat amazingly, a direct admission by the man himself to his local newspaper, the Arizona Central.
Published January 11, the report discussed how Epps had been approached by the outlet and asked for comment about a widely circulated video from the night of January 5, in which someone closely resembling him boldly proclaimed to a crowd of fellow Trump supporters, “We need to go into the Capitol.” He confirmed he was that individual, but played down the significance of his comments, alleging that the “only thing” he meant was “we would go in the doors like everyone else.”
He went on to assert that the violent manner in which protesters subsequently entered was “totally, totally wrong,” but did not clarify why, in the same clip, he also declared, “I’ll be arrested” for proposing they gain entry to the building in the first place.
In the following weeks, news reports of arrests of individuals who’d busted into the Capitol were published almost daily, although Epps’ name never came up. Indeed, the FBI seems to have taken no decisive action in this regard until almost six months later, and, even then, not in a manner most would have expected. At an indeterminate point on July 1, between the wee hours of the morning and early evening, his mugshot was abruptly removed from the bureau’s most-wanted list, leaving an unaccounted-for gap between Suspects 15 and 17.
There is no indication that this was because he had been arrested. In every other case of a successful arrest, the corresponding photo of the suspect in question is slapped with an “arrested” logo, and Epps’ name doesn’t appear in the dedicated, searchable Justice Department Capitol Breach Cases database. Quite why he apparently remains at liberty is perplexing, although how he came so quickly to the FBI’s attention is no mystery.
The video referenced by the Arizona paper is one of many depicting Epps aggressively advocating the breach of the Capitol from January 5 onwards. That evening saw a law enforcement-mediated standoff between Trump supporters visiting Washington DC for the next day’s planned and widely promoted protest, and Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists.
Strikingly, an aspect of that particular clip not mentioned in the news report is the extremely hostile reaction his bold suggestion elicited from those around him. After he repeatedly advocated “going in”, other pro-Trump protesters respond with a shouted chorus of “no!”, before chanting in unison “Fed!” over and over, prompting Epps to awkwardly clarify that he meant “peacefully”.
Multiple separate clips show Epps moving between different groups in the crowd, and repeating the same routine, loudly calling for attendees to enter the Capitol building, and typically being met with indifference or even outright antipathy. In one, his audience’s exhaustion with his antics is evident – he asks for “one minute” to make his pitch yet again to another group of Trump supporters, but the throng responds that he has only “30 seconds”, despite a sympathetic protester drawing attention to Epps’ military background and calling for him to be respected.
This activity alone would surely mark him out as of interest to the FBI – after all, determining the degree to which what transpired on January 6 was planned in advance and, if so, by whom, were central initial questions in its probe that remain unanswered. However, Epps’ movements the next day, much of which was likewise captured on film, would make him one of the most valuable sources of information on the Capitol’s infiltration.
Revolver meticulously reviews numerous videos showing Epps apparently issuing orders to a masked Capitol rioter, seemingly also a former US Marine, who appears to have been armed with super-strength bear mace, to have engaged in a range of incendiary acts, and to have repeatedly provoked other protesters to commit violent acts and not back down from law enforcement. That rioter, Suspect 273 – also known as #MaroonPB – coincidentally remains at large today, too.
Even more tantalisingly, though, one clip shows Epps right on the frontline when the protest turned violent and the police barricades were broken through for the first time. Ryan Samsel, who has been blamed for kickstarting the “insurrection”, is pictured standing in front of the barricade, in a bitter showdown with the officer behind.
Epps emerges from the left of the frame, takes Samsel aside, whispers something in his ear, then vanishes. Moments later, Samsel and others begin charging at the barricades, knocking them down – a pivotal act that allowed for the eventual deluge of protesters into the Capitol. Media reports in the immediate aftermath of January 6 suggested the infiltrators’ path was effectively laid by the DC Police’s failure to deploy precautions such as ‘frozen zones’ (areas officially off-limits) and the hardened barriers commonly used for major events.
Samsel was arrested just three weeks after January 6 – conspicuously, he’s one of only a few individuals accused of comprising the large “breach team” who’s been taken into custody. According to his attorney, in prison, he’s been subjected to vicious torture, his jaw, nose and orbital bone having all been shattered, and his right eye damaged so badly he may be permanent half-blind.
Almost a year later, we’re still no closer to learning the truth about January 6. In the meantime, that date has been endlessly invoked by lawmakers, pundits and journalists as a grave attack on US values and democracy. Some have compared the event to 9/11, while the White House has likened it to the Civil War and proposed wide-ranging new domestic spying powers to avert another such catastrophe.
Consideration of how state capitol buildings have been repeatedly invaded during protests in the past, and DC’s Capitol Hill was overwhelmed at the conclusion of the 2017 Women’s March, has been entirely lacking. But that doesn’t fit the narrative many powerful people wish to perpetuate about January 6, so this staggering oversight is unsurprising. That the show trials of the 648 people charged in connection with the riot so far will shed no light on potential deep-state machinations that day is likewise almost inevitable.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
January 6 Could Be Washington’s Part of FBI’s Multi-State Operation Cold Snap, Argues US Observer
Ekaterina Blunova | Sputnik | October 18, 2021
FBI’s involvement in 6 January riots could be bigger than the mainstream media have recently acknowledged, according to US political commentator Julie Kelly. She wonders whether the DC incident was part of the agency’s Operation Cold Snap against Whitmer kidnapping case plotters, unveiled by BuzzFeed in July 2021.
The US Department of Justice announced on 8 October 2020 that six men had been arrested and charged federally with conspiring to kidnap the Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The DoJ’s press release said that “through confidential sources, undercover agents, and clandestine recordings, law enforcement learned particular individuals were planning to kidnap the Governor and acting in furtherance of that plan”.
However, on 12 July 2021, BuzzFeed revealed that the FBI allegedly used at least 12 informants in the Whitmer kidnapping case, who not only kept the agency in the loop, but were allegedly used by the FBI to “induce or persuade” the defendants to go along with the violent scheme. The agency’s operation was called Cold Snap.
According to BuzzFeed, the FBI assets “had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception”.
One of those infiltrators, Stephen Robeson, 57, helped organise a series of meetings around the country “enthusiastically pushing people he knew to attend” and even “paid for some hotel rooms and food as an incentive to get people to come”. At these meetings many of the alleged plotters first met one another.
Another informant, an Iraq War veteran, known as “Big Dan”, rose to the second-in-command of the group, encouraged members to work with other potential suspects and paid for their transportation to meetings. He allegedly urged the supposed mastermind of the Whitmer kidnapping plot to carry his plan out, and then laid the trap that eventually led to the arrest.
The defendants in the kidnapping case later accused the FBI of “entrapment”, saying the infiltrators encouraged the group and even led military-style trainings for the plot.
All these meetings and training were captured on film by FBI agents “to produce major headlines as early voting was underway in the crucial swing state of Michigan”, argued Julie Kelly in her op-ed for American Greatness (AG).
She noted that the blame for the plot was pinned on then-President Donald Trump. “There is a through line from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one”, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed on 8 October 2020.
“It also appears that the Whitmer operation was only part of the FBI’s overall plan to infiltrate and perhaps direct the conduct of unsuspecting ‘militia’ men in 2020”, Kelly continued, stressing that the agency’s operation was not limited to Michigan but was a “multi-state” probe.
Citing a testimony by one of the lead FBI special agents in the Whitmer case, the political commentator highlighted that there had been other FBI “domestic terrorism” investigations in Baltimore and Milwaukee and Cincinnati and Indiana involving other militia members.
According to Kelly, “Big Dan” was also ordered by the FBI to convince a man in Virginia to participate in a plan against Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. “Just like in the Whitmer plot, ‘Big Dan’ advised his target how to build an explosive device and urged him to attend a training camp in Wisconsin”, she noted.
The AG senior contributor insists that “it’s hard to imagine Operation Cold Snap ended with the arrest of Whitmer’s would-be abductors”. According to her, the 6 January riot, attended by several groups of right-wing militia, could have been a continuation of the same FBI op, this time in Washington, DC.
She suggested that it was hardly a coincidence that FBI chief Christopher Wray promoted Steven M. D’Antuono, special agent in charge of the Detroit Field Office, Michigan, to head of the DC FBI Field office on 13 October 2020 – just five days after the arrest of kidnap plotters and ahead of the November 2020 elections. Apparently, D’Antuono was seen as a man for the job, according to the political commentator.
Citing a New York Times article unveiling FBI infiltrators’ role in 6 January riots, Kelly presumed that the NYT report could only be seen as the start of a slow drip of information about the extent” of the agency’s role in the Capitol breach.
“It’s only a matter of time before we learn how many “Big Dans” or Stephen Robesons were part of January 6,” Kelly believes.
Civil liberties are being trampled by exploiting “insurrection” fears. Congress’s 1/6 Committee may be the worst abuse yet.
By Glenn Greenwald | October 17, 2021
When a population is placed in a state of sufficiently grave fear and anger regarding a perceived threat, concerns about the constitutionality, legality and morality of measures adopted in the name of punishing the enemy typically disappear. The first priority, indeed the sole priority, is to crush the threat. Questions about the legality of actions ostensibly undertaken against the guilty parties are brushed aside as trivial annoyances at best, or, worse, castigated as efforts to sympathize with and protect those responsible for the danger. When a population is subsumed with pulsating fear and rage, there is little patience for seemingly abstract quibbles about legality or ethics. The craving for punishment, for vengeance, for protection, is visceral and thus easily drowns out cerebral or rational impediments to satiating those primal impulses.
The aftermath of the 9/11 attack provided a vivid illustration of that dynamic. The consensus view, which formed immediately, was that anything and everything possible should be done to crush the terrorists who — directly or indirectly — were responsible for that traumatic attack. The few dissenters who attempted to raise doubts about the legality or morality of proposed responses were easily dismissed and marginalized, when not ignored entirely. Typically, they were vilified with the accusation that their constitutional and legal objections were frauds: mere pretexts to conceal their sympathy and even support for the terrorists. It took at least a year or two after that attack for there to be any space for questions about the legality, constitutionality, and morality of the U.S. response to 9/11 to be entertained at all.
For many liberals and Democrats in the U.S., 1/6 is the equivalent of 9/11. One need not speculate about that. Many have said this explicitly. Some prominent Democrats in politics and media have even insisted that 1/6 was worse than 9/11.
Joe Biden’s speechwriters, when preparing his script for his April address to the Joint Session of Congress, called the three-hour riot “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” Liberal icon Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), whose father’s legacy was cemented by years of casting 9/11 as the most barbaric attack ever seen, now serves as Vice Chair of the 1/6 Committee; in that role, she proclaimed that the forces behind 1/6 represent “a threat America has never seen before.” The enabling resolution that created the Select Committee calls 1/6 “one of the darkest days of our democracy.” USA Today’s editor David Mastio published an op-ed whose sole point was a defense of the hysterical thesis from MSNBC analysts that 1/6 is at least as bad as 9/11 if not worse. S.V. Date, the White House correspondent for America’s most nakedly partisan “news” outlet, The Huffington Post, published a series of tweets arguing that 1/6 was worse than 9/11 and that those behind it are more dangerous than Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda ever were.
And ever since the pro-Trump crowd was dispersed at the Capitol after a few hours of protests and riots, the same repressive climate that arose after 9/11 has prevailed. Mainstream political and media sectors instantly consecrated the narrative, fully endorsed by the U.S. security state, that the United States was attacked on 1/6 by domestic terrorists bent on insurrection and a coup. They also claimed in unison that the ideology driving those right-wing domestic terrorists now poses the single most dangerous threat to the American homeland, a claim which the intelligence community was making even before 1/6 to argue for a new War on Terror (just as neocons wanted to invade and engineer regime change in Iraq prior to 9/11 and then exploited 9/11 to achieve that long-held goal).
With those extremist and alarming premises fully implanted, there has been little tolerance for questions about whether proposed responses for dealing with the 1/6 “domestic terrorists” and their incomparably dangerous ideology are excessive, illegal, unethical, or unconstitutional. Even before Joe Biden was inaugurated, his senior advisers made clear that one of their top priorities was to enact a bill from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) — now a member of the Select Committee on 1/6 — to import the first War on Terror onto domestic soil. Even without enactment of a new law, there is no doubt that a second War on Terror, this one domestic, has begun and is growing, all in the name of the 1/6 “Insurrection” and with little dissent or even public debate.
Following the post-9/11 script, anyone voicing such concerns about responses to 1/6 is reflexively accused of minimizing the gravity of the Capitol riot and, worse, of harboring sympathy for the plotters and their insurrectionary cause. Questions or doubts about the proportionality or legality of government actions in the name of 1/6 are depicted as insincere, proof that those voicing such doubts are acting not in defense of constitutional or legal principles but out of clandestine camaraderie with the right-wing domestic terrorists and their evil cause.
When it comes to 1/6 and those who were at the Capitol, there is no middle ground. That playbook is not new. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” was the rigidly binary choice which President George W. Bush presented to Americans and the world when addressing Congress shortly after the 9/11 attack. With that framework in place, anything short of unquestioning support for the Bush/Cheney administration and all of its policies was, by definition, tantamount to providing aid and comfort to the terrorists and their allies. There was no middle ground, no third option, no such thing as ambivalence or reluctance: all of that uncertainty or doubt, insisted the new war president, was to be understood as standing with the terrorists.
The coercive and dissent-squashing power of that binary equation has proven irresistible ever since, spanning myriad political positions and cultural issues. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s insistence that one either fully embrace what he regards as the program of “anti-racism” or be guilty by definition of supporting racism — that there is no middle ground, no space for neutrality, no room for ambivalence about any of the dogmatic planks — perfectly tracks this manipulative formula. As Dr. Kendi described the binary he seeks to impose: “what I’m trying to do with my work is to really get Americans to eliminate the concept of ‘not racist’ from their vocabulary, and realize we’re either being racist or anti-racist.” Eight months after the 1/6 riot — despite the fact that the only people who died that day were Trump supporters and not anyone they killed — that same binary framework shapes our discourse, with a clear message delivered by those purporting to crush an insurrection and confront domestic terrorism. You’re either with us, or with the 1/6 terrorists.
What makes this ongoing prohibition of dissent or even doubt so remarkable is that so many of the responses to 1/6 are precisely the legal and judicial policies that liberals have spent decades denouncing. Indeed, many of the defining post-1/6 policies are identical to those now retrospectively viewed as abusive and excessive, if not unconstitutional, when invoked as part of the first War on Terror. We are thus confronted with the surreal dynamic that policies long castigated in American liberalism — whether used generally in the criminal justice system or specifically in the name of avenging 9/11 and defeating Islamic extremism — are now off-limits from scrutiny or critique when employed in the name of avenging 1/6 and crushing the dangerous domestic ideology that fostered it.
Almost immediately after the Capitol riot, some of the most influential Democratic lawmakers — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who also now chairs the Select 1/6 Committee — demanded that any participants in the protest be placed on the no-fly list, long regarded as one of the most extreme civil liberties assaults from the first War on Terror. And at least some of the 1/6 protesters have been placed on that list: American citizens, convicted of no crime, prohibited from boarding commercial airplanes based on a vague and unproven assessment, from unseen and unaccountable security state bureaucrats, that they are too dangerous to fly. I reported extensively on the horrors and abuses of the no-fly list as part of the first War on Terror and do not recall a single liberal speaking in defense of that tactic. Yet now that this same brute instrument is being used against Trump supporters, there has not, to my knowledge, been a single prominent liberal raising objections to the resurrection of the no-fly list for American citizens who have been convicted of no crime.
Axios, Jan. 12, 2021
With more than 600 people now charged in connection with the events of 1/6, not one person has been charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government, incite insurrection, conspiracy to commit murder or kidnapping of public officials, or any of the other fantastical claims that rained down on them from media narratives. No one has been charged with treason or sedition. Perhaps that is because, as Reuters reported in August, “the FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.” Yet these defendants are being treated as if they were guilty of these grave crimes of which nobody has been formally accused, with the exact type of prosecutorial and judicial overreach that criminal defense lawyers and justice reform advocates have long railed against.
Dozens of the 1/6 defendants have been denied bail, thus being imprisoned for months without having been found guilty of anything. Many are being held in unusually harsh and bizarrely cruel conditions, causing a federal judge on Wednesday to hold “the warden of the D.C. jail and director of the D.C. Department of Corrections in contempt of court,” and then calling on the Justice Department “to investigate whether the jail is violating the civil rights of dozens of detained Jan. 6 defendants.” Some of the pre-trial prison protocols have been so punitive that even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — who calls the 1/6 protesters “domestic terrorists” — denounced their treatment as abusive: “Solitary confinement is a form of punishment that is cruel and psychologically damaging,” Warren said, adding: “And we’re talking about people who haven’t been convicted of anything yet.” Warren also said she is “worried that law enforcement officials are deploying it to ‘punish’ the Jan. 6 defendants or to ‘break them so that they will cooperate.”
The few 1/6 defendants who have thus far been sentenced after pleading guilty have been subjected to exceptionally punitive sentences, the kind liberal criminal justice reform advocates have been rightly denouncing for years. Several convicted of nothing more than trivial misdemeanors are being sentenced to real prison time; last week, Michigan’s Robert Reeder pled guilty to “one count of parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building” yet received a jail term of 3 months, with the judge admitting that the motive was to “send a signal to the other participants in that riot… that they can expect to receive jail time.”
Meanwhile, long-controversial SWAT teams are being routinely deployed to arrest 1/6 suspects in their homes, and long-time liberal activists denouncing these tactics have suddenly decided they are appropriate for these Trump supporters. That prosecutors are notoriously overzealous in their demands for harsh prison time is a staple of liberal discourse, but now, an Obama-appointed judge has repeatedly doled out sentences to 1/6 defendants that are harsher and longer than those requested by DOJ prosecutors, to the applause of liberals. In sum, these defendants are subjected to one of the grossest violations of due process: they are being treated as if they are guilty of crimes — treason, sedition, insurrection, attempted murder, and kidnapping — which not even the DOJ has accused them of committing. And the fundamental precept of any healthy justice system — namely, punishment for citizens is merited only once they have been found guilty of crimes in a court of law — has been completely discarded.
Serious questions about FBI involvement in the 1/6 events linger. For months, Americans were subjected to a frightening media narrative that far-right groups had plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, only for proof to emerge that at least half of the conspirators, including its leaders, were working for or at the behest of the FBI. Regarding 1/6, the evidence has been clear for months, though largely confined to right-wing outlets, that the FBI had its tentacles in the three groups it claims were most responsible for the 1/6 protest: the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters. Yet last month, The New York Times acknowledged that the FBI was directly communicating with one of its informants present at the Capitol, a member of the Proud Boys, while the riot unfolded, meaning “federal law enforcement had a far greater visibility into the assault on the Capitol, even as it was taking place, than was previously known.” All of this suggests that to the extent 1/6 had any advanced centralized planning, it was far closer to an FBI-induced plot than a centrally organized right-wing insurrection.
Despite this mountain of abuses, it is exceedingly rare to find anyone outside of conservative media and MAGA politics raising objections to any of this (which is what made Sen. Warren’s denunciation of their pre-trial prison conditions so notable). The reason is obvious: just as was true in the aftermath of 9/11, people are petrified to express any dissent or even question what is being done to the alleged domestic terrorists for fear of standing accused of sympathizing with them and their ideology, an accusation that can be career-ending for many.
Many of the 1/6 defendants are impoverished and cannot afford lawyers, yet private-sector law firms who have active pro bono programs will not touch anyone or anything having to do with 1/6, while the ACLU is now little more than an arm of the Democratic Party and thus displays almost no interest in these systemic civil liberties assaults. And for many liberals — the ones who are barely able to contain their glee at watching people lose their jobs in the middle of a pandemic due to vaccine-hesitancy or who do not hide their joy that the unarmed Ashli Babbitt got what she deserved — their political adversaries these days are not just political adversaries but criminals and even terrorists, rendering no punishment too harsh or severe. For them, cruelty is not just acceptable; the cruelty is the point.
The Unconstitutionality of the 1/6 Committee
Civil liberties abuses of this type are common when the U.S. security state scares enough people into believing that the threat they face is so acute that normal constitutional safeguards must be disregarded. What is most definitely not common, and is arguably the greatest 1/6-related civil liberties abuse of them all, is the House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
To say that the investigative acts of the 1/6 Committee are radical is a wild understatement. Along with serving subpoenas on four former Trump officials, they have also served subpoenas on eleven private citizens: people selected for interrogation precisely because they exercised their Constitutional right of free assembly by applying for and receiving a permit to hold a protest on January 6 opposing certification of the 2020 election.
When the Select 1/6 Committee recently boasted of these subpoenas in its press release, it made clear what methodology it used for selecting who it was targeting: “The committee used permit paperwork for the Jan. 6 rally to identify other individuals involved in organizing.” In other words, any citizen whose name appeared on permit applications to protest was targeted for that reason alone. The committee’s stated goal is “to collect information from them and their associated entities on the planning, organization, and funding of those events”: to haul citizens before Congress to interrogate them on their constitutionally protected right to assemble and protest and probe their political beliefs and associations:
List of 11 private citizens who received subpoenas from the 1/6 Congressional Committee for deposition testimony and records
Even worse are the so-called “preservation notices” which the committee secretly issued to dozens if not hundreds of telecoms, email and cell phone providers, and other social media platforms (including Twitter and Parler), ordering those companies to retain extremely invasive data regarding the communications and physical activities of more than 100 citizens, with the obvious intent to allow the committee to subpoena those documents. The communications and physical movement data sought by the committee begins in April, 2020 — nine months before the 1/6 riot. The committee refuses to make public the list of individuals it is targeting with these sweeping third-party subpoenas, but on the list are what CNN calls “many members of Congress,” along with dozens of private citizens involved in obtaining the permit to protest and then promoting and planning the gathering on social media.
What makes these secret notices especially pernicious is that the committee requested that these companies not notify their customers that the committee has demanded the preservation of their data. The committee knows it lacks the power to impose a “gag order” on these companies to prevent them from notifying their users that they received the precursor to a subpoena: a power the FBI in conjunction with courts does have. So they are relying instead on “voluntary compliance” with the gag order request, accompanied by the thuggish threat that any companies refusing to voluntarily comply risk the public relations harm of appearing to be obstructing the committee’s investigation and, worse, protecting the 1/6 “insurrectionists.”
Worse still, the committee in its preservation notices to these communications companies requested that “you do not disable, suspend, lock, cancel, or interrupt service to these subscribers or accounts solely due to this request,” and that they should first contact the committee “if you are not able or willing to respond to this request without alerting the subscribers.” The motive here is obvious: if any of these companies risk the PR hit by refusing to conceal from their customers the fact that Congress is seeking to obtain their private data, they are instructed to contact the committee instead, so that the committee can withdraw the request. That way, none of the customers will ever be aware that the committee targeted their private data and will thus never be able to challenge the legality of the committee’s acts in a court of law.
In other words, even the committee knows that its power to seek this information about private citizens lacks any convincing legal justification and, for that reason, wants to ensure that nobody has the ability to seek a judicial ruling on the legality of their actions. All of these behaviors raise serious civil liberties concerns, so much so that even left-liberal legal scholars and at least one civil liberties group (obviously not the ACLU) — petrified until now of creating any appearance that they are defending 1/6 protesters by objecting to civil liberties abuses — have begun very delicately to raise doubts and concerns about the committee’s actions.
But the most serious constitutional problem is not the specific investigative acts of the committee but the very existence of the committee itself. There is ample reason to doubt the constitutionality of this committee’s existence.
When crimes are committed in the United States, there are two branches of government — and only two — vested by the Constitution with the power to investigate criminal suspects and adjudicate guilt: the executive branch (through the FBI and DOJ) and the judiciary. Congress has no role to play in any of that, and for good and important reasons. The Constitution places limits on what the executive branch and judiciary can do when investigating suspects . . . . .
Merrick Garland’s America
The justice department targets dissenters
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • OCTOBER 12, 2021
There have been a number of suggestions online that the withdrawal of American soldiers from overseas is being undertaken to use the troops against those individuals and domestic groups that are being targeted by the Justice Department. The possibility has a certain coherency given that we have a White House that believes it has the right to forcefully inflict medical procedures on anyone who happens to live in the US, but it falls down due to the fact that the soldiers themselves might side with the dissidents as they are being sent to reeducation camps and subsequently weeded out based on their political views, even to the extent of having their social media covertly monitored. Quis custodet custodes?, one must ask.
If there is one thing that all Americans should feel pleased about with the Republican Party performance it is the fact that the then Republican dominated Senate was able to block President Barack Obama’s bid to place Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court. The downside of that is, of course, that he now is Joe Biden’s Attorney General, where he is very well placed to engage in mischief that will potentially affect all Americans. In fact, he has proven to be a more than willing accomplice in the social engineering that the Biden Administration is engaged in, to include his declaration of war against white supremacists as the single greatest terrorist threat the United States faces today.
One might well recall Taki Theodoracopulos’s recent comment that “If America survives in its current form, years from now people will wonder how society was enslaved by a minority of privileged people who would surrender and give up their mother at the first sign of an attack.” That defines Garland and those around him, but he is generally regarded by the media and those who care about such things, as a moderate, judicially speaking. As I can hardly confirm his actual views on anything, I would not dispute that assessment, but I would note that he certainly walks like a standard Democratic Party liberal duck since he has been appointed Attorney General, very tolerant of bizarre “woke” culture and taking the lead on finding and punishing domestic terrorists. The enemies list admittedly features white supremacists regarded ipso facto as extremists, but it now also includes parents who do not support “critical race theory” (CRT) in the nation’s public schools.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has observed how “The Department of Justice’s fight against angry parents is a real testament to the authoritarian nature of the Biden administration and indeed, the entirety of the left. It takes a lot of hubris to declare that you know how to raise someone’s child better than them and send authorities to shut you down when you protest that.” To be sure, Critical Race Theory has been fairly criticized as it pretends to be an antidote to systemic racism but is itself racist in nature as it opposes a race neutral system that equally benefits everyone. It proposes that America’s governmental bodies and infrastructures are racist and supportive of “white supremacy” and must be deconstructed. It requires everything to be examined through a value system determined by identity politics and race and it views both whites and their institutions as hopelessly corrupted, if not evil. This is what will be taught to children and this is why parents are protesting.
One has to wonder if a “moderate” jurist would support using the nation’s law enforcement resources to come down on hard on people, most of whom are committing something that might be referred to as thought crimes. The mainstream media has little to say on the issue, most probably because Garland is a protected species called “Jewish” and he is also serving a liberal Democratic Administration. One notes in particular that Garland has said nothing about intensifying FBI efforts to identify, arrest, prosecute and confine the black lives matter punks who rioted, burned and looted last summer, causing billions of dollars-worth of damage, and beating and even killing those who resisted. Could it be because they are part of the Democratic Party coalition?
Some of the press coverage on Garland that does exist is embarrassing because it is exculpatory of what might be an egregious violation of the Constitution by a government that might be described truthfully as neo-totalitarian. Indeed, Garland’s most recent pronouncement on cracking down on CRT critics triggered an approving puff piece from Newsweek, which once upon a time was considered a reliable news magazine.
The article is headlined “Merrick Garland Tackles Threats to Educators Amid Critical Race Theory Furor,” which is all you need to know about what will follow. Per News-weak and Garland, educators are being threatened by racists. Its lead paragraphs states that “Attorney General Merrick Garland is taking aim at intimidation and threats of violence directed at educators and school administrators who are working to give children ‘a proper education in a safe environment.’ Garland issued a memorandum to FBI Director Christopher Wray and federal prosecutors on Monday saying there had been a ‘disturbing spike’ in threats against school personnel and promising to take measures to deal with the issue. The move from the Department of Justice comes after fraught scenes at school board meetings across the country, with heated exchanges about COVID-19 regulations and Critical Race Theory (CRT).”
Garland’s action was reportedly in response to a letter from the politically left-leaning National School Boards Association (NSBA) to President joe Biden on September 29th, comparing threats against school personnel to “domestic terrorism.” It said “… many public school officials are… facing physical threats because of propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula. As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
Garland is mobilizing what he refers to as a “Partnership among federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement.” The FBI memorandum itself argues that “In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools. While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views. Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values. Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety. The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate. In the coming days, the Department will announce a series of measures designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.”
Merrick Garland, like Newsweek, makes pretty clear where he sits on the issue and it is beyond amusing to see him write about the “nation’s core values,” which he and his accomplices are attempting to subvert and destroy. The school boards are presumed to be completely innocent while the parents protesting against the “values” being forced down the throats of their children by the recently empowered “woke” fanatics who tend to make up many of the boards are the criminals. If Garland had looked a little deeper, he would have discovered that quite a lot of the harassment and intimidation is coming from the members of the school boards and their political allies in local government and the media, as has been evident in Loudoun County Virginia. Indeed, while Garland states his intention to stop those who would “intimidate individuals based on their views,” that is exactly what he and his friends in the world of education are trying to do, and succeeding in many places. A “proper education in a safe environment” is precisely what students are not receiving as standards are dropped and the focus on racism and transgenderism begin to influence and generally dominate what is in the curriculum, aided and abetted by hypocrites like Merrick Garland and his nominal boss the perpetually befuddled President Joe Biden.
No one can make a better assessment of what is happening to our country than former congressman Ron Paul. In a recent piece entitled “Parents Should Control Education” he observes: “In contrast to an authoritarian society, a free society recognizes that parents have both the responsibility and the right to provide their children with a quality education that reflects the parents’ values. Teachers who use their positions to indoctrinate children in beliefs that contradict the views of the parents are the ones overstepping their bounds. Restoring parental control of education should be a priority for all who believe in liberty. If government can override the wishes of parents in the name of ‘education’ or ‘protecting children’s health’ then what area of our lives is safe from government intrusion?”
Indeed Dr. Paul, with Merrick Garland at the helm and Captain Queeg in the White House no area of our lives is safe from the government.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
What did he know and when? Biden’s National Security advisor implicated in Alfa Bank Russiagate scam
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | September 21, 2021
The indictment of lawyer Michael Sussmann promises to shed more light on what really went on during Russiagate. And it also raises questions about the possible involvement of Jake Sullivan – now National Security Advisor.
On September 16, Special Counsel John Durham charged Sussmann, a partner at Perkins Coie, the law firm which represented the Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, with making false statements to the FBI over the course of its Trump-Russia probe.
Sussmann met with counsel James Baker in September 2016, and claimed the Trump Organization had used a secret server of Russia’s Alfa Bank as a communications channel with the Kremlin. What he didn’t mention, according to the indictment, was that he was conducting “opposition research” on Trump, and “coordinating” with the Clinton campaign to present that information to the FBI and mainstream media. In fact, the indictment suggests Sussmann lied, stating he said outright he wasn’t conducting work “for any client.”
This led Baker to “understand that Sussmann was acting as a good citizen merely passing along information, not as a paid advocate or political operative,” when in fact, Durham asserts, he was acting on behalf of three specific clients – an unnamed US tech industry executive, a US internet company, and the Clinton campaign.
Sussmann denies any wrongdoing, and has pleaded not guilty, claiming the charges are politically motivated – his defense lawyers argue that he didn’t make any false statements, and who he was representing was not a material fact. However, in December 2017, the defendant told the Congressional committee on intelligence that information on Alfa Bank was given to him “by a client” and “absolutely” not by “any other source,” and that his client had explicitly directed him to speak to Baker and others.
In any event, dossiers outlining the incendiary allegations were passed anonymously to every major US news outlet over the course of the 2016 presidential election campaign, with many eagerly seizing upon them. However, not all journalists were convinced, and several organizations refused to publish anything on the material. The Intercept issued a withering report on the charges a week prior to the vote, documenting how DNS records provided by the anonymous source “can’t really prove anything at all, and certainly not ‘communication’ between Trump and Alfa,” and no one “can show that a single message was exchanged between Trump and Alfa.”
That same day however, Clinton drew attention to the “covert server” on social media, sharing a statement on the subject by her senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan, acting as if the information her team had passed to the media was new to her.
“This could be the most direct link yet between Trump and Moscow… This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide,” he boldly asserted. “We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our elections.”
The indictment makes clear that Sullivan was a key player in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to publicize the Alfa Bank disinformation. It records how Sussmann was “alerted” to the Alfa Bank allegations by his tech executive client in July 2016, and “over the ensuing weeks, as part of their lawyer-client relationship,” the pair engaged with a Clinton campaign lawyer and individuals acting on the candidate’s behalf to share the false charges “with the media and others.”
In mid-September, that lawyer exchanged emails with the “campaign’s manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor” concerning the false charges, and Sussmann’s success to date with cultivating media interest. This contact was so significant, the lawyer specifically billed the Clinton campaign for the correspondence, an accompanying entry – titled “re: Alfa Bank Article” – naming Sullivan, the campaign’s manager and its communications director.
Sullivan went on to be appointed Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor in November 2020. Now there must be questions as to whether his position remains tenable, given that Durham set up a dedicated grand jury to investigate the Alfa Bank fraud, and several other individuals involved may also subsequently face charges of giving false information to federal officials – the indictment can only raise questions about whether Sullivan was one of them, what he knew, and when.
Durham’s investigative hypothesis is that the Clinton campaign consciously used Perkins Coie to submit dubious information to the FBI about Trump’s non-existent Kremlin ties in order to “gin up” the agency’s investigative activity in that regard, and damage his electoral prospects. If true, Sussmann certainly seems central to these cloak-and-dagger efforts – he was the Democratic National Committee representative who contracted cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, personally reaching out to its president Shawn Henry for his company’s assistance in investigating the leak of internal emails from the DNC’s servers.
CrowdStrike concluded that the emails had been hacked by Russian intelligence services, which has informed the universally received mainstream wisdom on the subject. Henry’s repeated admissions in December 2017 to the House Intelligence Committee that his company possessed no “concrete evidence” the files were hacked, let alone by Russia, went entirely unreported upon their public release in May 2020. That the CIA maintains technology, dubbed the Marble Framework, which can falsely attribute cyberattacks to foreign countries – including Russia – has likewise never been acknowledged by a Western media outlet.
Another strand of Perkins Coie’s informational assault was the hiring of Fusion GPS, which infamously enlisted the services of former MI6 operative Christopher Steele to compile a dossier on ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow. The August 2017 testimony of the company’s cofounder Glenn Simpson to the Senate Judiciary Committee would appear to reinforce Durham’s hypothesis, given he revealed that Fusion GPS engaged in a number of insidious schemes to ensure the dossier reached the “leadership level” of the FBI, as it was felt senior operatives would “treat [the information] very seriously.”
One subterfuge involved Steele briefing the Bureau on the allegations, whereupon Fusion GPS “encouraged” journalists to ask the FBI whether they were investigating Trump’s connections with Russia. Another, which proved decisive, saw Steele’s associate Andrew Wood, former UK Ambassador to Russia, speak with John McCain about the dossier at the November 2016 Halifax International Security Forum in Canada. Suitably concerned, McCain arranged for a copy of the dossier to be provided to him, which he then passed to FBI Director James Comey. In turn, it reached President Barack Obama’s desk in the first week of January the following year.
Other schemes may be unearthed over the course of Sussmann’s trial. Fusion GPS alone clearly has much to hide – in 2017, the owners of Alfa Bank sued Fusion GPS and Simpson for publication of false statements accusing the organization of “bribery, extortion, and interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election.” In May this year, the bank’s lawyers filed a motion to compel the disclosure of around 500 documents wrongfully withheld over the course of the trial.
Fusion GPS and Simpson have fought tooth and nail to prevent their release ever since, questionably arguing that they are subject to “attorney-client privilege” and thus should not be subject to production. Among the communications the pair seek to keep secret are those between Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie, including correspondence with Sussmann mere weeks before he met with Baker. Watch this space.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
Reuters and BBC Caught Taking Money for Propaganda Campaign
This article was previously published March 10, 2021, and has been updated with new information.
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | September 20, 2021
Operation Mockingbird,1,2 publicly revealed during a 1975 Congressional hearing, was a clandestine CIA media infiltration campaign launched in 1948 under the Office of Special Projects.3
The CIA reportedly spent $1 billion a year (about one-third of its entire budget4) on under-the-table bribes to hundreds of American journalists who in return published fake stories at the CIA’s request. CIA-recruited journalists worked in most major news organizations, including CBS News, Time, Life, Newsweek and The New York Times, just to name a few.5 Later on, the campaign expanded to include foreign media as well.6 As reported by the Free Press :7
“In 1976, Senator Frank Church’s investigation into the CIA exposed their corruption of the media. The Church Committee reported: ‘The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda.
These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets’ …
The tactic was straightforward. False news reports or propaganda would be provided by CIA writers to knowing and unknowing reporters who would simply repeat the falsehoods over and over again.”
Reuters and BBC News Were Paid for Propaganda Campaign
While Operation Mockingbird may sound like ancient history, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest it’s still in full swing. During the Cold War, CIA propaganda disparaged communist ideologies. Today, it promotes radical socialist ideas that support a technocratic economic system instead.
While the propaganda messages change with the times, the basic modus operandi of their dissemination remains the same. If anything, the system has only gotten more efficient and effective, as the number of major media outlets has shrunk over these past decades, and a vast majority of journalists and news anchors simply parrot what’s reported by the three global news agencies.
The CIA also isn’t the only intelligence agency using the media for its own propaganda purposes. Leaked documents8 reveal Reuters and BBC News have been involved in a covert program by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to weaken Russia’s influence on its neighbors. In his extensive February 20, 2021, GrayZone article, Max Blumenthal writes:9
“Working through a shadowy department within the UK FCO known as the Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD), the media organizations operated alongside a collection of intelligence contractors in a secret entity known simply as ‘the Consortium.’
Through training programs of Russian journalists overseen by Reuters, the British Foreign Office sought to produce an ‘attitudinal change in the participants,’ promoting a ‘positive impact’ on their ‘perception of the UK’ …
In effect, the British government was seeking to infiltrate Russian media and propagate its own narrative through an influence network of Russian journalists trained in the UK …
‘These revelations show that when MPs were railing about Russia, British agents were using the BBC and Reuters to deploy precisely the same tactics that politicians and media commentators were accusing Russia of using,’ Chris Williamson, a former UK Labour MP who attempted to apply public scrutiny to the CDMD’s covert activities and was stonewalled on national security grounds, told The Grayzone.
‘The BBC and Reuters portray themselves as an unimpeachable, impartial, and authoritative source of world news,’ Williamson continued, ‘but both are now hugely compromised by these disclosures. Double standards like this just bring establishment politicians and corporate media hacks into further disrepute.'”
Reuters, BBC Hired to Promote Pro-NATO Narratives
The leaked documents show both Reuters and the BBC received “multimillion-dollar contracts to advance the British state’s interventionist aims.” The FCO funded:
- The cultivation of Russian journalists
- The establishment of “influence networks” in and around Russia
- The promotion of pro-NATO narratives in Russian-speaking regions
In its proposals, Reuters stated it has 15,000 journalists and staff within its global network, including 400 journalists within Russia. Reuters and BBC carried out their covert influencing mission in partnership with other high-profile media companies, including Bellingcat, Meduza and Mediazona.
Overseeing the operation was the Zinc Network, an intelligence contractor, which was also responsible for the establishment of a network of Russian and Central Asian YouTubers who were not registered as external sources. The Zinc Network also claimed to have the ability to “activate a range of content; to support anti-government protests inside Russia.”
This isn’t the first time Reuters and the BBC have been implicated in a Mockingbird-type media influencing operation. Documents declassified in January 2020 showed the British government funded Reuters “throughout the 1960s and 1970s to assist an anti-Soviet propaganda organization run by the MI6 intelligence agency,” Blumenthal writes.10 The BBC, meanwhile, was used as “a pass-through to conceal payments” to Reuters.
180-Degrees From the Truth
It’s no small irony that most of the organizations claiming to promote truth and counter disinformation are in fact doing the exact opposite. The Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD) group sounds very much like the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
The CCDH is an opaquely funded group run by Imran Ahmed, who is also a member of the Steering Committee on the Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force under the British government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.
Ahmed has gone on record saying he considers anti-vaxxers “an extremist group that pose a national security risk,”11 and admits tracking and spying on 425 vaccine-related Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter accounts.12
In addition to stating that medical and scientific professionals must “convince the public that COVID is dangerous and give them confidence that a vaccine is safe and effective,”13 the CCDH is also calling for deplatforming anyone who questions vaccines,14 and to “hold platforms accountable” through fines, criminal sanctions and other measures that can impact the platform’s bottom line.
So, just as the CDMD is actually not countering disinformation but, rather, creating it, the CCDH is not in the business of countering digital hate; it’s actively creating and promoting online hate by baselessly labeling millions of law-abiding parents — whose only crime is to be concerned about their children’s health — as extremist threats and enemies of the state.
Media Have Become Integral Part of Intelligence Spy Network
Other media reports15,16,17 have also highlighted the role of intelligence agencies in the global effort to eliminate “anti-vaccine propaganda” from public discussion, and the fact that they’re using sophisticated cyberwarfare tools to do so. For example, independent investigative journalist Whitney Webb writes:18
“British and American state intelligence agencies are ‘weaponizing truth’ to quash vaccine hesitancy as both nations prepare for mass inoculations, in a recently announced ‘cyber war’ to be commanded by AI-powered arbiters of truth against information sources that challenge official narratives …
The UK’s GCHQ [Government Communications Headquarters19] ‘has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states’ and ‘is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State’ to do so.20
In addition, the UK government has ordered the British military’s 77th Brigade, which specializes in ‘information warfare,’ to launch an online campaign to counter ‘deceptive narratives’ about COVID-19 vaccine candidates.
The newly announced GCHQ ‘cyber war’ will not only take down ‘anti-vaccine propaganda’ but will also seek to ‘disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.’
The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other countries in the ‘Five Eyes’ alliance (U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target such ‘propaganda’ sites hosted within their borders.”
Intelligence-Led Information Warfare Against the Public
Clues that U.S. intelligence agencies — not just the CIA but also the FBI — support this cyberwar against the public can also be found in a white paper21 published in the InfraGard Journal in June 2019. InfraGard, a nonprofit national security group, collaborates with the FBI22 on educational and information-sharing initiatives “that help mitigate threats” to national security.23
The InfraGard paper24 claims the American anti-vaccine movement is being orchestrated by Russian government-aligned organizations seeking to “sow discontent and distrust in topics and initiatives that serve U.S. interests,”25 and that “The biggest threat in controlling an outbreak comes from those who categorically reject vaccination.”26
Other evidence includes the fact that the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Special Operations Command have awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to the U.S.-based “machine intelligence” company Primer, to develop “the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation.”27
According to Webb, “Primer’s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of ‘truth,’ as defined by the state.”28
The self-appointed arbiter of truth NewsGuard — which rates websites on criteria of “credibility” and “transparency” — is also partnered with both the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Defense,29 which strongly suggests government support (if not direct involvement) of censorship.
NewsGuard is also funded by the PR firm Publicis, which also appears to have an important role in this information war.
Most Mainstream Media Are Now Propagandists
Were it not for the mainstream media pumping out misleading if not flat-out false information on a daily basis for months on end, the COVID-19 pandemic would have been a mere blip on the public’s radar. None of the draconian, freedom-robbing measures would have been remotely possible.
Considering the consistency of the narratives across the world this past year, it’s inconceivable that there isn’t some central “agency” of sorts directing it all. And, if so, there clearly must be a reason behind it. One does not fear-monger for no reason whatsoever. It has a purpose.
Historically, fear has been used by every would-be authoritarian and totalitarian regime you can think of, so there’s every reason to suspect the same applies now. The main difference is that today’s totalitarian ruler is more or less wholly unknown.
Who is it that wants to rule the world’s population through fear? Who is trying to take control over the whole globe? Who is guiding and instructing virtually all government leaders? Intelligence agencies and their media partners undoubtedly play key roles, but they’re unlikely to be the true core of the power structure behind it all.
No, the real power and leadership resides with the technocratic elite, the members of which have quietly and diligently worked to forward the agenda of a New World Order (NWO) for decades. What was once known as the NWO is now referred to as the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with a public focus on a “green” carbon-based economy to “build back better” by reinventing capitalism, as defined by the World Economic Forum.30
The not-so-public focus is technological surveillance and control over every facet of everyone’s life, from health and civic involvement to labor, education and economy. Unfortunately, members of the technocracy no longer carry member cards or pay membership dues, which obscures their affiliation, but certain organizations are so intimately involved in furthering the Great Reset agenda that you can safely assume a majority of their members play some role in this scheme.
The Council on Foreign Relations
Aside from intelligence agencies, another key player behind the Great Reset is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). As explained by Swiss Policy Research, “Executives and top journalists of almost all major U.S. media outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations.”31
Not to be confused with the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations or the European Council on Foreign Relations, CFR is a nonprofit think tank, the 5,000-plus members of which also include past and present presidents, politicians, secretaries of state, CIA directors, bankers, lawyers, academic professors and corporate leaders, just to name a few.32
CFR also operates the David Rockefeller Studies Program, which in turn advises the White House on foreign policy matters. Overall, the CFR wields incredible power and influence over the U.S. White House and its policies. As reported by Swiss Policy Research:33
“In his famous article about ‘The American Establishment,’ political columnist Richard H. Rovere noted: ‘The directors of the CFR make up a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that guides our destiny as a nation …
[I]t rarely fails to get one of its members, or at least one of its allies, into the White House. In fact, it generally is able to see to it that both nominees are men acceptable to it.’ It was not until the 2016 election that the Council couldn’t, apparently, prevail.”
The Synchronization of Fake News
CFR has two international affiliates: the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, both of which were established by CFR leaders “to foster elite cooperation at the global level.”
Well-known names in the Trilateral group’s U.S. branch include David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Michael Bloomberg and Google heavyweights Eric Schmidt and Susan Molinari, vice president for public policy at Google. Many of its board members are also members of the Aspen Institute, which grooms and mentors executives from around the world about the subtleties of globalization.
As you can see in the graphic below, major media are well represented in all three groups. As mentioned, CFR members also include current and former CIA directors. In his book, “American War Machine,”34,35 Peter Dale Scott also documents the ties between CFR, the CIA, the national security apparatus and the banking industry. Taken together, these ties explain how a false narrative (whatever it might be) can be so widely coordinated and synchronized.
Richard Stengel — Technocracy Poster Boy
Knowing what you now know about the CFR, comments by Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for President Biden’s transition team, will probably make a lot more sense.
During a 2018 CFR forum on fake news, Stengel — a CFR member and Atlantic Council fellow, former State Department official for the Obama administration, former managing editor for Time magazine, strategic adviser to Snap Inc., which runs Snapchat and Bitmoji and a political analyst on MSNBC — insisted governments must use propaganda on their citizens.36
He repeated this sentiment in November 2020, after being appointed to President Biden’s transition team, saying he’s “not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”37 As reported by The GrayZone :38
“A committed crusader in what he openly describes as a global ‘information war,’ Stengel has proudly proclaimed his dedication to the careful management of the public’s access to information.”
Stengel has even proposed abolishing — “rethinking” — the First Amendment, which guarantees the freedom of speech and press, “for practical reasons in society.”39
Stengel’s presence in the Biden administration may be an augury of things to come, considering he created a nonclassified government entity during his Obama years, specifically to combat Russian disinformation.40 This entity, the Global Engagement Center, now facilitates the U.S. government’s efforts to spread its own propaganda around the world.
Stengel, with his close ties to several key centers of technocratic power — the U.S. government, the CFR, the Atlantic Council, mainstream media and Big Tech — is a veritable poster boy for modern technocracy, which makes his shameless promotion of censorship and propaganda more than a little understandable.
Pre-Mockingbird Media Manipulation
While Operation Mockingbird has earned a place in history as a point at which the free press was compromised, in reality, the infiltration of the press occurred long before the 1950s.
In his February 9, 1917, Congressional remarks, Congressman Oscar Callaway, D-Texas, explained the origin and execution of the plan to control and manipulate public opinion and mindset through media, which had taken shape just two years earlier:41
“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press.
They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.”
Operation Mockingbird was essentially the CIA’s effort to consolidate, while simultaneously expanding, this secret hold over the media some three decades later. It’s a sobering thought to realize that virtually no one alive today has ever been informed by a truly free and independent press.
While the situation has surely deteriorated in more recent years, the covert use of mainstream media to manipulate and misdirect the public to protect the interests of the elite few has been par for the course for over 100 years.
The Propaganda Multipliers
When it comes to the actual dissemination of fake news and propaganda, news agencies play a central role, and there’s only three of them: The Associated Press (AP), Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP). As explained in the Swiss Policy Research post, “The Propaganda Multiplier”:42
“The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports … 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of a U.S. and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.”
In short, until or unless at least one of these news agencies sends out a notice, national and local media are unlikely to report on certain events. Even photos and videos are often sourced directly from these global news agencies. This way, people hear, see and read the exact same message everywhere.
“This dependency on the global agencies creates a striking similarity in international reporting: from Vienna to Washington, our media often report the same topics, using many of the same phrases — a phenomenon that would otherwise rather be associated with ‘controlled media’ in authoritarian states,” Swiss Policy Research writes.43
Even media outlets that have foreign correspondents on their payroll do not expect those correspondents to conduct independent investigations. They too simply report whatever the Big Three news agencies want covered, and from the angle they want it covered. What you end up with is a sort of echo-chamber where only one view is presented. As one might expect, this setup makes for a perfect propaganda machine.
As noted by Swiss Policy Research, “Due to the rather low journalistic performance of the mainstream media and their high dependence on a few news agencies, it is easy for interested parties to spread propaganda and disinformation in a supposedly respectable format to a worldwide audience.” Intelligence agencies and defense ministries are well aware of this and use it with regularity, as surely does the CFR and the rest of the technocratic apparatus.
In short, the current censoring and labeling of anything that threatens the technocratic agenda and the profiteering of its members as “misinformation” and “disinformation” is a top-down scheme. It’s not random, by any means, and it’s not driven by the opinions of private companies themselves. Social media companies, for example, are mere tools for the technocratic deep state, which operates worldwide.
The question then becomes, if propaganda is that deeply entrenched in our media structure, how do we know what is true and what is not? There’s no easy answer to this question, but the solution involves first becoming aware of the fact that media lies, and that there is a reason for why the media narrative is what it is. One way to evaluate the news is to ask yourself, “Why might they want me to think of this in this particular way?” Eventually, patterns begin to form.
Ultimately, to find the truth, you must be willing to look for it, and to look in places outside the mainstream media consortium. You have to ask questions and reason your way through the information you find. If something doesn’t make sense yet you’re told to accept it without question, it’s probably propaganda.
Any number of COVID-19 restrictions, for example, have been illogical in the extreme, which tells us they’re not about protecting people from infection. It’s about something else, and that something else has often been the purposeful destruction of small businesses to facilitate wealth transfer from the middle- and lower class to the top echelon. Ultimately, that is the plan, and to stop it, we have to stop believing the propaganda. It’s just that simple. And that challenging.
Sources and References
- 1, 6 ATI March 12, 2018
- 2, 4 SGT Report October 7, 2019
- 3, 5, 7 Free Press July 17, 2013
- 8 Telegraph Trojan Horse Undermining Russia
- 9, 10 The GrayZone February 20, 2021
- 11 The Independent July 7, 2020
- 12 The Anti-Vaxx Playbook (PDF), Page 9
- 13 The Anti-Vaxx Playbook (PDF), Page 10
- 14 The Anti-Vaxx Playbook (PDF), Page 43
- 15, 20 The Times November 9, 2020
- 16 UK Defense Journal November 10, 2020
- 17 The National News November 9, 2020
- 18, 28 Unlimited Hangout November 11, 2020
- 19 GCHQ.gov.UK
- 21, 24, 25, 26 The Infragard Journal June 2019; 2(1) (PDF)
- 22 InfraGard
- 23 InfraGard About Us
- 27 PR Newswire October 1, 2020
- 29 Dropbox NewsGuard Partners
- 30 World Economic Forum July 13, 2020
- 31, 33 Swiss Policy Research The American Empire and Its Media
- 32 Council on Foreign Relations: The Imperial Council of the US
- 34 Amazon.com American War Machine by Peter Dale Scott
- 35, 41 Global Research September 30, 2019
- 36 The New American July 16, 2018
- 37, 38, 39, 40 The GrayZone November 11, 2020
- 42, 43 Swiss Policy Research, The Propaganda Multiplier
Twitter dodges election-meddling complaint over suppressing ‘unsubstantiated’ Hunter Biden laptop story
RT | September 14, 2021
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has reportedly rejected a Republican complaint claiming Twitter gave Democrats an in-kind contribution by blocking a New York Post story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter ahead of the 2020 vote.
The New York Times, which broke the news of the FEC decision on Monday, editorialized by describing the story as “unsubstantiated.” The commission has yet to officially publish the ruling or any explanations.
Twitter executives “credibly explained” that they had commercial reasons for blocking the distribution of an article revealing the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents, and had not coordinated with his father’s presidential campaign to do so, according to the Times. The decision “provides further flexibility to social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat to control what is shared on their platforms regarding federal elections,” the paper opined.
The Republican National Committee, which had accused Twitter of making a de facto contribution to the Democrats by banning the distribution of the article, said it was “weighing its options for appealing this disappointing decision.”
Editorializing by the Times was met with derision from commenters across the political spectrum, who pointed out that the Biden laptop had been confirmed as authentic. After the election, Hunter himself said it “could have been” his, and admitted to “losing” another.
“[We]’ve all seen the videos from the laptop of him smoking crack with our own eyes,” tweeted Donald Trump Junior. “This is why the corporate media has lost all credibility.”
“The only ‘unsubstantiated article’ that was circulating on Twitter at the time was the one from Politico declaring Hunter Biden’s laptop was ‘Russian disinformation’,” Fox News media reporter Joseph Wulfsohn pointed out.
“We all remember when Twitter blocked every major media outlet from sharing unsubstantiated articles about Trump being a Russian asset/blackmail victim virtually every day for 3+ years,” noted the Grayzone’s Aaron Mate – sarcastically, because that never actually happened.
After the New York Post revealed the existence of a laptop Biden abandoned in a Delaware repair shop, and quoted some emails from it suggesting he was trading on the family name overseas, Twitter first blocked the story from being shared under its newly established “hacked materials” policy, then locked the Post’s account. The lockout lasted for over two weeks and was only lifted a few days before the election.
The Biden campaign responded to the story by calling it “Russian disinformation,” citing a letter by former intelligence officials – the same ones behind the original ‘Russiagate’ assessment – and denying the laptop’s authenticity.
Twitter appears to have used stories about a “hacker” threat, seeded by the FBI, to justify their reaction. According to the Times, the company told the FEC they had “received official warnings throughout 2020 from federal law enforcement that ‘malign state actors’ might hack and release materials associated with political campaigns and that Hunter Biden might be a target of one such operation.”
At least four FEC commissioners had to have voted to reject the RNC complaint. While it is currently chaired by a Democrat, three of the commissioners are Republicans appointed by President Donald Trump, and one is an independent appointed by President George W. Bush.
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From the Archives
The US: The Century of Lost Wars
By James Petras | Global Research | September 12, 2018
Introduction
Despite having the biggest military budget in the world, five times larger than the next six countries, the largest number of military bases – over 180 – in the world and the most expensive military industrial complex, the US has failed to win a single war in the 21st century.
In this paper we will enumerate the wars and proceed to analyze why, despite the powerful material basis for wars, it has led to failures. … continue
Blog Roll
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- Iran to US: Sanctions and war failed; try diplomacy and respect
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- If Americans Knew
- Footage Shows Israeli Troops Waiting in Ambush, Then Opening Fire on a Palestinian Teen
- The US is on the brink of a major new war that Trump has not even bothered explaining
- Latest Epstein document dump is one more cover-up
- No Protection, No Justice: US Citizens Killed with Impunity by Israel
- Maria Farmer: Epstein Victim Reveals Explosive Information Covered Up by Media
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- Palestinian church leaders admonish Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee – Not a ceasefire Day 135
- Ominous messaging from Trump’s “Board of Peace” – Not a ceasefire Day 134
- ‘Christians Out’: Jerusalem Church Tagged With Hate Graffiti, Police Investigating
- Israeli Settlers Kill American Teen
- No Tricks Zone
- New Research Reaffirms Clouds, Aerosols, And Surface Solar Radiation Are ‘Driving The Climate System’
- Germany: Electric Car Catches Fire At Charging Station, Sets Off Local “Inferno”, Widespread Damage
- New Study: Canada’s New Brunswick Was 1°C Warmer Than Today During The Medieval Warm Period
- Coal Power Back In Trend As Globe Tries To Keep Pace With Growing Demand For Power
- New Study: A 4°C Warmer Beaufort Sea Had ‘No Sea Ice’ 11,700 – 8200 Years Ago
- Unfudging The Data: Dutch Meteorological Institute Reinstates Early 20th Centruy Heat Waves It Had Erased Earlier
- German Gas Crisis…Chancellor Merz Allegedly Bans Gas Debate Ahead of Elections!
- Pollen Reconstructions Show The Last Glacial’s Warming Events Were Global, 10x Greater Than Modern
- Germany’s Natural Gas Storage Level Dwindles To Just 28%… Increasingly Critical
- New Study Rebuts The Assumption That Anthropogenic CO2 Molecules Have ‘Special’ Properties
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