Free Republic

The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork ... Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as...

Two Obama-era officials were instrumental in the false flag operation in Alabama ahead of the special election in 2017, reports show. One of the Obama-era officials behind the misinformation campaign in Alabama finally opened up about his group’s role in the caper. Two of the people involved in the social media misinformation campaign in Alabama are denying their roles in the operation, reports indicate. A trove of reports show two Obama-era officials are partially responsible for a misinformation campaign designed to derail Republican Roy Moore’s senatorial campaign in Alabama. Former President Barack Obama campaign organizer, Mikey Dickerson, was instrumental in...

A left-wing think tank erroneously claiming to track Russian online activity was responsible for thousands of bogus stories asserting the nation’s influence in US politics, according to the latest batch of Twitter Files. The Hamilton 68 “dashboard” was the brainchild of former FBI special agent and MSNBC contributor Clint Watts and operated under the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a think tank founded in 2017 — shortly after former President Trump took office. The ASD Advisory Council included such figures as top Clinton ally John Podesta, Obama-era acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and former...

This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting. ...snip In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups...

The Justice Department is set to produce a “large volume” of classified materials this week pertaining to the main source for Christopher Steele’s dossier on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.Special Counsel John Durham in a file photograph. (U.S. Department of Justice via AP)The infamous “Steele dossier”, also known as the Trump–Russia dossier, contained allegations that then-presidential candidate Donald Trump had colluded with Russian intelligence officials to help him win in the 2016 presidential election against Hillary Clinton. Special counsel John Durham has asked a judge in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia for a deadline extension on the...

Cybersecurity experts who held lucrative Pentagon and homeland security contracts and high-level security clearances are under investigation for potentially abusing their government privileges to aid a 2016 Clinton campaign plot to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia and trigger an FBI investigation of him and his campaign, according to several sources familiar with the work of Special Counsel John Durham. Durham is investigating whether they were involved in a scheme to misuse sensitive, nonpublic Internet data, which they had access to through their government contracts, to dredge up derogatory information on Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign in 2016...

The "Tech Executive-1" in John Durham's indictment of a Democratic cybersecurity lawyer testified in a lawsuit that he had invoked his Fifth Amendment rights when asked to testify by the special counsel. Rodney Joffe, former senior vice president at Neustar, coordinated in 2016 with Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was indicted last year for allegedly concealing his clients, including Hillary Clinton's campaign and Joffe, from the FBI in September 2016 when he pushed debunked claims of a secret back channel between the Trump Organization and Russia's Alfa Bank. Alfa Bank filed a "John Doe" lawsuit and deposed Joffe in...

FBI agents are at the home of Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska, the agency confirmed Tuesday. The agents are conducting “court-authorized law enforcement activity” at Deripaska’s home in Washington, D.C., an FBI spokeswoman told CNBC. The spokeswoman did not provide additional details about the FBI presence. Multiple agents were seen restricting access to the property, NBC News reported.

The Twitter executive responsible for blocking stories about Hunter Biden's laptop is one of several advisers to the Aspen Institute's disinformation commission. Yoel Roth is one of several questionable advisers to Aspen's Commission on Information Disorder, which on Monday released its much-anticipated report. Commission members include Katie Couric, who recently acknowledged that she edited comments on National Anthem protests out of a 2016 interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to preserve the justice's reputation with liberals. Another commissioner, Rashad Robinson, helped fuel actor Jussie Smollett's hate crime hoax. Commission members' censorship of legitimate news stories could undercut their lofty mission. The...

Conservative commentator Bill Kristol said that President Trump and Senate candidate Roy Moore (R-Ala.) are bringing out his "inner liberal." In a tweet Tuesday afternoon, the founder and editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard suggested that his long-held views are being tested by Trump and Moore, as well as a growing number of sexual allegations and the Republican Party's tax-reform effort. 

President Trump reminded voters Saturday morning he’d like to block a return to Washington for his former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “Big Senate Race in Alabama on Tuesday,” Mr. Trumptweeted, while urging voters to back former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville in the July 14 primary. “Jeff Sessions is a disaster who has let us all down. We don’t want him back in Washington!” The winner of Alabama’s GOP primary runoff will face Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in November. Mr. Jones rode a torrent of out-of-state money and scandals engulfing his GOP opponent to win a special election in 2017,...

Glenn Simpson, whose Fusion GPS firm has been tied to anti-Trump efforts and pro-Russian lobbying, will not talk to lawmakers in response to a subpoena, the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committe said Friday.... ..."Simpson’s attorney has asserted that his client will invoke his Fifth Amendment rights in response to the subpoena," Grassley and Feinstein said. During the campaign, Fusion GPS contracted former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele to look into rumors about Trump's financial and social connections in Russia.

...Just 10 days before the February 2017 meeting, Jones had incorporated a nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project (known internally as TDIP) after huddling with Simpson. The goal of their ongoing project is to “prove” the allegations in the dossier, while digging up new dirt on Trump and feeding it to media outlets, congressional investigators and the FBI to derail his presidency. The work of such opposition research outfits has become a mainstay of Washington journalism. In their book, “Crime in Progress,” Simpson and Fritsch detail their access to top journalists at The New York Times and other influential publications....

While the 2016 presidential race was raging in America, Ukrainian prosecutors ran into some unexpectedly strong headwinds as they pursued an investigation into the activities of a nonprofit in their homeland known as the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC). The focus on AntAC — whose youthful street activists famously wore “Ukraine F*&k Corruption” T-shirts — was part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption inside the former Soviet republic had been improperly diverted. The prosecutors soon would learn the resistance they faced was blowing directly from the U.S. Embassy...

There are several dozen critical issues that stem from revelations about the DOJ and FBI conduct in/around the Carter Page FISA application (2017) and Steele Dossier writ large; but DOJ official Bruce Ohr still being employed isn’t one of them, and here’s why. (further down) -- Bruce Ohr wasn’t the only non FBI person back-channeling information from corrupt source Christopher Steele into the FBI and Mueller team in 2017. SSCI Vice-Chairman Mark Warner was doing exactly the same thing. Senator Warner was having secret contacts, “would rather not have a paper trail”, with Steele through liaison Adam Waldman, and then...

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA)’s campaign press secretary suggested Russia was behind Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) after she landed an effective blow on Harris’ record as a prosecutor during the Democrat debates on Wednesday night. Her press secretary, Ian Sams, tweeted shortly after the attack an NBC News article from February 2019 claiming the “Russian propaganda machine” was promoting Gabbard: “Reporters writing their stories with eyes on the modern-day assignment desk of Twitter, read this: ‘The Russian propaganda machine that tried to influence the 2016 election is now promoting the presidential aspirations of a controversial Hawaii Democrat,'” he tweeted. He later...

Reid Hoffman, a billionaire who was allegedly involved in a false information campaign in Alabama, played a crucial role in developing software capable of creating “deepfake” news articles, sources confirmed.Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggests he distanced himself from OpenAI in 2018 after disagreements about the direction researchers were taking the group. One of the big tech billionaires responsible for financing a project creating “deepfake” news articles is a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter and Democratic donor.  The liberal billionaire who allegedly backed a misinformation campaign during the midterm elections played a significant role in funding a group responsible for creating a...

An NBC News analysis of the main English-language news sites employed by Russia in its 2016 election meddling shows Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who is set to make her formal announcement Saturday, has become a favorite of the sites Moscow used when it interfered in 2016.

NBC NEWS PUBLISHED a predictably viral story Friday, claiming that “experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.” But the whole story was a sham: the only “experts” cited by NBC in support of its key claim was the firm, New Knowledge, that just got caught by the New York Times fabricating Russian troll accounts on behalf of the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to manufacture false accusations that the Kremlin was interfering in that election.

A non-profit group linked to Fusion GPS has ties to a cybersecurity firm recently implicated in a self-described “false flag” operation in the Alabama Senate race. The Democracy Integrity Project, which works with Fusion GPS and dossier author Christopher Steele, partnered before the 2018 midterms with New Knowledge, an Austin-based firm that has been tied to an operation that created fake Russian bots in Alabama’s December 2017 special election. New Knowledge recently produced a report for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and TDIP’s founder was in contact with two Democrats from the committee. A nonprofit group linked to Fusion...