January 30, 2023 by Chief Visionary Officer & Founder

The Press Versus the President (Part 1) | Columbia Journalism Review

By Jeff Gerth

INTRODUCTION: ‘I REALIZED EARLY ON I HAD TWO JOBS

The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven, sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no.

“Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it,” is how Dean Baquet, then the executive editor of the New York Times, described the moment his paper’s readers realized Mueller was not going to pursue Trump’s ouster.

Baquet, speaking to his colleagues in a town hall meeting soon after the testimony concluded, acknowledged the Times had been caught “a little tiny bit flat-footed” by the outcome of Mueller’s investigation.

That would prove to be more than an understatement. But neither Baquet nor his successor, nor any of the paper’s reporters, would offer anything like a postmortem of the paper’s Trump-Russia saga, unlike the examination the Times did of its coverage before the Iraq War.

In fact, Baquet added, “I think we covered that story better than anyone else” and had the prizes to prove it, according to a tape of the event published by Slate. In a statement to CJR, the Times continued to stand by its reporting, noting not only the prizes it had won but substantiation of the paper’s reporting by various investigations. The paper “thoroughly pursued credible claims, fact-checked, edited, and ultimately produced ground-breaking journalism that has proven true time and again,” the statement said.

But outside of the Times’ own bubble, the damage to the credibility of the Times and its peers persists, three years on, and is likely to take on new energy as the nation faces yet another election season animated by antagonism toward the press. At its root was an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth. (The Washington Post has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements.) At times, Trump seemed almost to be toying with the press, offering spontaneous answers to questions about Russia that seemed to point to darker narratives. When those storylines were authoritatively undercut, the follow-ups were downplayed or ignored.

Trump and his acolytes in the conservative media fueled the ensuing political storm, but the hottest flashpoints emerged from the work of mainstream journalism. The two most inflammatory, and enduring, slogans commandeered by Trump in this conflict were “fake news” and the news media as “the enemy of the American people.” They both grew out of stories in the first weeks of 2017 about Trump and Russia that wound up being significantly flawed or based on uncorroborated or debunked information, according to FBI documents that later became public. Both relied on anonymous sources.

Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the trend was positive, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. The phrase “fake news” was limited to a few reporters and a newly organized social media watchdog. The idea that the media were “enemies of the American people” was voiced only once, just before the election on an obscure podcast, and not by Trump, according to a Nexis search.

Today, the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. In 2021, 83 percent of Americans saw “fake news” as a “problem,” and 56 percent—mostly Republicans and independents—agreed that the media were “truly the enemy of the American people,” according to Rasmussen Reports.

Trump, years later, can’t stop looking back. In two interviews with CJR, he made it clear he remains furious over what he calls the “witch hunt” or “hoax” and remains obsessed with Mueller. His staff has compiled a short video, made up of what he sees as Mueller’s worst moments from his appearance before Congress, and he played it for me when I first went to interview him, just after Labor Day in 2021, at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

During my interview with Trump, he appeared tired as he sat behind his desk. He wore golf attire and his signature red MAGA hat, having just finished eighteen holes. But his energy and level of engagement kicked in when it came to questions about perceived enemies, mainly Mueller and the media.

He made clear that in the early weeks of 2017, after initially hoping to “get along” with the press, he found himself inundated by a wave of Russia-related stories. He then realized that surviving, if not combating, the media was an integral part of his job.

“I realized early on I had two jobs,” he said. “The first was to run the country, and the second was survival. I had to survive: the stories were unbelievably fake.”

What follows is the story of Trump, Russia, and the press. Trump’s attacks against media outlets and individual reporters are a well-known theme of his campaigns. But news outlets and watchdogs haven’t been as forthright in examining their own Trump-Russia coverage, which includes serious flaws. Bob Woodward, of the Post, told me that news coverage of the Russia inquiry ” wasn’t handled well” and that he thought viewers and readers had been “cheated.” He urged newsrooms to “walk down the painful road of introspection.”

Over the past two years, I put questions to, and received answers from, Trump, as well as his enemies. The latter include Christopher Steele, the author of the so-called dossier, financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that claimed Trump was in service of the Kremlin, and Peter Strzok, the FBI official who opened and led the inquiry into possible collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign before he was fired. I also sought interviews, often unsuccessfully, with scores of journalists—print, broadcast, and online—hoping they would cooperate with the same scrutiny they applied to Trump. And I pored through countless official documents, court records, books, and articles, a daunting task given that, over Mueller’s tenure, there were more than half a million news stories concerning Trump and Russia or Mueller.

On the eve of a new era of intense political coverage, this is a look back at what the press got right, and what it got wrong, about the man who once again wants to be president. So far, few news organizations have reckoned seriously with what transpired between the press and the presidency during this period. That failure will almost certainly shape the coverage of what lies ahead.

Chapter 1: A narrative takes hold

Trump entered the presidential race on June 16, 2015. In his campaign speech, he offered a rambling analysis of global affairs that briefly touched on Russia and Vladimir Putin, noting “all our problems with Russia” and the need to modernize America’s outdated nuclear arsenal to better deter the Russian leader.

The media covered his inflammatory comments about Mexico and China, and ignored Russia. The next day, Trump gave a long interview to Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and Trump supporter and friend, who would go on to become an informal adviser to the president. In the interview, Trump indicated he thought he could have good relations with Russia. Asked if he had any previous “contact” with Putin, Trump answered yes. When pressed by Hannity to elaborate, Trump replied, “I don’t want to say.” Trump, as he acknowledged at a debate in October 2016, didn’t know Putin.

Three days before Trump’s presidential announcement, Hillary Clinton entered the race, and it was she, not Trump, who began her campaign facing scrutiny over Russia ties. Weeks earlier, the Times had collaborated with the conservative author of a best-selling book to explore various Clinton-Russia links, including a lucrative speech in Moscow by Bill Clinton, Russia-related donations to the Clinton family foundation, and Russia-friendly initiatives by the Obama administration while Hillary was secretary of state. The Times itself said it had an “exclusive agreement” with the author to “pursue the story lines found in the book” through “its own reporting.” An internal Clinton campaign poll, shared within the campaign the day of Trump’s announcement, showed that the Russia entanglements exposed in the book and the Times were the most worrisome “Clinton negative message,” according to campaign records. Robert Trout, Clinton’s campaign lawyer, declined to comment on the record after an exchange of emails.

By 2016, as Trump’s political viability grew and he voiced admiration for Russia’s “strong leader,” Clinton and her campaign would secretly sponsor and publicly promote an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that there was a secret alliance between Trump and Russia. The media would eventually play a role in all that, but at the outset, reporters viewed Trump and his candidacy as a sideshow. Maggie Haberman of the Times, a longtime Trump chronicler, burst into a boisterous laugh when a fellow panelist on a television news show suggested Trump might succeed at the polls.

Fairly quickly, Trump started to gain traction with voters, and it was clear his candidacy was no longer a joke. His popularity drew large television audiences and online clicks, boosting media organizations’ revenues while generating free publicity for the candidate. The relationship would remain symbiotic throughout the Trump era.

As Trump began to nail down the GOP nomination in 2016, he spoke critically about NATO. He focused mostly on America’s disproportionate share of the financial burden, though he occasionally called the alliance “obsolete” in an era of counterterrorism and voiced his hope to “get along” with Putin, prompting some concerns inside the national-security world.

Those concerns would be supercharged by a small group of former journalists turned private investigators who operated out of a small office near Dupont Circle in Washington under the name Fusion GPS.

In late May 2016, Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a Fusion cofounder, flew to London to meet Christopher Steele, a former official within MI6, the British spy agency. Steele had his own investigative firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. By then, Fusion had assembled records on Trump’s business dealings and associates, some with Russia ties, from a previous, now terminated engagement. The client for the old job was theWashington Free Beacon, a conservative online publication backed in part by Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire and a Republican Trump critic. Weeks before the trip to London, Fusion GPS signed a new research contract with the law firm representing the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.

Simpson not only had a new client, but Fusion’s mission had changed, from collection of public records to human intelligence gathering related to Russia. Over lasagna at an Italian restaurant at Heathrow Airport, Simpson told Steele about the project, indicating only that his client was a law firm, according to a book co-authored by Simpson. The other author of the 2019 book, Crime in Progress, was Peter Fritsch, also a former WSJ reporter and Fusion’s other cofounder. Soon after the London meeting, Steele agreed to probe Trump’s activities in Russia. Simpson and I exchanged emails over the course of several months. But he ultimately declined to respond to my last message, which had included extensive background and questions about Fusion’s actions.

As that work was underway, in June 2016, the Russia cloud over the election darkened. First, the Washington Post broke the story that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, a breach the party’s cyber experts attributed, in the story, to Russia. (The Post reporter, Ellen Nakashima, received “off the record” guidance from FBI cyber experts just prior to publication, according to FBI documents made public in 2022.) Soon, a purported Romanian hacker, Guccifer 2.0, published DNC data, starting with the party’s negative research on Trump, followed by the DNC dossier on its own candidate, Clinton.

The next week, the Post weighed in with a long piece, headlined “Inside Trump’s Financial Ties to Russia and His Unusual Flattery of Vladimir Putin.” It began with Trump’s trip to Moscow in 2013 for his Miss Universe pageant, quickly summarized Trump’s desire for a “new partnership” with Russia, coupled with a possible overhaul of NATO, and delved into a collection of Trump advisers with financial ties to Russia. The piece covered the dependence of Trump’s global real estate empire on wealthy Russians, as well as the “multiple” times Trump himself had tried and failed to do a real estate deal in Moscow.

The lead author of the story, Tom Hamburger, was a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had worked with Simpson; the two were friends, according to Simpson’s book. By 2022, emails between the two from the summer of 2016 surfaced in court records, showing their frequent interactions on Trump-related matters. Hamburger, who recently retired from the Post, declined to comment. The Post also declined to comment on Hamburger’s ties to Fusion.

By July, Trump was poised to become the GOP nominee at the party’s convention in Cleveland. On July 18, the first day of the gathering, Josh Rogin, an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a piece about the party’s platform position on Ukraine under the headline “Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russian stance on Ukraine.” The story would turn out to be an overreach. Subsequent investigations found that the original draft of the platform was actually strengthened by adding language on tightening sanctions on Russia for Ukraine-related actions, if warranted, and calling for “additional assistance” for Ukraine. What was rejected was a proposal to supply arms to Ukraine, something the Obama administration hadn’t done.

Rogin’s piece nevertheless caught the attention of other journalists. Within a few days, Paul Krugman, in his Times column, called Trump the “Siberian candidate,” citing the “watering down” of the platform. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, labeled Trump a “de facto agent” of Putin. He cited the Rogin report and a recent interview Trump gave to the Times where he emphasized the importance of NATO members paying their bills and didn’t answer a question on whether nations in arrears could count on American support if Russia attacked them.

But other journalists saw the Rogin piece differently, introducing a level of skepticism that most of the press would ignore. Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and harsh Putin critic, writing in the New York Review of Books that month, said labeling Trump a Putin agent was “deeply flawed.” Gessen, in articles then and a few months later, said the accounts of the platform revisions were “slightly misleading” because sanctions, something the “Russians had hoped to see gone,” remained, while the proposal for lethal aid to Ukraine was, at the time, a step too far for most experts and the Obama administration.

Matt Taibbi, who spent time as a journalist in Russia, also grew uneasy about the Trump-Russia coverage. Eventually, he would compare the media’s performance to its failures during the run-up to the Iraq War. “It was a career-changing moment for me,” he said in an interview. The “more neutral approach” to reporting “went completely out the window once Trump got elected. Saying anything publicly about the story that did not align with the narrative—the repercussions were huge for any of us that did not go there. That is crazy.”

Taibbi, as well as Glenn Greenwald, then at The Intercept, and Aaron Mate, then at The Nation, left their publications and continue to be widely followed, though they are now independent journalists. All were publicly critical of the press’s Trump-Russia narrative. (Taibbi, over the last month, surged back into the spotlight after Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, gave him access to the tech platform’s files.)

At the end of July, the DNC held its nominating convention in Philadelphia. In attendance were legions of journalists, as well as Simpson and Fritsch. On the eve of the events, the hacked emails from the DNC were dumped, angering supporters of Bernie Sanders, who saw confirmation in the messages of their fears that the committee had favored Hillary.

The disclosures, while not helpful to Clinton, energized the promotion of the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators. On July 24, Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign manager, told CNN and ABC that Trump himself had “changed the platform” to become “more pro-Russian” and that the hack and dump “was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” according to unnamed “experts.”

Still, the campaign’s effort “did not succeed,” campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri would write in the Washington Post the next year. So, on July 26, the campaign allegedly upped the ante. Behind the scenes, Clinton was said to have approved a “proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” according to notes, declassified in 2020, of a briefing CIA director John Brennan gave President Obama a few days later.

Trump, unaware of any plan to tie him to the Kremlin, pumped life into the sputtering Russia narrative. Asked about the DNC hacks by reporters at his Trump National Doral Miami golf resort on July 27, he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.” The quip was picked up everywhere. Clinton national-security aide Jake Sullivan quickly seized on the remarks, calling them “a national-security issue.” The comment became a major exhibit over the next several years for those who believed Trump had an untoward relationship with Russia. Clinton’s own Russia baggage, meantime, began to fade into the background.

Hope Hicks, Trump’s press aide, later testified to Congress that she told Trump some in the media were taking his statement “quite literally” but that she believed it was “a joke.”

I asked Trump what he meant. “If you look at the whole tape,” he said in an interview, “it is obvious that it was being said sarcastically,” a point he made at the time.

I reviewed the tape. After several minutes of repeated questions about Russia, Trump’s facial demeanor evolved, to what seemed like his TV entertainer mode; that’s when, in response to a final Russia question, he said the widely quoted words. Then, appearing to be playful, he said the leakers “would probably be rewarded mightily by the press” if they found Clinton’s long-lost emails, because they contained “some beauties.” Trump, after talking with Hicks that day in Florida, sought to control the damage by tweeting that whoever had Clinton’s deleted emails “should share them with the FBI.”

That didn’t mute the response. Sullivan immediately jumped in, saying the remarks at Doral encouraged “espionage.”

On another track, Fusion became involved in an effort to promote another unproven conspiracy theory, that Trump’s company was involved in back-channel communications with a Russian bank. Clinton personally supported pitching a reporter to explore the story as the campaign was not “totally confident” of its accuracy, according to 2022 court testimony by Mook. The back-channel theory was pushed to the media and the FBI at the same time, though the campaign did not direct and was not aware of all the various efforts.

Hundreds of emails were exchanged between Fusion employees and reporters for such outlets as ABC, the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, the Washington Post, Slate, Reuters, and the Times during the last months of the campaign; they involved sharing of “raw” Trump-related information and hints to contact government and campaign officials to bolster the information’s credibility, according to a federal prosecutor’s court filings in 2022. The lawyer who hired Fusion, Marc Elias, testified, in 2022, that he would brief Sullivan and other Clinton campaign officials about Fusion’s findings, having been updated himself through regular meetings with Simpson and Fritsch. With Elias as the intermediary, the Fusion founders could write in 2019 that “no one in the company has ever met or spoken to” Clinton.

In mid-August, after the Times published an investigation into the Ukrainian business dealings of Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman since May, the longtime Republican resigned. Manafort’s ties to business interests and a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine were well known, but the Times obtained a “secret ledger” purporting to show cash payments of almost $13 million to Manafort. Manafort denied he dealt in cash and explained that the payments covered expenses for his whole team, but he nevertheless resigned from his post. (In a 2022 memoir, Manafort wrote that the amounts of money in the ledger were “in the range of what I had been paid” but “the cash angle was clearly wrong.”) Manafort’s finances and his work for Ukraine would eventually lead to his being convicted of multiple crimes, jailed, and then pardoned by Trump. (The Ukraine-related cases were based on banking records and wire transfers, as opposed to cash.) The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for the work on Manafort.

In late August, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, wrote a letter to FBI director James Comey, hoping to prod the agency into probing Trump’s Russia ties and Russian election influence efforts. While not naming the Trump aide, Reid’s letter said “questions have been raised” about a volunteer foreign-policy adviser who had business ties in Russia, including their recent meetings with “high-ranking sanctioned individuals” in Russia. That fit the description of a recent, unsubstantiated Fusion/Steele dossier report, about Carter Page, a Trump volunteer with his own business dealings in Russia and previous contacts with Russian officials.

Reid, who died in 2021, never publicly disclosed how he knew about that information, but in an interview for the HBO documentary Agents of Chaos a few years before his death, he said that he first heard about the dossier from two unidentified “men that worked in the press for a long time,” according to a transcript of the interview.

By the time Reid wrote the letter, some reporters, aware of the dossier’s Page allegations, had pursued them, but no one had published the details. Hamburger, of the Washington Post, told Simpson the Page allegations were found to be “bullshit” and “impossible” by the paper’s Moscow correspondent, according to court records.

But not everyone held back. In late September, Michael Isikoff, chief investigative correspondent at Yahoo News, published a story about the allegation, confirmed that Reid was referring to Page, and added a new detail that he says was key: a senior law enforcement source said the Page matters were “being looked at.” That was accurate—the FBI was already investigating Steele’s dossier—but it would later emerge that the FBI clandestinely surveilled Page and those he communicated with on the campaign based on seriously flawed applications to the secret surveillance court. The applications not only relied heavily on the unsubstantiated dossier, but they left out exculpatory evidence, including Page’s previous cooperation with the CIA and more recent statements he made to an undercover FBI informant, according to a subsequent Justice Department inquiry. Page would quickly deny the allegations to other reporters and write a letter to Comey denouncing the “completely false media reports” and mentioning his “decades” of having “interacted” with the “FBI and CIA.” But, after the Yahoo piece, he stepped down from his volunteer position with the campaign.

The Clinton campaign put out a statement on Twitter, linking to what it called the “bombshell report” on Yahoo, but did not disclose that the campaign secretly paid the researchers who pitched it to Isikoff. In essence, the campaign was boosting, through the press, a story line it had itself engineered.

Isikoff says he first learned about the Page allegations when he met that September with Steele in Washington, a meeting arranged by Fusion. After being the first reporter to go public with Steele’s claims, Isikoff, by late 2018, began publicly casting doubt about their accuracy—earning praise from Trump—and had a falling-out with Simpson, his former friend. In a 2022 interview, Isikoff pointed to his earlier description of the dossier as “third hand stuff” and added that, “in retrospect, it never should have been given the credence it was.”

The 2016 dossier’s conspiracy claim was never corroborated by the media, and the supposed plot involving the Russian bank, Alfa Bank, didn’t fare much better. Still, that fall Fritsch made frantic efforts to persuade reporters from several outlets, including Isikoff, to publish the bank story. Their best hope appeared to be the Times.

The Clinton campaign, in mid-September, was eagerly anticipating a “bombshell” story on “Trump-Russia” from the Times. It was causing a “Trump freak out,” headlined a private September 18 memo by Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime close Clinton confidant. His memo circulated among top campaign aides, the two Fusion leaders, Elias, and Michael Sussmann, then a partner in the same firm as Elias. (The memo was made public in 2022.)

Two hours after Sussmann received the memo, he texted the private phone of James Baker, the general counsel of the FBI, seeking a meeting on a “sensitive” matter. They met the next afternoon, where Sussmann briefed him about the back-channel allegations. Sussmann upped the ante with Baker by pointing out that the media—soon understood to be the Times—was about to publish something about the supposed secret Russian communication link.

Sussmann later testified to Congress that he gave the story to a Times reporter, Eric Lichtblau. The reporter and the lawyer had started communicating at the beginning of September, according to emails filed in court. (Sussmann was acquitted in 2022 of a charge that he had lied to Baker about who he was representing when he delivered the Alfa Bank allegations.)

Lichtblau later paired up with Steven Lee Myers, a former Moscow hand for the Times. Whereas Myers, in an interview, said he saw some “red flags” in the Alfa Bank tip, Lichtblau, he added, “believed in the Alfa thing more than I did.”

A few days after Sussmann’s meeting with Baker, Myers and Lichtblau met with the FBI, where officials, including Baker, asked them to hold off on publishing anything until the bureau could further investigate the allegation, according to the journalists and public records. The Times agreed, and the bureau quickly concluded “there was nothing there,” according to Baker’s testimony and other evidence at Sussmann’s trial. Once the Times learned of the dead end, the story went into remission as Baquet told the reporters, “You don’t have it yet,” according to Myers and other current and former Times journalists.

In early October, the intelligence community put out a brief statement concluding that Russia had been behind the recent hacks, a pattern of behavior “not new to Moscow.” But, the report continued, it would be “extremely difficult,” even for a nation-state, to alter voter ballots or election data [Editor’s Note: not true anymore].

The report was quickly lost in a frenzied news cycle. First, the Postpublished a tape recording of Trump bragging, in vulgar terms, about some of his sexual activities. Then WikiLeaks published the first of a weeks-long series of leaked emails from the email account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, causing more problems for her campaign. Two weeks later the Times would report that a private security group had concluded that the GRU, a Russian intelligence agency, was behind the Podesta hack. (The Justice Department, in 2018, charged twelve GRU officials for the Podesta and DNC hacks, but the charges have never been litigated.)

As the election entered its final weeks, Lichtblau thought there was a bigger story beyond the FBI rejection of the Alfa Bank theory; the bureau, the paper had learned, was conducting a broader counterintelligence investigation into possible Russian ties to Trump aides. In mid-October, two Times reporters, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, were in California, where they met with a top federal official who cautioned them about the larger FBI inquiry, according to current and former Times reporters. (FBI records show that then–deputy director Andrew McCabe met the two reporters at the Broken Yoke Café in San Diego on October 16, during a conference there. I exchanged emails with McCabe in September, but after I sent him a detailed list of questions, he didn’t respond.)

After Baquet heard the feedback from California, the story stayed on hold, according to current and former Times journalists. Finally, at the end of the month, the languishing story was published. The headline read “Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” The top of the piece dealt with the FBI’s doubts about the Alfa Bank allegation, and waited until the tenth paragraph to disclose the broader inquiry. It also noted the FBI believed the hacking operation “was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.” The piece mentioned a letter to Comey the day before from Senator Reid, who again was trying to spur the FBI to look into what he believed was “explosive information.” The letter, according to Myers, was an impetus for publishing the story. Another factor, Timesjournalists said, was the publication earlier that day of a piece about the Alfa-Trump allegation in Slate, which wrote less critically about the supposed back channel at length, though the title framed it as a question.

That piece’s author, Franklin Foer, worked closely with Fusion, forwarding drafts of his stories to the private investigative firm prior to their publication, according to court records. Foer, now at The Atlantic, declined to respond to an email seeking comment.

Fusion’s co-founders would later call the Times story “a journalistic travesty.” Baquet, in April 2018, told Erik Wemple, the Post’s media critic, that the story was “not inaccurate based on what we knew at the time,” but, he added, the “headline was off.” A few weeks after Wemple’s column, the Times explained to its readers what Baquet meant: in a piece about the FBI inquiry, the reporters said the headline that October night “gave an air of finality to an investigation that was just beginning” and that “the story significantly played down the case” because unnamed law enforcement officials in 2016 had “cautioned against drawing any conclusions.”

That Halloween night the Clinton campaign, anticipating the imminent publication of the Alfa Bank story, was prepared to “light it up,” Fritsch emailed a reporter that morning. Another story Fusion helped arrange appeared that day, too, in the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones. It said a “veteran spy” had provided the FBI information about an alleged five-year Russian operation to cultivate and coordinate with Trump. That came from Steele’s dossier. Within hours, the FBI contacted Steele, who “confirmed” he had been a source for the article. After working with the bureau for several months as a confidential informant on the Russia inquiry, he was terminated by the FBI, bureau documents show.

Before the election, the author of the article, David Corn, provided a copy of the dossier to Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, a longtime acquaintance. “It was a standard journalistic ploy to try and get information out of them, because I knew they had the dossier,” Corn said in an interview. But, he added, “it didn’t work.”

At 8:36 at night on October 31, the campaign lit up, as Fritsch promised, on Twitter. Hillary tweeted out a statement by Jake Sullivan about “Trump’s secret line of communication to Russia.” Her aide only cited the Slate story on Alfa Bank.

Clinton had also been aware of the Times’ unpublished story. She hoped it “would push the Russia story onto the front burner of the election,” but was “crestfallen” when an aide showed her the headline, according to an account in Merchants of Truth, a 2019 book about the news media by Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of the Times. The story was a closely guarded secret, but campaign operatives had been pushing it with Times reporters and were aware of some internal deliberations, according to the book by Fusion’s founders. Moreover, the candidate herself was aware of efforts to push the Trump-Russia story to the media, according to court testimony.

At the FBI, agents who debunked the Alfa Bank allegations appreciated the Times’ report: “made us look on top of our game,” one agent messaged another, according to court records.

After the election that ushered Trump into office, the Times began to undertake some soul-searching about its Trump-Russia coverage. The intelligence community did its own assessment on Russia, including a new take by the FBI.

Lichtblau left the Times in 2017, but continued to believe in the Alfa Bank story. He wrote a piece for Time magazine in 2019 about the supposed secret channel, even after the FBI, and other investigators, had debunked it.

In December, President Obama secretly ordered a quick assessment by the intelligence community of Russia’s involvement in the election. Instead of the usual group of seventeen agencies, however, it was coordinated by the Director of National Intelligence and produced by the National Security Agency, which gathers electronic intercepts, the CIA, and the FBI.

In mid-December the Post reported that the FBI now backed the CIA view that Russia aimed to help Trump win the election, compared with a broader set of motivations, as the Times had reported on October 31. Strzok, the FBI official running the probe, texted a colleague about the unprecedented wave of leaks: “our sisters have been leaking like mad,” he wrote, referring to intelligence agencies like the CIA. Strzok now believes the leaks originated elsewhere. “I now believe,” he told me in a 2022 interview, “that it is more likely they came not from the CIA but from senior levels of the US government or Congress.”

Trump, unaware of the coming tornado, including the most salacious contents of the dossier, set out to form a government and make peace with the press. He made the rounds of news organizations, meeting with broadcast anchors, editors at Condé Nast magazines, and the Times.

Trump’s longest sit-down after the election was with the Times, including the then-publisher, editors, and reporters. For seventy-five minutes Trump’s love/hate relationship with his hometown paper was on display.

At the end, he called the Times a “world jewel.”

He added, “I hope we can get along.”

A note on disclosure

In 2015–16, I was a senior reporter at ProPublica. There, I reported on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Russian oligarchs, among other subjects. I helped ProPublica decide whether to collaborate with a book that was critical of the Clintons’ involvement with Russia; the arrangement didn’t happen. Another of the projects I worked on, also involving Clinton, was published in the Washington Post in 2016, where I shared a byline. Some of my other Clinton-related work was used in 2016 articles appearing in the New York Times, my employer between 1976 and 2005, but without my byline. Initially, the Times sought my assistance on a story about Hillary’s handling of Bill Clinton’s infidelity. Subsequently I approached the paper on my own about the Clinton family foundation. In both cases, I interacted with reporters and editors but was not involved in the writing or editing of the stories that used my reporting. During the second interaction, I expressed disappointment to one of theTimes reporters about the final result.

I left ProPublica in December 2016. That month I was approached by one of the cofounders of Fusion GPS, who sounded me out about joining a Trump-related project the firm was contemplating. The discussion did not lead to any collaboration. I had previously interacted with Fusion related to my reporting on Russian oligarchs.

In the 2017–18 academic year I was a nonresident fellow at the Investigative Reporting Program, affiliated with the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. There, one of my projects involved looking into the dossier as part of preliminary research for a 2020 film the Investigative Reporting Program helped produce for HBO on Russian meddling. I was not on the film’s credits.

At CJR, these stories have been edited by Kyle Pope, its editor and publisher. Kyle’s wife, Kate Kelly, is a reporter for the Washington bureau of the New York Times. CJR’s former board chair was Steve Adler, formerly the editor in chief of Reuters; its current board chair is Rebecca Blumenstein, a former deputy managing editor of the Times who recently became president of editorial for NBC News.

Source: Columbia Journalism Review

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January 4, 2023 by Chief Visionary Officer & Founder

Former FBI Boss Admits Bureau Has Been Infiltrated by ‘WEF Goons’ Who ‘Want To Destroy America’ | News Punch

By Sean Adl-Tabatabai

Former FBI chief Chris Swecker has admitted that the bureau has been infiltrated by goons working for the World Economic Forum (WEF) who are working to destroy America.

Ex-FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker on Tuesday said he supports creating an independent commission modelled after the U.S. Senate’s 1970s Church Committee to investigate the WEF coup d’etat of the FBI and impose reforms on the tarnished law enforcement agency.

Justthenews.com reports: Swecker, a lawyer himself, said one of the many tell-tale signs that the FBI has lost its independence is the bureau’s relationship with Big Tech firms, as exposed by recent internal file releases by Twitter and a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri.

The original partnerships, he said, were designed to legitimately counter foreign influence operations on U.S. social media but have since evolved into spying and censorship operations impacting Americans.

“The FBI has an industry outreach program to help exchange information with industry, helping in the counterintelligence efforts of the FBI. This has gone well beyond that,” he said. “This is nothing but domestic spying, and this is nothing but suppression of First Amendment rights and ideas.”

He said the bureau’s role in pressuring Twitter and other social media and search sites to censor Americans “needs to be the first line of inquiry” in a new Congress.

A growing number of prominent figures — including House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, incoming House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and retired FBI intelligence chief Kevin Brock — have embraced the idea that Congress should create a blue-ribbon panel modeled after the 1970s Church Committee to probe where the FBI has gone astray and to craft meaningful reforms.

Swecker said he believes that is a good approach, noting that while he remains friends with Christopher Wray, the current FBI director has allowed his agency to lose significant public trust.

“The Church Committee was a full inquiry into what were perceived to be some very serious abuses by the FBI in the domestic surveillance area, in terms of watching U.S. citizens doing things involving U.S. citizens that were considered to be abuses of their power,” he said. “And I think we’ve come full circle here.”

Swecker said the FBI’s involvement in labeling school parents “domestic terrorists,” and its “bare-knuckles” pursuit of Donald Trump contrasted with its “kid gloves cases” against Hillary Clinton, Andrew McCabe and Hunter Biden have not only shaken public trust but also the internal confidence of the FBI.

“I’m telling you the retired agent community and many agents inside the FBI on active duty are saying this needs to be looked at,” he said. “I’m not big fan of congressional inquiries, but they need to shine some light on this.”

Swecker has some experience in independent inquiries: he chaired the independent commission that investigated the culture at the U.S. Army Fort Hood that led to the murder of a female soldier.

Swecker, who retired as the assistant director for criminal investigations after 24 years inside the FBI, said the bureau’s problems have been long in the making, beginning near the end of Director Robert Mueller’s term and accelerating under his successors, James Comey and Christopher Wray.

“I think there’s a cultural shift that started late in Mueller’s term and then we got into sort of full stride in Comey’s term, and is now being sort of perpetuated under Chris Way’s term, and that is that DOJ has basically taken over the FBI,” he said. “They were supposed to have some independence despite being a Bureau under the Department of Justice.”

Source: NewsPunch

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January 4, 2023 by Chief Visionary Officer & Founder

Maricopa County Corruption: Now It’s Your Problem, Too | Uncover DC

By Rachel Alexander

Until very recently, few Americans were familiar with Maricopa County, Arizona. It made the news only rarely and mostly for reporting its status as one of the fastest-growing counties in America. Since 2020, however, Maricopa County has gained notoriety for a very different reason. It’s emerged as an infamous cauldron of bitter political disputes and shady shenanigans crucial for denying the election to Donald Trump and his supporters.

In 2020, the votes of Maricopa County, where 6 out of 10 Arizonans live, were decisive for the narrow, declared victory of Joe Biden over Trump in the Grand Canyon State. Trump heatedly questioned the tally. Sensing misconduct, his supporters in the Arizona Legislature attempted to investigate the election. But Maricopa County politicians blocked these efforts.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, the county’s governing commission, consists of five members, four RINOs and a Democrat. They stonewalled and fought efforts to scrutinize the election. Legislative and Arizona Attorney General’s attempts to audit the election results ultimately went nowhere. Key legislators backed down in response to threats from county supervisors and their powerful allies, including the leftist media and the Biden FBI. The firm that attempted the election probe, Cyber Ninjas, went out of business after a judge hammered it with fines.

In 2022, the same pattern returned. Kari Lake, a former Phoenix TV anchorwoman, ran for governor of Arizona. She adopted a MAGA platform and earned Trump’s endorsement. She was declared the loser, however, after Arizona narrowly rejected Trump’s slate of candidates for the state’s top four offices.

This time, it was thought MAGA world was ready. Maricopa County officials were credibly accused by Lake’s attorneys and expert witnesses of tampering with ballots and voting machines to prevent election-day voters—who were disproportionately Republican and pro-Lake—from successfully casting their votes. Serious questions were raised and evidence supplied about county officials violating state laws governing proper chain of custody for county ballots.

Again, Maricopa County Supervisors and allied county officials were defiant. They didn’t give an inch when fighting in the friendly terrain of the media and the anti-Trump courts. Despite mountains of evidence, Lake and the other two candidates lost all their lawsuitschallenging the election. To add insult to injury, and presumably to deter any future MAGA litigation questioning election results, a federal judge imposed sanctions against Lake’s lawyers (including no less than Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz). For his part, a state judge granted a $33,000 costs judgment against Lake’s team.

Notably, Lake had trouble finding any lawyers willing to represent her. She complained at one point she might have to settle for “Better Call Saul” because lawyers feared threats to their livelihood. The attorneys who signed on as her counsel were not even experts in election law. Two conservative Republican county supervisors in a border county, Cochise County, had concerns about election irregularities but were left high and dry. They could not find any attorneys to help them.

How could such corruption occur “in broad daylight,” as Lake complained? And why were lawyers so hesitant to help them? The answers to the two questions, it turns out, are essentially one and the same.

The corruption in Maricopa County was no secret to informed citizens in the county and state. In fact, for years, Maricopa County has been putting to shame the old-school corruption of Cook County, Illinois. I now frequently say that Maricopa County has replaced Cook County as the most corrupt county in the country.

Years before, Maricopa County officials showed they could take out prosecutors who dared to stand up to them. More than any other reason, this precedent is why Trump’s public appeals for “brave prosecutors and judges” to come forward have been in vain, particularly in Arizona.

I know because I was there fighting this corruption more than a decade ago.

First, some background on the greasy politics of the Maricopa County Supervisors. It started with a now-distant election over illegal immigration. After serving as an assistant attorney general for Arizona, I signed on as a deputy county attorney following the election of my new boss, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, a Harvard Law graduate. In 2004, the same year in which then-citizen Trump began his hit TV show “The Apprentice,” Thomas ran for Maricopa County Attorney—district attorney for greater Phoenix—with a simple slogan and promise: “Stop Illegal Immigration.” This was the first time a local prosecutor had run on such a platform.

Overcoming the heated opposition of the political establishment, including both Republican U.S. senators (John McCain and Jon Kyl, who wouldn’t cross McCain), Thomas was elected.

The following year, Thomas went about keeping his campaign promise. After Maricopa County Sheriff’s deputies arrested U.S. Army Reservist Patrick Haab for detaining illegal immigrants at gunpoint at an Interstate rest stop, Thomas declined to prosecute him. Thomas was then picketed by left-wing activists and publicly denounced by the U.S. Attorney for Arizona and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (yes, that Sheriff Arpaio). Shortly thereafter, as Arizonans increasingly demanded a secure border, Arpaio changed course and became a staunch ally of Thomas in the fight against illegal immigration. Working together, Thomas and Arpaio single-handedly drove illegal immigrants out of the state in a massive exodus. This made international news and horrified the ruling class.

Thomas helped draft a ballot measure to end the right to bail for illegal immigrants accused of serious felonies. Seventy-seven percent of Arizonans voted for it in 2006. When Arizona courts sought to shield illegal immigrants from the law (emails surfaced showing that senior Maricopa County court personnel had instructed their staff not to enforce the measure), Thomas publicly denounced these actions.

In response, retired judges went to the Arizona State Bar—part of the state judiciary which controlled Thomas’ law license—and urged them to “do something” about Thomas. A wave of State Bar investigations ensued, 13 in total. Thus began a five-year campaign of ceaseless State Bar investigations and attacks on Thomas’ law license. It’s now standard practice for leftist bar associations to try to disbar conservative attorneys who threaten the Left. But most people don’t realize this tactic began in Arizona with the corrupt efforts to stop Thomas.

The State Bar openly retaliated against one of Thomas’ expert ethics witnesses, denying him appointment to a national legal board because of the expert’s affidavit in support of Thomas. Even leftist editors at The Arizona Republic newspaper were shocked and criticized this retaliation. (Note: The Arizona Republic conveniently has removed links to these older articles unhelpful to the left, but Thomas has provided extensive citations, and they can be found on library microfiche if searched for.)

Brave and undeterred, Thomas pressed an array of reforms. He ended plea bargaining as we know it for serious violent criminals. He pursued the death penalty in a greater number of murder cases. He refused to give special plea bargains sought by well-connected defense attorneys or judges; instead, he set up a system so that every defendant was treated the same.

Thomas advocated giving voters more information about judges’ performance when they were up for retention elections. This would have meant fewer judges would be retained by an electorate otherwise largely kept in the dark about judges’ rulings on key cases and issues. Finally, Thomas and Arpaio formed an anti-corruption task force. These probes very quickly led them to uncover serious misconduct involving two of the five members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which controlled an enormous county budget and wielded other great powers in the sprawling county. Those two supervisors, Donald Stapley and Mary Rose Wilcox, were indicted by county grand juries for corruption.

Stapley raised about $70,000 for a race where he had no opponent, then spent it on luxury items for himself and his family. In contrast, when Jesse Jackson Jr. did the exact same thing in Cook County, he was sentenced to prison for two and a half years. Wilcox failed to disclose material monetary associations on her financial disclosure forms, including ones that would influence her votes.

Thomas and Arpaio also attempted to investigate potential financial and other improprieties in the construction of the new Maricopa County courthouse. This was the most expensive public-works project in the history of Maricopa County government. Powerful politicians, judges, and lawyers were scrutinized, and initial evidence was uncovered.

For the establishment, this was the final straw. In short, the courts blocked the investigation of the Maricopa County project, scuttled the other corruption cases brought by Thomas and Arpaio, and turned the tables to investigate Thomas with “ethics” charges. One “courthouse insider” summed up the behind-the-scenes dirty war against Thomas when boasting anonymously and brazenly to The Arizona Republic, “The establishment will take care of Andrew Thomas.”

The courts as an institution had their own scores to settle with Thomas—and they worked closely with Maricopa County Supervisors to get rid of him. After the Arizona Supreme Court chief justice recused herself from the State Bar ethics investigations into Thomas, this left the vice chief justice, Andrew Hurwitz, as the senior justice overseeing the case. Hurwitz was the former chief of staff to liberal Democratic Governor Bruce Babbitt and a well-connected advocate of liberal causes (as noted by Heritage Action, which criticized Hurwitz’s leftist politics when he was later nominated for a federal judgeship).

Left-wing State Bar lawyers were carefully selected, in violation of the State Bar’s own rules, to drive Thomas out of the legal profession. They ultimately sought his disbarment, instituting proceedings denounced by the Maricopa County Republican Committee as “baseless and politically motivated.”

They alleged Thomas had targeted his opponents with politically motivated prosecutions. This is a joke to Republicans and Trump supporters, who know that politicians such as New York’s Democrat Attorney General have run for office promising to target Trump and escape any State Bar investigations or judicial correction. Moreover, the claim against Thomas was provably false. In fact, Thomas had tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to hand off the investigations to other prosecutors. Incredibly, the Maricopa County Supervisors and their county manager blocked him from appointing independent special prosecutors to handle the matters. The county officials then claimed he had unfairly targeted them when he went forward with the cases himself!

I came into the picture because I helped Thomas fight back with a federal RICO lawsuit against these figures. The federal suit alleged these powerful insiders were wrongfully targeting his law license in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Robert Driscoll, a senior lawyer in the Bush Justice Department and commentator on the Fox News Channel, vouched for this lawsuit. The State Bar was so incensed that they then targeted my law license for allegedly filing a frivolous lawsuit (I wasn’t even named as an attorney on the lawsuit until after it was drafted and filed, that was how minimal my role was, and the lawsuit was withdrawn a couple of months later). They did so even though Thomas eventually was disbarred—as the lawsuit correctly predicted—in violation of his rights, thereby directly proving the suit’s validity.

The Maricopa County Supervisors prevented Thomas from having even a semblance of a fair trial. This was because, in the words of the left-wing Arizona Republic, they “repeatedly fired” Thomas’ lawyers. This happened no fewer than five times, in clear violation of his civil rights. Nevertheless, they got away with it—just as these powerful establishment figures got away with their Trump-related antics in the 2020 and 2022 elections.

These actions were only their latest display of shameless audacity. To facilitate the lynching of Thomas, the Maricopa County Supervisors had earlier voted to “fire” Andrew Thomas from handling county civil legal matters. They replaced him with the law firm of the president of the State Bar! Even The Arizona Republic questioned this outrageous move. Years later, the Arizona Court of Appeals struck down this move as illegal—but only after they had succeeded in ousting Thomas.

The final kicker: Some of the supervisors got rich from these machinations. Stapley, Wilcox, and other Maricopa County officials filed lawsuits against their own entity, Maricopa County, related to alleged wrongful prosecutions on which the Thomas disbarment was partially based. This included claims by three out of five Maricopa County Board of Supervisors members at the time, officials who directly or through subordinates repeatedly fired Thomas’s lawyers and disrupted his defense.

The Arizona Republic editorialized that these claims were “an insult to taxpayers.” The process set up for settling these cases, they wrote, “is rife with opportunity for self-dealing and abuse.” The county manager handling the claims “works at the pleasure of the very people who would benefit from the quiet, discreet, out-of-the-public-view mediation process he has constructed.” But they got away with it yet again. Ultimately, millions of dollars were handed out to Maricopa County officials by subordinates of the Maricopa County government without their having to prove their case to a jury.

All of this happened even though Thomas was clearly and provably innocent of wrongdoing. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to the two separate grand juries of Arizona citizens who investigated these very matters. One was a federal grand jury impaneled and controlled by the Obama Justice Department working with a politicized FBI. If this lawfare tactic sounds familiar to patriots today, note that the current practice of DOJ/FBI targeting of conservative mavericks was honed in Arizona many years before the current situation.

The other grand jury was a state one, overseen by Judge William O’Neil. Yes, this was the same Judge O’Neil who later oversaw Thomas’ disbarment trial as State Bar disciplinary judge and refused to recuse himself — he ultimately wrote the disbarment order! As noted in an official Arizona Supreme Court opinion, O’Neil ridiculously claimed he “did not recall” presiding over the state grand-jury investigation of one of Arizona’s most prominent elected officials at the time. Liar.

Both grand juries, federal and state, declined to charge Thomas. In response to media reports about the investigation (he was never contacted by law enforcement), Thomas publicly volunteered to speak to the federal grand jurors but wasn’t taken up on his offer. At all times, Thomas answered every question publicly and under oath, never taking the Fifth Amendment.

Esteemed legal experts were astounded by this circus. Ronald Rotunda, a law professor at the Chapman University School of Law, was one of the nation’s leading authorities on constitutional law and legal ethics. He stated in an affidavitthat the Bar proceedings were initiated unlawfully. Rotunda noted that John Phelps, the CEO of the Arizona State Bar, “without the benefit of any statute or rule, initiated and insinuated himself into an ethics investigation.” Rotunda stated,

“In my forty years of experience as a practicing lawyer, legal scholar, and law professor, concentrating in the areas of legal ethics and constitutional law, I have never witnessed, confronted, nor heard of a situation where an administrative or executive officer of a state bar organization has initiated and commenced an ethics investigation against a lawyer, without any specific legal authority authorizing his actions.” Rotunda added, “it is my opinion that [the] initiation of the Bar investigations against Mr. Thomas, et al. was without benefit of law and illegal, and consequently violated the due process rights of the investigative subjects.“

He concluded, “The State Bar of Arizona’s reckless use and false representation of its authority to initiate investigations of attorneys is a denial of the fundamental right to due process applicable to disciplinary investigations.“

Another key witness was former Rep. Bob Barr. A former U.S. Attorney in Georgia who later served in Congress, Barr was one of the House Managers of the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton.

Former Representative Bob Barr (1995-2003)

In a series of affidavits, Barr concluded the process used against Thomas “violates the State Bar’s rules and procedures and, more importantly, violates Mr. Thomas et al.’s constitutionally-protected due process and equal protection rights.” The State Bar had violated its own “rule requiring a written complaint to be lodged prior to the initiation of any ethics investigation.” Instead, “Independent Bar Counsel has represented that there are no written complaints and that he is maintaining an ‘open file’ with the State Bar of Arizona.”

“The due process violation inherent in this procedure is obvious,” Barr explained. “Without specific notice of the complaints against them and the facts that inform those complaints, it is impossible for Mr. Thomas et al. to adequately defend themselves against those charges. Moreover, without written documentation of the complaints pending against them, the investigation can morph and grow regardless of any defense offered by Mr. Thomas et al. This is utterly contrary to the notions of fairness and justice in this country and does not amount to procedural due process by any reasonable or legal concept thereof.“

Since other attorneys given the benefit of the rule are treated differently, Barr noted, “This disparate treatment is a violation of Mr. Thomas et al.’s right to equal protection of the law under both the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution of Arizona.” Moreover, “prosecutors…enjoy absolute immunity from civil liability for their actions in initiating prosecutions…the State Bar is employing its power improperly to interfere with the prosecutorial discretion of Mr. Thomas.”

Barr agreed with Rotunda that initiating the State Bar proceedings against Thomas was “illegal.” He added, “The blatant disregard for the rule of law” here “and failure to abide by the State Bar’s own rules is not only unusual, it is practically unheard of.”

Finally, Barr stated that the negative actions taken by the State Bar and State Bar president against one of Thomas’ expert witnesses, Ernest Calderon, who was a former State Bar president himself, “is a clear and unambiguous threat” and an “illegal threatagainst a witness” that was never retracted by the State Bar or Arizona Supreme Court.

“The most widely-recognized example of witness intimidation is in the criminal prosecution of members of the mafia,” Barr noted. He stressed, “a threat issued to a witness in one prosecution can have the very real effect of chilling witness testimony in many prosecutions….That general statement risks chilling witness testimony in any ethics investigation against Mr. Thomas and those to be allied with Mr. Thomas.“

“If the Arizona State Bar is willing to retaliate against an attorney who served only as a witness for Mr. Thomas,” Barr stated, “there is no reason to believe it would not retaliate against attorneys who represent Mr. Thomas or others who are being investigated based upon allegations made by the State Bar.” Additionally, “The State Bar has an outstanding and unrepudiated threat against attorneys and witnesses who may testify or act on behalf of Mr. Thomas et al. The foregoing situation is extraordinary, unprecedented, and a violation of the investigative subject’s right to due process.“

Even leftist hack editors and writers for The Arizona Republic spoke up for Thomas. Editors wrote a column when the State Bar investigations commenced entitled “Bar’s Witch Hunt.” Chronicling the Thomas case, establishment political consultant turned columnist Bob Robb didn’t mince words. The normally staid columnist wrote, in a series of columns, that the case showed the “credibility of the Supreme Court’s disciplinary process has been severely shaken“; “the gross overcharging…gives credence to Thomas’ claim that he is the victim of a witch hunt“; and the final disbarment ruling made clear Thomas “never had a chance” at fair treatment by the judicial panel. Others chimed in, including American Thinker, which published an article titled “Corruption in Maricopa County.”

By then, however, Thomas was out of office, having narrowly lost his race for Attorney General of Arizona because of these smears (I wonder about fraud in that race now, but it’s too late to investigate or prove anything). People moved on. But grassroots activists remembered him. After a panel of three legal insiders disbarred Thomas in April 2012, the Maricopa County Republican Committee and other Republican Party leaders gave him a standing ovation when he addressed them. So did other GOP and Tea Party groups in Maricopa County.

Oh, and the sanctions that were threatened and/or imposed against Kari Lake and her attorneys in 2022? That same intimidation tactic was used and perfected against Thomas, me, and another attorney swept up in the inquisition. Following our sham trial, Thomas was disbarred, and I was suspended for six months from the practice of law for exposing their wrongdoing in the RICO suit.

The Arizona State Bar then demanded that we repay the cost of their show trial—over half a million dollars. Faced with that looming threat, our lawyers being fired yet again by the county supervisors, and a justice system hostile to our rights, we were coerced into agreeing to costs of over $100,000. The State Bar did not seek to convert the ruling into a judgment against us and collect it but seemed content to let the outstanding financial threat chill our criticism of the proceedings (the threat didn’t work). Nevertheless, a decade later, I still can’t practice law until I agree to pay this outrageous sum. This is an amount of money that I, like most people, don’t have.

Thomas was no quitter. He fought back as best he could. Following his disbarment, Thomas announced his candidacy for governor of Arizona. Running on a platform of securing the border and standing up to activist judges, he collected signatures from just under 10,000 Arizona voters, almost double the number required to qualify for the ballot. More than 4,500 Arizona citizens contributed $5 to his campaign. Thomas collected many of these by campaigning door-to-door in Maricopa County. As a result, he qualified for more than $750,000 in Clean Elections funding for his campaign.

Thomas received the endorsements of the immediate past state Republican Party chairman, the immediate past Maricopa County Republican Party chairman, numerous conservative grassroots leaders, and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin. Malkin described Thomas as a “true and tested independent leader” and praised him for withstanding “nightmarish abuse at the hands of the state’s liberal judicial and legal elites.” Despite being vastly outspent by multi-millionaire establishment opponents and taking on the no-holds-barred opposition of the ruling class, Thomas ran a strong race and successfully promoted the conservative causes for which he had sacrificed his career.

Thomas’ gubernatorial campaign drew greater attention to the need for judicial and State Bar reforms. The following year, the Arizona legislature formed a joint legislative study committee to consider State Bar legislation. I assisted in part. Following the recommendations of the committee, the Arizona House of Representatives voted in 2016 to pass what the leftist media tellingly dubbed the “Andrew Thomas Revenge Bill.”

The legislation would have essentially dismantled the State Bar. In the State Senate, this legislation passed on the first vote but then failed on the second and final vote, following fierce lobbying by the State Bar and pressure from the media.

The election of President Donald Trump and his signature promise to “Build the Wall” to secure the U.S. border was a triumph of the grassroots politics popular for many years in Arizona. The dark forces and ruling-class machinations that came down on President Trump and his administration were very much reminiscent of those deployed against Thomas (and me) a decade before.

Trump has expressed concern that the injustices done to him will turn into a “cold case.” All I can say, respectfully, is: Tell me about it. Our “cold case” fundamentally changed both law and politics in Arizona — and, since 2020, the country as a whole because of Arizona’s influence on national elections. The travesty done to us happened a decade ago and is now forgotten by all except for some grassroots activists and lawyers in Arizona. For the latter, the Thomas case has become Banquo’s ghost, haunting and intimidating them, and warping our elections and society.

In other words, our problem is now your problem.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors’ actions following the 2020 presidential election revealed the obstacles Thomas faced in attempting to hold accountable members of that same powerful establishment institution. Their defiant and dirty tactics in the 2022 elections were a fresh reminder that they remain shameless and unfazed by any criticism Trump supporters have hurled at them.

Real election and legal reforms are possible only by overturning the rotten, destructive rulings in the once-high-profile Thomas case and providing some measure of justice to the targets of that madness. The process followed in the Thomas case was demonstrably and outrageously violative of basic and universal civil rights. The case must be tossed on those grounds alone. Otherwise, nothing will change. These rulings still baldly intimidate prosecutors and lawyers, especially in Arizona, but increasingly the rest of America.

Source: UncoverDC

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November 18, 2022 by Chief Visionary Officer & Founder

Counterfeit Cash Financed Midterm Democrats | The Epoch Times

Samuel Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of FTX, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Feb. 9, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

By Thomas McArdle

With facial recognition technology able to find a wanted man who strolls in front of a surveillance camera anywhere in the world, and artificial intelligence able to generate deepfake video impersonations so realistic that Congress began panicking about its potential for abuse over three years ago, foolproof counterfeit currency is hardly a heavy lift.

But physical cash has become almost a relic of the 20th century. Counterfeit dollars just used by Democrats to restrain the widely predicted Republican “red wave” was wealth that existed within cyberspace, the result of a bamboozling of investors perpetrated by a now-washed-up tycoon in his 20s whose treasure chest ended up consisting of play money. If you thought Republicans were the party of big business and the heartless rich, you might be wondering how Democrats managed to outspend Republicans in key races this year, like John Fetterman raking in nearly $48 million in his Pennsylvania U.S. Senate campaign, while the GOP opponent he defeated, Mehmet Oz, took in only about $12 million, (augmented by loaning himself $21 million). Or incumbent New Hampshire U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan being re-elected after raising $38 million, while her GOP challenger, Trump-backed retired Gen. Don Bolduc, pulled in a mere $2.2. million. A big part of the answer is that Democrats are now the party of the snake oil mogul.

Despite his unprepossessing image, often seen in a t-shirt and shorts, Sam Bankman-Fried is an MIT physics grad who was a billionaire before age 30. Defying the usual American entrepreneurial norms of familial stability and respect for the law, Bankman-Fried headquartered his cash cow in the tax haven of the Bahamas and, if we are to believe reports, enlisted a board of senior executives/roommates which doubled as his own polyamorous commune.

Before his financial scam came crashing to an end this month and over $2 billion in FTX clients’ investments dissolved, Bankman-Friend had handed Joe Biden $10 million during the 2020 presidential election and gave Democrats over $40 million in this year’s midterms, likely buying the party a majority in the U.S. Senate in the next Congress. Now ruined, he was the second-biggest donor to the party’s campaigns, behind only, Hungarian-born leftist billionaire currency manipulator George Soros.

Epoch Times Photo — The FTX logo and mobile app adverts are displayed on screens in London, England, on Nov. 10, 2022. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

In dissecting FTX’s collapse, it is crucial to appreciate what too few, woefully uneducated in economic truths thanks to a union-dominated public school system, know about company valuation—that what observers accept to be a firm’s worth is always dependent on human judgment that presumes trustworthy conduct. Was Blockbuster Video worth $8.4 billion when Sumner Redstone bought it for that price in 1994? Had he known that some 16 years later, as consumers became able to “rent” movies with a click of their remote, Blockbuster would be a corporate dinosaur filing for bankruptcy, Redstone likely would have considered investing those billions elsewhere. But no one at Blockbuster knew it was headed off a cliff.

In the case of FTX, however, Bankman-Fried likely didn’t need a crystal ball to see that what he and his Caribbean playmates were presiding over was near to doom. John Ray III, appointed to replace Bankman-Fried as CEO during bankruptcy, and previously the overseer of the Enron clean-up, remarked of FTX that he had never seen “such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.”

Perhaps only a one-time adolescent math whiz absent moral scruples could possess the technical skills and lack of ethics required to pull off shifting his customers’ money back and forth between various affiliated business entities in a shell game that included using new loans to pay interest on old loans in order to present the fiction of liquidity, with celebrities like quarterback Tom Brady and TV actor Larry David enlisted to enhance FTX’s public image. Bankman-Fried even got FTX’s logo on the uniforms of all of Major League Baseball’s umpires, juxtaposing the Nike swoosh adorning those of the players. After flying so high, the firm, once thought to be worth $32 billion, is now under federal investigation for securities violations.

But the writing was on the wall long ago for the Biden administration to see. Crypto was losing a lot of people money in recent months, yet Bankman-Fried was mysteriously buying rival crypto companies like BlockFi and Voyager Digital, as the Securities and Exchange Commission apparently sat idly by.

Add to all this the fact that Bankman-Fried’s parents are Democratic Party operatives, his father, Joseph Bankman, having helped Sen. Elizabeth Warren draft a tax bill, his mother leading an outfit called “Mind The Gap” that connects donors with Democrat candidates and causes, and his brother Gabe founding a political action committee that uses fear of future pandemics to funnel cash to Democrats.

Compare the fraudulent money FTX loaded up Democrats with to Elizabeth Holmes, disgraced CEO of multi-billion-dollar blood-testing scam firm Theranos, hosting a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign at Theranos’ Palo Alto headquarters in the spring of 2016, dangling a chance for facetime with Chelsea Clinton for those willing to cough up $2,700.

In the cases of both FTX and Theranos, unwitting investors’ cash didn’t all go down the black hole of Bankman-Fried and Holmes’ lies; they financed left-wing candidates and causes the owners of that money did not approve, and no doubt many oppose. And Democrats seem none too happy to take money invested under false pretenses.

Thus the left has found another way to use capitalism in their war against economic freedom—and every other freedom.

Source: The Epoch Times

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November 18, 2022 by Chief Visionary Officer & Founder

Is there a link between ‘Aid to Ukraine,’ the US Democratic Party and the suspicious collapse of the FTX Crypto exchange? | RT.com

By Felix Livshitz

Breaking news throughout the first half of November has been dominated by coverage of the sudden collapse of FTX, one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges.

The crash has shaken the crypto market, lost institutional investors billions – and individual customers millions – led to official investigations of FTX in several countries, and made some question whether the Bitcoin sphere might crash and burn outright, and perhaps cause wider problems for the financial system.

Some take the view that FTX was a fraud all along, ever since its launch in April 2019. If that’s the case, it has grave implications for the US Democratic Party and Ukrainian government, as the company’s corrupt activity may have been used to fund both, openly and secretly.

Where’s the money, Zelensky?

On March 14, FTX launched a new online portal for cryptocurrency donations, Aid for Ukraine, in partnership with Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation. Through this, crypto traders, both large and small, could donate bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which FTX would convert into cash for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense to spend on weapons and other war-related expenses.

Very rapidly, the fund claimed to have amassed “over” $60 million in donations. By April 14, it was reported that just over $45.15 million of that sum had been splurged on digital rifle scopes, thermal imagers, monoculars, rations, armor, helmets, military clothing, tactical backpacks, fuel, communication devices, laptops, drones, medical supplies, and a “worldwide anti-war media campaign.”

The same records show a further $10 million was spent over the next three months – leaving around $5 million in the bank, so to speak. An Aid for Ukraine social media post on November 15 said this sum was still held in reserve, and that $60 million remained of the total amount of donations received through the portal to date.

This seems very odd, particularly given that Ukraine was reported to have received $100 million in bitcoin donations, and then spent almost all of it, between February 24 and March 11 alone, before Aid for Ukraine’s establishment.

Ukraine has taken in at least $100 million in crypto donations this year, but what have officials in Kiev done with the money?

Are we to believe that – over the course of seven months, from the time the $60 million figure was first publicized to today – no further funds at all have been donated through Aid for Ukraine? Despite the entire crypto community having been able to do so, and being actively encouraged to do so that whole time?

Official investigations into FTX, and its founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, have only just begun. However, it seems clear already that he secretly and illegally moved billions stored in the FTX exchange to its sister company Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm that he also runs.

The gaping black hole Bankman-Fried’s sleight-of-hand created meant that, when customers sought to withdraw their money from the exchange, FTX didn’t have the funds to keep up with demand. It seems he was assisted in this underhand ploy by a “back-door” specially created for him in the company’s accounting, which meant sums could be moved into and out of the exchange off the books, and without auditors or FTX employees noticing.

Much of the money taken out of FTX by Bankman-Fried has disappeared completely. The US Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission are particularly looking at whether these stolen client deposits were used to prop up Alameda in any way, which was reportedly struggling financially.

There is, as yet, no sign though that these authorities are probing an obvious lead – Aid for Ukraine. Was money moved from FTX to Alameda, then channeled to Kiev to be spent on Western – mainly US – weapons, and indeed other activities that the government and its backers in Washington, London, and elsewhere in Europe and North America would prefer to be kept hidden?

Conversely, money raised beyond the initial $60 million total could’ve been funneled out of Aid for Ukraine by Bankman-Fried to enrich himself, or secretly spent for very different purposes – such as funding the US Democratic Party’s election campaigns.

Sam Bankman-Fried ©Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

The man behind

Bankman-Fried is a very well-connected figure indeed in US politics. Over the course of the 2020 presidential election cycle, he contributed $5.2 million to two super PACs supporting Joe Biden’s campaign, and was the overall second-largest individual donor to Biden that year.

Such extravagant spending appears trivial today. In 2021/22, he provided tens of millions to Democratic causes and candidates, becoming the party’s second-largest donor, behind only “spyless coup” specialist George Soros.

You are under contrôle: French elites privately fear the US and new research explains why

Bankman-Fried has boasted of meeting policymakers in Washington “every two or three weeks for the last year.” Over 2022, this has included multiple audiences with senior government officials and top Biden advisers at the White House. These meetings escalated in volume around the time that the Ukraine conflict began.

On March 7, exactly one week before Aid for Ukraine was launched, his brother Gabe Bankman-Fried – who directs his political operations – visited the White House along with Jenna Narayanan, a Democratic strategist who once worked for the Democracy Alliance, which has been called the “most powerful liberal donor club” in the US.

Bankman-Fried himself then visited the White House on numerous occasions in April and May, concurrent with him donating $865,000 to the Democratic National Committee.

In early June, mere days after his last recorded White House meet-and-greet, Bankman-Fried announced he would invest up to $1 billion in further funds between then and 2024 to guarantee Biden – or whoever might take his place – won the next presidential election.

These activities have been interpreted by many as an attempt by Bankman-Fried to ingratiate himself with politicians to further his commercial interests. It is certainly true that, at the same time, he and FTX high-rankers were attempting to influence US lawmakers on crypto regulation, to make the market more favorable for his company.

Democratic Party supporters at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York. ©Sputnik / Gina Moon

In this context, the promised $1 billion appears to be a dangled carrot, an implied promise of future financing if Bankman-Fried got his way. Accompanying him on some of these visits was Mark Wetjen, FTX head of policy and regulatory strategy, who previously served as commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under President Barack Obama – but only some. Were the other meetings related to Ukraine?

If so, the $1 billion pledge may have reflected what Bankman-Fried thought could be secretly skimmed from Aid for Ukraine for Democratic Party purposes. It’s conspicuous that in mid-October, he completely disowned that enormous commitment, saying, “That was a dumb quote. I think my messaging was sloppy and inconsistent in some cases.”

In repudiating his $1 billion promise, Bankman-Fried also quietly added that he would stop giving any money at all to political causes. It was just days later that it was announced FTX was subject to investigation in Texas for allegedly selling unregistered securities. Jump to a few weeks later, and the company had filed for bankruptcy.

Bankman-Fried clearly said something he shouldn’t have back in June – whether he got carried away by all the positive press and high-level access his political donations were receiving and wrote a proverbial check in public he couldn’t privately cash, or his comments drew unwanted attention to how much money was actually flowing into Aid for Ukraine, we do not currently know. But the truth must out.

Source: RT.com

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November 2, 2022 by Chief Visionary Officer & Founder

Democrats Worried Republicans May Take Lead Beyond Margin Of Cheating | Babylon Bee

As Republicans continue to expand their leads in polling across the country, Democrats are worried that the leads may soon grow beyond the normal margin of Democrat cheating.

“Yeah, normally our big-city vote harvesting machines and slimy election procedures are good for a bump of a few percentage points, but Republican poll numbers may have even grown beyond that,” said a visibly nervous DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, (they/them). “I don’t understand why people care more about feeding their kids than they do about voting in literal mega-MAGA, far-right, Nazi, alt-right, white supremacist, Nazi, fascist-adjacent Nazis. It could be the end of democracy!”

DNC operatives are hoping to close the gap by promising free abortions and gender-affirming care, as well as by sending tons of unsolicited emails to millions of voters begging for more money to save Nancy Pelosi’s job.

Democrats warn that if Republicans gain control of Congress, it will be the end of democracy until the next election in 2024.

At publishing time, Republicans had gone up another 7 points nationally.

Source: Babylon Bee

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November 1, 2022 by Chief Visionary Officer & Founder

Officials Across United States Spread Misinformation on COVID-19 Vaccines | The Epoch Times

Syringes containing the Moderna Covid-19 vaccination for 6 month olds to 5 year olds lay on a table waiting to be used at Temple Beth Shalom in Needham, Massachusetts, on June 21, 2022. The temple was one of the first sites in the state to offer vaccinations to anyone in the public. – US health authorities on June 18, 2022, cleared the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines for children aged five and younger, in a move President Joe Biden greeted as a “monumental step” in the fight against the virus. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)

By Zachary Stieber

Officials across the United States are continuing to spread misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, The Epoch Times has found.

The claims include unsupported or misleading statements about vaccine effectiveness and safety.

The vast majority of officials responsible for the misinformation were unable or unwilling to provide evidence backing their claims.

The Louisiana Department of Health is among those exaggerating vaccine effectiveness. The agency claims in a promotional message that the vaccines “are 100% effective at preventing serious hospitalizations and deaths.”

The message does not cite any evidence and the department did not respond to a request for comment.

Clinical trials for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines estimated effectiveness against severe illness at 100 percent, but studies since then have shown the protection starts much lower and drops quickly. That’s led to the clearance and recommendation of boosters, which confer a boost that also wanes.

Louisiana’s statement is one of many that rely on data from 2021, before the Omicron virus variant emerged, or even 2020. That data has little connection with the present state of the pandemic.

South Dakota’s health department, meanwhile, says that “Nearly everyone in the United States who is getting severely ill, needing hospitalization, and dying from COVID-19 is unvaccinated.”

That’s not true, and hasn’t been for months.

South Dakota officials did not return an inquiry.

Such statements are “directly related” to the drop in public confidence in health authorities during the pandemic, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, told The Epoch Times after reviewing a sample of the claims.

“The public understands when they’re being manipulated,” he added.

Bhattacharya was referring to surveys that show members of the public have less confidence in health authorities now than before the pandemic.

Hyping Vaccines for Children

Many state health agencies are offering falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness, or downplaying negative information about the shots—a continuation of a trend that dates back to when the vaccines became available in late 2020.

One theme emerged over the summer—hyping vaccine effectiveness for young children after U.S. authorities authorized and recommended the Pfizer and Moderna shots for children aged 6 months to 5 years.

“We welcome having COVID-19 vaccines to help protect our youngest Marylanders against severe illness, hospitalization, or even death from this virus and strongly encourage parents to vaccinate their children,” Maryland Health Secretary Dennis Schrader said in a statement.

“Clinical trials proved that the pediatric vaccine is an effective way to prevent COVID infection and serious illness in young children,” the Massachusetts Department of Public Health says on its website.

But the clinical trials for the age group weren’t able to measure efficacy against severe illness, which has been acknowledged by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“The clinical trials were not powered to detect efficacy against severe disease in this young population,” Dr. Sara Oliver, a CDC medical officer, told a meeting over the summer.

Saying the vaccines protect young children against severe disease “is a leap of faith,” Dr. David McCune, a hematology and oncology doctor in Washington state, told The Epoch Times. “It’s not supported by the research.”

Officials in every state were asked to provide evidence for dubious or false statements. Maryland officials pointed to a CDC page that did not support Schrader’s statement. Massachusetts officials did not respond to an inquiry.

False Statements on New Boosters

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently authorized updated booster shots from Moderna and Pfizer. The CDC then recommended them for virtually all Americans aged 12 and older, and later enabled children 5 to 11 to get one of the new shots.

Clinical trials for the bivalent boosters, which contain spike protein components targeting the original COVID-19 strain and the BA.4/BA.4 Omicron subvariants, were not done—and have not been completed—on any group of humans as of yet.

Officials relied on data from testing in mice, data from the original vaccines, and a BA.1/Wuhan bivalent that has never been available in the United States.

The testing on that bivalent, done in adults 18 and older (Moderna) and adults 55 and older (Pfizer), showed that the updated boosters triggered higher levels of antibodies than the old boosters. But the trials didn’t provide any efficacy estimates for protection against infection or severe illness.

The dearth of data didn’t stop states from promoting the vaccines as tools that would definitely work.

“Adding a component to the boosters that specifically targets the subvariants currently circulating will help restore protection against COVID-19 infections, including hospitalizations, that has decreased over time,” Dr. Dean Sidelinger, Oregon’s state epidemiologist, said in a statement.

“The updated bivalent COVID-19 booster, along with the flu vaccine, give parents two powerful tools to protect their children from severe illness and hospitalization,” Dr. Sameer Vohra, the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, said.

Officials in Oregon and Illinois did not respond to requests for comment.

Minimizing Side Effects

Many states emphasize how most side effects are mild. That’s true, according to data from the CDC and studies. But a number of states fail to mention serious side effects, like heart inflammation, that have been linked to the vaccines.

New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, for instance, didn’t mention myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, or thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), a severe blood clotting issue.

Most of the states that did mention myocarditis promoted the idea that the incidence of myocarditis is higher after COVID-19 infection than after COVID-19 vaccination.

“Myocarditis and pericarditis are much more common if you get sick with COVID-19,” the Washington state Department of Health says on its website.

“The risk of developing myocarditis after a COVID-19 infection is much higher than the risk of developing myocarditis after the vaccine,” the Alabama Department of Public Health said in a press release over the summer.

But more papers show a higher rate of myocarditis after vaccination in high-risk groups, especially young men, including one provided by authorities in Alabama.

Asked for evidence for its statement, Alabama officials sent a link to a British study published after its release was issued. But the study detected a higher risk for young males, or men aged younger than 40 years old, after vaccination.

After that was pointed out, Alabama officials stopped responding.

Some states, like Oregon, say no deaths have been linked to myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination. Researchers around the world, including with the CDC, have determined there’s a causal link between myocarditis and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which both utilize messenger RNA (mRNA) technology. And autopsies and medical records have confirmed deaths from myocarditis among the vaccinated.

Florida and other countries recommend against or don’t advise messenger RNA vaccination, or the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, for some age groups due to myocarditis.

TTS is an often-fatal form of blood clotting that happens on occasion after receipt of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, according to federal officials. The FDA restricted the Johnson & Johnson vaccine due to TTS.

Dr. Danice Hertz, who was injured by a vaccine, says that the statements underline her experience with the health care system and top federal officials. That includes the FDA not acknowledging how many Americans have actually been injured by one of the shots.

“I blame the FDA and our federal government for creating this environment where doctors don’t know anything about vaccine injuries,” she said.

Outdated Information

A number of states still cite data from 2021 or even 2020, even though over half a dozen new variants have emerged since COVID-19 first appeared.

“FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines protect against Delta and other known variants,” the Oklahoma State Department of Health says on its website.

The Delta variant stopped circulating in the United States in 2021.

Oklahoma also says that so-called breakthrough cases, or post-vaccination infections, “happen in only a small percentage of vaccinated people.”

That hasn’t been true since Omicron displaced Delta in late 2021.

The California Department of Public Health links to a study from the CDC that was published in August 2021 when claiming that unvaccinated people who already had COVID-19 “are more than twice as likely as vaccinated people to get it again.”

Studies from late 2021 and 2022 show that post-infection protection, known as natural immunity, is superior to vaccination. Natural immunity has also held up better, but also waned against newer variants.

Heavy Reliance on the CDC

Nearly all of the state health agencies rely heavily on the CDC and other federal agencies.

Many repeatedly reference the CDC on their websites. The CDC has promoted misinformation on COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, including the unsupported claim that the vaccines protect young children against severe illness and promoting a study that exaggerated the COVID-19 death toll among children.

States that did provide evidence to back claims mostly cited CDC studies and documents.

The CDC publishes a quasi-journal called the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The CDC has said (pdf) the publication is distinct from “all other health-related publications,” in part because the content “constitutes the official voice” of the CDC and because most articles are not peer-reviewed. Instead, multiple levels of CDC officials review a submission.

“By the time a report appears in MMWR, it reflects, or is consistent with, CDC policy,” the CDC said in one overview of the publication.

The CDC and its partner, the FDA, have aggressively promoted vaccination during the pandemic, even when little evidence supports the vaccines. The agencies have also repeatedly refused to release COVID-19 vaccine safety data.

Dr. Todd Porter, a pediatrician in Illinois, said that the effort to get virtually all children vaccinated against COVID-19, despite the small amount of efficacy and safety data, is contributing to parents hesitating over other vaccines.

“This has created a much different conversation with parents of my patients with respect to benefit/harm and has further eroded parent confidence in public health and has made it harder for me to make recommendations for other more important proven vaccines,” Porter told The Epoch Times in an email. “Most notable has been lack of influenza vaccine uptake in my patients over the past year.”

Steps Forward

Regaining people’s trust is key to moving forward and involves acknowledging information that was conveyed is not correct, experts said.

“When a public health authority or federal official says something that’s incorrect, it has a responsibility to correct it. And when it doesn’t, when it just lets the matter lie, people continue to distrust them even more,” Bhattacharya said.

One example, he said, is how officials repeatedly said—and some are still saying—that the vaccines cut down on transmission, even though a top Pfizer executive recently acknowledged testing on transmission has not been done. The claim that vaccines curb transmission helped lead to vaccine mandates.

“I think it would go a long way if our nation’s public health institutions could demonstrate humility and acknowledge that in the panic of the pandemic they got it wrong where it comes to children,” Porter said.

The urge to get people vaccinated has led to some of the false and misleading claims, according to McCune, who saw the same pattern repeated during the rollout of the new boosters.

“You could have started with the bivalent booster and said, ‘this is what we know. We know some things about antibody levels from basic science studies that were done in animal models and from similar vaccines that were given to humans that we have a reason to believe these antibodies are going to improve,’” he said. “And then to say, ‘the reason we were approving this is we think that this has overall been a safe program, and we don’t anticipate there’ll be future problems. We’re making a leap here to try and get ahead of it, even though there’s some uncertainty.’ That’s an honest statement, but it’s not a very salesy statement.”

Source: Epoch Health

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September 15, 2022 by Chief Visionary Officer & Founder

30th Anniversary Edition ~ Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty Now Available! | Liberty International

If you have ever heard talk or been to a seminar about “sovereignty”, then very likely those conversations were influenced by the foundational research of the author and educator.

His research and educational journey reaching millions of people worldwide began in 1992 and culminated in 2022 with the 3-Volume book release – his final word on the subject.

At the turn of the millennium his books and audio courses facilitated in part – a sovereignty and tax-honesty movement that involved millions of Americans.

This 3 Volume series comprises the life’s work of Johnny Liberty filled with comprehensive insights into the last few hundred years of history, law, economics, money, citizenship and governance.

These books show how it is supposed to be done in a constitutional Republic.

How did We the People get to where we are today?

What can we do to reclaim our inherent sovereignty and natural rights?

Many of the answers may be found within these revolutionary pages. Available as a paperback, E-Book (PDF) or an Amazon Kindle format. Thank you for supporting the author.

Sincerely,

With Freedom For All,
~ Johnny Liberty

Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty (30th Anniversary Edition)

A three-volume, 750 page tome with an extensive update of the renowned underground classic ~ the Global Sovereign’s Handbook.
Still after all these years, it is the most comprehensive book on sovereignty, economics, law, power structures and history ever written.
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Order Additional Books, Audios & Videos from The Freedom Catalog: LibertyInternationalBooks.com
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June 25, 2022 by Chief Visionary Officer & Founder

Trance: The Cathy O’Brien Story | YouTube & Ickonic.com

What were the results of the experimentation and practice of social engineering and mind-control during the Cold War? When Project Paperclip was ushered into the United States, coinciding with the inception of the CIA and the National Security Act, Nazi research and trauma based mind-control experiments were brought to the US, initiating Project MK ULTRA. These secret projects were funded through arms deals, drug operations, human trafficking and human slavery.

The ultimate goal behind this hidden agenda was to implement mind-control deeply within our government, education, healthcare and media to create compliance in the new world regime. TRANCE weaves Cathy O’Brien’s experience as one of the last surviving victims of MK Ultra and Project Monarch, into the macrocosm of past world events, and the agenda currently unfolding. An eye opening view of our world today and how we got here.

Source: YouTube & Ickonic.com

January 24, 2022 by Chief Visionary Officer & Founder

“These are Criminal Companies” RFK Jr. Brilliant Takedown of Big Pharma That Ignited a Media Firestorm | The Wildfire News & Trending Politics

The “Defeat the Mandates” rally in Washington D.C. drew thousands of peaceful protesters in support of the common cause of opposing mask and vaccine mandates. Robert Kennedy Jr., founder and Chairman of Children’s Health Defense delivered a speech to the rally attendees was focused on Big Pharma, which has escaped accountability and demands for transparency despite their core responsibilities during the Covid pandemic. His words were so provocative they ignited a media firestorm.

“You cannot sue that company,” he reiterated. “They have a license…”

“These are criminal companies, by the way,” he proclaimed. “These are serial felons.”

“The four companies that make all four of our U.S. vaccines for the children’s program… have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties for hundreds of violations and damages in the last ten years,” he went on.

“These are the companies that gave us the opioid crisis,” he added. “That kills 56,000 children a year. More American kids every year than the Vietnam War killed in twenty years.”

“These are not good citizens,” he emphasized. “These are criminal enterprises.”

“And now you’re taking away any economic or legal incentive for them to behave?” he asked rhetorically. “What do you think they are going to do?”

“Do you think they’ve found Jesus, suddenly?” he went on. “And they’re going to take care of us and our children, they’re suddenly concerned with public health?”

“No,” he said.

“They took away due process rulemaking, they’ve taken away our right to be free of warrantless searches and seizures, this very intrusive track-and-trace surveillance, etcetera,” he went on.

“We are watching something now that I never believed that I would see in my lifetime,” RFK Jr. said. “I have read Orwell and Kafka and Aldous Huxley, this dystopian science fiction novels that someday the United States would be overtaken by fascism.”

“Fascism, incidentally, is defined… Mussolini defined it as the merger of state and corporate power,’” he added.

“And orchestrated by Tony Fauci,” he went on as the crowd booed loudly.

“What we’re seeing today is what I call ‘turnkey totalitarianism,’” he continued. “They are putting in place all of these technological mechanisms for control we’ve never seen before.”

“It’s been the ambition of every totalitarian state from the beginning of mankind to control every aspect of behavior, of conduct, of thought, and to obliterate dissent. None of them have been able to do it,” he added.

“They didn’t have the technological capacity,” he noted. “Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did. I visited in 1962 East Germany with my father. And met people who had climbed the wall and escaped. So, it was possible. Many died, surely. But it was possible.”

“Today, the mechanisms are being put in place,” he warned. “That will make it so that none of us can run, and none of us can hide.”

“Within five years, we are going to see 415,000 low orbit satellites,” he claimed. “Bill Gates and his 65,000 satellites alone will be able to look at every square inch of the planet 24 hours a day. They’re putting in 5G to harvest our data and control our behavior. Digital currency that will allow them to punish us from our distance and cut off our food supply. Vaccine passports.”

This part of the speech ignited a media firestorm. They pounced on RFK Jr.’s bit about satellite surveillance and issues with 5G, hardly fringe matters, to lambaste his speech and brandish him a “conspiracy theorist,” which essentially means it is beneath them to address his concerns.

Jake Tapper called him “an ignorant lying menace.” Adam Klasfield of Law Crime News weirdly commented, “The obscene Holocaust invocations and analogies, from RFK Jr. and others at this anti-vaccine rally, sound eerily similar to the rhetoric that appears in legal briefs for indicted Oath Keepers extremists.” Professor Peter Hotez, CNN’s resident vaccine fanatic, opined: “Since June 200,000 unvaccinated Americans lost their lives needlessly to COVID19, victims of antivaccine disinformation, aggression, dog whistles from extremists who compare vaccines to the Holocaust, or promote conspiracies about Bill Gates, Tony Fauci, Me, other US scientists.” Poor guy. It turns out the disinformation has been coming from his side all along.

The reflexive “conspiracy theorist” label was invoked, just as it has countless times in the past before the “theory” actually became the “reality,” such as with “vaccine passports” themselves… which are now being used all over the world to deny people work and access to public spaces.

Even if it is difficult to verify all of RFK Jr.’s claims, the epithet “conspiracy theorist” no longer has the power to unilaterally shut down conversation. It would be remiss not to point out there is no biggest perpetrator of “conspiracy theories” than the mainstream media, which lied for years about Russia collusion, just like it has lied the entire time about the Covid pandemic. We continue.

“You have a series of rights, as flawed as our government is, you can still go out and go to a bar, you can go to a sporting event, you can get on a bus or an airplane and you can travel, you have certain freedoms,” RFK Jr. went on. “You can get educated, etcetera.”

“The minute they hand you that vaccine passport, every right that you have is transformed into a privilege contingent upon your obedience to arbitrary government dictates,” he added.

“It will make you a slave!”

“What do we do?” he asked. “We resist.”

At the end of the day, this is about accountability. It is about accountability for the elected leaders and unelected public health officials who have seized upon a pandemic to wantonly violate every American’s unalienable rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, the right to travel, and the right to bodily autonomy.

RFK Jr. has issued a rousing clarion call for all those who believe that the unlawful vaccine and mask mandates are simply “public health issues.” They are much more than that. They are about rights.

Nothing less than the future of Western civilization is on the line. There are dire implications if we fail to resist the authoritarian state’s escalating violations of human rights. No matter what its pretexts.

Source: The Wildfire News & Trending Politics

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Where’s the money, Zelensky?

The man behind

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Hyping Vaccines for Children

False Statements on New Boosters

Minimizing Side Effects

Outdated Information

Heavy Reliance on the CDC

Steps Forward

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