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 PostSlate, 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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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, this is the most comprehensive book on sovereignty, economics, law, power structures and history ever written. Served as the primary research behind the best-selling Global One Audio Course. Available Now!

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Dawning of the Corona Age: Navigating the Pandemic by Johnny Freedom 
(3rd Edition)
(Printed, Bound Book or PDF)

This comprehensive book, goes far beyond the immediate impact of the “pandemic”, but, along with the reader, imagines how our human world may be altered, both positively and negatively, long into an uncertain future. Available Now!

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World War III has Officially Started | David Icke

So, now it is out in the open. The German Foreign Minister has stated that we are at war with Russia.

The mainstream media was too concerned with the usual dross to notice, but this means that World War III has officially started.

On the day that Germany announced WWIII, the leading section of the BBC’s news site carried no mention of the German Foreign Minister’s announcement but managed to find space for the following headlines: ‘Homeowner’s fury over sofa wedged in stairs’ and ‘BBC News Presenter gets emotional in last ever sign off’.

And once again, for the third time, a world war was officially started by Germany.

This is no big surprise. I mentioned many months ago that German citizens were hearing Air Raid Warning signals being tested.

And, of course, many months ago, the UK and the US pulled out of peace talks and abandoned any attempt to negotiate a settlement with Russia.

US President Biden and European Ministers and the UK are all sending tanks to Ukraine (one of the most corrupt countries in the world) to fight Russia. (Biden, of course, has financial links with the Ukraine.)

The odd thing is that the Ukraine has over 1,000 tanks already. So the few dozen the West is sending – and which will take months to arrive – will not make a great deal of difference. This is a tactical donation. Military experts claim that some of the promised arms will take nearly three years to arrive in the Ukraine. Is that a sign of how long the West is hoping this war will last?

And, of course, those tanks will need trained soldiers. You can’t just hand over tanks and expect the Ukrainians to know how to use them. Apart from anything else, Ukraine has very few soldiers left. Around 150,000 Ukranian soldiers have been killed and several hundred thousand have been wounded. (In comparison, of the 600,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine, between 16,000 to 25,000 have died.)

But the tanks aren’t enough for Ukraine.

Ukraine, which is losing its war, now wants warships, submarines and planes.

Seriously. Check it out.

And they’ll get them.

Source: David Icke

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Dawning of the Corona Age: Navigating the Pandemic by Johnny Freedom 
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Tucker Carlson: Antifa is the Armed Militia of the Democratic Party and is Back in Force | YouTube

Source: Tucker Carlson Tonight & YouTube

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Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty 
(30th Anniversary Edition)
(3-Volume Printed, Bound Book or PDF)

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, this is the most comprehensive book on sovereignty, economics, law, power structures and history ever written. Served as the primary research behind the best-selling Global One Audio Course. Available Now!

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Dawning of the Corona Age: Navigating the Pandemic by Johnny Freedom 
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In Davos Covering the World Economic Forum Meeting | Rebel News

Rebel News is sending a team of SEVEN reporters, videographers and producers led by our fearless Rebel Commander Ezra Levant to Davos, Switzerland from January 16 to 20 to cover the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Annual Meeting.

This mission is going to be some of the most important journalism we’ve ever done at Rebel News.

Callum Smiles is coming from the U.K.

Avi Yemini is coming all the way from Australia.

And we even have a special guest joining us for this mission: British political adviser, TV/radio presenter, and conservative commentator Reverend Calvin Robinson!

We will be providing the world’s most comprehensive independent coverage of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2023.

Source: Rebel News & YouTube

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Dawning of the Corona Age: Navigating the Pandemic by Johnny Freedom 
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Dr. Peter McCullough’s Presentation on InfoWars with Alex Jones | Truth for Health

Dr. Peter McCullough joins Alex Jones live in studio to give his powerful presentation on the COVID virus, its mutations, and the mRNA gene therapy/viral vector injections.

Segment 1 – Introduction

In this segment Dr. Peter McCullough touches on the public policy decisions in response to Covid-19 that have resulted in mass death, and the current international lawsuits alleging intentional crimes against humanity. The Doctor goes onto provide a big picture analysis of C19’s origins at the Wuhan Lab, and distinctions between it’s variants. This segment provides the basis for the detailed presentations that follow including: facts about the viral lifecycle, Euler’s Ratchet, the importance of early treatment, Omicron vs Delta, confirmation that no test currently exists to identify variant identity, and finally citations from the study conducted on American loss of life due to the vaccines.

View Here: https://rumble.com/embed/vp6uv2/?pub=cw76n

Segment 2 – The Great Gamble of C19 Vaccine Development

In the second part of Dr. McCullough’s InfoWars interview contrary to CDC/NIH guidelines the Doctor extols the urgent need for early ambulatory therapy for successful Covid-19 treatment. Dr. McCullough prefaces the discussion of experimental mRNA and adenovirus injections with review of an article titled, “The Great Gamble of C19 Vaccine Development.” This sets the stage for a deep dive into the origins of the C19 Spike Protein, and its mechanism of action. The segment culminates in corroboration of the Whuhan Lab theory, and a detailed explanation how vaccine damage occurs, and the tissues affected.

View Here: https://rumble.com/embed/vp6vw0/?pub=cw76n

Segment 3- Medical Censorship & Countervailing Evidence

Dr. McCullough describes the attacks being waged on members of the medical community who publish examinations of the empirical evidence demonstrating Covid-19 vaccine damage. This includes an analysis of VAERS data showing disproportionate instances of myocarditis among men of all ages, plus a study using census data revealing up to 180,000 American deaths linked to the vaccine, making it a bigger killer than the illness. Finally, Dr. McCullough exposes the Regulatory Malfeasance occurring as CNN diabolically attempts to seduce young children to take the deadly vaccines through promotions running on Sesame Street.

View Here: https://rumble.com/embed/vp6yuy/?pub=cw76n

Segment 4- The Biggest Event In Human History

A current lawsuit is challenging the secrecy of Pfizer’s vaccine trial data. Dr. Peter McCullough is one of the lead experts tasked with reviewing the data should the suit prevail. Currently, the fact pattern demonstrates zero transparency between the US Government and Pfizer. What are they hiding? The first priority is to “Do no harm” and safety is valued higher than efficacy, but Pfizer is attempting to seal all trial data for 70 years making product safety evaluations nearly impossible, while the Government is failing to conduct reviews according to statutory and historical measures. Dr. Peter McCullough advises the audience on the best way to stay healthy. 

View Here: https://rumble.com/embed/vp6zoo/?pub=cw76n

Segment 5- Vaccine Efficacy

Dr. McCullough examines a recent study involving 780,000 VA Veterans. This and 22 other studies show waning vaccine efficacy over 3-6 months for all vaccines against all variants. Statistically this evidence demonstrates just a 1% mortality benefit, without addressing adverse events in adults, and young people geting no medical benefits from Covid-19 vaccination. With the waning efficacy, what does this mean going forward? Dr. Peter McCullough and Alex Jones predict increasing vaccine frequency tied to travel, work, etc. With Pfizer knowing about 1000’s of deaths following vaccination, is this part of a depopulation agenda?

View Here: https://rumble.com/embed/vp72go/?pub=cw76n

Segment 6- Genetic Mutations of Omicron Variant

The segment begins in review of the timeline and development of the Covid-19 pandemic including the well documented simulations preceding the outbreak that lead many to believe we are experiencing a well planned and orchestrated crisis.

Dr. McCullough reveals the genomic sequencing of the Omicron variant, which is unique from all previous strains of Covid. Omicron differs across 26 mutations occurring at the Receptor Binding Domain for ACE2 receptor sites, making this variant much less invasive than its predecessors. Dr. McCullough notes the presence of insertions in the Omicron genetic code, which are distinct from mutations, and could possibly indicate evidence of engineering. 

Dr. McCullough also dispels the false claim that Omicron should be blamed on the unvaccinated, citing a study from Denmark showing 79% of Omicron infections occurring in fully vaccinated patients. 

View Here: https://rumble.com/embed/vp75q6/?pub=cw76n

Segment 7 – Destructive Public Policy Patterns

Alex Jones and Dr. McCullough discuss the war being waged against honest medical professionals attempting to save lives by revealing disastrous public policy measures in response to Covid-19. Examples include forced vaccination policies within hospitals like Houston Methodist, that have aggressively coerced staff to take the vaccination or face termination of employment. The result is these institutions are now facing shortages due to attrition of staff that resist such measures, and loss of staff due to high infection rates despite nearly 100% vaccination. The Doctor also touches on reactivation diseases resulting from immunosuppression, durability of immunity, and a pattern of the Government blocking effective therapeutics in favor of deadly vaccines.

View Here: https://rumble.com/embed/vp77tq/?pub=cw76n

Segment 8 – Evidence Based Treatment Protocols

Topics include federal monoclonal rationing, and CDC exoneration of unvaccinated as causing the pandemic by their own statistics. Dr. McCullough breaks down effective Early Outpatient Treatment Protocol consisting of: 1) Precautionary principle – mass casualty event, 2) Comprehensive evidence signalling, 3) Acceptable safety, and 4) Drugs in combination. Gold standard randomized trials indicate viracidal treatments with Iodine, H2O2, Colloidal Silver, and 03 are highly effective in stopping viral replication within the nasal passage.

View Here: https://rumble.com/embed/vp7n5o/?pub=cw76n

Segment 9 – Call to Action

Top Scientists call on the World Health Organization to shut down vaccinations against Omicron. Dr. McCullough describes the case for crimes against humanity, and issues an optimistic message for humanity. 

View Here: https://rumble.com/embed/vp5n3s/?pub=cw76n

Source: Truth for Health, InfoWars & Rumble

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Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty 
(30th Anniversary Edition)
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Dawning of the Corona Age: Navigating the Pandemic by Johnny Freedom 
(3rd Edition)
(Printed, Bound Book or PDF)

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BlackRock: The Company that Owns the World | YouTube

Source: David Icke & YouTube

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Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty 
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(3-Volume Printed, Bound Book or PDF)

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Dawning of the Corona Age: Navigating the Pandemic by Johnny Freedom 
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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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Dawning of the Corona Age: Navigating the Pandemic by Johnny Freedom 
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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.

Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas

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.

John McCain and Jon Kyl

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.

Donald Stapley and Mary Rose Wilcox

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.

Justice Andrew Hurwitz

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.

Former Judge William O’Neil

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.

Law Professor Ronald Rotunda

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.

Donald Trump

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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Reversing mRNA Damage: Canceling the Spike Protein, Blood Clotting with Ozone Therapy | Business Game Changers

By Thomas E. Levy, MD, JD

Canceling the Spike Protein: Striking Visual Evidence

Reprinted with permission: see archives and subscribe to the Orthomelcular.org newsletter

OMNS (Oct. 18, 2021) No issue in the history of medicine has been as strident and polarized as that of the risk/benefit profiles of the various COVID vaccines being administered around the world. This article does not seek to clarify this issue to the satisfaction of either the pro-vaccine or the anti-vaccine advocates. However, all parties should realize that some toxicity does result in some vaccinated individuals some of the time, and that such toxicity can sometimes be unequivocally attributed to the preceding administration of the vaccine. Whether this toxicity occurs often enough and with great enough severity in vaccinated persons to be of greater concern than dealing with the contraction and evolution of COVID infections remains the question for many people.

Practically speaking, it does not matter whether an adverse event that occurs after a vaccination gets “blamed” on the vaccination. Such a matter may never get resolved. The issue of greatest concern is whether that adverse event can be clinically resolved if not effectively prevented, and whether any long-term damage to the body can be prevented once an adverse event is recognized. The remainder of this article will address the etiologies of such damage along with measures that can mitigate or even resolve such damage.

Toxins and Oxidative Stress

All toxins ultimately inflict their damage by directly oxidizing biomolecules, or by indirectly resulting in the oxidation of those biomolecules (proteins, sugars, fats, enzymes, etc.). When biomolecules becomes oxidized (lose electrons) they can no longer perform their normal chemical or metabolic functions. No toxin can cause any clinical toxicity unless biomolecules end up becoming oxidized. The unique array of biomolecules that become oxidized determines the nature of the clinical condition resulting from a given toxin exposure. There is no “disease” present in a cell involved in a given medical condition beyond the distribution and degree of biomolecules that are oxidized. Rather than “causing” disease, the state of oxidation in a grouping of biomolecules IS the disease.

When antioxidants can donate electrons back to oxidized biomolecules (reduction), the normal function of these biomolecules is restored (Levy, 2019). This is the reason why sufficient antioxidant therapy, such as can be achieved by highly-dosed intravenous vitamin C, has proven to be so profoundly effective in blocking and even reversing the negative clinical impact of any toxin or poison. There exists no toxin against which vitamin C has been tested that has not been effectively neutralized (Levy, 2002). There is no better way to save a patient clinically poisoned by any agent than by immediately administering a sizeable intravenous infusion of sodium ascorbate. The addition of magnesium chloride to the infusion is also important to protect against sudden life-threatening arrhythmias that can occur before a sufficient number of the newly-oxidized biomolecules can be reduced and any remaining toxin is neutralized and excreted.

Abnormal Blood Clotting

Both the COVID vaccine and the COVID infection have been documented to provoke increased blood clotting [thrombosis] (Biswas et al., 2021; Lundstrom et al., 2021). Viral infections in general have been found to cause coagulopathies resulting in abnormal blood clotting (Subramaniam and Scharrer, 2018). Critically ill COVID ICU patients demonstrated elevated D-dimer levels roughly 60% of the time (Iba et al., 2020). An elevated D-dimer test result is almost an absolute confirmation of abnormal blood clotting taking place somewhere in the body. Such clots can be microscopic, at the capillary level, or much larger, even involving the thrombosis of large blood vessels. Higher D-dimer levels that persist in COVID patients appear to directly correlate with significantly increased morbidity and mortality (Naymagon et al., 2020; Paliogiannis et al., 2020; Rostami and Mansouritorghabeh, 2020).

Platelets, the elements of the blood that can get sticky and both initiate and help grow the size of blood clots, will generally demonstrate declining levels in the blood at the same time D-dimer levels are increasing, since their stores are being actively depleted. A post-vaccination syndrome known as vaccine-induced prothrombotic immune thrombocytopenia (VIPIT) with these very findings has been described (Favaloro, 2021; Iba et al., 2021; Scully et al., 2021; Thaler et al., 2021). Vaccinations have also been documented to cause bleeding syndromes due to autoimmune reactions resulting in low platelet levels (Perricone et al., 2014).

This can create some confusion clinically, as chronically low platelet levels by themselves can promote clinical syndromes of increased bleeding rather than increased blood clotting. As such, some primary low platelet disorders require pro-coagulation measures to stop bleeding, while other conditions featuring primary increased thrombosis with the secondary rapid consumption of platelet stores end up needing anticoagulation measures to stop that continued consumption of platelets (Perry et al., 2021). Significant thrombosis post-vaccination in the absence of an elevated D-dimer level or low platelet count has also been described (Carli et al., 2021). In platelets taken from COVID patients, platelet stickiness predisposing to thrombosis has been shown to result from spike protein binding to ACE2 receptors on the platelets (Zhang et al., 2021).

Of note, a D-dimer test that is elevated due to increased blood clotting will usually only stay elevated for a few days after the underlying pathology provoking the blood clotting has been resolved. Chronic, or “long-haul” COVID infections, often demonstrate persistent evidence of blood clotting pathology. In one study, 25% of convalescent COVID patients who were four months past their acute COVID infections demonstrated increased D-dimer levels. Interestingly, these D-dimer elevations were often present when the other common laboratory parameters of abnormal blood clotting had returned to normal. These other tests included prothrombin time, partial thromboplastin time, fibrinogen level, and platelet count. Inflammation parameters, including C-reactive protein and interleukin-6, typically also had returned to normal (Townsend et al., 2021).

Persistent evidence of blood clotting (increased D-dimer levels) in chronic COVID patients might be a reliable way to determine the persistent presence/production of the COVID spike protein. Another way, discussed below, might be dark field microscopy to look for rouleaux formation of the red blood cells (RBCs). At the time of the writing of this article, the correlation between an increased D-dimer level and rouleaux formation of the RBCs remains to be determined. Certainly, the presence of both should trigger the greatest of concern for the development of significant chronic COVID and post-COVID vaccination complications.

Is Persistent Spike Protein the Culprit?

Spike proteins are the spear-like appendages attached to and completely surrounding the central core of the COVID virus, giving the virion somewhat of a porcupine-like appearance. Upon binding to the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptors on the cell membranes of the target cells, dissolving enzymes are released that then permit entry of the complete COVID virus into the cytoplasm, where replication of the virus can ensue (Belouzard et al., 2012; Shang et al., 2020).

Concern has been raised regarding the dissemination of the spike protein throughout the body after vaccination. Rather than staying localized at the injection site in order to provoke the immune response and nothing more, spike protein presence has been detected throughout the body of some vaccinated individuals. Furthermore, it appears that some of the circulating spike proteins simply bind the ACE2 receptors without entering the cell, inducing an autoimmune response to the entire cell-spike protein entity. Depending on the cell type that binds the spike protein, any of a number of autoimmune medical conditions can result.

While the underlying pathology remains to be completely defined, one explanation for the problems with thrombotic tendencies and other symptomatology seen with chronic COVID and post-vaccination patients relates directly to the persistent presence of the spike protein part of the coronavirus. Some reports assert that the spike protein can continue to be produced after the initial binding to the ACE2 receptors and entry into some of the cells that it initially targets. The clinical pictures of chronic COVID and post-vaccine toxicity appear very similar, and both are likely due to this continued presence, and body-wide dissemination, of the spike protein (Mendelson et al., 2020; Aucott and Rebman, 2021; Levy, 2021; Raveendran, 2021).

Although they are found on many different types of cells throughout the body, the ACE2 receptors on the epithelial cells lining the airways are the first targets of the COVID virus upon initial encounter when inhaled (Hoffman et al., 2020). Furthermore, the concentration of these receptors is especially high on lung alveolar epithelial cells, further causing the lung tissue to be disproportionately targeted by the virus (Alifano et al., 2020). Unchecked, this avid receptor binding and subsequent viral replication inside the lung cells leads directly to low blood oxygen levels and the adult respiratory distress syndrome [ARDS] (Batah and Fabro, 2021). Eventually there is a surge of intracellular oxidation known as the cytokine storm, and death from respiratory failure results (Perrotta et al., 2020; Saponaro et al., 2020; Hu et al., 2021).

COVID, Vaccination, and Oxidative Stress

Although some people have prompt and clear-cut negative side effects after COVID vaccination, many appear to do well and feel completely fine after their vaccinations. Is this an assurance that no harm was done, or will be done, by the vaccine in such individuals? Some striking anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise, while also indicating that there exist good options for optimal protection against side effects in both the short- and long-term.

Under conditions of inflammation and systemically increased oxidative stress, RBCs can aggregate to varying degrees, sometimes sticking together like stacks of coins with branching of the stacks seen when the stickiness is maximal. This is known as rouleaux formation of the RBCs (Samsel and Perelson, 1984). When this rouleaux formation is pronounced, increased blood viscosity (thickness) is seen, and there is increased resistance to the normal, unimpeded flow of blood, especially in the microcirculation (Sevick and Jain, 1989; Kesmarky et al., 2008; Barshtein et al., 2020; Sloop et al., 2020).

With regard to the smallest capillaries through which the blood must pass, it needs to be noted that individual RBCs literally need to fold slightly to pass from the arterial to the venous side, as the capillary diameter at its narrowest point is actually less than the diameter of a normal RBC, or erythrocyte. It is clear that any aggregation of the RBCs, as is seen with rouleaux formation, will increase resistance to normal blood flow, and it will be more pronounced as the caliber of the blood vessel decreases. Not surprisingly, rouleaux formation of the RBCs is also associated with an impaired ability of the blood to optimally transport oxygen, which notably is another feature of COVID spike protein impact (Cicco and Pirrelli, 1999). Increased RBC aggregation has been observed in a number of different microcirculatory disorders, and it appears to be linked to the pathophysiology in these disorders.

Rouleaux formation is easily visualized directly with dark field microscopy. When available, feedback is immediate, and there is no need to wait for a laboratory to process a test specimen. It is a reliable indicator of abnormal RBC stickiness and increased blood viscosity, typically elevating the erythrocyte sedimentation test (ESR), an acute phase reactant test that consistently elevates along with C-reactive protein in a setting of generalized increased oxidative stress throughout the body (Lewi and Clarke, 1954; Ramsay and Lerman, 2015). As such, it can never be dismissed as an incidental and insignificant finding, especially in the setting of a symptom-free individual post-vaccination appearing to be normal and presumably free of body-wide increased inflammation and oxidative stress. States of advanced degrees of increased systemic oxidative stress, as is often seen in cancer patients, can also display rouleaux formation among circulating neoplastic cells and not just the RBCs (Cho, 2011).

Rouleaux Formation Post-COVID Vaccination

The dark field blood examinations seen below come from a 62-year-old female who had received the COVID vaccination roughly 60 days earlier. The first picture reveals mild rouleaux formation of the blood. After a sequence of six autohemotherapy ozone passes, the second picture shows a completely normal appearance of the RBCs.

v17n24-pic1a-300x244 Reversing mRNA Damage: Canceling the Spike Protein, Blood Clotting with Ozone Therapy
v17n24-pic1b-300x234 Reversing mRNA Damage: Canceling the Spike Protein, Blood Clotting with Ozone Therapy

A second patient, a young adult male who received his vaccination 15 days earlier without any side effects noted and feeling completely well at the time, had the dark field examination of his blood performed. This first examination seen below revealed severe rouleaux formations of the RBCs with extensive branching, appearing to literally involve all of the RBCs visualized in an extensive review of multiple different microscopic fields. He then received one 400 ml ozonated saline infusion followed by a 15,000 mg infusion of vitamin C. The second picture reveals a complete and immediate resolution of the rouleaux formation seen on the first examination. Furthermore, the normal appearance of the RBCs was still seen 15 days later, giving some reassurance that the therapeutic infusions had some durability, and possibly permanency, in their positive impact.

v17n24-pic2a-300x232 Reversing mRNA Damage: Canceling the Spike Protein, Blood Clotting with Ozone Therapy
v17n24-pic2b-300x265 Reversing mRNA Damage: Canceling the Spike Protein, Blood Clotting with Ozone Therapy

A third adult who received the vaccination 30 days earlier also had severe rouleaux formation on her dark field examination, and this was also completely resolved after the ozonated saline infusion followed by the vitamin C infusion. Of note, similar abnormal dark field microscopy findings were found in other individuals following Pfizer, Moderna, or Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccinations.

Preventing and Treating Chronic COVID and COVID Vaccine Complications

In addition to the mechanisms already discussed by which the spike protein can inflict damage, it appears the spike protein itself is significantly toxic. Such intrinsic toxicity (ability to cause the oxidation of biomolecules) combined with the apparent ability of the spike protein to replicate itself like a complete virus greatly increases the amount of toxic damage that can potentially be inflicted. A potent toxin is bad enough, but one that can replicate and increase its quantity inside the body after the initial encounter represents a unique challenge among toxins. And if the mechanism of replication can be sustained indefinitely, the long-term challenge to staying healthy can eventually become insurmountable. Nevertheless, this toxicity also allows it to be effectively targeted by high enough doses of the ultimate antitoxin, vitamin C, as discussed above. And even the continued production of spike protein can be neutralized by a daily multi-gram dosing of vitamin C, which is an excellent way to support optimal long-term health, anyway.

As was noted in an earlier article (Levy, 2021), there appear to be multiple ways to deal with spike protein effectively. The approaches to preventing and treating chronic COVID and COVID vaccine complications are similar, except that it would appear that a completely normal D-dimer blood test combined with a completely normal dark field examination of the blood could give the reassurance that the therapeutic goal has been achieved.

Until more data is accumulated on these approaches, it is probably advisable, if possible, to periodically reconfirm the normalcy of both the D-dimer blood test and the dark field blood examination to help assure that no new spike protein synthesis has resumed. This is particularly important since some patients who are clinically normal and symptom-free following COVID infection have been found to have the COVID virus persist in the fecal matter for an extended period of time (Chen et al., 2020; Patel et al., 2020; Zuo et al., 2020). Any significant immune challenge or new pathogen exposure facilitating a renewed surge of COVID virus replication could result in a return of COVID symptoms in such persons if the virus cannot be completely eliminated from the body.

Suggested Protocol (to be coordinated with the guidance of your chosen health care provider):

  1. For individuals who are post-vaccination or symptomatic with chronic COVID, vitamin C should be optimally dosed, and it should be kept at a high but lesser dose daily indefinitely.
    • Ideally, an initial intravenous administration of 25 to 75 grams of vitamin C should be given depending on body size. Although one infusion would likely resolve the symptoms and abnormal blood examination, several more infusions can be given if feasible over the next few days.
    • An option that would likely prove to be sufficient and would be much more readily available to larger numbers of patients would be one or more rounds of vitamin C given as a 7.5 gram IV push over roughly 10 minutes, avoiding the need for a complete intravenous infusion setup, a prolonged time in a clinic, and substantially greater expense (Riordan-Clinic-IVC-Push-Protocol, 10.16.14.pdf).
    • Additionally, or alternatively if IV is not available, 5 grams of liposome-encapsulated vitamin C (LivOn Labs) can be given daily for at least a week.
    • When none of the above three options are readily available, a comparable positive clinical impact will be seen with the proper supplementation of regular forms of oral vitamin C as sodium ascorbate or ascorbic acid. Either of these can be taken daily in three divided doses approaching bowel tolerance after the individual determines their own unique needs (additional information, see Levy, vitamin C Guide in References; Cathcart, 1981).
    • An excellent way to support any or all of the above measures for improving vitamin C levels in the body is now available and very beneficial clinically. A supplemental polyphenol that appears to help many to overcome the epigenetic defect preventing the internal synthesis of vitamin C in the liver can be taken once daily. This supplement also appears to provide the individual with the ability to produce and release even greater amounts of vitamin C directly into the blood in the face of infection and other sources of oxidative stress (www.formula216.com).
  2. Hydrogen peroxide (HP) nebulization (Levy, 2021, free eBook) is an antiviral and synergistic partner with vitamin C, and it is especially important in dealing with acute or chronic COVID, or with post-COVID vaccination issues. As noted above, the COVID virus can persist in the stool. In such cases, a chronic pathogen colonization (CPC) of COVID in the throat continually supplying virus that is swallowed into the gut is likely present as well, even when the patient seems to be clinically normal. This will commonly be the case when specific viral eradication measures were not taken during the clinical course of the COVID infection. HP nebulization will clear out this CPC, which will stop the continued seeding of the COVID virus in the gut and stool as well. Different nebulization approaches are discussed in the eBook.
  3. When available, ozonated saline and/or ozone autohemotherapy infusions are excellent. Conceivably, this approach alone might suffice to knock out the spike protein presence, but the vitamin C and HP nebulization approaches will also improve and maintain health in general. Ultraviolet blood irradiation and hyperbaric oxygen therapy will likely achieve the same therapeutic effect if available.
  4. Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and chloroquine are especially important in preventing new binding of the spike protein to the ACE2 receptors that need to be bound in order for either the spike protein alone or for the entire virus to gain entry into the target cells (Lehrer and Rheinstein, 2020; Wang et al., 2020; Eweas et al., 2021). These agents also appear to have the ability to directly bind up any circulating spike protein before it binds any ACE2 receptors (Fantini et al., 2020; Sehailia and Chemat, 2020; Saha and Raihan, 2021). When the ACE2 receptors are already bound, the COVID virus cannot enter the cell (Pillay, 2020). These three agents also serve as ionophores that promote intracellular accumulation of zinc that is needed to kill/inactivate any intact virus particles that might still be present.
  5. Many other positive nutrients, vitamins, and minerals are supportive of defeating the spike protein, but they should not be used to the exclusion of the above, especially the combination of highly-dosed vitamin C and HP nebulization.

Summary

As the pandemic continues, there is an increasing number of chronic COVID patients and patients post-COVID vaccination with a number of different symptoms. Furthermore, there is increasing number of vaccinated individuals who still end up contracting a COVID infection. This is resulting in a substantial amount of morbidity and mortality around the world. The presence and persistence of the COVID spike protein, along with the chronic colonization of the COVID virus itself in the aerodigestive tract as well as in the lower gut, appear to be major reasons for illness in this group of patients.

Persistent elevation of D-dimer protein in the blood and the presence of rouleaux formation of the RBCs, especially when advanced in degree, appear to be reliable markers of persistent spike protein-related illness. The measures noted above, particular the vitamin C and HP nebulization, should result in the disappearance of the D-dimer in the blood while normalizing the appearance of the RBCs examined with dark field microscopy. Even though new research is taking place daily that may modify therapeutic recommendations, it appears that taking the measures to eliminate D-dimer from the blood and to maintain a consistently normal morphological appearance of the blood is a very practical and efficient way to curtail the ongoing morbidity and mortality secondary to the persistent spike protein presence seen in chronic COVID and in post-COVID vaccination patients.

There are many vaccinated individuals who feel well yet remain cautious about potential future side effects, and who really have no easy access to D-dimer testing or dark field examination of their blood. Such persons can follow a broad-spectrum supplementation regimen featuring vitamin C, magnesium chloride, vitamin D, zinc, and a good multivitamin/multimineral supplement free of iron, copper, and calcium. Periodic but regular HP nebulization should be included as well. This regimen will offer good spike protein protection while optimizing long-term health. Furthermore, such a long-term supplementation regimen is advisable regardless of how much of the protocol discussed above is followed.

(OMNS Contributing Editor Dr. Thomas E. Levy is board certified in internal medicine and cardiology. He is also an attorney, admitted to the bar in Colorado and in the District of Columbia. The views presented in this article are the author’s and not necessarily those of all members of the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service Editorial Review Board.)

Ozone treatment is also supported by other research groups and papers:

The paper titled, “Rationale for ozone-therapy as an adjuvant therapy in COVID-19: a narrative review” by Giovanni Tommaso Ranaldi , Emanuele Rocco Villani, * , Laura Franza.  (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8086623/pdf/MGR-10-134.pdf).

The paper titled, “Potential Role of Oxygen–Ozone Therapy in Treatment of COVID-19 Pneumonia” by AE 1 Alberto Hernández F 2 Montserrat Viñals F 3 Tomas Isidoro E 3 Francisco Vilás.  (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7476746/pdf/amjcaserep-21-e925849.pdf)

References

Alifano M, Alifano P, Forgez P, Iannelli A (2020) Renin-angiotensin system at the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. Biochemie 174:30-33. PMID: 32305506

Aucott J, Rebman A (2021) Long-haul COVID: heed the lessons from other infection-triggered illnesses. Lancet 397:967-968. PMID: 33684352

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Source: Business Game Changers

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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.

Epoch Times Photo
Sam Bankman-Fried speaks on stage at Casa Cipriani in New York on June 23, 2022. (Craig Barritt/Getty Images for CARE For Special Children )

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

ORDER YOUR LIBERTY BOOKS TODAY!

Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty 
(30th Anniversary Edition)
(3-Volume Printed, Bound Book or PDF)

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, this is the most comprehensive book on sovereignty, economics, law, power structures and history ever written. Served as the primary research behind the best-selling Global One Audio Course. Available Now!

$99.95 ~ THREE-VOLUME PRINT SERIES
$33.33 ~ THREE-VOLUME EBOOK

Dawning of the Corona Age: Navigating the Pandemic by Johnny Freedom 
(3rd Edition)
(Printed, Bound Book or PDF)

This comprehensive book, goes far beyond the immediate impact of the “pandemic”, but, along with the reader, imagines how our human world may be altered, both positively and negatively, long into an uncertain future. Available Now!

$25.00 ~ PRINT BOOK
$10.00 ~ EBOOK