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We need to get the right-wing and left-wing conspiracy theorists together to hash this out. Was Assad’s chemical attack in Idlib a false flag perpetrated by some shadowy agent (Syrian rebels, the “deep state,” Mossad, etc) to give Trump’s new establishment masters a pretext to lead him into war? Or was it a real attack cynically exploited by Trump a la “Wag the Dog” to change the subject from bad news here at home (the Russia probe, health-care failure, sagging job approval, etc), possibly with the cooperation of Vladimir Putin? Under the first theory, American hawks are trying to push...

A stunning update on Friday afternoon from the Associated Press said the Pentagon is investigating possible Russian participationin the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons attack. These officials also supported the dire suspicion that nearby hospitals were attacked to cover up evidence of the WMD deployment: The officials say Russia has failed to control the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons. They say a drone belonging either to Russia or Syria was seen hovering over the site of the chemical weapons attack Tuesday after it happened. The drone returned late in the day as citizens were going to a nearby hospital for treatment....

The key to all of this is the Atlantic Council. The vehemently anti-russian think tank that Dr. Farkas is a senior fellow. Most people think that the FBI analyzed the DNC servers and came to the conclusion based on their analysis that Russia hacked the DNC. That is not true. The DNC refused to let the FBI look at their servers. Instead the DNC hired a private company, Crowdstrike, to do an analysis of their servers. It was Crowdstrike that concluded that Russia hacked the DNC. They then turned over those findings to the FBI. If this sounds incredibly shady...

Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) couldn't say on Sunday whether there was evidence of collusion during the 2016 election between the campaign for President Donald Trump and Russia. Schiff appeared on CNN's "State of the Union," where host Jake Tapper asked Schiff if he had evidence of the collusion some have accused the Trump campaign of. "The big issue, of course, is whether or not there was collusion among members of the Trump campaign or surrounding the Trump campaign, Trump advisers," Tapper said. "Can you say definitively that there was collusion, there were people affiliated with the Trump campaign who...

Are those pushing the Trump/Russian collusion conspiracy living in Alice in Wonderland or what? Accepting this conspiracy narrative requires both the suspension of common sense and the collective amnesia about the history of Democrats’ actions that have earned favor from Soviet and Russian leadership over past decades and right up to the present.             Vladimir Putin is shrewd, calculating, and fairly predictable. If he were serious about influencing the outcome of the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, he would not have favored the relatively unknown and impulsive Donald Trump, who had no history of doing favors for Putin or Russia....

Maher said, “It looks like Donald Trump and his crime family were installed by Russia to loot and destroy America.” Maher also asked Stone if it bothered him that “we’re so in touch with the Evil Empire these days?”

Founder of Infowars and conspiracy-peddling media personality Alex Jones apologized for his role in spreading the baseless viral theory that claimed Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders were involved in a child sex trafficking ring run out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. Jones on Friday shared a six-minute video on his website in which he distanced himself from the “Pizzagate” theory that emerged after Wikileaks dumped the emails of Clinton Campaign chair John Podesta. The story, he said, “was based upon what we now believe was an incorrect narrative.”

A new documentary suggests Michael Brown did not rob a convenience store in Ferguson, Mo. before he was fatally shot in 2014 by police. A new documentary that debuted Saturday at a film festival in Austin, Texas — citing previously unseen footage — instead reports that there was a possible drug transaction Brown had with employees at the store during an earlier visit, The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Moscow was tired of the accusations. He said a report released by US intelligence agencies detailing the allegations was groundless.

The other story, “Carolina Conspiracy,” centered around the idea that the 15-year-old girl Anthony Weiner was allegedly sexting online was actually a Russian hacking ring. “I can exclusively report that there is ample evidence that suggests that Weiner was sexting not with a 15 year old girl but with a hacker, working for Russia, part of the North Carolina hacking group ‘Crackas With Attitude’, who hacked the head of the CIA, and a great many FBI agents, police officers, and other law enforcement officials,” Mensch wrote. Her evidence for this claim is rather thin. http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/26/msnbc-panelist-spouts-loony-conspiracy-theories-on-the-internet/#ixzz4ZslyzVOS

What it's like to be at the center of a fake-news conspiracy theory.

The FBI did not look over the Democratic National Committee's servers before issuing a report that Russia had hacked the organization, according to a report published Wednesday evening. Other than the FBI, no federal agency has conducted an investigation into the DNC's email server since the incident was uncovered six months ago. "The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI's Cyber Division and its Washington (DC) Field Office, the Department of Justice's National Security Division, and U.S. Attorney's Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC's...

The tortured path that began with a left turn onto Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963, will find its unlikely end point this October in College Park, Md. At a National Archives annex, the last remaining documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are being readied for release. Under the terms of the 1992 JFK Records Act–a result of Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which revived fascination with the idea of a cover-up–the government was given 25 years to make public all related files. The time is up on Oct. 26, 2017. About 3,000 never-before-seen documents, along...

Russian hackers tied to recent cyberattacks on U.S. political organizations breached a Vermont utility, the Washington Post reported Friday. A code associated with the Russian hacking operation aimed at the U.S. presidential election, which the intelligence community has named “Grizzly Steppe,” was detected within the Vermont system. The Russians did not disrupt electrical operations, officials told the Post. According to the Burlington Free Press, the city-owned Burlington Electric was the target of the hack. Vermont Public Service Commissioner Christopher Recchia said malware was discovered on a laptop that was not connected to the grid's operations. "The grid is not in...

"The attempted recount process has uncovered that voting machines relied on in these states and across the country are prone to human and machine error, especially in under-resourced black and brown communities, and vulnerable to tampering and hacking," the letter reads.

<p>Russia's ambassador to Turkey has been shot in an 'assassination attempt'.</p> <p>We'll be bringing you the very latest updates, pictures and video on this breaking news story.</p>

Russia’s Hacks Followed Years of Paranoia Toward Hillary Clinton Max Fisher Hillary Clinton last month Washington. “It’s not just they didn’t like Clinton, but they actually thought that she represented a threat,” said Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert at the Institute of International Relations. Cliff Owen/Associated Press Russia’s unprecedented intervention in the United States election came amid more than United States-Russia tension and Donald J. Trump’s praise of Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president. It also coincided with a growing belief, in Moscow, that Russia faced an imminent threat in Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Mrs. Clinton is viewed in Moscow as...

An Outline of What Increasingly Exhibits the Hallmarks of an Election Conspiracy Unlike the effect of Russian interference on the 2016 presidential campaign, the effect—in votes—of the now-infamous “Comey Letter” is knowable. While various media outlets downplayed the effect at the time, the hard data is unmistakable: according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll taken immediately after FBI Director Comey’s end-of-October announcement that the FBI would be reviewing additional evidence in the Clinton email-server case, one-third of likely voters reported that the revelation made them “much less likely” to vote for Clinton. In an election Clinton lost by just 77,143 combined...

Five Questions About Russia's Election Hacking As the culpability of Putin’s government becomes more clear, a host of other issues remain unresolved. David Frum The evidence to support the CIA’s conclusion that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump remains mostly secret. But the outline of the case is no mystery. Both Democratic and Republican Party servers were reportedly hacked by foreign agents, yet the Moscow-friendly folks at Wikileaks somehow only obtained the contents of Democratic servers. Meanwhile, Donald Trump ran a campaign that sometimes seemed almost designed to please Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump lavishly praised...

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