Free Republic

Internet billionaire Reid Hoffman apologized on Wednesday for funding a group linked to a “highly disturbing” effort that spread disinformation during last year’s Alabama special election for U.S. Senate, but said he was not aware that his money was being used for this purpose. Hoffman’s statement is his first acknowledgement of his ties to a campaign that adopted tactics similar to those deployed by Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential election. In Alabama, the Hoffman-funded group allegedly used Facebook and Twitter to undermine support for Republican Roy Moore and boost Democrat Doug Jones, who narrowly won the race. Hoffman, the...

The Democrats’ Biggest Expert Accusing Republicans of Russian Trolling Was a Russian Troll They invented the Russian conspiracy, then they faked the crimes. December 31, 2018 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. When the Democrats and the media wanted to prove that Russian trolls were everywhere, and supporting Republicans, they turned to Jonathon Morgan and Renee DiResta. Morgan and DiResta had originally been part of Obama’s futile effort to fight ISIS on social media, before discovering a much more lucrative...

A Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee says he is worried that the Russians “never left,” raising the specter that Moscow is looking to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections through cyber or other means. “I am concerned that the Russians never left,” Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) told CBS News when asked about his concerns about threats to the 2018 midterm elections. Quigley also alleged that Russia-linked hackers breached “somewhere between 20 and 40 state board of elections,” including the Illinois voter database, in 2016 and alleged that states are not prepared for future interference efforts by Russia. “First, they...

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

In a recent addition to the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi revealed to the public how Twitter — the preferred social media platform of politicians, academics, and journalists — co-opted the algorithmic blacklist of a bipartisan neoliberal propaganda outfit known as Hamilton 68. Hamilton 68 was a digital dashboard that, as my colleague Emily Jashinsky recently discussed, was used to perpetuate and mainstream the myth of Russian interference in American politics through algorithmic censorship and suppression. But it wasn’t just egghead professors, left-wing activist journalists, and the tragically narcissistic (Adam Schiff) who perpetuated the thoroughly repudiated lie that Russia determined the...

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

The 2016 presidential election wasn’t just a political battle, it was spiritual warfare. If you doubt it, recall that Satanists were among those who protested in Washington, DC, against Donald John Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 20, 2017. ... According to Wikipedia, with a networth in February 2018 of $1.54 billion, Mark Pincus, 52, is an Internet entrepreneur who was a founding investor of Twitter and Facebook. He is also the founder of Zynga, a mobile social gaming company; the startups Freeloader, Inc., and Support.com; incubator SuperLabs; and the co-founder of Win the Future (WTF), the “progressive left wing” insurgency...

A federal jury awarded Republican Roy Moore $8.2 million in damages Friday after finding that a Democratic super PAC defamed him in an advertisement during the 2017 U.S. Senate race in Alabama. Conservative Roy Moore had won the Senate primary. Democrats then set out to destroy his candidacy. Jurors found the Senate Majority PAC made false and defamatory statements against Moore in the ad that attempted to capitalize on a sexual misconduct accusation made against Moore during the 2017 race, Yahoo News reports.

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

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

Durham filed a motion Friday for U.S. District Court of Washington, D.C. to examine a potential conflict of interest stemming from Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann’s own lawyer, who represented Perkins Coie – a law firm tied to the Clinton campaign – in Durham’s probe. Sussmann was indicted by Durham in September 2021 for lying to the FBI by providing phony information alleging secret backchannel communications between the Trump campaign and a Russian bank. In the filing, Durham explains that tech executive Rodney Joffe – known as Tech Executive-1 in the Sussmann indictment – and his team at Georgia Tech...

It’s a shame that news of Special Counsel John Durham’s court filing landed on a Saturday in which so much is already going on. This is a bombshell, blockbuster, story for the ages as it pretty much takes the crimes committed during Watergate and expands them exponentially. Except instead of Richard Nixon in the crosshairs, it’s Hillary Clinton.According to Infowars:A court filing by Special Counsel John Durham reveals that a Democrat tech executive spied on President-elect Donald Trump and the Executive Office in the White House on behalf of the Clinton campaign.Durham filed a motion Friday for U.S. District Court...

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

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

Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his electoral defeat is alarming, but unsurprising. It is Mr. Trump’s character to reject even reality itself when it conflicts with his ego. More alarming is the long list of state and national Republican leaders cravenly falling in line behind his desperate efforts to topple American democracy. On Friday, the Supreme Court rejected a Texas lawsuit to overturn the election, a legal challenge that was as frivolous as it was anti-constitutional. Yet more than 60 percent of House Republicans signed a supporting brief, joining 18 Republican attorneys general who filed their own and embraced entirely...

Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, called attention to an "important" story published Sunday evening related to the opposition research firm and author behind the infamous Trump dossier. The Daily Caller reported on what it said was a dark money group based in California that gave $2 million to The Democracy Integrity Project, an organization that has contracted with Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to conduct research on President Trump. In a tweet, Nunes stressed the report bore extra significance due to its timing. "This is actually important as we wait for the March 14...

A dark money group based in California contributed $2 million to The Democracy Integrity Project, the organization that has contracted with Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to investigate President Donald Trump. The Democracy Integrity Project’s founder, a former staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has acknowledged to the FBI that the group provides information to the press, lawmakers and investigators. Fund for a Better Future is the second Democracy Integrity Project donor to have been identified. George Soros gave $1 million to the group. A dark money group with links to several high-profile liberal activists contributed $2 million to The Democracy...

On Tuesday August 18th, I had the opportunity to talk to, be interviewed by and brief, the person described as the “main guy”, the “central investigator”, “the guy who coordinates all investigative aspects” behind the John Durham investigation. His name is William Aldenberg, and before getting to the substance of the conversation some background context is needed. On June 7, 2018, an indictment against Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe was unsealed. Approximately six weeks later, July 21, 2018, the DOJ mysteriously declassified and publicly released the Carter Page FISA application. That’s when I noticed the first two documents...

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

As the 2014 midterm elections approached, the media were quick to criticize conservative donors like the Koch brothers for backing issues important to them. But journalists largely ignored the incredible financial power being used to promote the liberal agenda. Five top donors – Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, Pierre Omidyar, Tom Steyer and George Soros’s own son, Jonathan – are major funders of the left. Together, they have contributed at least $2.7 billion since 2000 to groups pushing abortion, gun control, climate change alarmism and liberal candidates. That’s not how major media depicted them. Broadcast networks applauded when billionaire hedge fund...