rigorousintuition.ca

Holocaust attorney sues FBI over election interference that could ‘lead to impeachment’ of Trump

David Edwards
08 DEC 2016 AT 10:18 ET



E. Randol Schoenberg, an attorney renowned for recovering artworks stolen by Nazis during the Holocaust, filed a lawsuit against the FBI this week to get answers about why Director James Comey falsely suggested that Hillary Clinton committed a crime just days before the 2016 election.

“I filed a lawsuit today against the US Department of Justice seeking immediate disclosure of the FBI search warrant for the e-mails of Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin on Anthony Weiner’s laptop,” Schoenberg wrote on his Facebook page on Wednesday. “I think we need to see what ‘probable cause’ was shown for obtaining the search warrant, because whoever thought there was going to be evidence of a crime was obviously mistaken. And that mistake probably changed the outcome of the election.”

In a blog post late last month, Schoenberg explained that it would be very unusual for a judge to grant the FBI a search warrant “imply because someone has the ability to commit the crime of intentionally violating laws governing the handling of classified information.”

“To obtain a warrant it had to establish probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime would be found. Since we now know that no such evidence was found on the laptop, it is time to investigate why the FBI believed it had probable cause.”

One possible theory, Schoenberg said, is that “the new allegations came from people associated with the Trump campaign.”

He continued on his blog:

What if the allegations were intentionally false? During the nine days when the investigation was underway, Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani made public statements suggesting he was in communication with the FBI about the ongoing investigation. It does not seem too far-fetched to believe that politically-motivated individuals might have tried to get the FBI to re-open the investigation of Clinton by making false allegations. Finding Huma Abedin’s e-mails on Weiner’s laptop might have been just an opportunity to carry out their wishes.
Schoenberg’s lawsuit calls on the court to force the FBI to honor a Freedom of Information Act request to turn over the warrant to search Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Weiner was the husband of Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin.

“Many members of the public have doubts about the propriety and legality of re-opening of the investigation,” the lawsuit notes. “Access to the search warrant is critical for the public to learn the basis for there-opening of the investigation to ensure that the FBI acted in a manner consistent with its constitutional obligations under the Fourth Amendment.”

“This is potentially very serious, something that if traced back to Donald Trump might even lead to impeachment,” Schoenberg wrote on his blog. “It deserves to be investigated fully and openly, and quickly, because if a crime was committed in the course of the FBI investigation, it is the crime of the century.”

The attorney told the Jewish Journal this week that it was reasonable to believe a Trump ally — including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — might have provided the false information to the FBI.

“It’s more likely something criminal happened in the obtaining of the search warrant than… Hillary Clinton did something wrong,” Schoenberg pointed out.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/holocau ... -of-trump/

Nazi Loot Lawyer Sues FBI To Release Clinton Investigation Documents
BY NATHAN TEMPEY IN NEWS ON DEC 8, 2016 9:35 AM

A Los Angeles lawyer is suing the Justice Department to obtain the documents supporting FBI director James Comey's late-October investigation into Hillary Clinton, which Comey publicized in a dramatic breach of protocol 11 days before the presidential election. The lawsuit, filed today in New York federal court, follows up on a November 12th Freedom of Information Act request by E. Randol Schoenberg, an attorney who specializes in the recovery of property looted by the Nazis. The records request and lawsuit seek the search warrant and supporting documents that the FBI and Justice Department used to review the Clinton-related emails of Huma Abedin that were found on Anthony Weiner's computer, during a separate investigation into his reported sexual online messages to a teenage girl in North Carolina.
"The American public has a strong interest in the disclosure of the search warrant and related application, affidavits, and receipts," the lawsuit reads. "The FBI is the nation's premier law enforcement agency. Access to the records that underlie criminal investigations is crucial to ensuring that the FBI is accountable for following the legal standards it is required to uphold."
On October 28th, Comey sent a letter to Congress explaining that he was revisiting the investigation into Clinton's use of a secret, insecure email server while secretary of state, because of new emails discovered in an unrelated investigation, which turned out to be the Weiner probe. Two days later, the New York Times reported that the FBI had obtained the search warrant it needed to proceed.
Over the summer, Comey had announced he was essentially closing the investigation into Clinton despite his misgivings over Clinton's behavior, also a breach of federal protocol regarding the discussion of investigations. His announcement that he was again investigating emails related to Clinton dominated headlines for nine of the 11 days leading up to the election—the fervor subsided when he announced, on November 6th, that the FBI would stand by its original determination on Clinton. Following her stunning upset loss by what now looks like about 80,000 votes in three key states, Clinton herself blamed Comey for the outcome, and Democratic Senator Harry Reid and others suggested that Comey may have violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits certain federal employees from engaging in political activity.
161207ERandolSchoenberg1.jpg
E. Randol Schoenberg's legal fight with the Austrian government on behalf of a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, seeking the return of paintings by Gustav Kilmt, was the basis of the 2015 movie Woman in Gold. (Tommaso Boddi/Getty)
The crux of the issue, according to Schoenberg, is contained in documents showing how the FBI got the warrant signed off on by a judge. To do so, law enforcement agents need to show the judge that there is probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed. Schoenberg speculates that either conservative-leaning federal officials made a case as if Clinton was an organized crime boss, i.e. "She's always up to no good, we're just not sure what she's doing," which wouldn't meet the bar of probable cause and could get the judge in trouble. On the flip-side, he said, it's possible that someone acting as an informant or witness provided false information to the FBI, possibly for political purposes, which should prompt its own investigation, given that lying to federal agents is a crime.
"How did that [warrant] get issued, and did someone do something wrong in getting that issued?" Schoenberg said. "Especially given the fact that many people believe, including me, that it changed the outcome of the election."
Ahead of Comey's October announcement, Donald Trump surrogates including Rudy Giuliani boasted of their ties to the FBI, claiming insider knowledge of a revolt against Comey's decision not to prosecute Clinton, and of coming revelations. Schoenberg said that he did not have any specific evidence to support the hypothesis that Trump allies planted the investigation, but that he has personal experience lobbying federal law enforcement via his work on returning Nazi-stolen art, and that it's very possible someone did something similar to make this happen.
Pressuring the authorities to look into something can be legitimate, he said. The difference, he said, is "Here there was never going to be any crime...especially after they had already investigated it, so why was a warrant issued?"
Schoenberg's lawsuit demands an injunction requiring the feds to depart from their usual timetable and process the FOIA request immediately. This, he said, is because in his experience FOIA requests can take years. He hopes that the documents enter the public record before Trump takes office in January.
"I think this one is a little bit more urgent," he said. "If—and this is obviously a huge leap—if there was some illegal activity that led to this failed search warrant and that traces back to the Trump campaign, that could have huge ramifications with Congress and the electoral college."
There is also, he acknowledged, the possibility that the basis of the warrant could point to some malfeasance by the Clinton camp, which he said would also be in the public interest to know about.
Schoenberg is best known for his long-shot legal victory in recovering five famous paintings by Gustav Klimt, stolen by the Nazis in Austria, for Maria Altmann, a Jewish refugee who resettled in the U.S. The battle over the paintings inspired the 2015 movie Woman in Gold. Ryan Reynolds starred as Schoenberg.
Schoenberg noted that he would rather prominent, well-resourced publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post had tackled the search warrant issue. However, he said he is happy to take it on, and that the task has some connection, however tenuous, with his work chasing Nazi bounty.
"I like tilting at windmills, and sometimes it turns out not to be as crazy as everybody thinks," he said. "[Maybe] I’m right that there’s some big story behind this, maybe i’m wrong...Sticking to your convictions, trying to think differently from everyone else is what I like to do."
The Justice Department has 30 days to formally respond, according to Schoenberg's attorney, David Rankin.
http://gothamist.com/2016/12/08/comey_c ... awsuit.php

barracuda » Tue Jan 24, 2017 5:56 pm wrote:

Morty » Tue Jan 24, 2017 6:13 pm wrote:"providing false information to the FBI"

I'm afraid that's just speculation. More hot air, in other words. There had been an official FBI investigation into Clinton's email server, and a new potential source of evidence presented itself. It's not surprising that a judge gave the go-ahead to investigate it, I wouldn't have thought.

Trump Just Ordered Government Scientists to Hide Facts From the Public
He also immediately suspended all EPA contracts and grants.

TOM PHILPOTTJAN. 24, 2017 7:24 PM

Throughout Trump's campaign, he and his proxies consistently expressed hostility to government regulation, particularly of the fossil fuel and agriculture industries. Within days of taking over, the Trump Administration has already put a squeeze on the two agencies that most directly regulate Big Energy and Big Ag, the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture.

At EPA, the administration has ordered that "all contract and grant awards be temporarily suspended, effective immediately," ProPublica writers Andrew Revkin and Jesse Eisinger report, quoting an internal EPA email they obtained. Myron Ebell, the climate change denier who led the Trump team's EPA transition and directs the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, confirmed the suspension, Revkin and Eisenger report.

If you can prevent public agencies from conducting vital functions, "you can say they don't do anything, and justify cutting their funding."
That's potentially a massive blow to the the agency's core functions, says Patty Lovera, assistant director of the environmental watchdog group Food & Water Watch. "The EPA's not necessarily out there running a bulldozer to clean up a toxic site," she says. Superfund, an EPA program responsible for cleaning up the nation's most contaminated land, is executed through contracts, she said. The EPA turns to contractors for "tons of water stuff, too"—from monitoring water quality downstream from polluters to helping municipalities update water infrastructure to avoid toxins.

"It's one thing to put a pause on new contracts to they can be reviewed, but to reach back and stop existing ones is a whole other can of worms," Lovera said.

in Flint, Michigan, where lead contamination has led to the nation's most notorious drinking-water catastrophe in years, the announcement brought uncertainty and confusion. "State officials are seeking more information on a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency freeze on grants and contracts and what it could mean to $100 million in federal funds already appropriated for the Flint water crisis," the news site MLive.com reported Tuesday. In statement quoted by MLive.com, the press secretary for Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder noted that "we haven't received any guidance from the federal government" about EPA's funding to address the Flint crisis.

Andrew Rosenberg, who directs the Center for Science and Democracy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, adds research to the list. The agency funds crucial environmental science through contracts with outside scientists, and interruptions to their funding can be devastating, he said. He likened the situation to the government shutdown of 2013, which temporarily blacked research funding throughout the federal government, including EPA. In a blog post at the time, Rosenberg quoted an EPA scientist he interviewed on the effects of such interruptions:

A toxicologist who works for the Environmental Protection Agency expressed great frustration that the crucial work of testing chemicals on the market for toxicity has been interrupted. This work had been slow and complex, and short of manpower. Now, things are worse, the scientist writes. “The next time you reach under the sink to pull out a cleaning product, ask yourself if you’d really like to know if it was causing cancer, or if it was safe.” The shutdown, the toxicologist concludes, will keep toxic chemicals on the shelves “longer than they otherwise should have.”

Of course, it remains unclear exactly how far-ranging the contract suspension is—and that brings us to another move from the White House: a media blackout. The Huffington Post's Kate Sheppard got hold of an internal EPA email sent to staff Monday blocking all press releases, social media messages, and blog posts. As for answering queries from journalists, "Incoming media requests will be carefully screened," the email stated. My own calls an emails to EPA spokespeople on Tuesday went unanswered.

Meanwhile, over at the USDA, a similar media blackout is afoot, reports Buzzfeed's Dino Grandoni:

According to an email sent Monday morning and obtained by BuzzFeed News, the department told staff — including some 2,000 scientists — at the agency’s main in-house research arm, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), to stop communicating with the public about taxpayer-funded work.

"Starting immediately and until further notice, ARS will not release any public-facing documents," Sharon Drumm, chief of staff for ARS, wrote in a department-wide email shared with BuzzFeed News.

"This includes, but is not limited to, news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content," she added.

Food & Water Watch's Lovera notes that the decree is somewhat ironic, because the Obama USDA itself kept its scientists on a short leash in terms of press access—especially on topics of high importance to the agrichemical industry, like pesticides and genetically modified crops, she said. The plight of former ARS entomologist Jonathan Lundgren, who focused on those sensitive issues, illustrates her point. My profile of Lundgren is here.

"It's not like USDA scientists were out shouting the in the public square," Lovera said. The recent gag order signals that the Trump team will put USDA research under even tighter control.

If the funding interruptions and media blackouts continue, she said, much of what the USDA and EPA do to study and protect the public from polluting industries will be negated. And that might be the point, she said: If you can prevent public agencies from conducting vital functions, "you can say they don't do anything, and justify cutting their funding."

On a positive note, all of the information that emerged Tuesday on the EPA and the USDA came from internal leaks. Trump may be determined to keep these crucial watchdog/research agencies tightly muzzled, but at least some career bureaucrats and scientists appear unwilling to keep the public in the dark.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/ ... a-and-usda

Trump takes action to move forward with Keystone, Dakota Access pipelines
BY DEVIN HENRY AND TIMOTHY CAMA - 01/24/17 11:50 AM EST

President Trump on Tuesday moved two controversial pipeline projects forward by signing a pair of executive actions that could speed up approval of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access projects.

In an Oval Office ceremony, Trump said the actions would create new jobs in the United States, and that the pipelines should be built with U.S. steel and labor.

“We will build our own pipeline, we will build our own pipes, like we used to, in the old days,” Trump said as he held up one of his actions to television cameras brought into the Oval Office to broadcast the event.

The actions are a sharp turn from the Obama administration's policies, as the former president had rejected the Keystone pipeline and delayed Dakota Access.

Tuesday's actions will not force the approval of either project, and Trump said he wanted to renegotiate terms with the pipelines’ developers. Those terms may include some way for the United States government to get a financial return from Keystone, a possibility he mentioned on the campaign trail.
The orders fulfill campaign promises Trump made to move both pipelines forward. They will gain ardent support from the oil industry and the GOP but strong opposition from Democrats and environmentalists.

The two projects require different approvals. Keystone, which would run from Canada’s oil sands in Alberta to the Gulf Coast in Texas, needs a presidential permit to build across the Canadian border. Dakota Access, developed by Energy Transfer Partners, needs an Army Corps of Engineers easement to build under Lake Oahe in North Dakota. Trump’s orders will expedite both.

TransCanada Corp., the company developing Keystone, thanked Trump for his memo. "We are currently preparing the application and intend to do so," spokesman Terry Cunha said in a statement.

Environmentalists on Tuesday vowed to remobilize the legal and grassroots forces that originally fought against the pipelines during the Obama administration.

Jane Kleeb, an anti-pipeline organizer who leads the group Bold Alliance, insisted Keystone is years away from completion, noting it still has to overcome landowner disputes in Nebraska and legal challenges to government decisions on the project.

“If they try to build without having permits, then you’re literally talking about hundreds of thousands of Americans who will descend on the state of Nebraska, and people of his own party, out in the sand hills, protecting land that’s been in their families since the 1800s,” she said.

Jan Hasselman, the Earthjustice lawyer representing the Standing Rock Sioux in its lawsuits against Dakota Access, said he expects to take the Trump administration to court if it approves the easement needed for constructing the project.

“The easement still has to meet the standards of the statue,” Hasselman said in an interview.

“An executive order can’t circumvent the law, and the previous administration found, correctly, that more work was needed and that the tribe’s treaty rights required more thorough analysis of risk and consideration of alternatives. An easement issued under this executive order violates the law, and we will take the Army to court.”

Keystone XL and Dakota Access have been major targets for greens, who coalesced against them when were working their way through the regulatory process under Obama.

Environmentalists on Tuesday indicated they’re ready for another fight against the projects.

“This is a con — a con on a massive scale — and we will fight it, we will fight it with everything we’ve got,” said Bill McKibben, the founder of climate group 350.org.

“It will be in the courts and it will be in the streets. We will fight it and we will fight it with a certain amount of hope that we will prevail in the end.”

Dallas Goldtooth, an anti-Dakota Access organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said he didn’t know if protest camps — 10,000-people strong last fall — would crop back up in North Dakota.

But he said the network will look to launch protest against the project around the country.

“If Trump does not pull back from implementing these orders, it will only result in more massive mobilization and civil disobedience on a scale never seen of a newly seated president of the United States,” he said.

The oil industry and labor groups — whose workers would construct the pipelines — have a different take on the projects, and they welcomed Trump’s announcement Tuesday.

“We are pleased to see the new direction being taken by this administration to recognize the importance of our nation’s energy infrastructure by restoring the rule of law in the permitting process that’s critical to pipelines and other infrastructure projects,” said Jack Gerard, head of the American Petroleum Institute.

“Critical energy infrastructure projects like the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access Pipelines will help deliver energy to American consumers and businesses safely and efficiently,” he continued.

Terry O’Sullivan, head of the Laborers’ International Union of North American, was also pleased.

“What we saw today was bold and decisive action by President Trump,” he said. “He said he was going to create middle-class jobs, and by what he did today, that’s exactly what he’s going to do.”

Jim Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, called Trump's move “a major step toward putting more Americans to work, building the infrastructure that we need, and creating economic prosperity.”

“It’s certainly confirms his commitment both to the rule of law and to job creation and energy security, which is pretty critical,” said Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), a close Trump ally whose state would contain segments of both lines.

He called it a “pretty significant differentiation between the previous administration and this one.”
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-enviro ... ns-to-move

Trump poised to take executive action on immigration
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... the-coming

Exclusive: Trump expected to sign executive orders on immigration

U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sign several executive orders on Wednesday restricting immigration from Syria and six other Middle Eastern or African countries, according to several congressional aides and immigration experts briefed on the matter.

In addition to Syria, Trump's orders are expected to temporarily restrict access to the United States for most refugees. Another order will block visas from being issued to those from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, said the aides and experts, who asked not to be identified.

seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 24, 2017 9:23 pm wrote: Russia Russia Russia ...fuck Russia fuck trump

Starting this week, the White House will open up four so-called Skype seats to reporters outside of Washington, DC. Press secretary Sean Spicer announced the move in a briefing today, one that he says will "open up the briefing room to journalists who live beyond 50 miles" of the DC area. Spicer also explained that the virtual access will give news outlets that don't have press passes or the financial resources to travel a chance to attend White House news sessions.

"I think this can benefit us all by giving a platform to voices that are not necessarily based here in the Beltway," Spicer said.

This Pro-Trump "Fact-Checking" Website Is Run By An American In Russia
When contacted by BuzzFeed News, Clint Ehrlich said he is behind the site trying to debunk “bogus claims about Mr. Trump and Russia’s government.”

Originally posted on Jan. 24, 2017, at 12:47 p.m.
Updated on Jan. 24, 2017, at 3:28 p.m.
Craig Silverman

BuzzFeed News Media Editor
Hayes Brown

FactCheck.net / Clint Ehrlich

An American working in Moscow is playing a key role in an effort to support President Donald Trump by “fact-checking” claims about Trump’s alleged connections to Russia.
Clint Ehrlich is a visiting researcher at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). He gained attention during the US election campaign for repeating Kremlin talking points in an opinion piece published in Foreign Policy that outlined the view that Hillary Clinton genuinely wanted to start a war with Russia.
Now, Ehrlich is back. Domain registration records and document metadata show that he played a key role in creating both an anonymous website, FactCheck.net, and a recent report it published claiming to reveal “exclusive evidence that casts doubt on the recent, highly publicized allegation that Donald Trump was compromised by Russia’s foreign-intelligence services.”
When reached by BuzzFeed News, Ehrlich confirmed that he was the person behind the site, saying the project was “exactly what it purported to be.”
After the publication of this story, the site posted a response “officially announcing” that Erlich is its editor-in-chief.
The FactCheck.net report aimed to refute information contained in the dossier compiled by a former MI6 agent that US intelligence used to brief Trump and then-President Barack Obama. Ehrlich was critical of the decision to publish the dossier, which contains explosive but unverified claims about Trump, and has been sending tweets that question some of the allegations in the document. Similar refutations are present in the FactCheck.net report.
When it launched earlier this month, FactCheck.net claimed to be run by a “group of experts” working to expose the “bogus claims about Mr. Trump and Russia’s government.” Nine days after announcing its presence on a bare-bones website with no identifying information, FactCheck.net published a PDF called “Shower of Falsehoods” that claimed to expose key inaccuracies in the Steele dossier. (The title is likely a play on both a RAND Corporation report about Russian propaganda, “Firehose of Falsehood,” and the the most eyebrow-raising of the allegations contained in the dossier.)
The resulting PDF cited no sources and said its authors are “a coalition of national-security professionals from the United States and Russia who have joined forces to expose ‘fake news.’ Our work is a public service, which is not financed or directed by either state.”
“I was the primary person involved in writing the content of the report, but the project was a collective effort that drew on the expertise of likeminded professionals, both for sourcing and analysis,” Ehrlich said in an email to BuzzFeed News. “Some of those people work inside Russia’s foreign-ministry and/or intelligence community, but the site was not created with the approval of anyone in Russia’s government.”
Asked for the names of some of those who worked on the report with him, he said, without elaborating, that many of them worked with him inside the MGIMO. Ehrlich said he would ask if any were willing to speak to BuzzFeed News directly, but added, “your site does not have the best reputation in Russia.”
Upon its release, someone with the username FactCheckDotNet began submitting a link to the report in different Reddit subgroups to try and get attention for the work. One redditor was immediately skeptical of a site that mimicked US fact-checking site FactCheck.org, and said that it was making big claims with no evidence or authors to back it up.
The redditor, DrJackMegaman, subsequently opened the PDF report and saw the author was identified as Clint Ehrlich. “Next time, clear the author section of the PDF,” the redditor said in his post.
The PDF was subsequently removed from the thread by the FactCheckDotNet account. Soon after, the PDF and two associated blog posts were also removed from FactCheck.net. (The posts are still viewable in Google Cache.)

BuzzFeed News
The man behind the DrJackMegaman account provided BuzzFeed News with a screenshot of the author information he found in the PDF. He says he is a 35-year-old based in New Jersey who has worked with computers for a long time. He became suspicious about the quality of the information and its source after seeing it pop up on Reddit, he said. So he began looking into the site and PDF.
“Once I found his name, I Googled it, and just copied his Twitter info and posted it [to Reddit] because I was still so angry,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I think it was just my breaking point with this whole election. I can’t fight against political injustice on a national scale but I could fight this guy.”
A cached link to the PDF did not include the same author information, so BuzzFeed News examined historical registration records for the FactCheck.net domain to confirm its owner. Records from DomainTools show that “Clinton Ehrlich-Quin” became the registrant of FactCheck.net in August of 2014. That’s the full name often used by the same Clint Ehrlich based in Moscow, and the address listed for the domain registration is the location of a law firm owned by his father. (Another domain used by Ehrlich also listed his father’s law firm address; however, there is no evidence the law firm itself had involvement in these websites.)
Also, the email address used to register the domain is the same one that’s publicly listed as the owner of ClintEhrlich.com, as well as 18 other domains, including SelfControlHelp.com and SelfControlIsHot.com. Ehrlich had previously told BuzzFeed News he owned a supplements company that sold a product called Self Control.
After Ehrlich became the owner of FactCheck.net, the ownership information was soon made private. It has been under the same privacy protection since then.

DomainTools
Ehrlich now estimates that he paid roughly $1,000 for the domain name back in 2014.
“I’m not hiding the fact that I like Russia,” Ehrlich previously told BuzzFeed News. “I feel like my views about international relations are something I can say [in Russia], because I agree with a lot of what the foreign ministry has to say and I value the culture and the people.”
He also objected to people reading into his motives: “If I express my sincere convictions and that lines up with things Moscow believes, I’m a propagandist.”
As for the “Showers of Falsehoods” document, Erhlich says: “I stand by all of the information in the report 100%. I took it down because it became clear that a different approach was needed to get people’s attention in a productive way.”
The approach of FactCheck.net is similar to that of PropOrNot, an anonymous group that claims to be made up of “concerned American citizens with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, including professional experience in computer science, statistics, public policy, and national security affairs.”
Its mission is to expose online sources and propagators of propaganda aimed at Americans, with a particular focus on Russia. The group faced strong criticism after it released a PDF report that included a list of websites it said were sources of Russian propaganda, without providing evidence of any direct connection to the Kremlin. Its members remain anonymous.
FactCheck.net in its response to this article took issue with the comparison to PropOrNot. “We dare to challenge the orthodoxy of both sides,” the post that also announced Ehrlich as the editor-in-chief reads.
So, yes, there are rival groups in the US and Russia claiming to expose propaganda and false information from the other side, while offering no evidence to back up their assertions. Welcome to 2017.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman ... .dwz0Xldmy

8bitagent » Wed Jan 25, 2017 6:24 am wrote:Noone seems to be taking the time out to appreciate what a truly meta bizarro altenrate reality we're now in. I clearly remember 10 years ago on here, everyone was angry about
the wars, Bush neocons, etc. If I would have said that in 10 years exactly a man would be president who'd personally humiliate Dubya and the Bush family...as well as attack the neocons
and go off into literal Alex Jones conspiracies as president you'd all be flabbergasted. Especially if I said it would be a man who was an 80s goofy tv celebrity meets 90s movie actor meets
2000's era reality tv star. Wasnt this election suppose to be "Bush(Jeb) vs Clinton(Hillary?)

Part of me wonders if a part of Trump wants to create this ultra over the top monster charicature of himself to bring to life the nightmarish version of Trump that the left
has in their mind. His law re-enacing Keystone and DAPL, his gutting of abortion abilities, his complete attack on the EPA and environmentalism/climate change information,
his obsession with his "5 million illegals" cost him the popular vote, his "alternative facts" believing he had the "bigges inauguration of all time, period", his ramping up of
"felony protest laws", his sabre rattling of China,. his "national day of Patriotic Devotion" decree, the gutting of the arts/pbs/etc, gutting any art funding,
slashing AIDS research and domestic violence studies , his vow to "eradicate completely from the face of the earth" radical Islam and his full on assault on the press and media, his banning of a number of government agencies from using social media or computers...
and on and on. Day 5, and we're far deep in bizarro world

"Day 5, and we're far deep in bizarro world."

"Part of me wonders if a part of Trump wants to create this ultra over the top monster charicature of himself to bring to life the nightmarish version of Trump that the left
has in their mind"