Post-Truth 

Alexander Dugin said, “truth is a matter of belief… there is no such thing as facts.”[1] During a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “Alternative facts” to defend White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump’s lackluster inauguration. This circuitous logic and the proliferation of “fake news” inspired Oxford Dictionaries to proclaim that its 2016 word of the year was “post-truth.” The new neologism is described as, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion or personal belief.” This condition is the intended consequences of the dark millennial ambitions of maniacal mystics like Alexander Dugin, exercised through Russia’s cyberwarfare to create disunity and confusion in the United States. As explained by Paul Ratner, writing in Big Think:

It’s not that Dugin is personally responsible for the hacks that are currently being explained as Putin’s personal vendetta against Clinton. But Dugin’s influential philosophy aligns very well with what seems to have happened and provides a stunning window into this and future conflicts with Russia.[2]

According to Vladislav Surkov, while Americans fret as to the Russians’ interference in the 2016 election, the matter is far more serious: “Russia is playing with the West’s minds,” he writes. “They don’t know how to deal with their own changed consciousness.”[3] Ultimately, explains Molly K. McKew, Russian information warfare, “is not about creating an alternate truth, but eroding our basic ability to distinguish truth at all.”[4] As Adrian Chen noted, “Russia’s use of propaganda, dirty tricks, leaks, and hacks in foreign affairs works a lot like a troll farm on a larger scale. The aim is to promote an atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia, heightening divisions among its adversaries.”[5] As explained by Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro, who received Bonnier’s Award for Journalism in March 2016 for her investigation of pro-Russian Internet trolls, “one of the goals of info-war is to create chaos not only in the information sphere but also within society itself.”[6]

Dugin was the architect of Russia’s recent influence operation, which Craig Unger has characterized as “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history,” by employing a legion of hackers to propel “fake news” to the detriment of Hillary Clinton’s electoral bid, and in favor of their agent, Donald Trump.[7] According to Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times:

The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign.[8]

Dugin is the leading proponent of “netwar,” “net-centric warfare,” and a “Eurasian network” as part of his geopolitical strategy against the Atlantic bloc. Dugin’s Eurasian network would include political leaders, diplomats, scientists, military organizations, intelligence, media, and communications linked together to promulgate a geopolitical campaign to counter Western influence and information. He also insists that the creation of the network must be attended by a shift toward postmodernism, by which he seems to mean an evolution in Russian culture that can appeal to twenty-first-century masses.[9] A report developed by the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) summarized Dugin’s proposal as follows: “Persistent messaging through social media not only condition the domestic audience and targeted groups in areas of conflict, but it also gives rise to spontaneous support groups abroad—people who respond with enthusiasm to the Russian message and help to propagate it without direct control from the state.”[10]

Russian information warfare techniques are an amalgamation of methods evolved within the Soviet Union. The revitalized doctrine, called spetzpropaganda, is taught in the Military Information and Foreign Languages Department of the Military University of the Ministry of Defense. Two noted academics dominate the development of information warfare in Russia: Igor Panarin and Alexander Dugin. Igor Panarin holds doctoral degrees in political science and psychology. He is a member of the Military Academy of Science and currently serves as a professor in the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is a former KGB member and a close associate of Putin. In his recent work entitled The Technology of Victory, Panarin boasted about what he considered to be a nearly flawless Russian operation to annex Crimea, and attributed its success in avoiding armed violence and preempting American interference to the personal leadership and direct control of Putin.[11]

Panarin and Dugin believe that recent political upheavals often attributed to the powers of social media, such as the “color” revolutions in former Soviet states, and the Arab Spring to American acts of information warfare. In response to such threats, Panarin articulated the need for a centrally-controlled information warfare campaign that uses propaganda, intelligence, analysis, secret agents, media manipulation, and selected special operations to influence the masses and politicians.[12] Military operations, for Dugin, play a relatively minor role. Dugin, John B. Dunlop explains, believes in a sophisticated program of subversion, destabilization, and disinformation spearheaded by the Russian special services.”[13]

Dugin and Panarin’s theories have become the basis of what is called the Gerasimov Doctrine, currently prevalent in Russian defense. It is attributed to General Valery Gerasimov, the first Deputy Defense Minister, appointed by President Vladimir Putin in 2012. Gerasimov is the current Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia, who use Dugin’s book The Foundations of Geopolitics, as a textbook for aspiring officers.[14] The “Gerasimov doctrine” combines military, technological, information, diplomatic, economic, cultural and other tools deployed by the Russian state. General Gerasimov’s main thesis is that modern conflict differs significantly from the paradigm of World War II and even from Cold War conflict. In place of conventional warfare, liberal democratic often result in foreign intervention, chaos, humanitarian disaster, and civil war. These activities may become the “typical war” of the modern era, and may even humanitarian operations should be considered part of an unconventional warfare campaign.[15] “Methods of conflict,” he wrote, have changed, and now involve “the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian and other non-military measures.” All of this, he said, could be supplemented by agitating the local populace as a fifth column and by “concealed” armed forces.[16]

Troll Farm

Putin has continued to invest money and manpower into the country’s hacking forces since returning to the presidency in 2012, according to US officials.[17] Russian computer attacks have become more aggressive as the country increases its opposition to the U.S. and European nations over military objectives, first in Ukraine and now Syria. In the past couple years, Russian hackers have launched attacks on a French television network, a German steelmaker, the Polish stock market, the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. State Department, and The New York Times.

According to a report by the FBI and US intelligence agencies, Russia is home to the most skilled community of cybercriminals on the globe, and the Kremlin has close ties to them.[18] Spearheading the organized hacking rings is the Russian mafia, security experts say.[19] Russian-speaking hackers earned an estimated $4.5 billion globally using various online criminal tactics and are thus responsible for 36% of the estimated total of $12.5 billion earned globally by cybercriminals in 2011, Russian security analyst firm Group-IB said in a report published in 2012.[20] As early as 2001, the Russian mafia was already operating in 50 countries, including the US, with representatives in every major city.[21] Most of these criminal organizations in Russia make money by selling cyber “goods” on websites they host, ranging from botnets used for DDoS attacks to Trojans programmed to attack a specific target.[22]

Security experts said the Russian mafia hacking rings are often run by former KGB agents who recruit young hackers who answer Internet ads for computer programmers, planted by organized crime outfits in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Murmansk.[23] According to a new study published by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), there is a close connection between the Kremlin’s Foreign Intelligence Service, military intelligence (GRU), and the Federal Security Service (FSB) and Russian organized criminal groups active in European countries.[24] “The Russian state is highly criminalised, and the interpenetration of the criminal ‘underworld’ and the political ‘upperworld’ has led the regime to use criminals from time to time as instruments of its rule,” the ECFR study said.[25]

On February 16, 2018, Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into Russia’s impact on the 2016 indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations for their “conspiracy” to illegally influence the US presidential campaign. The majority worked for the Internet Research Agency, based in Saint Petersburg, known popularly as “Trolls from Olgino.” The agency has been widely reported in Russian media to be the brainchild of Evgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch and ally of Vladimir Putin.[26] One former troll, who was interviewed by the independent Russian news outlet Dozhd and went by “Maxim,” or Max, said the Internet Research Agency consisted of a “Russian desk” and a “foreign desk.” The Russian desk, which was primarily made up of bots and trolls, used fake social-media accounts to flood the internet with pro-Trump stories and fake news throughout the US presidential campaign, especially in the days leading up to the November election.

Beginning in fall 2014, The New Yorker writer Adrian Chen performed a six-month investigation into the Internet Research Agency. Chen observed a pattern in December 2015 where pro-Russian accounts became supportive of Donald Trump 2016’s presidential campaign.[27] Likewise, The Guardian reported in November 2016 the most strident Internet promoters of Trump were not US citizens but paid Russian propagandists, estimating the number in the thousands.[28] BuzzFeed and The Guardian separately investigated and found teenagers in Veles, a small town in Romania, were earning thousands of dollars a month from over 100 sites spreading fraud supportive of Donald Trump. The teenagers experimented with a left slant about Bernie Sanders, but found that fictions about Donald Trump more popular and more profitable.[29]

Working alongside the bots, explains Watts, were “honeypot” accounts, attractive-looking women or supposedly passionate political partisans, who would befriend certain audience members.[30] They targeted nearly any disaffected American audience, addressing claims of the US military declaring martial law during the Jade Helm exercise, controversy amid the Black Lives matter protests, or tensions in the Bundy Ranch standoff in Oregon. On the evening July 30, Russia Today and Sputnik News simultaneously launched false stories of the US airbase at Incirlik being overrun by terrorists.[31] The most common words found in English-speaking Twitter user profiles were: God, Military, Trump, Family, Country, Conservative, Christian, America, and Constitution.[32]

Established in March 2016, EndingTheFed.com, a popular source of fake news, was run by a 24-year-old Romanian named Ovidiu Drobota. The site was named after a similar book by Ron Paul, titled End The Fed, which debuted at number six on the New York Times Best Seller list and advocates the abolition of the United States Federal Reserve System, a popular topic with conspiracy authors since the first expose by Eustace Mullins. Ending the Fed garnered approximately 3.4 million views over a 30-day-period in November 2016. It was responsible for a false story in August 2016 that incorrectly stated Fox News had fired journalist Megyn Kelly, a story which was briefly prominent on Facebook on its “Trending News” section. EndingTheFed held four out of the 10 most popular fake articles on Facebook related to the 2016 US election in the prior three months before the election itself. After being contacted by Inc. magazine, Drobota stated he was proud of the impact he had on the 2016 U.S. election in favor of his preferred candidate Donald Trump.[33]

Some fake news websites use website spoofing, structured to make visitors believe they are visiting trusted sources. A well-known example is ABCnews.com.co which mimics ABCnews.com. Paul Horner, the owner of the site, has claimed to make $10,000 per month from advertising traffic.[34] Horner, a satirist, twice convinced the Internet he was the real Banksy, spread a story about paid Anti-Trump protesters, that Yelp was suing South Park, and that he had undergone the world’s first head transplant. Nevertheless, his stories had an “enormous impact” on the 2016 US presidential election according to CBS News, and were taken seriously and shared by third parties such as Trump presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Eric Trump, ABC News, and the Fox News Channel.[35] Horner later claimed that his work was intended “to make Trump’s supporters look like idiots for sharing my stories,” but that it backfired:

I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters—they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he’s in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad].[36]

The Internet Research Agency also had its own “Facebook desk,” whose function was to confront the site’s administrators who deleted numerous bogus accounts as they began gaining traction.[37] Facebook admitted in September 2017 that an internal investigation uncovered 470 fraudulent Facebook accounts and pages linked to a Russian “troll farm” that bought 3,300 Facebook ads costing around $100,000 during the recent American presidential election. Facebook found another 2,200 ads, costing $50,000, that appear to have originated in the US, but with the user language set to Russian. These ads reached between 23 million and 70 million Facebook users, according to one report, and wasn’t discovered until more than a year after the first ads were placed. Although the ads did not openly support one candidate or the other, they “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum,” according to Facebook.[38]

Among these accounts was a social media campaign calling itself “Blacktivist” which used both Facebook and Twitter in an apparent attempt to amplify racial tensions. The “Blacktivist” Facebook account had 360,000 likes, more than the verified Black Lives Matter account on Facebook, which in September 20017 had just over 301,000. The page also publicized at least seven rallies and demonstrations around the country in 2016. The matching Twitter account was among the roughly 200 accounts Twitter identified with links to those found by Facebook.[39]

Jenna Abrams, a Russian bot who went by the username @Jenn_Abrams, discussed topics online such as the Confederate Flag and the flaws of political correctness. Abrams’ account amassed over 70,000 followers during the 2016 presidential election. Her posts appeared in news stories across several media organizations, including the CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn followed Abrams, along with Flynn’s son, Michael Flynn Jr., who shared a tweet from the Russia-controlled account days before the election.[40]

Right-wing publications pushed a conspiracy theory about a Hillary Clinton body double, recirculated an old and false story about a Canadian mayor lecturing Muslim immigrants about integration, wrongly claimed that at his last address at the UN Obama told Americans they needed to give up their freedom for a “New World Government.”[41] The most notorious example is known as “Pizzagate.” According to two members of the Senate Intelligence committee, Senator Mark Warner and committee chairman Richard Burr, hundreds of Russian trolls were paid in 2016 to generate fake news stories about Clinton and target them at voters in key swing states to support the election of Trump.

Due to the winner-take-all style of the Electoral College, the system heavily favors these smaller, more conservative states, permitting Trump to win the election, despite losing the popular vote. According to a federal indictment by the US special prosecutor Robert Mueller, says senior employees working as Russian trolls visited the US under false pretenses in 2014 to gather intelligence on the upcoming elections, visiting several states, including Michigan, that might prove critical to the outcome. In fact, Trump lost the popular vote by about 3 million votes, but won in the Electoral College because of a total margin of roughly 100,000 votes in three swing states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.[42]

In or around June 2016, these same Russian agents, according to the indictment, posing online as U.S. persons, communicated with a real US person affiliated with a Texas-based grassroots organization. The Russians learned from the real US person that they should focus their activities on “purple states like Colorado, Virginia & Florida.” The person affiliated with the Texas grassroots group also promised the Russian nationals he or she would pass along Facebook events to Tea Party voters in Florida, the indictment says. One group, the Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM), which advocates for secession, immediately put out a statement saying it “had no knowledge of nor any involvement with the Russian-led efforts to influence” the election.[43] As revealed by Casey Michel, in September 2016, Nathan Smith, serving as “foreign minister” of TNM, attended the second-annual “Dialog of Nations” conference financed by the Kremlin in Moscow, which hosted Western organizations that would secede from their respective countries. The conference was hosted by the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, which names Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as “honorable members.”[44]

In addition to Facebook groups like Blacktivist, United Muslims of America and Army of Jesus, Mueller’s indictment also lists “Heart of Texas,” the most prominent Texas secession social media presence online. With over 225,000 followers as of summer 2017, the page, at one point last year, boasted more Facebook fans than the official Texas Democrat and Republican pages combined. When Heart of Texas asked TNM if it would participate in a series of anti-immigrant, anti-Hillary Clinton rallies it was planning to hold across the state in November 2016, the group’s president claims to have said “thanks, but no thanks.”[45]

Whistleblowers

On June 10, 2013, Daniel Ellsberg, who is famous for releasing the Pentagon Pagers, published an editorial in The Guardian praising the actions of Edward Snowden in revealing top-secret surveillance programs of the NSA. Ellsberg believes that the United States has fallen into an “abyss” of total tyranny, but said that because of Snowden’s revelations, “I see the unexpected possibility of a way up and out of the abyss.”[46] In the same month, Ellsberg and numerous celebrities appeared in a video showing support for Chelsea Manning, who was arrested by the U.S. military in Iraq after allegedly providing to WikiLeaks a classified video showing U.S. military helicopter gunships strafing and killing Iraqis alleged to be civilians, including two Reuters journalists. Ellsberg expressed hope that either Assange or President Obama would post the video, and expressed his strong support for Assange and Manning, whom he called “two new heroes of mine.”[47]

Left-wing journalist-celebrity Glenn Greenwald praised Wikileaks in Salon for its “vital” work,[48] and described Manning as “a whistle-blower acting with the noblest of motives” and “a national hero similar to Daniel Ellsberg.”[49] However, Ex-CIA head John Brennan said that if someone tracked WikiLeaks’ releases over time, it was clear that they were often timed to coincide with certain events or to undermine national security.[50] Nevertheless, Greenwald characterized an Washington Post article that claimed that millions of Americans were deceived in a massive Russian “misinformation campaign” as “disgracefully” promoting a “McCarthyite blacklist.”[51]

As summarized by Sean Wilentz in “Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?” for The New Republic, Greenwald, “beholds American liberals, and American liberalism, as no less guilty than the so-called conservatives of the Republican Party for expanding and defending, at all costs, brutal American imperialism abroad and tyrannical surveillance at home.”[52] Despite his liberal background, Greenwald initially gravitated to right-wing sites such as Townhall, where he met some of their supporters and liked them. By 1996, Greenwald had co-founded his own litigation firm where he represented the neo-Nazi National Alliance and Matthew Hale, the head of the Illinois-based white-supremacist World Church of the Creator, after he encouraged shooter Benjamin Smith to go on a two-state shooting rampage. Hale was sued by a number of survivors, which included two teenage Orthodox Jewish boys and a Black minister. Greenwald remarked, “I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me.”[53] The court found the Greenwald’s conduct was unethical, taping the witnesses he subpoenaed and manipulating their statements.[54]

In 2005, Greenwald wound down his legal practice and launched his own blog, Unclaimed Territory. In 2007, he became a regular columnist for Salon, becoming very popular on the left, eventually gaining praise from, among others, Christopher Hayes, Michael Moore, and Rachel Maddow, who dubbed him “the American left’s most fearless political commentator.”[55] As well as to left-wing anti-imperialists, Greenwald’s critiques of America foreign policy appealed also to isolationist paleoconservatives. In August 2007, he appeared at the Cato Institute’s headquarters in Washington. In November 2007, Greenwald called Paul “as vigilant a defender of America’s constitutional freedoms… as any national figure in some time.” To defend his many contradictory associations, Greenwald attacked his critics as “McCarthyite” purveyors of “falsehoods, fabrications, and lies.”[56]

In an article titled “Russia and the Menace of Unreality” for The Atlantic, with reference to Greenwald’s shoddy journalism, Peter Pomerantsev wrote:

The ties that bind Greenwald and the Kremlin consist of more than a shared desire to ensure Edward Snowden’s safety. In some dark, ideological wood, Putin the authoritarian gay-basher and Greenwald the gay, leftist-libertarian meet and agree. And as the consensus for reality-based politics fractures, that space becomes ripe for exploitation. It’s precisely this trend that the Kremlin hopes to exploit.[57]

In October 2010, just before WikiLeaks reached the peak of its influence with the release of the State Department cables, Assange vowed that WikiLeaks would expose the secrets not just of the United States but of all oppressive regimes, including Russia. The day after, an anonymous official from Russia’s FSB, told the independent Russian news website LifeNews.ru, “It’s essential to remember that given the will and the relevant orders, [WikiLeaks] can be made inaccessible forever.”[58] In November 2010, a request was made for Assange’s extradition to Sweden, where he had been questioned months earlier over allegations of sexual assault and rape. Assange denied the allegations, but surrendered himself to UK police on 7 December 2010, and was held for ten days before being released on bail. A few days after Assange was arrested on sexual assault charges, Kremlin officials emerged among his most vocal supporters. The Moscow Times reported that Putin himself had condemned Assange’s arrest, stating, “If it is full democracy, then why have they hidden Mr. Assange in prison? That’s what, democracy?”[59] The Moscow Times article also recounted how the Russian Reporter, a Putin-friendly publication, had gained “privileged access” to “hundreds of [American diplomatic] cables containing Russia-related information.”[60]

Assange ultimately ended up in asylum inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he remains. Ecuador has a long-standing diplomatic relationship with Russia. Ecuador and the Soviet Union had established diplomatic relations in 1969, but it was not until 1972, when Ecuador joined OPEC, that the Soviets showed much interest in country. By the mid-1970s, the Soviet Union maintained an embassy in Quito rivaling in importance that of the United States. Russia and Ecuador have enjoyed close relationship over a decade as Rafael Correa’s government moved the country away from the US. In 2017, Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Guillaume Long told Sputnik that the relations between Russia and Ecuador had a strategic value, adding that such cooperation promoted the idea of a multipolar world.[61]

In 2011, WikiLeaks had announced that it would be represented by Alan Dershowitz, who described his client as “the Pentagon Papers case for the 21st Century.”[62] In April 2012, Assange launched a half-hour political TV show, eventually named “The Julian Assange Show” on Russia Today. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Assange reportedly “gave excuse after excuse” for refusing to publish a trove of documents related to corruption within the Russian government, according to chat logs obtained by Foreign Policy.[63]

Late in 2012, Assange announced the formation of the WikiLeaks Party in Australia, which nominated Senate candidates in three states, with Assange running for office in Victoria, and aligned with a collection of far-right parties. One was the nativist Australia First, whose most prominent figure was a former neo-Nazi previously convicted of coordinating a shotgun attack on the home of an Australian representative of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.[64]

However, Assange confessed, “the 95 percent of the population which compromise the flock have never been my target and neither should they be yours. It’s the 2.5 percent at either end of the normal that I have in my sights.”[65] As Raffi Khatchadourian observed in a New Yorker profile, Assange came to see “the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution.”[66] Finally, in 2013, Assange proclaimed, “The only hope as far as electoral politics presently… is the libertarian section of the Republican Party.”[67]

From within the Ecuadorian Embassy, Assange also praised Edward Snowden as a “hero.” On May 20, 2014, Snowden fled Hawaii with hard drives full of NSA material and arrived in Hong Kong, where he was joined by Greenwald and his associate, the filmmaker and activist Laura Poitras who revealed him to the world as the NSA “whistle-blower.” In February 2014, Greenwald and Poitras became editors of The Intercept, which was founded by First Look Media. The news organization was created by billionaire eBay co-founder and PayPal owner Pierre Omidyar, in a $250 million deal, to report on the documents released by Snowden in the short term, and to “produce aggressive, adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues” in the long term.[68] The Omidyar Network also has ties with Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden’s former employer.[69] When accusations surfaced that documents withheld by Greenwald included information that connected PayPal to the NSA, he responded on Twitter, “I don’t doubt PayPal cooperates with NSA—that this is in the docs that we’ve been paid to withhold are total lies.”[70]

In time, Assange would disclose that WikiLeaks was paying for Snowden’s travel and lodgings and providing him with legal counsel. On June 21, 2014, according to a report in the Russian newspaper Kommersant, Snowden took up residence at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong. Two days later, he and by Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks boarded an Aeroflot flight for Moscow. Reports vary about who exactly steered Snowden to the Russians. But WikiLeaks has claimed credit, tweeting that it had helped to arrange for Snowden to gain “political asylum in a democratic country.”[71] Izvestia divulged that the Kremlin and its intelligence services, in collaboration with WikiLeaks, had arranged Snowden’s escape.[72] Ecuador was one of the countries that offered Snowden political asylum while he was in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.

After it published the DNC emails in July 2016, WikiLeaks did not reveal its source, but Guccifer 2.0 claimed responsibility for the attack. Guccifer 2.0 was also leaking documents directly to The Observer, a publication owned by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and Senior White House Adviser.[73] In March 2018, The Daily Beast, citing US government sources, reported that Guccifer 2.0 is in fact a Russian GRU officer. Guccifer apparently once forgot to use a VPN, leaving IP logs on “an American social media company” server. The IP address was used by US investigators to identify Guccifer 2.0 as “a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street (ru) in Moscow.”[74]

Assange received more than 80 visitors in the seven weeks leading up to the release of hacked DNC emails by WikiLeaks, including two journalists from RT, the documentary film-maker Michael Moore, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek and a German hacker. Assange’s visitors also included well-known WikiLeaks supporters such as the designer Vivienne Westwood, the journalist John Pilger and the German hacker Andy Müller-Maguhn.[75]

Among his guests were senior staff members from RT. A declassified US intelligence assessment released in January 2017 singled out RT and referred to it as a “partner” of WikiLeaks. Visits by RT’s London bureau chief, Nikolay Bogachikhin, who is Russian, and Afshin Rattansi, a British citizen and an RT journalist who has been a staunch defender of both Assange and Putin’s government. In June and July 2016, Assange was also visited by two Russian citizens, Bogachikhin and Yana Maximova, 28, a Russian émigré to the US who has worked as a volunteer journalist for a community radio station in Portland.[76] Adam Waldman, a longtime US lobbyist for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska visited Assange nine times at the Ecuadorian embassy in 2017, according to visitor logs seen by the Guardian. Waldman, who also represents other clients including Hollywood stars, also served as a counsel for Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.[77]

Alt-Left

According to the Trump Dossier, a Kremlin official involved in US relations commented that Russian operations involved supporting various political figures, including indirectly funding their recent visits to Moscow, including a delegation from Lyndon Larouche, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Carter Page and Michael T. Flynn, who would become Trump’s controversial National Security Advisor. That support, according to the official, was determined to be successful in terms of perceived outcomes, whose goals had been threefold: “asking sympathetic US actors how Moscow could help them; gathering relevant intelligence; and creating and disseminating compromising information (‘kompromat’).”

Subsequent to the 2016 election, the issue of fake news turned into a political weapon, with supporters of left-wing politics saying those on the opposite side of the spectrum spread falsehoods, and supporters of right-wing politics contending such accusations were merely a way to censor conservative views.[78] A BuzzFeed analysis found that three big right-wing Facebook pages published false or misleading information 38% of the time during the period analyzed, and three large left-wing pages did so in nearly 20% of posts.[79] As the authors concluded:

The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world’s biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear.[80]

“Russia’s propaganda mechanisms primarily aim for “alt-right and more traditional right-wing and fascist parties,” said Watts. “It’s not exclusive to Trump,” Watts explained however. “They are huge in the white nationalist community. That’s where we saw them before they went to Trump. And then they try on the left as well.”[81] They are also “hitting across any group in the United States that is anti-government, or fomenting dissent or conspiracies against the US government and its institutions.”[82]

A key aspect of the Russian propaganda campaign against the US was its command of the alternative and right-wing conspiracy media. As Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has stated, the Kremlin sees the mass media as a “weapon.”[83] In Russia, broadcast and print media is tightly controlled by the Kremlin. After Putin came into power in 2000, he established control over the three main TV stations. In 2001 and 2002, he took control of the two biggest TV channels, ORT (now First Channel) and NTV. The state broadcaster, RTR (now Rossiya 1), was already under his control. During his subsequent year in power, Putin gathered more outlets under his influence until he controlled most of the major mainstream media, appointing editors and general directors, either officially or unofficially.

In 2005, the Kremlin established the state-funded 24-hour international news channel Russia Today. In 2014, the Russian government launched Sputnik geared towards a non-Russian audience. Like Russia Today, it has been widely criticized of bias, disinformation and being a Russian propaganda outlet. As noted by Jessikka Aro, “Many fake news sites, such as Sputnik, describe their content as ‘alternative.’ In reality this usually means ‘pro-Russian’, ‘conspiracy theoretical’ and ‘anti-Western’. Articles critical of Putin’s regime are not published.”[84]

Weisburd and Watts wrote for The Daily Beast in August 2016 that Russian propaganda-fabricated articles were spread from Russia Today and Sputnik News and popularized on Twitter and other social media.[85] RT’s English-language flagship YouTube channel, launched in 2007, has 1.85 million subscribers and a total of 1.8 billion views, making it more widely viewed than CNN’s YouTube channel.[86] Watts told CNN, but they’re also “hitting across any group in the United States that is anti-government, or fomenting dissent or conspiracies against the US government and its institutions.”[87]

A non-partisan group of anonymous investigators, calling themselves PropOrNot, produced a report provided to the Washington Post which identifies more than 200 websites as part of a Russian propaganda network, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. They could be recognized by their parroting of the Kremlin party-line, often packaged in anti-establishment or anti-imperialist and left-wing rhetoric, or popular themes of conspiracy theorists, and aligning with the Eurasianist philosophy of Alexander Dugin.[88] Some of these stories originated with RT and Sputnik, or used social-media accounts to amplify misleading stories already circulating online, causing news algorithms to identify them as “trending,” and sometimes prompting coverage from mainstream news organizations. PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times on Facebook. These trends, wrote John Herrman in the New York Times Magazine “are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm.”[89] They included a wide range of websites from either end of the political spectrum, from Global Resesarch, to popular conspiracy sites like BeforeItsNews, VeteransToday, Rense.com and Alex Jone’s InfoWars.

Politico has reported that Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington who has studied the role of Veterans Today (VT) in the Russia-aligned “alternative media ecosystem,” described the website as an “active partner” in the dissemination of Russian propaganda.[90] VT struck up a partnership with New Eastern Outlook (NEO), a geopolitical journal published by the government-chartered Russian Academy of Sciences. Before that it partnered with Iran’s state-backed PressTV and counted among its editorial board of directors a former head of Pakistan’s intelligence services. VT’s sister site Veterans News Now began publishing content from the Strategic Culture Foundation, a Moscow think tank run by Yuri Profokiev, a former head of Moscow’s Communist Party and member of the Soviet Politburo.

VT also partnered with South Front, which a State Department expert in Russian influence campaigns described as a part of the Kremlin’s influence apparatus and noted that Russia has long sought to amplify the voices of Western conspiracy theorists. VT’s chairman Gordon Duff stated in a 2012 interview, “About 30% of what’s written on Veterans Today, is patently false. About 40% of what I write, is at least purposely, partially false, because if I didn’t write false information I wouldn’t be alive.”[91]

New Eastern Outlook has also partnered with F. William Engdahl and Tony Cartalucci of the Land Destroyer Report. Both are also featured authors of GlobalResearch.ca, founded by Michael Chossudovsky. As well as researchers popular in the conspiracy community, such as Webster Tarpley and Alex Jones, RT has recruited as regular contributors a wide range of pundits popular on the left, including Chossudovsky and Engdahl, as well as John Pilger, George Galloway, Dean Henderson and Pepe Escobar. Galloway hosts a show on Sputnik called “Orbiting the world with George Galloway.” Oliver Stone’s son Sean Stone, who converted to Shiah Islam hosts “Watching the Hawks” on RT. Oliver Stone recently directly Snowden, and a series of interviews with Russian president Vladimir Putin over the span of two years was released as The Putin Interviews.

Chossudovsky is the founder of the Canada-based Centre for Research on Globalization, which operates globalresearch.ca, and which is critical of American foreign policy, NATO, the official 9/11 narrative and the War on Terror. Chossudovsky and the Centre’s contributors Mahdi D. Nazemroaya and William Engdahl are members of the scientific committee of the Italian journal Geopolitica, which also includes John Laughland and Natalya Narochnitskaya, the key proponent of the Third Rome myth and member of the Izborsk Club with Dugin. Geopolitica is edited by Tiberio Graziani, a fervent advocate of the Eurasian cooperation and a member of the High Council of the International Eurasian Movement led by Alexander Dugin. Geopolitica itself is an offshoot of the Italian extreme right journal Eurasia, Rivista di Studi Geopolitici, published and edited by Claudio Mutti.[92]

John Laughland is a British eurosceptic conservative academic who has contributed articles to The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator, Brussels Journal, The Wall Street Journal, William F. Buckley’s National Review, and Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservative The American Conservative and paleolibetarian Antiwar.com. Since 2008, Laughland has been Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation (IDC) in Paris, which is headed by Narochnitskaya. Laughland, along with Chossudovsky, Dugin, Engdahl and Narochnitskaya are in the pool of political commentators of yet another Kremlin-sponsored media service, the Voice of Russia, which is an offshoot in France is ProRussia TV which is linked to the National Front.[93]

Laughland is on the Academic Board of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity (RPIPP), whose Advisory Board includes Lew Rockwell, Dennis Kucinich and former US Ambassador to Switzerland Faith Whittlesey. According to an analysis by the Washington Free Beacon, the RPIPP “have spent years as professional spin-doctors for Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders of oppressive regimes.”[94] Ron Paul, recently made the headlines when he defended Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “Actually he has some law on his side,” Paul said on Fox Business Channel’s “The Independents” in 2014.[95] Paul Craig Roberts claimed in a RPIPP article that “Washington’s neoconservative nazis have been agitating for war with Russia for a long time” because they “want to remove one of the three remaining restraints (Russia, China, Iran) on Washington’s world hegemony.”[96] RPIPP has also defended the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, and the government of Iran.

Whittlesey is also a member of the National Security Advisory Council (NSAC) is a sub-organization of the Center for Security Policy (CSP) founded by Frank Gaffney. The NSAC also includes Edwin Feulner, Jr. founder and President of the Heritage Foundation, and neoconservatives like Midge Dector, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle. Other the members of the RPIPP include Eric Margolis; Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit; Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; and Claes Ryn, former president of the Philadelphia Society; Flynt Leverett, was the senior CIA analyst and senior director for at the NSC, and a Senior Fellow and Director of Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of Energy Security Project at the New America Foundation (NAF).[97] The chairman of the Board of Directors is the Chairman & CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt.[98]

Webster Tarpley, author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, like Engdahl has also been a long-time associate of the LaRouche movement and has written many articles for their publications. Engdahl is the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order and discusses the role of Henry Kissinger and the Bilderberger conferences in the orchestration of the 1973 Oil Crisis. Engdahl is also a contributor to the Russian website New Eastern Outlook, and the Voltaire Network, and a freelancer for varied newsmagazines such as the Asia Times.

The Voltaire Network was founded in 1994 by French conspiracy-theorist Thierry Meyssan for the purpose of the “defense of freedom of expression and secularism.” Meyssan is the author of 9/11: The Big Lie. Meyssan was a participant at the Eurasian Media Forum in Kazakhstan in 2014, and his articles are published in Meyssan’s articles are published in Odnako, alongside Dugin’s. Meyssan has also been featured in Geopolitika. He was also the founder of the “Axis for Peace” conference held in 2005, which was aimed at “initiating a dialogue between world political leaders and intellectuals who want to reach a common understanding and strategy against imperialism and Zionism.” Support for the conference in the US came from Willis Carto’s American Free Press, and featured Christopher Bollyn, Tarpley and General Leonid Ivashov, a former Member of the Russian Joint Chiefs of Staff and vice president of the Academy on Geopolitical Affairs, who was reportedly involved in Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics.[99] The conference was covered by RT, TeleSur, the Venezuelan television channel of the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela, and Al Jazeera. General Ivashov is described by the LaRouche organization as an active participant in Russia’s increasingly influential Izborsk Club, having co-authored its military-strategic white paper in early 2013.[100]

Nataliya Vitrenko, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, and member of Supreme Council of Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement, which has branches in 22 countries, is also a close ally of the LaRouche network. Vitrenko has for years promoted LaRouche’s ideas, addressed LaRouchite-sponsored meetings and conferences, and received favorable coverage in LaRouchite publications. In February 2014, for example, Executive Intelligence Review published a statement by Vitrenko under the headline “U.S.A. and EU, With Ukrainian Terrorists, Establish Nazi Regime.”[101]

As noted by Matthew N. Lyons, while LaRouche is dismissed in the United States as a “wing-nut conspiracist,” in Russia “his ideology is taken seriously by high-ranking politicians and scholars, and is cross-pollinating with the ideas of Russian far rightists such as Dugin.”[102] Beginning in 1994, LaRouche made numerous visits to Russia, peddling his conspiracy-driven theories, which argued against adoption of Western liberal economic models by Russia. Presented at the State Duma in 1995, his ideas struck a chord with many members of the Duma largely dominated by the anti-liberal and anti-democratic forces such as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia and other ultranationalists.”[103]

Around this time, LaRouche began to forge ties with Sergey Glazyev, an adviser to Putin on the issues of regional economic integration. The LaRouchites praised Glazyev published Glazyev’s interviews and articles in their weekly Executive Intelligence Review. In 1999, LaRouche published an English translation of Glazyev’s Genocide: Russia and the New World Order, in which he shared his theories about “the world oligarchy” using “depopulation techniques developed by the fascists” “to cleanse the economic space of Russia for international capital.” According to Glazyev, under the guidance of “the world oligarchy,” the US is implementing “anti-Russian policies” aimed at preventing “the reunification of the Russian people,” provoking “further dismemberment of Russia” and frustrating “integration processes within the territory of the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States].”[104]The relations between LaRouche and Glazyev continued in the 2000s, the Putin era. In particular, LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche took part in the Duma hearing “On Measures to Ensure the Development of the Russian Economy under Conditions of a Destabilization of the World Financial System” held in June 2001 at the initiative of Glazyev who was then chairman of the Duma Committee on Economic Policy and Entrepreneurship.

The Russian website Terra Americas posted a five-part series, under the title “The Last Rosicrucian,” which outlined the source of LaRouche’s influence in Russia. The series explained that LaRouche had a direct affiliation to the Rosicrucian order, any more than the Golden Dawn would have, but described his influence as follows:

The essence and the soul of what was called the Rosicrucian devotion, a comprehensive transformation of art, science, religion, and the intellectual domain in Europe of that time, which faced a global crisis (the Thirty Years War), in our view has been reborn in the activity of Lyndon LaRouche and his supporters. This is the reason why we see LaRouche as a sort of last Rosicrucian—an intellectual who battles for the harmonic combination of spirituality and science.[105]

In recent years, the LaRouchites have increasingly emphasized the importance of Russia on the world stage, and have largely aligned themselves with President Vladimir Putin’s international policies, such as on the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. In 2011, LaRouche applauded the nomination of Putin to return to the office of president: “This assertion of leadership sends a clear message of defiance against the British Empire’s divide-and-conquer games, and represents a major step forward toward a new Pacific-centered recovery program for the entire world.”[106] In an interview with Russia Today, Webster Tarpley was equally effusive about Putin’s election win in 2012:

The perspective we now have is taking some steps away from the unipolar world, which is proven to be such a failure, in the direction of a more balanced world, through the creation of some kind of counter-weight, or check, against the more irresponsible and reckless policies of the Anglo-Americans… It is a historic occasion. I would compare it to Franklin D. Roosevelt winning the third term in 1940, or General de Gaulle returning to power in France in 1958. As of right now, Vladimir Putin is in my judgment the most prestigious political leader in the world, with an immense political capital.[107]

In 2011, Global Research TV broadcast a speech on Libyan state television by Cynthia McKinney, a former US Congressperson for the Democratic Party, known for her avowal of 9/11 conspiracy theories. McKinney has been close to Amelia Boynton Robinson, the vice-president of the LaRouche Movement’s Schiller Institute, since 2005, and in 2009 she wrote an article blaming George Soros of a “one-world government” conspiracy. McKinney led a delegation to Libya which included conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen and US attorney Ramsey Clark, a legal representative and full supporter of LaRouche.

After leaving public office in 1969, Clark has led many progressive activism campaigns and supported Lyndon Larouche. As a lawyer, Clark has also provided legal counsel and advice to prominent figures, including many controversial individuals, such as Saddam Hussein, Radovan Karadzic, former Bosnian Serb politician, Nazi concentration camp commandant Karl Linnas, Nazi War criminal Jakob “Jack” Reimer, Liberian political figure Charles Taylor, the PLO, and Father Philip Berrigan, a Catholic priest and antiwar activist of the Harrisburg Seven who plotted to kidnap Henry Kissinger. Clark also defended 100 survivors and relatives of the dead members of the Branch Davidian sect, and hired JFK conspirator Gordon Novel as chief investigator. Former CIA Director William Colby collaborated with Novel on the investigation of misconduct on the higher levels of command including the FBI.[108]

Clark founded the International Action Center (IAC), a front group of the Workers World Party, which he co-directs with WWP leader Sara Flounders. The WWP is a small Stalinist party formed as a faction led by Sam Marcy which split in 1958 from the Socialist Workers Party. The WWP sent members to support Slobodan Milosevic during the war in the Balkans and later sent a delegate to a group of Stalinist parties supporting the “Iraqi resistance” organized by Subhi Toma, an associate of neo-fascist Thierry Meyssan. Neo-fascists Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya and Thierry Meyssan and RT journalist Lizzie Phelan were all present in Libya that same year as McKinney.

Clark traveled with WWP delegations in support Milosevic, and attended Milosevic’s funeral in 2006 together with General Leonid Ivashov, Gennady Zyuganov and Sergey Baburin (then a co-leader of Rodina). Clark co-signed an open letter together with Baburin in March 2009 in opposition to the independence of Kosovo before attending a pro-Milosevic rally by Serbian ultra-nationalists in April of that same year. Clark presently co-chairs of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic together with fascist Baburin, who is himself also on the Scientific Committee of Eurasianist journal Geopolitica together with Chauprade, Engdahl, Chossudovsky, Narochnitskaya and Nazemroaya, and on the Scientific Committee of Eurasia with Engdahl and Dugin.

McKinney’s tour of Libya was organized by Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER Coalition), which was affiliated with an WWP offshoot, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), formed in 2004. Also speaking on the tour were Ramsey Clark, former member of the WWP and co-founder and leader of the PSL Brian Becker, and Elijah Muhammad’s son Akbar Muhammad of the Nation of Islam. The NOI, one of the many far-right groups funded by Gaddafi, had worked with LaRouche in the 90s and was already moving towards the Church of Scientology at that time. This prompted a number of Palestinian activists to condemn her position and the ANSWER Coalition prevented Libyans from attending her speaking tour because they opposed McKinney’s pro-Gaddafi positions.

Flounders and Nazemroaya later both contributed to McKinney’s book on Libya, published by Clarity Press, a publisher which lists Global Research as its partner website. Clarity features books from multiple conspiracy theorists such as James Petras and Paul Craig Roberts. Clarity published Nazemroaya’s book The Globalization of NATO.

The bulk of Russian money received by Flynn, more than $45,000, came from Russia Today, when he was invited to a gala in December 2015 in Moscow to participate in a panel on “Geo­politics 2015 and Russia’s changing role in the world.”[109] Flynn, who had made semi-regular appearances as an analyst on RT after he retired from government service, sat next to Putin, and at the same table as Green Party candidate Jill Stein. On December 18, 2017, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr told BuzzFeed that Stein was being investigated for potential “collusion with the Russians.”[110]

Flynn was one of 10 people at the head table, including three of the Russians under U.S. sanctions at the time. These included Putin, Sergei Ivanov and Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s de facto national security adviser. Flanking Putin on his right, two seats from Flynn, was Alexey Gromov, Putin’s deputy chief of staff, who U.S. intelligence considers to be Putin’s head propagandist. At the table behind Putin’s was Mikhail Gorbachev. Also in attendance was Viktor Vekselberg, and Julian Assange appeared via satellite.[111]

Weeks after his RT gala, Flynn, who was until then a Democrat, joined the Trump campaign. During the transition, Flynn and his lawyers came to the White House and warned that he had been accepting money from foreign governments and that he was under investigation by the Justice Department for haven taken money from foreign governments and for not having registered as a foreign agent when he did so.[112] Sally Yates, the Acting Attorney General, met twice with the White House Council to shared detailed warning that Flynn was “compromised” by the Russians, vulnerable to blackmail, and not forthcoming about his communications with a foreign government.[113]

DisinfoWars

Tarpley was also a frequent guest on Alex Jones programs, and LaRouche was also on the show warning about the “destabilization of Ukraine” by the West, and a “potential thermonuclear war with Russia.”[114] According to a McClatchy report, two anonymous sources “familiar with the inquiry,” allege that the FBI investigators of Trump’s ties to Russia are also scrutinizing a network of Kremlin-controlled social media bots that published millions of links to articles from RT and Sputnik News, as well as Alex Jones’ InfoWars and Breitbart News.[115] “Russian bots and internet trolls sought to propagate stories underground,” said Mike Carpenter, a former senior Pentagon official during the Obama administration whose job focused on Russia. “Those stories got amplified by fringe elements of our media like Breitbart.”[116]

Facebook also confirmed that Russian operatives used false identities to post events on its platform to remotely organize and promote political protests in the US, including an August 2016 anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rally in Twin Falls, Idaho, which had been criticized by Breitbart, InfoWars, and WorldNetDaily for its open-door policy towards refugees.[117] WorldNetDaily is run by Joseph Farah, a member of the board of governors of the CNP.[118] The event was “hosted” by SecuredBorders, a purported American anti-immigration group that was exposed in March 2017 as a Russian front. Their Facebook page had 133,000 followers when Facebook shut it down in August. When Chobani’s planned to hire immigrants to work at the Twin Falls plant, WorldNetDaily responded with a January 2016 piece once titled “American Yogurt Tycoon Vows to Choke U.S. With Muslims.” In the month before the event, Breitbart posted 37 articles about immigrants in Twin Falls, including a false story about a rape attack. When an InfoWars article claimed that Chobani’s workers were responsible for a “500 percent increase in tuberculosis in Twin Falls,” the company sued InfoWars who were forced to issue a retraction.

In her attack on the alt-right movement, Hillary Clinton blamed Trump for listening to Stone’s collaborator Alex Jones. Roger Stone was a regular guest on Jones’ show. According to Stone, InfoWars is “the major source of everything,”[119] and that “rise of alternative media” should be credited for Trump’s unexpected election victory, and identified InfoWars and Matt Drudge—who also appeared on Jones’ show—as pivotal forces throughout the campaign.[120] “Alex Jones and his Infowars’ umbrella of radio shows, YouTube and Facebook broadcasts, Internet website and tweets turned out to be Trump’s secret weapon,” said Stone.[121] Stone proclaimed, “Thank God for the Breitbarts, and the Daily Callers, and the Town Halls, and the InfoWars.com, and the so many alternative media sites where we can learn the truth, and we can tell the truth, and we can spread the truth.”[122]

Despite calling Stone a “stone-cold loser” in a 2008 interview and accusing him of seeking too much publicity, Trump praised Stone during an appearance in December 2015 on Alex Jones’ radio show orchestrated by Stone. “Roger’s a good guy,” Trump said. “He’s been so loyal and so wonderful.”[123] Stone left the campaign on August 8, 2015 amid controversy, with Stone claiming he quit and Trump claiming that Stone was fired. During a live feed from the RNC, a tense, almost physical fight occurred, between Jones and Stone and the co-founder of The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, who shouted, “You’re a sick dude, Roger Stone! You’re the world’s biggest liar! You’re a piece of crap!”[124]

Part of Stone’s campaign tactics included “confirming” that Ted Cruz’ father was involved in the JFK assassination [Stone wrote a book accusing Lyndon Johnson of involvement], called for Bernie Sanders to be shot for treason, and promised Alex Jones that “Trump will destroy Hillary.” Stone regurgitated all the popular conspiracy tropes to undermine Clinton’s candidacy, including claims that Chelsea Clinton is not Bill Clinton’s biological daughter, that the Clintons had something to do with the murders of Vince Foster and others, and that they and George H.W. Bush “trafficked millions worth of cocaine” through Mena, Arkansas, and that Hillary was having a Lesbian affair with her Muslim Brotherhood affiliated aide, Huma Abedin.[125]

Wikileaks

FBI affidavits submitted to obtain search warrants in the criminal investigation into Stone revealed that he was in contact with one or more apparently well-connected Israelis at the height of the 2016 campaign. The Times of Israel identified one of them, whose name is redacted and described as a “minister without portfolio in the cabinet dealing with issues concerning defense and foreign affairs,” as Tzachi Hanegbi, who served as Minister of Justice, Minister of Internal Security, Minister of Intelligence and Nuclear Affairs, and Minister in the Prime Minister’s office supervising Israel's intelligence agencies Mossad and Shin Bet.[126] Hanegbi would be appointed to serve as acting prime minister of Israel, while Netanyahu traveled abroad. According to the affidavit, Hanegbi messaged Stone on or about August 12, 2016, “Roger, hello from Jerusalem. Any progress? [Trump] is going to be defeated unless we intervene. We have critical intell. The key is in your hands!”[127]

The leading propaganda scheme of the Trump campaign, to present him as a legitimate “anti-establishment” candidate was to vilify Hillary Clinton as a “liberal” and tool of the “globalists” by focusing on the elusive 33,000 deleted emails. In the wake of the first revelations, Trump called on Wikileaks to help find Clinton’s deleted emails, which became a central focus of his campaign, referring to her as “Crooked Hillary” and chanting “Lock Her Up.” In the summer of 2014, lawyers from the State Department noticed a number of emails from Clinton’s personal account, while reviewing documents requested by the House Select Committee on Benghazi. A request by the State Department for additional emails led to negotiations with her lawyers and advisors. In October, the State Department sent letters to Clinton and all previous Secretaries of State back to Madeleine Albright requesting emails and documents related to their work while in office. Clinton ordered her lawyers to give the State Department all of her “work-related” emails. Though, a second batch of “non-work related” emails, around 32,000 of them, were eventually deleted.

On October 9, 2016, in a televised debate, Trump told Clinton, “If I win, I’m going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there’s never been so many lies, so much deception.”[128] “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’ll be able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump pronounced at a campaign rally on the following day. “I love WikiLeaks!”[129] Post-election analyses of media coverage during the 2016 presidential campaign show that the Clinton email controversy received the most extensive coverage of any topic.[130] In her book What Happened, Clinton labeled the email controversy and FBI Director James Comey’s decision to reopen the investigation days before the election date as a major reason for her loss. However, in November 2016, following the election, Trump told reporters from the New York Times that he would not recommend prosecution of Clinton, saying that it was “just not something [he] feel[s] very strongly about” and suggesting that Clinton had “suffered greatly.”[131]

Roger Stone claimed in early 2016 that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told him his organization had obtained stolen emails that could damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Washington Post reported. Stone and Trump have been working since the mid-1980s on campaigns to help Trump’s casino business as well as politics. Stone and Trump first met in 1979, when they were introduced to each other by Roy Cohn, when Stone was working for Reagan’s presidential campaign. In 2000, when an Indian casino in the Catskills threatened to steal business from Trump’s Atlantic City resorts, Trump and Stone were fined $250,000 for setting up the Institute for Law and Society, a fake “family values” front in New York, to run a series of racist ads against the Indian reservation.

Two associates of Stone, former Trump advisor Sam Nunberg and another who spoke to the Washington Post on condition of anonymity, said that Stone told them in the spring of 2016 that he’d learned WikiLeaks had accessed emails belonging to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair at the time.[132] The conversation occurred before it was publicly known that hackers had obtained the emails. The Smoking Gun reported that during the presidential campaign Stone communicated through private Twitter messages with Guccifer 2.0. In typical Roger Stone fashion, when he was later confronted by Matthew Rozsa of Salon in April 2017, Stone first framed himself as a hero when he was the victim of a hit and run which he hinted was to “bump me off,” because the Russians “do not want me to testify because it would show their hand. That would be obvious.”[133] When Stone realized he had incriminated himself, he characterized what he said was a “misnomer.”[134]

In an interview on June 12, 2016, just weeks prior to the publication of the DNC hack, Assange told a British television host, Robert Peston of the ITV network, that his organization had obtained “emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication,” which he described as “great.”[135] Peston said: “Plainly, what you are saying, what you are publishing, hurts Hillary Clinton. Would you prefer Trump to be president?” Assange replied that what Trump would do as president was “completely unpredictable.” By contrast, he thought it was predictable that Clinton would wield power in two ways he found problematic. First, Assange accused Clinton of having been among those pushing to indict him after WikiLeaks disseminated a quarter of a million diplomatic cables during her tenure as secretary of state. In addition, Assange criticized Clinton for pushing to intervene in Libya in 2011, which he said enabled ISIS to flourish. In February 2017, Assange had written in an essay that a vote for Clinton to become president amounted to “a vote for endless, stupid war.”[136]

The Atlantic obtained a number of direct messages between Wikileaks and Donald Trump Jr., that were turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. The correspondence began weeks before the election, and continued until at least July 2017. WikiLeaks made a series of increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump’s tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States.[137] The Atlantic wrote: “At no point during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks, which had published stolen documents and was already observed to be releasing information that benefited Russian interests.”[138]

The Smoking Gun reported that during the presidential campaign Stone communicated through private Twitter messages with Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0, who hacked the DNC and fed leaked documents to Wikileaks. According to various cybersecurity firms and U.S. government officials, Guccifer 2.0 is a persona that was created by Russian intelligence services to cover for their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. However, Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be a lone activist committed to “fight all those illuminati,” a claim that Stone repeated.[139] Stone tweeted on August 21, 2016, a day before Guccifer 2.0 would release another trove of documents, that then-Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta would soon have his “time in the barrel.”[140] During the election campaign, Stone told Boston Herald Radio that he expected “Julian Assange and the Wikileaks people to drop a payload of new documents on a weekly basis fairly soon. And that of course will answer the question of exactly what was erased on that email server.”[141] Podesta believed that Stone may have had “advance knowledge” that his private emails were hacked and about to be published on Wikileaks. “I think there is a reasonable belief that Mr. Assange may have passed this information on to Mr. Stone,” he commented.[142] Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon also pointed out that Stone claimed to have been in touch with Assange through “mutual friends,” and repeatedly warned that Assange would soon release more information on Clinton, both on Twitter an in another interview with Alex Jones’ InfoWars.

Stone told the House intelligence committee that he had a intermediary to Assange and named comedian and radio host Randy Credico as that person. Assange had been on Credico’s radio show three times, and Credico tweeted a picture of himself outside the London Ecuadorian embassy on Oct. 5, 2016.[141] October 2, 2016, Stone said on Alex Jones’s show: “An intermediary met with him [Assange] in London recently who is a friend of mine and a friend of his, a believer in freedom. I am assured that the mother lode is coming Wednesday. It wouldn’t be an October surprise if I told you what it was but I have reason to believe that it is devastating because people with political judgment who are aware of the subject matter tell me this.”[142] On October 7, 2016, two hours after the “Access Hollywood” story is published by the Washington Post, WikiLeaks’ publication of the Podesta emails. Podesta suggested that Wikileaks timed the latest release to drown out the scandal over Trump saying in leaked audio from ten years ago that he liked to grab women by the genitals. He called the timing “a curious coincidence.”[143]

QAnon

The FBI affidavit reports further communication between Roger Stone and American author and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, who on August 20, 2016, “told STONE that they needed to meet with [NAME REDACTED] to determine “what if anything Israel plans to do in Oct.”[146] Corsi is a far-right political commentator and conspiracy theorist, published on WorldNetDaily and Human Events. Corsi has been a member of the board of governors of the CNP and a frequent guest on Art Bell’s show on Coast to Coast AM. In 2004, Corsi’s Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, was published by Regnery Publishing. The book sold more than 1.2 million copies. Corsi is best known for his two New York Times Best Selling books: The Obama Nation and Unfit for Command. In October 2009, his book America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving a Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty was published, which alleges “the globalists’ plan to put America up for sale, from its financial services firms to public infrastructure such as highways and airports.”[147] To promote the book, he appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News and Coast to Coast with George Noory.

Draft court documents, released in November 2018, showed that two months before the emails stolen from the Clinton campaign were released, Corsi sent emails to Roger Stone informing him that WikiLeaks was going to publish the emails in two “dumps,” giving dates of the planned releases and that the “impact planned” would be “very damaging.” Stone also sent Corsi an email directing him to contact Assange “and get the pending (WikiLeaks) emails.” Although Corsi told Mueller’s investigators he ignored the direction, they discovered that he had passed it to an associate in London, whom Corsi later identified as Ted Malloch, who had worked with the Trump campaign and been questioned by Mueller’s investigators in April 2018.[148]

The special counsel Robert Mueller has subpoenaed Ted Malloch, a controversial academic and InfoWars guest with ties to Roger Stone and Nigel Farage, to testify in the Russia probe. According to Simpson, “We started going into who Stone was and who his relationships were with, and essentially the trail led to sort of international far right. And, you know, Brexit happened, and Nigel Farage became someone that we were very interested in, and I still think it’s very interesting.”[149] Farage and Malloch met frequently. Malloch has appeared on Farage’s radio show multiple times, and they were also spotted together in Brussels. “So I have formed my own opinions that went through—that there was a somewhat unacknowledged relationship between the Trump people and the UKIP people and that the path to Wikileaks ran through that,” Simpson said. “And I still think that today.”[150] Asked whether he had discovered any “factual links” between Farage and WikiLeaks, Simpson pointed to Farage’s trips to New York, and said he had been told, but had not confirmed, that Farage made additional trips to the Ecuadorian Embassy and that he provided a thumb drive of data to Assange.”[151]

Malloch said investigators questioned him about his relationship with Stone, his involvement in President Donald Trump’s campaign, and whether he visited the Ecuadorian embassy where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange resides. Malloch recently wrote The Plot to Destroy Trump: How the Deep State Fabricated the Russian Dossier to Subvert the President, released in May 2018. The book includes a foreword by Stone, as well as blurbs by Farage and Alex Jones. Malloch has appeared several times as a guest on InfoWars. In the video “Davos Group Insider Exposes The Globalist Luciferian Agenda” he says:

The EU is part of, of course, the globalist Empire, the New World Order. I think many of its origins are in fact quite evil…

It’s basically a German takeover of Europe making Europe into its own puppet state with its crony capitalism and its fake currency of the Euro… Luciferianism is a belief system that venerates the essential characteristics that are affixed to Lucifer. That tradition has been informed by Gnosticism by Satanism and it usually refers to Lucifer not as the devil per se but as some kind of liberator, some kind of guardian, some kind of guiding spirit, in fact is the true God as opposed to Jehovah… of course we know who Lucifer is and he’s seen as one of the morning stars, as a symbol of enlightenment, as a kind of independence, and of true human progress, turning away from God and turning to Lucifer in order to enlighten yourself.[152]

Malloch was propelled into the national spotlight amid reports that Trump was considering him for the position of the US ambassador to the European Union. However, the Financial Times reported that he had made a number of false statements in his autobiography, and in a second follow-up article corrected further inaccuracies made by Malloch in a Breitbart article.[153] Glenn Simpson, cofounder of Fusion GPS which produced the Trump Dossier, described Malloch as a “Bannon Stone associate” and said he believed Malloch was a “significant figure” in the Trump-WikiLeaks connection.[154] Stone described Malloch as a “policy wonk” who became a “self-appointed surrogate for Trump” during and after the campaign.[155]

On 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks published Vault 7, a series of documents that that detail activities and capabilities of the United States Central Intelligence Agency to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. The leak exposed a collection called UMBRAGE, which Wikileaks described as “a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation,” and tweeted, “CIA steals other groups virus and malware facilitating false flag attacks.”[156] A conspiracy theory soon emerged alleging that the CIA framed the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 US elections. Conservative commentators such as Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter speculated about this possibility on Twitter, and Rush Limbaugh discussed it on his radio show. Breitbart proclaimed in a headline, “WikiLeaks: CIA Uses ‘Stolen’ Malware to ‘Attribute’ Cyberattacks to Nations Like Russia.,” while Infowars published, “Vault 7: CIA Can Stage Fake Russian Hacking to Undermine Trump,” by Corsi.[157] Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov added that Vault 7 showed that “the CIA could get access to such ‘fingerprints’ and then use them.”[158]

In 2017, Corsi became the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for InfoWars. Jerome Corsi was assigned to the “beat” for #Qanon (meaning Q, anonymous), also known as #TheStorm, a fast-spreading right-wing conspiracy theory. Though he initially supported the movement, Michael Flynn was later reported as saying that he thought QAnon was a CIA disinformation campaign.[159] The purported origins of QAnon were shared by Paul E. Vallely, author of the MindWar paper with Michael Aquino, founder of the Temple of Set. Vallely was interviewed by Mike Filip on AmeriCanuck Internet Radio of Canada, on October 14, 2019, where he explained:

Q-Anon is information that comes out of a group called ‘The Army of Northern Virginia.’ This is a group of military intelligence specialists, of over 800 people that advises the president. The president does not have a lot of confidence in the CIA or the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) much anymore. So the President relies on real operators, who are mostly Special Operations type of people.  This is where ‘Q’ picks up some of his information.[160]

 #Qanon has ranked as one of the top hashtags on the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which charts hashtags, topics and URLs promoted by Russia-linked influence networks on Twitter. A user identified as Q on 4chan, who claimed to be a high-level government operative, who started posting vague predictions related to an approaching Trump’s eerie prediction of a “calm before the storm,” which caught the attention of /pol/. October 5, 2017, Trump made cryptic remarks that have never been fully explained by the White House. “Maybe it's the calm before the storm,” he said to the group of reporters. “We’re being told by the White House, ‘Please cover this,’” Jones boasted. “So, what does that tell you?”[161] According to The Independent, #TheStorm conspiracy theory claims Trump is a “secret genius who pretended to collude with Russia to defeat child sex traffickers.” Cheryl Sullenger, senior vice president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, posted an article on the group’s website about an “intel drop” from Q revealing a White House plan to end Planned Parenthood. Sean Hannity has tweeted about QAnon, and the Russian government-funded network RT News has discussed the topic. Roseanne Barr tweeted, Trump “has broken up trafficking rings in high places everywhere.”[162]

In March 2017, the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Stone to preserve all documents related to any Russian contacts. Although he had denied it, the Committee’s final report of August 2020 found that Stone did have access to Wikileaks and that Trump had spoken to Stone and other associates about it multiple times. Immediately after the Access Hollywood tape was released in October 2016, Stone directed Corsi to tell Assange to “drop the Podesta emails immediately,” which Wikileaks leaked minutes later. The Committee also found that Wikileaks “very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.”[163] On January 25, 2019, Stone was arrested at his Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home in connection with Mueller’s investigation and charged in an indictment with witness tampering, obstructing an official proceeding, and five counts of making false statements. In November 2019, a jury convicted him on all seven felony counts, and he was sentenced to 40 months in prison. On July 10, 2020, days before he was scheduled to report to prison, Trump commuted his sentence. Trump pardoned Stone on December 23, 2020.

[1] Matthew d’Ancona. “Putin and Trump could be on the same side in this troubling new world order.” The Guardian (December 19, 2016).

[2] Paul Ratner. “The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the World.” Big Think (December 18, 2016).

[3] Vladislav Surkov. “Vladislav Surkov: Putin’s Long State.” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (February 2, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/putin-russia-kremlin-vladislav-surkov-grey-cardinal-moscow-a8773661.html

[4] Molly K. McKew. “Putin’s real long game.” Politico (January 1, 2017).

[5] Adrian Chen. “The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks.” The New Yorker (July 27, 2016).

[6] Jessikka Aro. “The cyberspace war: propaganda and trolling as warfare tools.” European View (2016) 15:121-132.

[7] Craig Unger. House of Trump, House of Putin.

[8] Scott Shane & Mark Mazzetti. “The Plot to Subvert an Election.” New York Times (September 20, 2018).

[9] Jolanta Darczewska. “The Anatomy of Russian Information Warfare: The Crimean Aperation, A Case Study.” Point of View Number 42, (Centre for Eastern Studies: Warsaw, May 2014).

[10] The United States Army Special Operations Command. “Little Green Men: A Primer on Modern Russian Unconventional Warfare, Ukraine 2013-2014.” (Fort Bragg, North Carolina).

[11] Ibid.

[12] Jolanta Darczewska. “The Anatomy of Russian Information Warfare: The Crimean Aperation, A Case Study.” Point of View Number 42, (Centre for Eastern Studies: Warsaw, May 2014).

[13] John B. Dunlop. “Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics.”

[14] “The Hybrid War: Russia’s Propaganda Campaign Against Germany.”

[15] Jolanta Darczewska. “The Anatomy of Russian Information Warfare: The Crimean Aperation, A Case Study.” Point of View Number 42, (Centre for Eastern Studies: Warsaw, May 2014).

[16] Sam Jones. “Ukraine: Russia’s new art of war.” Financial Times (August 28, 2014).

[17] Michael Riley. “Cyberspace Becomes Second Front in Russia’s Clash With NATO.” Bloomberg (October 14, 2015).

[18] Brian Whitmore. “Putin’s Mafia Statecraft.” The Power Vertical (October 27, 2015).

[19] Laura Lorek. “Russian mafia’s Net threat.” ZDNet (July 17, 2001).

[20] Loek Essers. “Russian cybercriminals earned $4.5 billion in 2011.” Computerworld (April 24, 2012).

[21] Lorek. “Russian mafia’s Net threat.”

[22] Jarrod Rifkind. “Cybercrime in Russia.” Center for Strategic International Studies (July 14, 2011).

[23] Laura Lorek. “Russian mafia’s Net threat.” ZDNet (July 17, 2001).

[24] Irina Filatova. “Russian mafia groups reportedly operate in Europe on behalf of the Kremlin.” DW.com (April 27, 2017).

[25] Ibid.

[26] Adrian Chen. “The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks.” The New Yorker (27 July 2016).

[27] Andrew Weisburd and Clint Watts. “Trolls for Trump - How Russia Dominates Your Twitter Feed to Promote Lies (And, Trump, Too).” The Daily Beast (6 August 2016).

[28] Leo Benedictus. “Invasion of the troll armies: from Russian Trump supporters to Turkish state stooges.” The Guardian (6 November 2016).

[29] Craig Silverman & Lawrence Alexander. “How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News.” BuzzFeed News (3 November 2016).

[30] Clint Watts. “Clint Watt’s Testimony: Russia’s Info War on the U.S. Started in 2014.” The Daily Beast (March 30, 2017). Retrieved from https://www.thedailybeast.com/clint-watts-testimony-russias-info-war-on-the-us-started-in-2014

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Tess Townsend. “Meet the Romanian Trump Fan Behind a Major Fake News Site.” Inc (21 November 2016).

[34] Caitlin Dewey. “Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me.’” The Washington Post (November 17, 2016).

[35] Shanika Gunaratna. “Facebook fake news creator claims he put Trump in White House.” CBS News (November 17, 2016).

[36] Caitlin Dewey. “Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me.’” Washington Post (November 17, 2016).

[37] Sonar Sheth. “‘Our task was to set Americans against their own government’: New details emerge about Russia’s trolling operation.” Business Insider (October 17, 2017).

[38] Mike Elgan. “Disinformation as a service? DaaS not good!” Computer World (September 9, 2017).

[39] Done O’Sullivan & Dylan Byers. “Exclusive: Fake black activist accounts linked to Russian government.” CNN (September 28, 2017).

[40] Taylor Link. “Alt-right Twitter darling Jenna Abrams turns out to be Russian bot.” The Daily Beast (November 5, 2017).

[41] “Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate.” BuzzFeed (October 20, 2016).

[42] John McCormack. “The Election Came Down to 77,744 Votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan (Updated).” The Weekly Standard (November 10, 2016).

[43] Bobby Blanchard. “Indictment says Russians communicated with a person affiliated with a Texas grassroots group during the 2016 election.” The Texas Tribune (February 16, 2018).

[44] Casey Michel. “How Russia Created the Most Popular Texas Secession Page on Facebook.” ExtraNewsFeed (September 7, 2017).

[45] Natasha Bertrand. “Texas secession movement: Russia-linked Facebook group asked us to participate in anti-Clinton rallies.” Business Insider (September 14, 2017).

[46] Daniel Ellsberg. “Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America.” The Guardian (June 10, 2013).

[47] Philip Shenon. “WikiLeaks Founder to Release Massacre Video.” Daily Beast (June 16, 2010).

[48] Sean Wilentz. “Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?” The New Republic (January 19, 2014).

[49] Glenn Greenwald. “The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks.” Salon (June 18, 2010).

[50] Julian Borger. “Ex-CIA chief: Trump staff had enough contact with Russia to justify FBI inquiry.” The Guardian (May 23, 2017).

[51] Ben Norton & Glenn Greenwald. “Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group.” The Intercept (November 26, 2016).

[52] Wilentz. “Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?”

[53] Molly McDonough. “Civil Rights Group Sues White Supremacist.” American Lawyer Media (April 6, 2000).

[54] “ANDERSON v. HALE 159 F.Supp.2d 1116 (2001); Anderson v. Hale, 202 F.R.D. 548 (N.D.Ill. 2001); Dave Emory. “Snowden’s Ride, Part 6: Why Did Glenn Greenwald Represent Neo-Nazis Pro Bono?” SpitfireList (July 16, 2013).

[55] Wilentz. “Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?”.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Peter Pomerantsev. “Russia and the Menace of Unreality.” The Atlantic (Sepember, 9, 2014).

[58] Wilentz. “Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?”

[59] Ibid.

[60] Ibid.

[61] “Ecuador - Russia Relations.” Global Security (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/ecuador/forrel-ru.htm

[62] Charles Homans. “Alan Dershowitz joins Assange legal team: WikiLeaks is ‘21st Century Pentagon Papers’.” Foreign Policy (February 15, 2011).

[63] Jenna McLaughlin. “WikiLeaks Turned Down Leaks on Russian Government During U.S. Presidential Campaign.” Foreign Policy (August 17, 2017).

[64] Wilentz. “Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?”

[65] Jamie Bartlett. The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld (Melville House, 2015).

[66] Wilentz. “Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?”

[67] Ibid.

[68] Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras & Jeremy Scahill. “Welcome to The Intercept.” The Intercept (February 10, 2014).

[69] James Corbett. “Secrets for Sale?: The Greenwald/Omidyar/NSA connection.” BoilingFrogsPost.com (December 17, 2013).

[70] Glenn Greenwald. Twitter (4:16 PM - 11 Dec 2013).

[71] Peter Walker & Jim Newell. “Edward Snowden asks for asylum in Ecuador - as it happened.” The Guardian (June 23, 2013).

[72] Sean Wilentz. “Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?”

[73] “Donald Trump on Russia, Advice from Barack Obama and How He Will Lead.” Time (December 7, 2016).

[74] Spencer Ackerman & Kevin Poulsen. “EXCLUSIVE: ‘Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer.” The Daily Beast (March 22, 2018).

[75] Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Dan Collyns & Luke Harding. “Assange’s guest list: the RT reporters, hackers and film-makers who visited embassy.” The Guardian (May 18, 2018).

[76] Ibid.

[77] Ibid.

[78] Sabrina Tavernise. “As Fake News Spreads Lies, More Readers Shrug at the Truth.” The New York Times (December 7, 2016) p. A1.

[79] “Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate.” BuzzFeed (October 20, 2016).

[80] Ibid.

[81] Jill Dougherty. “The reality behind Russia’s fake news.” CNN (December 2, 2016).

[82] Ibid.

[83] Jessikka Aro. “The cyberspace war: propaganda and trolling as warfare tools.” European View (2016) 15:121-132.

[84] Ibid.

[85] Andrew Weisburd & Clint Watts. “Trolls for Trump - How Russia Dominates Your Twitter Feed to Promote Lies (And, Trump, Too).” The Daily Beast (August 6, 2016).

[86] Craig Timberg. “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” Washington Post (November 24, 2016).

[87] Jill Dougherty. “The reality behind Russia’s fake news.” CNN (December 2, 2016).

[88] The PropOrNot Team. “Black Friday Report: On Russian Propaganda Network Mapping.” (November 26, 2016). Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Byj_1ybuSGp_NmYtRF95VTJTeUk

[89] Cited in “Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate.” BuzzFeed (October 20, 2016).

[90] Ben Schreckinger. “How Russia Targets the U.S. Military.” Politico (June 12, 2017).

[91] Ibid.

[92] Anton Shekhovtsov. “Pro-Russian network behind the anti-Ukrainian defamation campaign.” Anton Shekhovtsov’s blog (February 3, 2014).

[93] Ibid.

[94] Alana Goodman. “The Ron Paul Institute for Putin’s Priorities.” Washington Free Beacon (March 17, 2014).

[95] Greg Hengler. “Ron Paul: Putin has ‘Law on His Side’ with Crimean Invasion.” TownHall (March 13, 2014).

[96] Paul Craig Roberts. “The Failure of German Leadership on Ukraine.” Ron Paul Institute (March 13, 2014).

[97] “About.” Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Retrieved from http://ronpaulinstitute.org/about-us/

[98] New America Foundation, “About New America,” [accessed February 2009].

[99] John B. Dunlop. “Review: Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics.”

[100] Matthew N Lyons. “The LaRouche network’s Russia connection.” ThreeWayFight

 (July 03, 2015).

[101] Ibid.

[102] Ibid.

[103] Anton Shekhovtsov. “Sergey Glazyev and the American fascist cult.” Anton Shekhovtsov’s blog (June 7, 2015).

[104] Ibid.

[105] “Russian Website Features LaRouche’s Influence in Post-Soviet Russia.” Executive Intelligence Review (May 25, 2012).

[106] Anton Shekhovtsov. “Sergey Glazyev and the American fascist cult.” Anton Shekhovtsov’s blog (June 7, 2015).

[107] “Tarpley on RT 3/4/2012:Putin Landslide an Historic Event on Scale of FDR 1940.” Webster Tarpley Fan Channel, YouTube (March 15, 2012).

[108] Dick J. Reavis. “Conspiracy dreams are an FBI nightmare.” San Antonio Express News (January 23, 2000).

[109] Rosalind S. Helderman & Tom Hamburger. “Trump adviser Flynn paid by multiple Russia-related entities, new records show.” Washington Post (March 16, 2017).

[110] “Report: Senate’s Russia Probe Targets Jill Stein Campaign.” BuzzFeed (December 18, 2017).

[111] Robert Windrem. “Guess Who Came to Dinner With Flynn and Putin.” NBC News (April 18, 2017).

[112] Chad Day, Stephen Braun & Julie Pace. “Trump transition knew Flynn might register as foreign agent.” Associated Press (March 10, 2017).

[113] Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima & Philip Rucker. “Justice Department warned White House that Flynn could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail, officials say.” The Washington Post (February 13, 2017).

[114] Cliff Kincaid. “Anti-Communist Revolutions are Spreading.” Accuracy in the Media (February 25, 2014).

[115] Peter Stone & Greg Gordon. “FBI’s Russian-influence probe includes a look at Breitbart, InfoWars news sites.” McClatchy (March 20, 2017).

[116] Ibid.

[117] Ben Collins, Kevin Poulsen & Spencer Ackerman. “Exclusive: Russia Used Facebook Events to Organize Anti-Immigrant Rallies on U.S. Soil.” The Daily Beast (September 11, 2017).

[118] “The Council for National Policy: Behind the Curtain.” Southern Poverty Law Center (May 17, 2016).

[119] Peter Stone & Greg Gordon. “FBI’s Russian-influence probe includes a look at Breitbart, InfoWars news sites.” McClatchy (March 20, 2017).

[120] Oliver Darcy. “Top Trump ally: Matt Drudge, Alex Jones ‘played crucial roles’ in electing Trump.” Business Insider (November 28. 2016).

[121] Jonathan Tilove. “In Travis County custody case, jury will search for real Alex Jones.” American-Statesman (April 16, 2017).

[122] “Get Me Roger Stone.” Netflix (May 12, 2017).

[123] “Alex Jones & Donald Trump Bombshell Full Interview.” The Alex Jones Channel (YouTube, December 2, 2015).

[124] Nick Visser. “Alex Jones, Roger Stone Hijack Liberal Livestream At RNC — And Things Get Very Real Very Fast.” The Huffington Post (21 July 2016).

[125] Nick Gass. “Trump embraces sensational anti-Clinton book by former aide Roger Stone.” Politico (October 14, 2015).

[126] TOI Staff. “Redacted FBI document hints at Israeli efforts to help Trump in 2016 campaign.” Times of Israel (April 29, 2020). Retrieved from https://www.timesofisrael.com/redacted-fbi-document-hints-at-israeli-efforts-to-help-trump-in-2016-campaign/

[127] TOI Staff. “Redacted FBI document hints at Israeli efforts to help Trump in 2016 campaign.” Times of Israel (April 29, 2020). Retrieved from https://www.timesofisrael.com/redacted-fbi-document-hints-at-israeli-efforts-to-help-trump-in-2016-campaign/

[128] Jeff Stein. “Is Donald Trump right when he says Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 emails? Yes and no.” Vox (October 10, 2016).

[129] Betsy Woodruff. “Trump Data Guru: I Tried to Team Up With Julian Assange.” The Daily Beast (October 25, 2017).

[130] Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild. “Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media.” Columbia Journalism Review (December 5, 2017); Rob Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa & Ethan Zuckerman Yochai Benkler. “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Berkman Klein Center (August 16, 2017); Thomas E. Patterson. “News Coverage of the 2016 National Conventions: Negative News, Lacking Context.” Shorenstein Center (September 21, 2016).

[131] David Wright & Z. Byron Wolf. “Trump flips, now opposes prosecution for Clinton.” CNN.com (November 23, 2016).

[132] Tom Hamburger, Josh Dawsey, Carol D. Leonnig & Shane Harris. “Roger Stone claimed contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2016, according to two associates.” Washington Post (March 13, 2018).

[133] Matthew Rozsa. “Trump adviser Roger Stone fears that a “suspicious hit and run” incident in Miami meant someone was targeting him.” Salon (March 16, 2017).

[134] Matthew Rozsa. “WATCH: Roger Stone is hiding something when it comes to Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia.” Salon (April 14, 2017).

[135] Charlie Savage. “Assange, Avowed Foe of Clinton, Timed Email Release for Democratic Convention.” New York Times (July 26, 2016).

[136] Ibid.

[137] Julia Joffe. “The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks.” The Atlantic (November 13, 2017).

[138] Ibid.

[139] William Bastone. “Roger Stone’s Russian Hacking ‘Hero’.” The Smoking Gun (March 8, 2017)

[140] Tom Hamburger, Josh Dawsey, Carol D. Leonnig & Shane Harris. “Roger Stone claimed contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2016, according to two associates.” Washington Post (March 13, 2018).

[141] David Smith. “Julian Assange confirms Cambridge Analytica sought WikiLeaks’ help.” The Guardian (October 26, 2017).

[142] Liz Goodwin. “Podesta says Trump adviser Roger Stone may have had ‘advance knowledge’ of hack.” Yahoo News (October 11, 2016).

[143] Betsy Woodruff. “Alleged Trump-Assange Backchannel: ‘There Was No Backchannel’.” The Daily Beast (February 19, 2018).

[144] Ryan Goodman. “How Roger Stone Interacted with Russia’s Guccifer and Wikileaks.” Newsweek (September 28, 2017).

[145] Liz Goodwin. “Podesta says Trump adviser Roger Stone may have had ‘advance knowledge’ of hack.” Yahoo News (October 11, 2016).

[146] TOI Staff. “Redacted FBI document hints at Israeli efforts to help Trump in 2016 campaign.” Times of Israel (April 29, 2020). Retrieved from https://www.timesofisrael.com/redacted-fbi-document-hints-at-israeli-efforts-to-help-trump-in-2016-campaign/

[147] “America For Sale’ skyrockets to top!” WorldNetDaily (October 4, 2009).

[148] Anna Schecter. “Mueller has emails from Stone pal Corsi about WikiLeaks Dem email dump.” NBC News (November 27, 2018). Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/mueller-has-emails-stone-pal-corsi-about-wikileaks-dem-email-n940611

[149] Sonam Sheth. “A ‘significant figure’ linked to Roger Stone has been compelled to testify in the Russia probe as Mueller homes in on the DNC hack.” Business Insider (March 30, 2018).

[150] Ibid.

[151] Ibid.

[152] “Davos Group Insider Exposes The Globalist Luciferian Agenda.” The Alex Jones Channel. YouTube (Dec 21, 2017).

[153] Henry Mance. “Financial Times - Academic touted as Trump's EU envoy embellished own autobiography.” FT.com (9 February 2017).

[154] Sonam Sheth. “A ‘significant figure’ linked to Roger Stone has been compelled to testify in the Russia probe as Mueller homes in on the DNC hack.” Business Insider (March 30, 2018).

[155] Ibid.

[156] Maxwell Tani. “Conservative media figures are embracing a wild WikiLeaks conspiracy theory that the CIA hacked the DNC, and then framed Russia.” Business Insider (March 9, 2017).

[157] Lucas Nolan. “WikiLeaks: CIA Uses ‘Stolen’ Malware to ‘Attribute’ Cyberattacks to Nations Like Russia.” Breitbart (March 7, 2017); Jerome Corsi. “Vault 7: CIA Can Stage Fake Russian Hacking to Undermine Trump.” InfoWars (March 7, 2017).

[158] Tani. “Conservative media figures are embracing a wild WikiLeaks conspiracy theory that the CIA hacked the DNC, and then framed Russia.”

[159] James Gordon. “'I find QAnon total nonsense': Michael Flynn DISAVOWS conspiracy movement he once  pledged allegiance to by saying its a 'disinformation campaign created by the CIA or the left' in audio released by lawyer Lin Wood.” Daily Mail (November 28, 2021). Retrieved from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10252807/Lin-Wood-Releases-Michael-Flynn-audio-calling-QAnon-CIA-disinformation-plot-total-nonsense.html

[160] “Americanuck Radio - 20191014.” Retrieved from https://www.spreaker.com/user/icrn/americanuck-radio-20191014

[161] Michael Edison Hayden. “How ‘The Storm’ Became the Biggest Fake News Story of 2018.” Newsweek (February 18, 2018).

[162] Michelle Goldberg. “Conspiracy theory claims Trump is a 'secret genius who pretended to collude with Russia to defeat child sex traffickers’.” The Independent (April 7, 2018).

[163] Mark Mazzetti. “G.O.P.-Led Senate Panel Details Ties Between 2016 Trump Campaign and Russia” New York Times (August 18, 2020). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/us/politics/senate-intelligence-russian-interference-report.html

Volume Six

1. Culture Wars

2. Red Mafia

3. From Russia With Love

4. #MeToo

5. Conservative Media

6. Atl-Reich

7. Multipolar World Order

8. Katehon

9. Collusion

10. Russia House

11. Techno-Libertarianism

12. Military-Digital Complex

13. Fake News

14. Memetic Warfare

15. Big Data

16. Make America White Again!

17. In Trump We Trust

18. Israel First