by Zev Shalev and Heidi Cuda

A suspected Russian asset was involved in organizing the January 6 attempted coup, including supplying accommodation and a gathering place for protest leaders in the weeks and days leading up to the storming of the Capitol.

Charles Bausman’s father was the Moscow Bureau Chief for Associated Press between 1968 and 1972, just the type of role Soviet officials would have targeted for recruitment to their intelligence services. It’s unclear if the elder Bausman was ever recruited, but Charles who has spent most of his adult life in Moscow, bears all the hallmarks of a man working for the Kremlin.

Bausman lived in Russia for 30 years before moving to Lancaster, PA in 2018 with enough money to buy three properties. On his arrival, he immediately launched US versions of his three Russian web sites pushing disinformation and propaganda, most notably Russia Insider, which included rabidly anti-semitic sentiment and Holocaust denialism. One of Bausman’s common themes is that America is “fractured.”

His websites were pro-Russian but the content decidedly focused on divisive U.S. domestic issues. Bausman promoted “Stop the Steal”— including appearing in and organizing anti-lockdown election protests in December and January outside the office and home of the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. He was spotted at protests outside Speaker Brian Cutler’s home and office in December. 

On the season premiere of Narativ, we broke the story about Bausman’s barn being used as a venue to plan for the insurrection and also discussed Bausman’s relationship with Sean Moon. Our guests were “Cult of Trump” author Dr. Steven Hassan, a former “Moonies Rev” himself and Michael Edison Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who wrote the first expose of Bausman. Heidi Cuda co-produced the show. Scroll down for Part 2.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

In psychological warfare, there are no strange bedfellows, and the purported Russian sleeper agent Bausman and gun crazy Pastor Sean Moon, of the Rod Iron Ministries, also known as the World Peace Unification Sanctuary, have been linked together during the lead up to the January 6 insurrection.

Turns out the next-gen Moonies and the alleged Russian spy Bausman reportedly played a much bigger role in the January 6 Insurrection than previously known.

And on Jan. 3, Bausman allowed out of town groups to stay over at his Pennsylvania property, specifically Sean Moon’s Rod of Iron group from Warren County. In fiery speeches, Moon invoked God’s name and fear of a Chi Com planet to whip people into a Trump-defending frenzy. Moon’s brother owns a tommy gun warehouse, whose 2016 grand opening was attended by Eric and Lara Trump. Eric was the guest speaker at the event. Donald Trump is scheduled to spend the 20th anniversary of 9/11 with Moon’s mother, Hak Ja Han Moon, the widow of Moonies founder Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Trump is listed as the featured speaker at the billionaire widow’s conference.

MEET THE MOONIES

According to multiple media reports and its own website, Sean Moon’s “Moonies” splinter group, Rod of Iron Ministries, worships at the altar of the AR-15, and Moon recently purchased a Waco-style compound about 40 miles from Waco, Texas, to prep for a war with the “deep state,” he said. Political provocateur Steve Bannon has spoken at Rod of Iron events, and both Moon and Bausman were present at the Insurrection. Moon was seen at the Capitol leading members into scaffolding. Bausman advanced to the Capitol, according to news reports, and then fled the country for Moscow.  

The Moonies weren’t the only Russian friendly assets at the Insurrection. Putin’s favorite former Congressman Dana Rohrabacher was at the Capitol; Russian chants can be heard as windows are being smashed; a Russian expat now living in Florida, Stanislauv Doudnik, broadcast live to Russian news outlets blaming Antifa and BLM for the violence. Two Russian women–a mother and daughter, originally from Moldova–were arrested for illegal entry. The daughter, Kristina Malimon, is a GOP activist living in Portland, according to a McClatchy report. In addition, a Ukrainian infowars host who appears on a network with ties to oligarch Dmitry Firtash posed with the QAnon shaman, Jake Angeli, on January 6.

Bausman left Russia where he had been living for decades and arrived in the US in 2018, quickly establishing his pro-Russian pop-up blogs and acquiring three properties. He left the US on Jan 7 in such a hurry, he didn’t have time to take down the Christmas lights at his home. Neighbors a say a friend took down the decorations weeks later.

One of Bausman’s Lancaster properties is a barn not far from his family home in Lancaster, PA, which he acquired under an LLC. The barn has been used to host white nationalist events like the launch of the National Justice Party, which is virulently anti-Zionist.

The following year he and Bausman’s family traveled to Verona for the 2019 anti-LGBT World Congress of Families conference.

Handler? Leaked emails from Charles Bausman reveal he sought funding from Konstantin Malofeev through an intermediary Alesksei Komov.

RENDEZVOUZ IN VERONA

In Verona, Bausman would likely have met up with another delegate at the WCF that year – the organization’s Russian representative, Aleksei Komov. One of Komov’s many job titles was journalist for Bausman’s Russia Insider.

Bausman’s emails also revealed Komov often arranged financing for Bausman’s projects through the St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation. Komov served as head of foreign charities at the Foundation.

The charitable foundation is a philanthropic effort Russian oligarch, Konstantin Malofeev. Malofeev also funds the WCF and is a staunch supporter of Russia’s Orthodox Church. He is also said to have been the architect of Putin’s invasion of Crimea. Komov is considered one of Malofeev’s right-hand men. Malofeev was sanctioned by the U.S., EU, and Canada for his alleged role in financing financing Russian military operatives in Ukraine.

After a couple of surprisingly successful financial years, Bausman encountered some financial trouble at his publications and shuttered them in late 2020, soon after the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Michael E. Hayden published an expose about him.

Part 2 of our podcast about Bausman and Moon: ‘A Bear in our House’

PLANNING PROTESTS

He may have quit his online news business, but Bausman kept engaged in politics, hosting Sean Moon and delegation from his “Rod Of Iron” Church overnight on Jan 2. The next day the heads of many insurrectionist groups were attending a secret closed-door meeting in an unknown location in the same PA town. It’s unclear if Bausman’s barn was used for the meeting or if he attended.

Bausman’s trail of strange associations with extremist groups, Russia’s Orthodox Church, and a continuing association with Konstantin Malofeev’s right hand-man, suggest Bausman’s pro-Russia agenda may have been operational in an espionage sense, or as we like to say on Narativ, he is likely a spy.

Bausman is now back in Moscow full-time and denies any link to the Russian state. His funder Aleksei Komov denies Malofeev funds Bausman or his publications.

If Bausman is an agent for the Kremlin, it would be standard operating procedure to wire up a meeting room like the barn for surveillance. Extremist leaders like Mike Peinovich of the National Justice Party and Sean Moon may have believed they were meeting in secret, when in reality they could have been meeting at a SVR-owned and monitored venue.

This is the first time we’ve been able to link a suspected Russian asset to the insurrection.

Narativ is made possible by viewers like you. Support our independent journalism. Patreon.com/Narativ

The post A Bear in Our House appeared first on Narativ.

The War We’re In. Part Two.

Exclusive. Erik Prince was building a weapon of mass disinformation intended to attack Iran over social media in 2015. His former business partner believes he deployed the WMD targeting the U.S. instead. Zev Shalev searches for the invisible weapon and wonders if it’s still operational today.

Every day for the last four years, I’ve woken up, poured a cup of coffee, typed several keystrokes on my laptop, hit enter, and headed into combat in the most surreal of battlegrounds: Twitter.

There is no comparison between Twitter and actual physical war, but that doesn’t mean the stakes are not the same. In fact, as we’ve been discovering, the consequences of an information war may be far greater than conventional warfare.

For decades, global anti-Democratic forces have been waging war against the US: A battle for the hearts and minds, a clash of ideologies and narratives, fought by hacks and lies, fueled by data, and existential consequences.

I began writing this blog a month after Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016. I’d been on Twitter since 2009 but only casually. People began appearing in ever-growing numbers after the election searching for answers, and they found each other.

Suburban moms by day transformed into narrative warriors by night. Activists, screenwriters, lawyers, and academics researched until their eyes hurt. They shared data nodes within groups and organized them in threads until complex factual narratives came into focus. It was by far the most significant crowdsourced investigation ever conducted. And it was spontaneous.

That’s how we learned how Russia helped win the election for Trump: with cash laundered through the NRA, and a Facebook manipulation tool called Cambridge Analytica. It’s also how we discovered Russia’s alliance with a group of Middle East nations, domestic white supremacists, and Christian fundamentalists.

Something else had slipped unnoticed into Twitter at around the same time. A formidable stealth weapon of mass disinformation. 

No one knows what this WMD looks like, what makes it so powerful, and where it’s based. But the weapon’s ability to project messages and ideology across social media with such volume and presence is inexplicable. No matter how definitively the volunteer squadron of social media researchers and journalists proved something, the other side could swamp it with a counter-narrative. It’s almost like they had a perception-shifting machine pointed directly at us, which turned whatever we proved into a dull, far-away voice.

In The Wizard of OZ, it’s hard to see the wizard hiding behind the curtain, but if you look carefully enough, you can make out his outline. That’s what this story is about, so let’s go see The Wizard.

A WAR BY ANY OTHER NAME…

Once Trump was elected, many of us assumed the volume and ferocity of the social media attacks would die down, but the exact opposite happened,

While the media covered him like any other president, Trump plundered our democratic institutions. The intelligence community was insulted, the state department gutted, the FBI questioned, and the media decried as fake. His tweets about former president Barrack Obama seethed with contempt. 

Trump’s assault on democracy accompanied a Wagnerian-like flood of pro-Kremlin and anti-American propaganda. 

It was all designed to stoke our primal instincts and drown out reason.

A few may have felt a stirring they hadn’t felt before, of belonging to something bigger than themselves, but for most, it was fear—each tweet triggering a binary emotion.

Every morning, Trump launched an incendiary tweet about an already red-hot situation, then retreated to his private office in the Oval to watch the ensuing hysteria engulf the nation. Cable anchors were happy to comply, secretly flattered the most powerful man in the world was watching them. The bot networks amplified all of it.

No one had ever witnessed the weaponization of social media on this scale, and as far as I could tell, American agencies were not responding. 

It was an impossible fight of David and Goliath’s proportions. The Twitter crowd of investigators was small. We’d duke it out with the other side’s formidable machine and their army of real-life digital soldiers in what I can only describe as a whack-a-mole of narratives.

Nothing in my twenty-five years as a journalist (which included a baptism by fire in the dying days of Apartheid) had prepared me for the onslaught of propaganda, agents provocateur, intelligence assets, double-agents, swarms of digital bots, and the complexity of organization that we confronted.

I wrote my stories in long-form posts on this blog. 100+ chapters are all told, like a novel unraveling in real time. Russia House, Confirming the Kompromat, Dial C for Collusion, Facebook the Nation, Meet Me at The Mayflower, Facebook’s Dirty Little Secret, and For Guns and Country, to name a few.

There were no guides or rules. I thought about walking away but just couldn’t.

STATE DEPARTMENT WARNING

When Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine in April 2014, a forward-thinking diplomat typed a memo to his superiors at the State Department: 

[The Russians] unleashed an unprecedented social media propaganda campaign to shore up domestic support for President Vladimir Putin’s policy and to support anti-Kyiv protest activity on the streets of Southern and Eastern Ukraine. Official and allegedly unofficial social media accounts have spewed forth an unceasing stream of disinformation and gained more and more online followers. Russia may be swaying people through sheer volume or at least discouraging people from participating.

Unknown diplomat in State Department memo, Dec 2014

The diplomatic cable mentioned two social media accounts, Artem Klyushin and Konstantin Rykov – two Billionaire loyalists of Vladimir Putin. Considering their outsized role in the social media campaign of Ukraine in 2014 and their proximity to Putin, they should have been on the radar of US officials investigating 2016, yet we’ve heard very little about them.

Rykov is a Kremlin propagandist. 

Klyushin and his now ex-wife owned a bot development company, The Agency for Development of Innovative Technologies (APRIT), which was under contract for the Russian government in 2015 when many Kremlin-sanctioned campaigns to support Trump began.

Both men have ties to the Internet Research Agency – a social media content factory in St. Petersburg quixotically helmed by Putin’s former chef, Yevgeny Prigozhin, which carried out disinformation assaults on the Us in late 2016.

Another close connection to Vladimir Putin is another oligarch who shares the lasts name of Prigozhin. Iossif Prigozhin is a well-known Russian music producer. He is regularly on Klyushin’s Instagram feed, as is Emin Agalarov. That’s how the 50-year-old bot-maker met Trump at the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow. Agalarov introduced them, and reporters spotted them regularly that week.

Klyushin boasts of an ability to “alter emotional and logical perceptions of situations” and claims his company could produce and amplify content through 1,000 accounts and millions of subscribers.

He doesn’t claim an ability to see into the future, yet somehow Klyushin’s wife knew enough to tweet this in January 2015, months before the world learned Trump was running, and yes, while under contract to the Kremlin.

“I’m sure @realDonaldTrump will be a great president. We’ll support you from Russia! America needs an ambitious leader”.

Klyushin celebrated Trump’s victory at an election night party in Moscow for Trump supporters. He bragged on Instagram that Trump would not have won without his help. Still, it’s hard to know where the bravado ends and the hubris begins. 

Klyushin often tweets advice to Trump, which days later often became presidential policy while Trump was in office.

The Senate Intelligence Committee said it believes Klyushin and Rykov were involved in manipulating social media perceptions in the 2014 Ukraine and the 2016 US elections.

Of course, achieving mass dissonance in the US is on a very different scale than in Ukraine. 

This may explain why Klyushin spends so much time in Dubai. That location shows up most on his Twitter posts, perhaps intentionally, but more likely because he forgot to turn off his geolocation.

POWER BROKER

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohamed bin Salman, gets the bulk of attention regarding Trump’s sordid relationship with Middle East countries, but it was the UAE’s crown prince Mohamed bin Zayed who was the power broker between the Trump campaign and the Gulf countries.

MBZ flew to New York City in Dec 2016 without informing the State Department, which is standard protocol. Obama officials were even more surprised when MBZ arrived at Trump Tower to meet Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Michael Flynn.

A month later, MBZ hosted a meeting in Seychelles – this time with Erik Prince and Russian envoy Kiril Dmitriev. Also present was George Nader, a senior advisor to the crown prince and a regular fixture on the Trump campaign (and current convict for human trafficking).

Prince represented the Trump Administration in the Seychelles talks, although he’s been on MBZ’s payroll for over a decade. Prince’s company Reflex Response (R2) was headquartered in Abu Dhabi and 51% owned by the Emiratis. Abu Dhabi is Prince’s official place of residence.

In 2015, The CEO of another of Prince’s companies was in Abu Dhabi and said he heard Prince discussing a psy-op that would weaponize social media to effect regime change in Iran.

Gregg Smith was the CEO of Frontier Services Group between 2014-16 and has a long history with Prince. Smith says he overheard a conversation between Prince and two former CIA agents working for him.

“Prince had a couple of former CIA officers that he employed, and they would sit there and talk about that psy-op running against the Iranians to try to get them to overthrow the regime there,” Smith told me on a recent Narativ podcast, “He just took the same psy-op and brought it to America.”

How could they target the US with a psy-op and evade detection? The answer is both macro and micro. Let’s begin with the macro. The CIA does not physically spy on the UAE, meaning there’s no human intelligence, which, as one former official told Reuters, amounts to a “dereliction of duty”.

While MBZ has been close to American presidents (notably Republican ones), he’s also maintained a close working relationship with Vladimir Putin, and his head of intelligence services, Sheikh Tahnoun Bin Zayed, maintains close ties with both the Russians and Israelis. The UAE has expanded its regional ambitions greatly in recent years operating militarily in Yemen and Syria and running covert military ops in Libya, notably under Prince.

In a sign of how sour the US-UAE relationship has become, President Joe Biden is yet even to call the crown prince almost two months into his administration. A significant diplomatic slight for what was until recently a major Middle East ally.

The micro answer to the above question is even more surprising.

PROJECT RAVEN

The US used UAE as a base for covert operations since the 1970s. The relationship was so close the US helped the Emiratis launch their own version of the National Security Agency. Today it’s called the Signals Intelligence Agency (SIA).

Dubbed “Project Raven” by the Americans, the NSA contracted out former NSA staffers to the Emirati agency beginning in 2008. They spied on thousands of people on behalf of the Emiratis, including some enemies of the crown prince.

“Raven” was based in an Abu Dhabi villa. The ex-NSA contractors trained SIA officials on top-secret technology and used protocols very similar to those used by the NSA.

“The incentive was to help in the fight against al-Qaeda. The UAE is a very good counterterrorism partner. You need to remember the timing back then, post 9-11,” Richard A. Clarke, a former US counterterrorism czar who helped build SIA told al-Jazeera. “The NSA wanted it to happen.”

That may have been the intention, but in 2016, one former NSA contractor discovered SIA was hacking the smartphones of American journalists.

The Ex-NSA staffers built the Emiratis an extraordinarily valuable resource. A network of remote servers allowed the Emiratis untraceable internet access to the world.

“Using fake identities and Bitcoin, the Infrastructure department anonymously rented servers worldwide. Those remote servers allowed Raven to launch attacks from a network of machines that cannot be traced back to the project.”

This seems to me to be something of extraordinary consequence. The only way to sustain a continuing social media manipulation psy-op like the one Prince was overheard describing would be to use a distributed network that would be untraceable to Twitter or any other bot detectors. For clarity, there’s no evidence to suggest the UAE used this facility for this purpose, but it strikes me as something you would need to run an operation like that and warrants further analysis.

One final note. One of Artem Klyushin’s ‘advice’ tweets to Donald Trump was a fawning endorsement of Erik Prince’s plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan, suggesting the two men know each other well enough to discuss military strategy.

Facebook The Nation

by Zev Shalev and Tracie McElroy September 12, 2017

Psychological Warfare

by Zev Shalev and Tracie McElroy September 5, 2017

Dial ‘C’ For Collusion

by Zev Shalev April 8, 2017

Here’s a selection of three Narativ pieces about data and psychological warfare in the 2016 election, beginning with one I wrote in April 2017.

MINDF*CK MACHINE

In May 2018, Chris Wylie exposed Cambridge Analytica’s use of 50 million Facebook profiles to build what Wylie called Stephen Bannon’s “mindf*ck machine. Days later, Channel 4 revealed CA’s use of honey traps to interfere in elections. Cambridge Analytica and its parent company quickly disbanded. 

CA’s owners transferred the company’s data and technology to Emerdata, co-owned by CA’s original owners, the Mercers, a Chinese associate of Erik Prince and Ahmed al-Khatib, who has close ties to the Emirati Crown Prince. The existence of Emerdata was discovered by fellow Twitter investigator Wendy Siegelman. The name was Emerdata derives from the Emirates.

Siegelman also reported another SCL alum Nigel Oakes, calls UAE home 

It’s hard to imagine the Crown Prince, who was the first and only foreign leader to meet directly with the Trump transition team in December 2016, was collecting all these assets and gathering operatives like Klyushin, Prince, Nader, and Oakes, all while hacking the phones of US journalists, for any other reason other than some sort of political operation.

So let’s imagine you had the mind-fucking instincts of the Russians, A highly functional distributed server network purpose-built by the NSA. And access to the raw data of 50 million Facebook users. Would that be enough to launch a psy-op in the US?

Almost.

To manipulate the entire Twitter population individually, you would need Artificial Intelligence. Only A.I. could process such a vast amount of data accurately and quickly. The search for a firm able and willing to undertake such a task led me to Israel’s Fifth Dimension.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Fifth Dimension was another one of these private spyware companies that spawned from Israel’s famed 8200 division. The company’s chairman Benny Gantz was until recently considered the likely successor to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg – another Putin acolyte – was the principal investor in Fifth Dimension until he received US sanctions for meddling in the 2016 elections and other malign activity. The April 2018 sanctions effectively froze the oligarch’s assets in the Russian gas sector, but they also surprisingly caused Fifth Dimension to shut down.

It’s unusual for a company specializing in the very sought-after space of machine learning to shut down, especially one with the backing of the Israeli Defense Force – even if their biggest investor backed out. Any private equity firm would jump at the chance to invest in a tech start-up like that, but not Fifth Dimension.

Fifth Dimension’s closure coincided with the shuttering of another Israeli spy firm with ties to the Trump campaign and Erik Prince. PSY Group worked on social media manipulation for the campaign for over a year and was shut down in December 2018. Prince first approached PSY-Group for a project in 2015.

Fifth Dimension transferred its residual technology to yet another Israeli tech firm, NSO, that specialized in the hacking of smartphones – the same hacking firm involved in Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination.

Was Fifth Dimension playing a more significant role in the 2016 election, which has somehow evaded the law? Or was the company’s technology used by others after it shut down? Or might we never know because we don’t spy on our allies?

It appears that many Israeli private spy tech firms like PSY-Group, Black Cube, NSO, and more recently, Carbyne and Cellebrite are fronts for Israeli and Russian stakeholders to surveil citizens of other countries or interfere in their domestic affairs without damaging official Israeli-American relations. Whether Fifth Dimension was, too, is impossible to say but worth assessing.

That’s as far as I can take you on our journey to see the Wizard, but hopefully, I’ve provided you with enough to see his outline, so keep an eye out for him the next time you wade on to Twitter.

We battled that monstrous machine for four years, fighting a war for the heart and minds of Americans. A race against the clock to avoid a second Trump term. A war most Americans didn’t even know existed. And a war we won, for now.

You can read part one of ‘The War We’re In‘ here.

The post Erik Prince’s Psy Op On U.S. appeared first on Narativ.

How Billionaire GOP donors are using dark money to rig the US justice system.

The very same dark money funding the selection of federal judges is also funding the draconian cases attempting to turn back legislation like gay marriage rights and Roe vs Wade and the recruitment of vulnerable churchgoers as GOP voters.

Watch part 1 and 2 of The Threat of Amy Coney Barrett. 

In part 1, we look at how US churches have become fertile ground for GOP data-miners to recruit future voters by targeting their algorithms to seek out vulnerable people based on their social media profiles and other available data.

This data-driven recruitment drive is the main premise of Dr. Charles Kriel’s new film “People You May know.”

Kriel was joined on the panel by national political journalist Nina Burleigh and author of “The Trump Women: Part of The Deal” and Greg Olear author of “Dirty Rubles” and publisher of “Prevail“.

Part 2 looks at how the GOP’s voter recruitment efforts connect to a much broader plan to influence every aspect of the United States Judicial system: from the selection of judges to the funding and mounting of specific cases designed to reverse rights. The plan has an even more pernicious goal.

The post The Threat of Amy Coney Barrett appeared first on Narativ.

Psychiatrists tried to warn us about Donald Trump. They were shut down.

Watch Part 3 of Covidgate. We learn of a coordinated effort to suppress warnings about Donald Trump’s mental health.

Lyndon B. Johnson was re-elected in a landslide in 1964 partially because American voters were increasingly concerned Johnson’s Republican challenger, Barry Goldwater, would lead the U.S. into nuclear war with Russia.

Over half of psychiatrists polled by Fact magazine that year responded that the Arizona Senator was mentally unfit to be president. Goldwater sued the magazine and won his case.

Despite clear evidence the poll itself was poorly structured and the results misrepresented, in 1973, chastened mental health practitioners adopted a new rule into their code of ethics named after Goldwater.

“[I]t is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion [on a public figure] unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization,” Rule 7a reads.

Duty To Warn

The rule, and psychiatry in general, has mostly stayed clear of presidential politics until Donald Trump was elected president, which is when a group of mental health professional gathered at Yale university for the ‘Duty to Warn’ conference.

The conference attendees concluded mental health professionals did have a responsibility to warn the public if they were concerned about a public person’s state of mind. And they were very worried about Donald Trump’s, whom many believed displayed the clear characteristics of someone with Anti Social Personality Disorder.

In other words, Trump is a sociopath.

The conference was organized by Dr. Bandy X. Lee who went on to curate a New York Times bestseller called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”.

The book became a runaway success and Dr. Lee began doing the TV rounds warning the public of the real dangers caused by a Donald Trump presidency. That’s when a scathing op-ed in the New York Times scolded Dr. Lee’s efforts. An an op-ed, she later discovered, which was backed by the America Psychiatric Association.

Goldwater’s Ghost

At the heart of the APA’s criticism was the Goldwater Rule.

Almost instantly, Dr. Lee noticed the mood shift. She claims she was booked and then cancelled by TV producers seventy times.

I can attest to one of those times. I was one of them.

In 2018, while doing a short tour of duty in Canada to launch a national Sunday morning show, one of the producers pitched Dr. Lee as a guest. I opted for another segment for a myriad of sound editorial reasons, but the New York Times editorial did factor into my thinking, such is the power of a vaunted institution like the Times.

In the ensuing weeks and months, Dr. Lee noticed something else. She claims her quotes were systematically deleted out of previously published New York Times articles.

The Goldwater Rule seems at best misguided. After all, In 1964, Americans heeded the warnings about Goldwater’s mental state and delivered Johnson one of the most decisive election victories since 1820.

But at its worst, the Goldwater Rule provides cover for literal madmen to assume the highest offices of power. Any reasonable person would agree that mental health practitioners should warn the country if there is clear evidence of danger.

Things Will Get Worse

The 1973 Goldwater Rule is relic, which decades after its adoption, looms over our current existential crisis. The APA ought to revisit it and Dr. Lee deserves the gratitude of a community and the indebtedness of her profession. We should also heed her warning. She published her book in 2017, and three years later she believes if Donald Trump stays in office, things will get far worse. Dr. Lee’s new book “Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul” will be out soon.

These days, we could do with Goldwater’s spirit from a later chapter of his political career, when he told Nixon he had to resign, and Nixon did. We don’t have Republican Senators like that anymore.

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be forced to confront many societal structures and long-held beliefs which have outlived their usefulness or their times. The Goldwater Rule serves as a timely reminder not to cling on to a past that no longer makes sense.

The post Warning Signs appeared first on Narativ.

By attempting to construct an elaborate narrative, Donald Trump has exposed his own cover-up.

Donald Trump’s coronavirus infection has spread to more than 100 people in and outside the administration.

Zev Shalev continues to make the case for an independent investigation into the Trump’s administration’s Covid-19 contagion. The White House has repeatedly refused to reveal when Trump last had a negative coronavirus test, citing HIPAA privacy laws.

In part 2, Zev and his guests explore Trump’s attempt to shape the narrative of this explosive scandal, which has unwittingly revealed a clumsy cover-up.

@Lincoln’sBible and Dr. Bandy X. Lee, author of the upcoming “Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul” join Zev.    

Watch Part 2 above; Listen to Part 2 below.

Watch Part 1 here.

The post Covidgate Cover-Up appeared first on Narativ.

Donald Trump and the First Lady now have Covid-19, or so we are led to believe.

Truth has become so disposable for the Trump administration, we no longer believe anything that comes from the White House. Special guests Jean Guerrero, author of “Hatemonger” and Greg Olear, Eric Garland and Lincoln’s Bible.

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The post Covid, Lies and Audiotape appeared first on Narativ.

The first presidential debate of the 2020 elections was an unwatchable, debasing affair that still delivered political blows. Our live special aired directly afterwards.

Immediate post-debate analysis from an all-star panel: Former Republican strategist and host of ‘Politics with Cheri Jacobus’ podcast, Cheri Jacobus,  Former ‘Apprentice’ talent executive and comedian Noel Casler and ‘Dirty Rubles’ and ‘Prevail’ founder author Greg Olear. 

Narativ’s content is provided free of charge to everyone thanks to the support of Narativ’s patrons. Video podcast are available on Apple IOS devices, Audio podcasts are available everywhere. and on player like Spotify.

The post Debate Debacle appeared first on Narativ.

This week: Jared Kushner’s coronavirus cash grab, Peter Thiel is selling everything about you for $22 Billion and should you watch the Comey Rule on Showtime?

Narativ Live has two podcasts: Our Tuesday shows delves more deeply into a single topic.  Fridays is really ‘anything goes’ night.  We call it the After Show but it’s regularly our best,  as was the case with this week’s episode with @LincolnsBible @GregOlear @ZevShalev. Watch it above or listen below.

The post After Show: New Hope appeared first on Narativ.

What role did China play in electing Donald Trump? That question has largely evaded Trump-Russia watchers, but Erik Prince helps us answer it.

Gregg Smith was the CEO of Chinese logistics firm, Frontier Services Group, where he worked alongside Erik Prince, a key advisor to Donald Trump. Smith had been at Prince’s side as a business associate through a number of joint ventures for the two decades prior to 2016.  

Now, Smith is coming forward with new information about Prince, about how the disgraced mercenary boss of Blackwater continues to involve himself in illegal private contracting. Smith believes Prince was likely involved in two recent aborted attempts to overthrow the US-backed UN government in Libya, a mission undertaken on behalf of Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, who is backed by Russia.

Smith joined Zev Shalev and Eric Garland on the Narativ Live podcast to discuss the attempted coup and also Prince’s role as a private contractor for China.

“We had $110 Million in cash, an airstrip in Mombasa, Kenya and a Chinese partner, CITIC,” Smith recounted to Shalev about how he and Prince landed up being bankrolled by China’s powerful CITIC Group.

That’s in part 2 of our special “Prince of Proxy“, you’ll find it near the bottom of this page.

But first, the big news this week is that Prince is being investigated by the United Nations for his role in an attempt to overthrow the US-supported UN government in Libya.

LIBYAn COUP ATTEMPT

In Part 1, Smith revealed Prince is under investigation by the United Nations for his role in an attempted overthrow of Libya’s UN-backed-government. The twice-aborted mission was intended to install warlord Khalifa Haftar, and was helmed by Prince’s longtime associate, Christiaan “Serge” Durant, who owns the gun-for-hire company, Lancaster 6.  

Watch Part 1 on Libya above. Part 2 about China is below.

CHINA’S MAN

Former Frontier Services Group CEO Gregg Smith revealed in Part 2 of of the podcast that Erik Prince answers to Chang Zhenming, the chairman of FSG, and a powerful ally of President Xi in the Chinese Communist Party.

Watch Part 2 of “Prince of Proxy” below.

The post Bankrolled By Beijing appeared first on Narativ.

For ten years, The Apprentice made Donald Trump a household name while creating a wholly fictional narrative that hid Trump’s criminal activity.

The Apprentice was much more than just a hit shows for Donald Trump, it was a calling card that gave him access to the world’s organized crime syndicates and helped him foster a cover story for a lifetime of crime.

As a talent handler on The Celebrity Apprentice, Noel Casler was an eyewitness to Donald Trump’s behind-the-scenes behavior. He joins Zev Shalev on the podcast to reveal secrets of the Apprentice: sex, drugs and Donald Trump. With panelists @LincolnsBible and @GregOlear.

In Part 2, The panel discusses how The Apprentice enabled Donald Trump’s organized crime activity around the world and exposes even more secrets of The Apprentice.

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Subversion of Democracy: Explaing Trump’s Charge

by Zev Shalev May 29, 2024

The Spy Games 2024

by Zev Shalev April 22, 2024

Exposing the enemies of democracy since 2016

by Zev Shalev December 11, 2023

The post Secrets of The Apprentice appeared first on Narativ.

Exposing Donald Trump and Bill Barr’s cynical plan to use a military clampdown against protesters to help them win the November election. Strategic Analyst @EricGarland joins Narativ’s @ZevShalev.

Liked the show? Support Narativ’s independent journalism by joining our Patreon community for as little as $5 a month by clicking the button below.

Many ways to watch and listen to Narativ’s podcast.

The post A Little Dictator appeared first on Narativ.

Is Jared Kushner a White House mole for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?

Not since Jonathan Pollard, has the United States had a public spy scandal involving our closest mid-east ally, Israel. Now within the space of a few years, we’ve learned about Jeffrey Epstein, George Nader, Psy Group, and George Papadopoulous, all off whom are, or were suspected of being assets for Israel.

Now there’s compelling evidence to suggest Kushner is heavily influenced by Netanyahu as part of a multinational conspiracy to destroy American democracy.

On the latest podcast, I’m joined by futurist and strategic analyst Eric Garland and Twitter’s authority on organized crime, Lincoln’s Bible. We break down the evidence from every angle: America’s interest, domestic politics, and intelligence operations

If you don’t already follow them, I highly recommend doing so @EricGarland and @LincolnsBible on #Twitter

Part 1 of Jared Kushner: Inside Man

Before you watch Part 2, Narativ relies on donations from viewers like you to fund our investigations and podcasts. Go to Patreon.com/Narativ and support real independent journalism for as little as $5 a month.

PART 2 OF JARED KUSHNER: INSIDE MAN

The post THE INSIDE MAN appeared first on Narativ.

The DOJ’s reversal on prosecuting Michael Flynn means reopening the case of Flynn’s alleged treasonous acts.

In my latest podcast, I was joined by strategic analyst Eric Garland. We discussed Flynn’s crimes and why Jared Kushner’s and Bibi Netanyahu’s actions need closer examination.

Before you watch Part 2, Narativ relies on donations from viewers like you to fund our investigations and podcasts. Go to Patreon.com/Narativ and support our independent journalism for as little as $5 a month.

Here’s part 2:

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The post The Flynn Files appeared first on Narativ.

EXCLUSIVE: It’s official. Donald Trump fits the clinical profile of a psychopath or sociopath.

A couple of years ago, a book came out claiming Donald Trump had Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Dr. Daniel Winarick says that diagnosis is not widely accepted by the medical community.

Dr. Winarick says Trump does fit the profile of the disorder associated with psychopaths and sociopaths known as Anti Social Personality Disorder.

Winarick joined Zev Shalev on Narativ Live to explain why Trump’s behavior is consistent with ASPD.

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Remember to subscribe, rate and share the podcast. It help a lot.

The post A Very Dangerous Mind appeared first on Narativ.

Narativ is premiering There’s Something About Rudy, a pop-up podcast about the man at the center of Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry, Rudy Giuliani.

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT RUDY

Rudy Giuliani is fond of his nickname, America’s Mayor, which he earned after 9/11. It suits his reputation as a mob-busting federal prosecutor and a tough New York City Mayor.

These days Giuliani calls himself the president’s personal attorney and cybersecurity adviser, but the truth about Rudy is a far cry from the image he presents.

Here are all three episodes of Narativ’s pop-up series “There’s Something About Rudy”.

PART 1: MAFIA MYTHS

Part one is all about Rudy and the mob. Giuliani claims credit for the cracking down on La Cosa Nostra as a federal prosecutor in the 1980s, but that’s only part of the story.

PART 2: RUSSIAN MISSION

My investigation into Rudy Giuliani leads me to a Ukrainian oligarch with direct ties to Vladimir Putin and a discovery of a series of ‘consulting’ agreements that appear to be bribes.

PART 3: LIBYA SCHEME

Rudy Giuliani has been linked to many world leaders of questionable repute and businessmen who play fast and loose with the law, but a connection to a Libyan oil smuggling ring involving ISIS is the last thing I expected.

MORE RUDY IN THESE PODCASTS

For the Rudy pods, my special thanks to colleagues @LincolnsBible and @PortlusGlam. They are required follows, in my opinion.

Subscribe and download the video podcast by searching “Narativ Live” wherever you get your podcasts. Follow me on twitter here, or leave your comments below or on email. Reach out if you have any new information or insights.

The post A Mob Story appeared first on Narativ.

Special Counsel, Robert Mueller has submitted his report to the Attorney General, William Barr. Barr is expected to release the report to Congress as early as this weekend. We can’t tell you what Mueller concluded but here’s what to expect. (updated).

While it’s tempting to think of Trump-Russia as a single crime like a jewelry heist with the American Presidency substituting for priceless gems, it is not that simple. In reality, the operation was a series of interconnected, simultaneous crimes, all setting up the right conditions for the taking of the most powerful throne on the planet.

There is no crime called “Stealing the American Presidency,” so Mueller’s first task is to identify whether a crime was committed to effect the election result for the benefit of the conspirators. To continue our jewelry heist analogy, this would be akin to our jewelry thieves disrupting traffic to create a distraction so they can slip past police with the loot. Because of this, Mueller’s case will be largely circumstantial and we don’t expect a smoking gun.

Narativ’s investigations and live shows are entirely funded by donations from paid supporters. Please consider donating and help us build a new news. Thank you.

Mueller’s second task is to determine if the crime was a conspiracy. To qualify as one, Mueller needs to show two or more parties conspiring in the execution of a crime. Conspirators usually try to hide their involvement from being detected by using cut-outs or intermediaries to execute their crime. Mueller may not have any direct evidence that Putin and Trump were directly conspiring but he will likely have evidence their subordinates did.

Important note, even if the actual crime was never carried out, the very fact that two or more parties planned to execute an offense together makes it a conspiracy.

Mueller’s third task is to prove the involvement of Russia or its agents or agencies on the one hand, and the Trump campaign or its associates on the other hand, in the execution of this conspiracy and crime. That is the scope of Mueller’s mandate.

Does Mueller have the goods?

If Mueller can determine Trump-Russia was a conspiracy, he’ll need to show a coordinated operation to defraud America and its citizens during the 2016 Presidential Election. There’s an actual law called “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States” (923.18 U.S.C Section 371) as defined by Hammerschmidt v. United States as:

To summarize, Mueller needs to determine if a crime was committed, whether it was a conspiracy and if it involved Russia and the Trump campaign or their delegates. Fortunately, Mueller already has a significant amount of evidence, and most of it has already been tested before grand juries and judges through various indictments and hearings.

Other countries, interest groups, politicians, organizations – criminal or otherwise – and some very wealthy people may also have been involved in the planning and execution of the conspiracy and the underlying crime or crimes. All told, we may find the number of people with direct knowledge of the crime to be in the hundreds or more, but Mueller’s primary interest is specifically Russia and the Trump Campaign.

One operation, many conspiracies.

Trump-Russia was one operation consisting of a many possible crimes, or conspiracies. These include known operations to influence the NRA, the use of stolen Facebook data to shift sentiment, an attempt to hand over dirt on HRC’s campaign and could even include the mysterious death of a GOP operative in Chicago.

Each of these operations appears to have their own conspiracies and their own crimes but one operation stands out among them as having the clearest connective tissue between the Russian state and the Trump campaign, and that is:

The DNC hack and the subsequent publication of emails by WikiLeaks is likely to be ground zero of Mueller’s report.

This operation has it all. Donald Trump himself pleading for help from Russia and WikiLeaks, an actual intrusion into the DNC servers by cyber hackers at Russia’s military intelligence, GRU, and a motley crew of Trump associates with a demonstrable timeline of contacts with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, including Roger Stone and the president’s son.

There are four known key nodes of this operation.

• The GRU hack of DNC servers. Twelve GRU officers were already indicted as part of this conspiracy.
• The publication of the contents from the hacked servers by WikiLeaks.
• Coordination between Trump associates and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange including regular contact with Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
• The GRU also coordinated its activities with a troll farm in St. Petersburg which spread fake news on social media.

Mueller’s indictment of the 12 GRU officers gives us a clear indication of the many crimes that could fall under this conspiracy. “From phishing attacks to gain access to Democratic operatives, to money laundering, to attempts to break into state elections boards, the indictment details a vigorous and complex effort by Russia’s top military intelligence service to sabotage the campaign of Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton,” says the New York Times.

A note on the front page of Roger Stone’s indictment from January 24, 2019, refers to his possible inclusion in a more significant case of conspiracy. The related case number refers to the indictment of the twelve GRU officers. “The Stone indictment was a conspiracy indictment without any conspirators,” says legal analyst Glenn Kirshner.

In today’s announcement we learned that Stone’s prosecution will continue in November albeit under a different office. Another strand of prosecution into the inauguration committee will also continue.

Expect no more indictments from Mueller

Mueller let it be known today that there would be no further indictments from his office but this doesn’t preclude further indictments as a result of the remaining investigations or state investigations. Thos are still likely according Rep Adam Schiff and Senator Richard Blumenthal, who told MSNBC: “I think there’s a strong possibility of additional indictments, including the president’s family.”

We know that Paul Manafort’s deputy at the Trump Campaign, Rick Gates, has provided extensive cooperation to state investigator particularly in New York. The SDNY is also investigating campaign finance violations resulting from Michael Cohen plus other investigations.

One big question that remains unanswered is the involvement of Saudi Arabia, UAE and Israel in the Trump-Russia conspiracy. Mueller’s team has been investigating this thread but has obviously chosen not to indict anyone. Why he declined to prosecute will be an area of interest.

Mueller may also issue his findings on whether there was a Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice in the firing of James Comey. We will also watch with interest Michael Flynn’s involvement in an upcoming case relating to Turkey.

The investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible crimes does not end with the Mueller report, nor does it end with state or congressional investigations. Judgement on Trump will likely only be delivered at polling booths in 2020.

Will Mueller indict Donald Trump?

This is the big question. Mueller has evidence Trump was aware of the hacking, timing and context of the publication of the hacked material. This was one of the biggest revelations to emerge from Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee.

Trump also publicly conspired when he called on Russia and Wikileaks to help during the campaign. This suggests Trump could be an un-indicted co-conspirator but it seems likely he will escape exposure in the report. That does not mean he will escape indictment by the SDNY.

This has been a long road, and whatever Mueller decides, perhaps one of the most important results of the entire process is that he be allowed to complete it. It is actual proof that we still have a functioning Justice Department and that the “rule of law” still prevails in the U.S. Many challenges lie ahead, but Mueller’s decision needs to be peacefully accepted for what it is, no matter what it is.

We need to give investigators time to complete their work. Our impatience shouldn’t have any more influence over the timing of Mueller’s work than Donald Trump’s indignance. As one old proverb puts it, the wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine.

Narativ’s investigations and live shows are entirely funded by donations from paid supporters. Please consider donating and help us build a new news. Thank you.

The post Mueller Time appeared first on Narativ.

Analysis: Vladimir Putin is using North Korea as a pawn in a real-life global chess game to rebuild the Russian empire. Here’s what you need to know.

The Twilight War.  That was what Winston Churchill called the first few months of World War Two.

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi army attacked Poland in a pre-dawn blitzkrieg on September 1, 1939. Two days later, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war but British troops didn’t step onto the battleground for several months.

Hitler and Josef Stalin had agreed to carve up Poland in a non-aggression pact and the two despots did just that. A month after Germany invaded Poland from the West, Russia attacked her from the East.

The Twilight War — or the Phony War as it became known – served as a prelude to actual conflict. The allies dropped propaganda leaflets over Germany to expose Hitler’s true intentions. The NAZI’s also sank the SS Athenia, a passenger ship bound from Glasgow to Montreal which they claimed was an error.

For seven months, the Germans and the West glared at each other across the front lines. On May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill became the Prime Minister and the Phony War ended. “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial,” Churchill later wrote. That same morning, Hitler ordered his blitzkrieg into Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg. Between 40 and 50 million people died around the world in the ensuing war – the bloodiest in human history.

Seventy-eight years later and another despot with tyrannical tendencies is eyeing the rebuilding of his empire.

Vladimir Putin doesn’t hide his intention of rebuilding the destroyed Soviet Empire. He views the defeat of the Soviet Union as the single biggest tragedy to befall Russia in modern times. “The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Putin said in 2005.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2013, the world has been waging proxy wars courtesy of Putin’s imperialist strategy. Russia’s invasion of Georgia and Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, Russia’s genocidal support of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the long U.S. war in Afghanistan have all been part of Putin’s plan to restore the Russian empire.

Russia was also an establishing force for ISIS and Putin’s hands are bloodied with a reign of terror that has gripped the West for over a decade killing innocent children at pop concerts and civilian commuters from London to Madrid.

Since Putin came to power, he’s amassed a personal fortune of $200 Billion stolen from his countrymen and Ukrainians. He’s enabled a criminal state ruled by a kleptocracy who’ve raped and pillaged Russia’s wealth. Putin’s henchmen have been allowed to “arrest, kidnap, torture and kill to take people’s properties away with impunity,” says human rights activist Bill Browder.

Putin and his merry band of thieves have laundered billions of dollars obtained through drug-trafficking, nuclear arms sales, human trafficking, large-scale criminal theft, hacking and cryptocurrency. Since 2014, U.S. sanctions have begun to threaten the oligarchs’ wealth hidden away in off-shore companies.

Last year, Russia turned from proxy wars in Syria and Afghanistan into directly engaging the U.S., albeit invisibly.

Putin’s unprecedented attack on the U.S. democracy included a multi-year financial and operational infestation of major U.S. conservative institutions like the National Rifle Association, the Republican Party and the co-opting of several leading Silicon Valley companies and billionaires.

The Kremlin employed thousands of operatives in U.S. financial, military and technology infrastructure. Data analysts, hackers and propagandists in Russia and the U.S. manipulated the minds of an electorate, stealing private information on Americans and using it against them by peddling fake news and targeted hate content to amplify deep-seated anger, prejudice and fear.

Putin targeted the downtrodden among us: immigrants, transgendered people and victims of injustice. Our research shows a track record of financial and political support dating back to 2009 for social conservative groups like the NRA, anti-gay group World Congress of Families and the exploitation of racial tensions in the U.S. from Black Lives Matter to immigration issues.

Putin has not shied away from attacking U.S. forces. Four U.S. navy carriers in the Pacific mysteriously crashed in the Pacific in what seems likely to be the hack of their steering and GPS systems. 17 U.S. servicemen were killed. The Kremlin is also suspected of launching sonic attacks which severely injured U.S. diplomats in Cuba.

Russia conspired to elect a U.S. president using known Kremlin operatives like Paul Manafort and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.  Flynn and others in the administration also copied and stole confidential documents from a secure room at the White House.

Why Trump? Possibly because he is monetarily compromised by Russia but also because he knew Trump could be goaded into a military response in North Korea. In December, Trump adviser Erik Prince met with Putin’s envoy in the Seychelles. They discussed ways of isolating Iran in exchange for the dropping of sanctions.

There is no greater signal Putin is itching for a real war with the West than his military and financial support for North Korea.

We were first to report about suspicious military cargo being shipped from Vladivostok in Russia to North Korea. Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear missiles are powered by Soviet-era rockets. Russia has also been dodging U.S. sanctions on North Korea, providing about $1 billion in illegal trade from its Russian neighbors, along with scientific help.

As we write, North Korea is planning another nuclear test possibly targeting the vicinity of the U.S. territory of Guam and likely launched from a submarine. This is a direct attempt to engage the U.S. militarily. While Trump will have his followers believe the war will stay in the Korean Peninsula, Russia is just using North Korea as a tactic to distract the U.S. military and allow an opening for Russia’s expansion into Eastern Europe.

Russia embarked on a ten-year, $700 billion program to bolster its military in 2010. Her military budget has ballooned from $25 billion in 2006 to $90 billion in 2013. Last month, Russian forces joined Belarus in a military exercise on their Western front. Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Georgia all raised concerns the Zapad exercises were a cover for Russia’s preparation for war.

Moscow and Minsk claimed only 12,7000 troops were involved in the exercise but the real number was closer to 100,000 and could have been as high as 240,000. Ukrainian military officials say Russia only withdrew a fraction of her troops after the war-games leaving them war-ready.

The Kremlin also deployed new Iskander surface-to-surface ballistic missile, Kalibr cruise missiles, Bal coastal-defense missile and the S-400 Triumph air defense systems during the war-games. Russia is also pursuing a new class of air-independent submarines, stealth fighter planes, high-tech ground gear for her ground forces and recently tested a new missile capable of destroying satellites in space.

Elsewhere, Russia has conducted joint military exercises with China and Egypt, as well as in the Northern Fleet of the Barents Sea. In Helsinki, the Fins have been preparing an underground city in the event of war.

If North Korea draws the U.S. into war on the Korean Peninsula, Russia will seize the opportunity to invade Eastern Europe.

Any attack on a NATO member country will draw the U.S. into war there, forcing the U.S. into fighting a war on two fronts. Both on Russia’s border. “Despite Russia’s denials, we know they are seeking to redraw international borders by force, undermining the sovereign and free nations of Europe,” U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis said in Ukraine in August.

Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine are likely to be first targets of a Russian-NATO war. While NATO outguns Russian, NATO troops are not fully mobilized on the front. Until they are, Russia could overrun the Baltic states in as quickly as in 60 hours. With U.S. forces split between Eastern Europe and Korea, the U.S. military would be pressed to capacity.

There’s ample reason to believe China could be working in coordination with Russia. Recent war-games and China’s support for North Korea are chief among them. China bought 14% of Russia’s oil producer Rosneft. Russia stands to benefit financially from a war because global conflict drives up oil prices and oil is the one thing Russia has.

Beijing and Moscow have also opposed tougher sanctions against Pyongyang. This could be a tell-tale sign China will sit out any war waiting for Russia and the West to destroy each other. Worse, they could side with Russia and North Korea militarily, plunging us all into the worst war in history.

And if you think such war will stay confined to Europe and Asia, think again. Russia and the U.S. have each rigged each others’ power grids and infrastructure with malware able to cut off power supply to population centers. An aggravated and unpredictable North Korea could also strike the U.S. mainland with nuclear missiles. Russia and U.S. Nuclear warheads are a deterrent but history shows us they can be used when push comes to shove in global conflict.

The world stands at the precipice of war with unthinkable consequences. The result will be a world far different from the one we have now: ruled by kleptocrats, despots and enemies of truth and justice. That is not the world for which the U.S. and its allies has spent generations fighting. It’s not the world we should leave behind. We cannot be antagonized into war by North Korea and give Russia the opening it wants to rebuild its empire in Eastern Europe.

We should focus our intentions squarely on the tyrant who has led the world into this nightmare: Vladimir Putin.

The post The Precipice appeared first on Narativ.

An investigation into Facebook’s political donations to Republican and anti-LGBT politicians and its investments from Putin-linked Russian oligarchs. We found a pattern of political activity at odds with the company’s public image.

At 33, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the world’s most recognizable names. Zuckerberg is also one of its richest, estimated to be worth $73.7 billion. The Facebook founder publicly espouses liberal notions on everything from gay rights to immigration but a closer look under the hood of Facebook’s finances and political operations reveals a record of support for conservative causes, opposition to LGBT rights and connections to Russian money.

Zuckerberg is now under enormous pressure to reveal more about Facebook’s role in a Russian propaganda campaign in support of Donald Trump in the 2016 election cycle. Despite a coy statement revealing $150,000 in advertising spend by a Russian social media firm with ties to Vladimir Putin and the FSB and new revelations the social network allowed Russian operatives posing as Americans to create and sell tickets to anti-immigration, secessionist, anti-LGBT and confederate events, Facebook is refusing to release the ads, groups and who was targeted.

“It appeared to me that the very social media sites that we rely on for virtually everything — our Facebooks, Googles and Twitters — it was my belief the Russians were using those sites to intervene in our elections,” Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) told CNN “And the first reaction from Facebook was: ‘Well you’re crazy, there’s nothing going on’ — well, we find yesterday there actually was something going on.”

Amid all this pressure, a renewed spotlight should be shone on why Facebook donated $120,000 to the Conservative Political Action Committee. Facebook made the donation to CPAC partly to allow conference attendees could easily produce Facebook Live videos, according to the Daily Beast. Facebook had previously contributed to production at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions but the decision to support a partisan action committee conference raises questions about the motives of the donation amid conflicting statements from Facebook and CPAC.

The social network acknowledged the payment but said “our involvement is not an endorsement of any particular position or platform.” CPAC’s Matt Schlapp indicated however there was some ideological participation: “We are glad Facebook agreed to be at CPAC and to acknowledge the importance of conservatives to their company, and we continue to work with them on issues important to conservatives,” he said.

The CPAC convention took place at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Md in February this year and featured President Donald Trump, VP Mike Pence, Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus, Kellyanne Conway. The NRA which is also linked to Russian influence is a big funder of CPAC.

Since 2011, Facebook’s PAC has contributed more to GOP candidates including those with anti-LGBT positions.

Facebook started its own Political Action Committee in 2011. The PAC supports politicians on both sides of the aisle which tends to favor Republican causes, giving $477,000 to Republican candidates like John Boehner and Paul Ryan. The PAC gave Democrats $425,000 in donations including to John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi. The PAC only supported one presidential candidate in 2016, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who received $4,000.

Since 2012, Facebook has also favored politicians with anti-LGBT voting records. More than 40 percent of Facebook’s PAC contributions, totaling roughly $156,000, have gone to politicians voting against LGBT rights. In 2014, Northstar Asset Management which owns more than 55,000 shares in Facebook filed a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission demanding the company’s PAC fall in line with Facebook’s values of being pro-gay and intellectual property rights.

Facebook rejected the claim, saying: “We have practices in place to ensure the appropriate disclosure and oversight of our lobbying and political activities. The proposal seeks to impose requirements that would be cumbersome to apply, are not required by law and are not standard amongst other companies, including competitors”.

A look inside Facebook also reveals a culture devoid of diversity. There are literally no people of color on Facebook’s board which is mostly men. As a whole, 90% of Facebook is white or asian. In 2015, only 2% black overall and 3% black in senior leadership.

One of those white men who has a seat on the board is Peter Thiel, an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump (he personally donated $1.25 million to the Trump campaign and spoke at the RNC). Zuckerberg has resisted pressure to oust Thiel from the board but as investigators turn up evidence of Facebook’s role in targeting and delivering Facebook ads on behalf of the Trump campaign, Thiel’s role is likely to receive new scrutiny.

Zuckerberg touts Thiel as an example of ideological diversity. “I think the folks who are saying we shouldn’t have someone on our board because they’re a Republican, I think that’s crazy,” Zuckerberg told a forum at North Carolina A&T State University. “I think you need to have all kinds of diversity if you want to make progress together as a society.”

Thiel is also tied to mercenary Erik Prince, brother of Betsy DeVos who favors a private army take over the war in Afghanistan and is vocally opposed to rights for transgender people.

One of Facebook’s biggest shareholders is a Russian company partly-owned by an oligarch known as the “hard man” of Russia and is very close to Vladimir Putin.

In 2009, Facebook was struggling financially. The company sought outside investment and it came from Russian internet holding company Digital Sky Technologies, which invested $200 million for 2% in the company in 2009 (the stake has since climbed to between 5.4% to 10% depending on who you ask). Digital Sky’s CEO is Russian oligarch Yuri Milner but its largest shareholder and initial funder is Alisher Usmanov who is known “as the hard man” of Russia.

Usmanov is criticised for being a “racketeer and gangster”. He is a convicted criminal and was in jail in the former Soviet Union though he claims he was a political prisoner. He owns Britain’s Arsenal Football Club and investments in mines, metals factories, media properties, and mobile phones in Russia. He is the Chairman of ‘Gazpromholdings’, a subsidiary of state-run Gazprom, which has been sanctioned by the U.S.

“Usmanov became a billionaire oligarch in the gangster takeover of Russia’s “privatised” mineral assets. He is close to Putin, and has been used by him to buy up and neutralise much of the little remaining independent media in Russia. Usmanov does this in his own name or as Chairman of ‘GazpromInvestHolding’. Independent journalists have died in mysterious accidents following Usmanov takeovers,” says former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray who has taken on a personal crusade against the oligarch and was sued for his effort.

Usmanov owns 35 per cent of DST which makes him the indirect owner of a significant amount of Facebook through Digital Sky. “For a blackmailer who is a key tool in Putin’s increasingly authoritarian regime, to have a share in Facebook is totally unacceptable,” says Murray.

Digital Sky’s CEO Milner presents a cleaner image to the world but is also very close to Putin, regularly attending meetings with Usmanov and the Russian president. DST is heavily invested in Silicon Valley including investments in Twitter, Groupon and many young startups.

Facebook’s reliance on DST was not just about getting Russian money. It gave the social network access to the Kremlin and the Russian digital market. “If Facebook wants to be successful in Russia, DST can bring a lot to the table besides knowledge. DST is close to the government there, the source said, and while outright involvement (or obstruction) from the Russian government is highly unlikely, if Facebook wants its business to go more smoothly, DST can help,” a source close to DST told CNET.

Facebook has many business reasons to supports conservative voices but it remains an open question how much they knew about Russia’s interference in 2016.

Silicon Valley is increasingly concerned about aggressive Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice antitrust investigations over “unfair or deceptive”, monopolies and online data collection and use, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and spam. According to Forbes, the FTC is known in Silicon Valley as the “Federal Technology Commission”. From a business perspective Facebook’s support for conservative allies makes some sense but that they fly in the social network’s public values could harm the company.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents is “zeroing in on how Russia spread fake and damaging information through social media and is seeking additional evidence from companies like Facebook and Twitter about what happened on their networks,” according to Bloomberg.

Mueller’s focus on social media is said to be “red hot” and Facebook, Twitter and Google executives may be called to testify in front of congressional committees as well. More troubling is a notion first floated by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Facebook, Twitter and Google may indeed be the scene of the biggest political crime in history. This would expose the tech giants to extraordinary examination by prosecutors and ironically the very regulation they may have sought to dissuade with their political efforts.

The post A Dirty Little Secret appeared first on Narativ.