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AN 11 26

The biggest donors to President Donald Trump have seen "mind-blowing" returns for their investments, according to a new report shared exclusively with The Daily Beast, which found that these backers had received "supercharged" paydays since his return to the White House.

In a piece published Monday morning, The Center for American Progress revealed to the outlet that it had tracked over 75 entities that had donated a total of nearly $1.7 billion to Trump's "political groups, inauguration fund, pet projects such as his ballroom and family businesses since 2023." Based on the center's "conservative estimates," these entities have since received "more than $182 billion in government-related benefits" since the start of Trump's second term.

While stopping short of accusing Trump or these entities of any "criminal quid pro quo," the center noted that these kickbacks included things like "federal contracts, advantageous government policy and tariff and trade exemptions."

"We’re documenting money and timing and benefits received, but we can’t read minds. We can only follow the data,” CAP senior director of research Ryan Koronowski told The Daily Beast, adding that the scale of this dynamic was "mind-blowing."

"Among the report’s biggest winners are defense titan Lockheed Martin, which is reported to have donated $16 million to Trump-related causes, including $5 million from its subsidiary Sikorsky for the new White House helipad," The Daily Beast explained. "Lockheed has secured $44.8 billion in new or expanded contracts since Trump returned to the White House, the report states. Donors from the fossil fuel industry have injected $65.7 million into Trump’s political groups, his inauguration committee, and funding for his ballroom, according to CAP. Its report says the industry will benefit by $31.2 billion from the administration’s policies and tax benefits. Other major firms named in the report include tech titans Apple, MAGA bro Elon Musk and his various companies, and AI firm Palantir and its executives."

Apple, The Daily Beast detailed, donated $25 million to Trump's ballroom, as many other corporate donors did to curry his favor, while former CEO Tim Cook also personally donated $1 million to his inauguration fund. The company later received tariff exemptions that CAP estimated saved it around $21 billion.

After pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into pro-Trump causes, CAP estimated that Elon Musk's companies have raked in $14 billion in benefits from the Trump government. A DOJ investigation into alleged discrimination at SpaceX was also dropped.

“Money gains you influence, which gives you more money, which gives you more influence, which gives you more money. And it’s very circular,” Devon Ombres, a CAP senior director and co-author of the report, told The Daily Beast, adding that the existing dynamics between corporate spending and the federal government has been “supercharged to a degree that we’ve never seen before" under Trump.

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Ewan Palmer @ The Daily Beast: Alex Jones Signs Off From Infowars With Unhinged Tirade

The conspiracy theorist has launched a new website ahead of The Onion’s expected takeover of his company.

NO LNX

Obsessed

Alex Jones Signs Off From Infowars With Unhinged Tirade

BYE BYE

The conspiracy theorist has launched a new website ahead of The Onion’s expected takeover of his company.

Ewan Palmer

Reporter

:{Published May 1 2026

Alex Jones had an on-air meltdown during his final Infowars broadcast before the show was shut down ahead of a potential takeover by the satirical news site The Onion.

In a typically deranged rant, the conspiracy theorist veered into a number of tangents, from claiming his defamation court proceedings were scripted by the CIA to calling The Onion CEO Ben Collins a “confessed satanist.”

Alex Jones Loses It Over Fake Mugshot of New Infowars Boss

MISFIRE

Eboni Boykin-Patterson

Jones, Heidecker

“These show trials I went through showed me so much. Like, I knew there were show trials, just like The Truman Show,” Jones began in his final unhinged monologue on Infowars.

“When you realize they’re so corrupt, they have coordinated scripts run by the CIA in court hearings, and you’re just like, ‘Oh my God. I thought I knew how bad it was, and I was naive.’ And when that hits you, it’s like a horse kicking you. It is like being kicked in the balls by Godzilla.”

Infowars show toasting.

Other members of the Infowars team joined Alex Jones in toasting a goodbye to the company. Screengrab/Infowars

Jones continued for several minutes, insisting that he is not “putting a good face on this, this is the reality, our enemies are falling apart,” while also taking a swipe at President Donald Trump, whom he has grown increasingly critical of.

“They think they’re gonna have their big victory. They think it’s all funny. They think it’s all cool. No, this is the beginning of the end. We didn’t ride in on Trump, he rode in on our train. He was useful as far as he went.”

Jones’ company is facing liquidation as he owes nearly $1.5 billion in defamation damages to the families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting. Jones falsely claimed on his show that the 2012 massacre—which left 26 people dead, including 20 children—was a hoax and that the grieving parents were “crisis actors.”

Alex Jones Melts Down After Losing Infowars to The Onion

STRIPPED FOR PARTS

Owen Mason-Hill

Alex Jones on Infowars

The Onion is attempting to take over Infowars and turn it into a parody site mocking conspiracy theories pushed by far-right figures like Jones, while also generating revenue for the Sandy Hook families.

The Onion submitted a new takeover bid last month after its previous attempt was blocked by a judge in November 2024 over concerns about the bidding process and whether the satirical outlet should have been declared the winner.

InfoWars founder Alex Jones speaks to the media outside Waterbury Superior Court during his trial on September 21, 2022 in Waterbury, Connecticut. Jones is being sued by several victims' families for causing emotional and psychological harm after they lost their children in the Sandy Hook massacre. A Texas jury last month ordered Jones to pay $49.3 million to the parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, one of 26 students and teachers killed in the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. (Photo by Joe Buglewicz/Getty Images)

:{Alex Jones founded InfoWars in 1997.

Ownership of Infowars is currently in limbo after a Texas appeals court approved an emergency motion by Jones’ lawyers that temporarily blocked the transfer of assets.

In a statement, Collins, a former editor at the Daily Beast, lashed out at the “insane, unprecedented stalling” and said it does “nothing but delay our deal with the receiver to take control of Infowars.”

Jones, meanwhile, is already declaring Infowars finished while simultaneously announcing a new website, AlexJonesLive.

“The state court just blocked the little rat, confessed satanist, from coming in to wear our skin for months while we launch our operation,” Jones said.

“I will sit there and live in a modest house with a modest car, which I love, and they think, oh, we’ll take your money, Jones, shut up. I’m ready to die for this. You think taking money from me does something? It makes me want to strangle you spiritually.”

Jones told his audience at the end of his rant: “You are the Infowars, and it lives forever.”

Ewan Palmer

Reporter

ewan.palmer@thedailybeast.com

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no lnx

Top Trump Campaign Aide Sues The Daily Beast for Defamation

The lawsuit accuses the news site of knowingly publishing false information about how much Chris LaCivita, a Trump campaign manager, was paid by the campaign.

The New York Times}:

Katie RobertsonDavid Enrich

By Katie Robertson and David Enrich

March 24, 2025

One of President Trump’s former campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, on Monday filed a defamation lawsuit against The Daily Beast over its reporting on how much he was paid by the campaign.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, accuses The Daily Beast of creating “the false impression that Mr. LaCivita was personally profiting excessively from his work on the campaign and that he was prioritizing personal gain over the campaign’s success.”

It centers on an article published Oct. 15, 2024, with the headline: “Trump In Cash Crisis-As Campaign Chief’s $22m Pay Revealed.” The article was written by Michael Isikoff, a freelance journalist, who was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

The article stated that Mr. LaCivita, a manager of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, had negotiated a series of contracts and was paid millions of dollars over two years from the campaign. The allegations were repeated in several follow-up articles and discussed on a Daily Beast podcast.

According to the complaint, Mr. LaCivita’s lawyers on Nov. 5 demanded a correction and a retraction, saying public records from the Federal Election Commission conflicted with statements in the article.

The Daily Beast corrected its article a few days after the demand by changing the amount to $19.2 million from $22 million and clarified that the funds went to Mr. LaCivita’s consulting firm rather than to him personally. The headline was modified, and an editor’s note was appended to the article.

After Mr. LaCivita’s lawyers demanded further retractions in January, The Daily Beast removed a podcast episode titled “How Has Trump’s Campaign Manager Made $22 MILLION?” from its platforms.

Mark Geragos, a lawyer for Mr. LaCivita, said The Daily Beast “should have investigated and followed the money before publishing lies in order to get clicks and push their political agenda.”

The Daily Beast said in a statement that the outlet stood by its reporting on Mr. LaCivita.

“His lawsuit is meritless and a transparent attempt to intimidate The Beast and silence the independent press,” the statement said. “The Beast will defend itself vigorously and looks forward to following the money to confirm where every penny flowed in LaCivita’s L.L.C.”

The lawsuit is the latest recent instance of defamation and other legal actions that Mr. Trump and his allies have filed against news outlets and journalists whose coverage they claim was misleading or inaccurate.

Mr. Trump, for example, has outstanding lawsuits against CBS News, The Des Moines Register, CNN and the group that awards the Pulitzer Prizes. Mr. Trump’s advisers have also repeatedly threatened or filed such lawsuits. As recently as Friday, Elon Musk warned that one was “inbound” after a former congressman criticized him on television.

The legal actions and threats have coincided with efforts by the Trump administration to constrain mainstream news organizations. The White House has restricted The Associated Press’s access to the president. The Federal Communications Commission is investigating broadcasters. And Mr. Trump and allies like Mr. Musk have railed against news outlets and individual journalists, including by falsely claiming that they are government propaganda outfits.

To win defamation lawsuits, public figures like Mr. Trump and Mr. LaCivita must prove that defendants knew that what they were writing was false or acted with reckless disregard for its accuracy. That high bar was erected in a series of Supreme Court precedents that Mr. Trump and his allies are pushing to overturn.

Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: katie.robertson@nytimes.com

David Enrich is the business investigations editor for The Times. His coverage has focused on law and business as well as the banking industry. He has reported on corporate law firms, the First Amendment and libel law, which is the topic of his latest book “Murder the Truth."

:{A version of this article appears in print on March 26, 2025, Section B, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Daily Beast Defamed Him, Ex-Trump Aide Says in Lawsuit.

See more on: 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, U.S. Politics, Daily Beast, The, Federal Election Commission, Donald Trump

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YiKES OMG SEE FAscism see pluto

an 10 24

Former Washington Post editor-at-large, Robert Kagan, revealed to The Daily Beast on Saturday that the newspaper's owner — Amazon's Jeff Bezos — and 2024 GOP nominee Donald Trump, allegedly agreed on a plan to "kill" thePost's endorsement of 2024 Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, the news outlet reports.

The Beast notes:

Bezos knows first hand the consequences of criticizing the former president. The Post’s 2016 endorsement of Hillary Clinton is widely thought to have led to him losing out on a $10 billion cloud computing defense contract awarded by the Trump administration.

Following his Friday resignation from thePost,Kagan told the Beast "that Trump’s meeting with executives of Bezos’ Blue Origin space company the same day that the Amazonfounder killed a plan to support Harris was proof of the backroom deal."

READ MORE:['Bit of a panic': Trump adviser’s attack on bombshell WaPo report fact-checked by expert

The ex-Post editor said, "Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people. Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”

Per the report, Kagan warned that this kind of "alleged collusion between" the billionaire tech founder and Trump "is just the beginning," and emphasized there will be "a lot of self censorship [in the media] and a lot of changing course just to be sure that they’re not going to be punished," if the MAGA leader wins the White House.

"This is what we have to look forward to," Kagan told the Post. "All Trump has to do is threaten the corporate chiefs who run these organizations with real financial loss, and they will bend the knee."

https://www.alternet.org/insensitive-creepy-and-ghoulish-republicans-are-doing-gunowners-more-harm-than-good-conservative/

an 4 23

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daily Beast opinion columnist and Never Trump conservative Matt Lewis has his share of disagreements with liberals and progressives where gun control is concerned. Lewis considers himself staunchly pro-2nd Amendment, and he isn't shy about saying that he grew up around a "gun culture."

But in a scathing column published on April 17, Lewis takes issue with the "insensitive, creepy, and ghoulish" way in which many "Republican politicians" address the gun control issue. And he believes that the theatrics of Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and other MAGA Republicans are doing the 2nd Amendment more harm than good.

"When I was around ten," Lewis recalls, "my grandfather gave me a real shotgun. My dad intervened to make sure that I did not have unfettered access to it, and that I could only shoot it with his direct supervision. My dad was a prison guard and an avid hunter. He took gun ownership seriously. All this to say, I'm not a gun-grabbing city slicker — though I do think there are common sense reforms we should consider, including red flag laws and background checks."

READ MORE: Guns don't kill Americans, Republicans do

Lewis continues, "I’m not offended by law-abiding Americans who have guns for hunting and protection. What I am offended by are weirdos who want to go out of their way to constantly remind you that they are armed to the teeth."

The conservative columnist has no problem with conservatives debating liberals and progressives vigorously on gun control; what he objects to are the "bizarre" and "weird" theatrics — especially when they follow a mass shooting.

"In the wake of all the violence we have seen in recent decades," Lewis laments, "I would expect 2nd Amendment advocates to go out of their way to demonstrate responsible gun ownership. Remember the Party of Personal Responsibility? Instead, it seems like Republican politicians are going out of their way to fetishize guns. They are more than just for protection or sport. They are a way of life, a religion, a culture."

Even Republicans with strong pro-2nd Amendment voting records, Lewis argues, risk being attacked as "squishy RINOs" by MAGA Republicans if they aren't "performative" enough.

READ MORE: How the gun-loving South dominates these United States

"Clearly, what we are seeing is some sort of vice signaling, presumably because the demand to be perceived as a performatively tough Second Amendment advocate is so intense that mere words and past votes are no longer persuasive enough," Lewis observes. "In addition to supporting the right to bear arms, you now also have to demonstrate that you are a gun fanatic."

READ MORE: Students across the country walk out of school to protest gun violence

Read Matt Lewis' full Daily Beast column at this link (subscription required).

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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sarahmimms/arizona-election-results-oan-reporters-fundraising

two reporters at One America News, a far-right TV station, are running a dark money organization that they say is helping fund a counter-reality “audit” that former president Donald Trump and his supporters believe will overturn Arizona’s 2020 election results in his favor.

What’s more, one of those reporters, Christina Bobb, is the network’s most visible correspondent covering the very “audit” that she is helping scare up money for on OAN’s airwaves, while she and the network enjoy unique access to the process where private contractors and volunteers are searching for fraud and have examined ballots for nonexistent watermarks and “bamboo fibers.” OAN has a deal as the exclusive livestream partner for the audit.

Christina Bobb hosting her show Weekly Briefing on OAN pix]

Bobb has not made a secret of her work to keep that audit going. On April 9, she tweeted that she’d founded a group called Voices and Votes to help the Republican-led Arizona Senate complete its audit of the vote in Maricopa County. The group reached its $150,000 fundraising goal that same day,according to Bobb, and she’s continued soliciting money for the audit since, both on Twitter and on air.

According to its website, Voices and Votes is run by Bobb as the CEO and president, as well as OAN’s White House correspondent Chanel Rion, who is listed as the chief marketing officer, and Courtland Sykes, Rion’s fiancé, who is listed as the group’s chief operations officer. The group’s website also says that Voices and Votes is registered as a 501(c)(4) organization, meaning its donors will never be made public.

That also means that the group will never have to give an accounting of how much money it has raised or where that money actually went. Bobb did not respond when BuzzFeed News asked how much Voices and Votes has brought in, but insisted that all of the money raised “has gone to the auditors.”Cyber Ninjas, the firm leading the audit, and its CEO did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether it had received money from Voices and Votes.

twt]

it’s important to pause here and note that the audit itself is not really an audit at all. What happened is the Arizona Senate, which is controlled by 16 Republicans (to 14 Democrats) sent a subpoena to Maricopa County, which was upheld by a judge, forcing the county to hand over 2.1 million ballots, as well as vote tabulators and a bunch of election data. The “audit,” which is being run by outside contractors hired by the Senate, will have no force or effect on the 2020 election results; Joe Biden is president, and Arizona already did an audit of Maricopa County in the presidential race and didn’t find a single ballot discrepancy. The county itself, which is not involved in the current Senate audit either, also hired two independent firms to review its elections equipment in February, which came back clean as well.

On Monday, Maricopa County’s Board of Supervisors, which is majority Republican, wrote a scathing letter to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, calling the audit a threat to democracy and telling her to end it. “The Arizona Senate is not acting in good faith, has no intention of learning anything about the November 2020 General Election, but is only interested in feeding the various festering conspiracy theories that fuel the fundraising schemes of those pulling your strings. ... The result is that the Arizona Senate is held up to ridicule in every corner of the globe and our democracy is imperiled,” the board wrote.

But, as Bobb told her OAN audience a few weeks ago, the new Senate audit will “unravel the Democrats' schemes from 2020” and Trump “will determine our next House and Senate” — whatever that means. In the same segment, she backtracked slightly, saying that “maybe” the audit would show there was no fraud. “Maybe,” she said, laughing, “Biden legitimately won Arizona.”

Needless to say, no legitimate newsroom would allow its reporters to fundraise for an actual news event they’re covering. Nonetheless, Bobb has for Voices and Votes,actively fundraising to keep the story she is covering going. Bobb tweeted as recently as April 28 that the audit isn’t “fully funded yet” and asked followers to “please help get this audit across the finish line!” That weekend she show to her reporting from the audit and an interview with the Arizona Republican Party chair.

[twt]

after reaching her $150,000 goal, Bobb announced the group’s “second pledge,” this time without naming a monetary goal, tweeting, “Let’s get this audit funded!” with a donation link.

photos of herself alongside some of the architects of the audit and thanking those “true Patriots” for making it happen.

Bobb and OAN are getting access to the audit that no other news outlets have, reporters on the ground say. While reporters at other Arizona and national media outlets have had to rotate through a few select spots to cover the audit, Bobb and a writer with the Gateway Pundit, another pro-Trump outlet, are exempted from that pool. She reported live from the coliseum where the audit is taking place every day last week.

Bobb disputed that she and OAN had received any “special treatment” in an email to BuzzFeed News on behalf of Voices and Votes. While she acknowledged that she had different access than members of the Arizona press corps, she said her access to cover the audit depended on “availability.” “I have been denied access at certain times and had to go on different days or at different times,” she wrote. “I am not permitted to attend whenever I want.”

Bobb also noted that OAN is not “in any way” affiliated with her fundraising group “other than allowing me to mention my efforts on air” and said the network “has not received anything as a result of Voices and Votes' donations.”

“I have openly and honestly disclosed all my efforts on air, and have handled the funds exactly as I said that I would,” she said.

Rion did not respond to requests for comment. Fann, the Senate president, deferred questions about OAN’s access to former Arizona secretary of state Ken Bennett, who is serving as an audit liaison. Bennett did not respond to multiple requests.... ...;that Arizona senators won’t say what would happen if the audit does find “some type of fraud” — which won’t happen, because legitimate audits have already been conducted — and that senators have said this audit is about promoting trust in future elections, not about 2020. “They would not commit to saying that they would overturn anything, but they did say they were certainly taking a look at it,” she said, citing anonymous Arizona legislators.

OAN did not respond to requests for comment on the conflict between Bobb and Rion’s work for their network and their affiliation with Voices and Votes or whether the network has a conflict-of-interest policy.

The audit itself has so far been a farce, enough so that one of the Republican state senators who voted for it told the New York Times that in practice the audit is “ridiculous” and “makes us look like idiots.” At one point, workers were checking for any traces of bamboo in the ballot paper in a frankly stupid and racist attempt to test a conspiracy theory that thousands of illegal ballots were shipped in from Asia. They were shining UV lights on ballots for reasons that weren’t really explained by officials at the time but seemed to line up with a QAnon-adjacent theory that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security had watermarked real ballots so the Democrats’ fraudulent ones could be easily found. That prompted the Maricopa County Elections Department to publicly post a fact check: “There are NO watermarks on Maricopa County ballots.”

Then there’s the firm that the Arizona Senate hired to run the whole thing, Cyber Ninjas, owned by Doug Logan. As the Arizona Mirror reported, Logan repeatedly posted conspiracies about the election being stolen and falsehoods about Dominion Voting Systems on his since-deleted Twitter account. Logan is also the author of a three-page document of “election fraud facts” posted to former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s website intended for senators to use in explaining why they would object to the election results and try to give the White House back to Trump, the Mirror also reported. Logan, it's worth noting, stood behind the document in a statement to the Mirror.

His firm and three others are now paying contractors $15 an hour and bringing in volunteers to examine the ballots — among them was a former state representative who lost his 2020 race and was also filmed on the Capitol steps during the Jan. 6 insurrection. With the process taking way longer than expected, a big bill is coming and it’s unclear who is paying it.

The Arizona Senate only gave $150,000 in taxpayer money to the project, which they knew was a laughable sum for an election audit of this size, and is allowing Cyber Ninjas to raise the rest from whoever. And several prominent Trump supporters have stepped up. Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who has peddled some of the more out-there election conspiracy theories, kicked in $1 million and has his own dark money group raising funds, per the Arizona Republic. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell told the Daily Beast that he had donated. And Lin Wood, an attorney who filed a bunch of lawsuits trying to overturn the election, told Talking Points Memo and confirmed to BuzzFeed News that his 501(c)(4) #FightBack had donated to Bobb’s Voices and Votes.

Meanwhile, reporters at other outlets who are not paying for the audit had to fight to cover it at all. At one point, the Arizona Senate told media that they could only have access to the audit if they signed up for at least five six-hour shifts as volunteer observers. To be clear, they wouldn’t then get to report on the audit, their only access under this plan was as workers for the audit they were trying to cover. And, the Senate said, they could not bring laptops or cellphones or even a paper and pen with them. “People observing even executions are allowed to bring their notebooks in with them,” Arizona Capitol Times reporter Julia Shumway, who has since covered the audit, told BuzzFeed News.

Shumway and her colleagues eventually did get press access to the audit, but only after the Arizona Mirror, the Arizona Republic, and the Arizona Broadcasters Association got lawyers involved. Now, reporters have to pool their resources with one print journalist, one videographer, and one photographer allowed into the audit at any given time, and they must be escorted, even to the bathroom, Shumway said. Meanwhile, Bobb and a reporter for the Gateway Pundit can report outside of the pool.

When asked about the discrepancy in treatment for OAN and the Gateway Pundit and every other news outlet, Fann told PBS that OAN was given livestreaming rights to the audit because “they have covered this from the beginning. They are one of the firms that came in right off the bat and said we will help do all the 24-hour video so everybody has access to this 24/7, that they wanted to be a part of it. So I don’t think that’s a bad idea. If there was another network had come up and said that first, we would have went with them probably.”

She later accused other, unnamed reporters of trespassing and said they had worried about too many members of the media “walk[ing] all over the place and tak[ing] pictures.” Asked if she had any similar concerns about OAN, she responded simply, “No, huh-uh. Nope.”<...The Arizona Mirror, the Arizona Republic, and the Arizona Broadcasters Association brought the legal fight to get reporters access to the audit. A previous version of this story was unclear on who led the legal effort.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/oan-host-christina-bobb-has-been-helping-rudy-giuliani-with-trumps-legal-efforts

as it seeks to overturn the election results and keep President-elect Joe Biden from assuming power, President Donald Trump’s legal team, fronted by lawyers such as Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and until recently Sidney Powell, has been operating out of a conference room at the 2020 campaign’s downsized headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. Aiding Trump’s so-called “elite strike force” team in that effort has been an on-air host at One America News Network (OAN), a vociferously pro-Trump cable-news channel that has been endorsed by the president.

A new analysis is dispelling the Republican Party's claims to justify the mediocre small-dollar donations it received during the latest election cycle.

The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberger noted that Republicans have been quick to insist inflation is to blame for the problem. “It’s gas or this donation; its vacation with our children or this donation,” Zac Moffatt, CEO of top GOP fundraising firm Targeted Victory, insisted back in July.

But, digging a bit deeper, Sollenberger has managed to uncover other complications that are likely contributing to the political party's small-dollar challenges.

The Daily Beast's new analysis of data on the party's donors indicates "the Republican fundraising base this year actually skews a bit wealthier than that of Democrats."

As part of a collaborative effort with the Sterling Data Company —artificial intelligence analytics firm— the news outlet found: "The results give Republican small-dollar donors a slightly higher average (mean) annual household income—$50,849—about $1,000 more than their Democratic counterparts, who clocked in at $49,747."

According to Sollenberger, the findings contradict the Republican Party's attempt to rebrand itself as the political party that identifies with working and middle-class Americans.

He noted, "Not only does that finding undercut the fundraising excuse, it also complicates the GOP’s attempt to rebrand as the party of the working and middle class—and to cast Democrats as the party of the wealthy elite of cities and suburbs."

Sollenberger also explained how the latest findings obscure the party's desired public projections. He wrote, "The fact that Republican small-dollar donors on average make a little more money than their Democratic counterparts suggests that, when it comes to funding party politics, the GOP does not have the working class dominance it likes to project."

But according to multiple knowledgeable sources, Bobb has actually been assisting the president’s long, long, long-shot legal effort—effectively taking on a secondary role as a pro-Trump lawyer even as she continues her job as a pro-Trump TV host.

“Christina is an attorney and has helped with some legal work in her personal capacity and not on behalf of OAN,” Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to Trump and his 2020 campaign, told The Daily Beast on Monday afternoon. ...https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-year-of-batshit-crazy-at-one-america-news-trumps-new-favorite-cable-news-channel Such an arrangement would be absolutely unthinkable in other newsrooms. But OAN’s editorial stance is so committedly pro-Trump that it almost, almost makes sense. Bobb certainly hasn’t hidden her feelings for the president or his current legal endeavors. Even when compared to the output of other OAN on-air staff, she has shown intense commitment to the premise that Trump actually won the election that he clearly lost.<...second presidential term. During on-air segments, she has suggested that there was indeed a “massive amount” of voter fraud both in Trump’s election and potentially in others, including former Republican candidate Kim Klacik’s race in Maryland (she lost her race in a heavily Democratic district by over 40 percentage points).

In recent segments about the Trump campaign’s legal efforts, Bobb has not disclosed that she has been an informal consultant to those very same efforts.

During her weekend show, she interviewed Ellis—her current legal collaborator—about recent developments in the campaign’s challenges to election results in several states. But she did not note during the segment that she had any sort of role in the campaign’s legal fight. On Twitter, Bobb has cheered on the Trump legal team, even praising its performance in a press conference in which such wild conspiracies were spun about voting corruption that the president himself reportedly thought it too far fetched. Once more, she never disclosed that she has been working with that team.

Since Friday, Bobb has not responded to multiple messages seeking comment on this story. Reached by phone on Monday, network founder and president Charles Herring declined to comment on his employee’s activity with the Trump legal team, requesting The Daily Beast email him instead. He did not respond to an email.

Bobb’s cozy relationship with the president’s legal team may be the most brazen example of the cozy relationship Trump and his campaign have maintained with members of conservative media. But it’s hardly the first.

As The Daily Beast reported in 2018, the president has regularly consulted with Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs, who would call in to private Oval Office meetings and advise the White House informally on various policies. The president also regularly canvases his friends in conservative media about administration policy and messaging, phoning Fox News stars like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, and hosting Fox personality Laura Ingraham at the White House to advocate for the use of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19.

### Trump Campaign Disavows Its Own Election-Conspiracy Lawyer

NO LONGER OURS

Lachlan Markay

Other news networks have allowed their personalities to dip their toes into partisan political activity, though to varying degrees. During the 2020 election, CNN contributor Ana Navarro hosted a virtual fundraiser for Biden, a move that the network said did not violate their policies because she was not paid. High-profile on-air personality Van Jones also advised Jared Kushner on the police-reform executive order signed by Trump earlier this year.

To avoid conflicts of interest, news networks generally do not allow their on-air contributors to endorse or run for office or work on political campaigns or political action committees while appearing as a paid analyst. Over the past month, since Joe Biden’s election, MSNBC has cut ties with at least four contributors who have taken advisory roles in the president-elect’s transition effort.

But OAN stands out in its on-air fealty to Trump, even when compared to the standards observed by its competitors in pro-MAGA right-wing media.

Two days before Election Day, The Daily Beast asked OAN president Charles Herring if the network would call the election for Trump if the president, as he had planned to do, declared victory preemptively. Herring responded by messaging a lengthy statement that included, “OAN is a subscriber to the Associated Press’ Votecast data and Votecount elections results technology," and that for "Winner Projections," the network "will be utilizing primarily Associated Press’ Votecast data and Votecount." (The statement also references the “expert analysis” provided by “Christina Bobb, host of Weekly Briefing.”)

In propping up an alternate media universe in which Trump didn’t lose, OAN is ignoring its own system of data collection. The AP has long since called the 2020 presidential election for Biden.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/without-merit-dan-bongino-ordered-to-pay-the-daily-beast-31-000-for-filing-frivolous-defamation-lawsuit/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-trolls-hype-coronavirus-and-giuliani-conspiracies

db no lnx pix docs

no lnx

Russian Trolls Hype Coronavirus and Giuliani Conspiracies

CAUGHT

EXCLUSIVE

A Daily Beast investigation reveals dozens of Russian accounts pushing disinformation on everything from Joe Biden to the origin of the novel coronavirus.

Adam Rawnsley

Updated Apr. 09, 2020 4:27PM ET / Published Apr. 09, 2020

Suspected Russian government trolls are trying to pin the COVID-19 pandemic on the Pentagon; hyping Rudy Giuliani’s conspiracy theories about collusion between Democrats and Ukraine; and trying to meddle in European elections, an investigation by The Daily Beast reveals.

Working with researchers from the disinformation-tracking firmGraphika, The Daily Beast found at least 20 fake news articles pushed by over 40 suspected Kremlin-backed personas across dozens of social media networks like Facebook, Reddit, Medium, and smaller web forums.

“This looks like a Russian disinformation operation we call ‘Secondary Infektion’ that's been running for years,” said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, who has been investigating the operation since Facebook exposed a first set of accounts in May 2019. “It uses blogging platforms as the soft underbelly of the internet, planting false stories based on forged documents or leaks that never happened. The fakes mostly appear designed to trigger tensions between European countries, or between Europe and the United States, but they were generally too clumsy to be believed.”

Nimmo and other disinformation researchers first identified the Secondary Infektion campaign in 2019, which uses forgeries and fake articles to push Moscow-friendly propaganda through fictional personas. The troll personas and articles identified by The Daily Beast followed the same Secondary Infektion pattern identified by Graphika and others. Trolls would set up one-time-use accounts at a handful of outlets in specific places—from obscure forums like the DebatePolitics and DefendingTheTruth to larger platforms like Medium and Reddit—and post articles and forgeries in broken English just minutes after creating their accounts.

The cluster of personas and articles identified by The Daily Beast date back through 2016. They add to a growing body of evidence that shows Russian information operations didn’t stop after Moscow’s interference in the last presidential campaign, but rather continued on, spreading to other countries. The trolls in this campaign forged letters and screenshots in an attempt to meddle in elections in Sweden and Latvia, touted Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine conspiracy theories, and tried to sow confusion about a former suspect in the leak of NSA hacking tools.

Pinning COVID-19 on the Pentagon

As COVID-19 ravaged China and began to spread around the globe, the State Department issued cryptic warnings in February and March that Russia was trying to pin the virus on the U.S. both through its overt and covert propaganda organs. In one February briefing, Assistant Secretary of State Philip Reeker called out the propaganda campaign in vague terms and claimed that Moscow was "once again choosing to threaten public safety by distracting from the global health response" with a COVID-19 disinformation campaign.

American diplomats offered no specifics, but just a few days before Reeker’s briefing, a fake story bearing the hallmarks of Secondary Infektion trolls surfaced in Russian-language blogging platforms.

The story, posted to Russian-language blogs and Reddit by multiple fake personas, tries to pin the blame on the COVID-19 outbreak on the U.S. and Kazakhstan by casting the virus as the byproduct of a U.S. nonproliferation program in the country. The trolls pointed to social media posts by a group of hackers calling themselves “Anonymous Kazakhstan.”

It was posted on exactly the same mix of blogging platforms by exactly the same sort of fake persona. If this wasn't Secondary Infektion, it was someone trying really hard to look like them.

— disinformation researcher Ben Nimmo

It’s a well-documented tactic among Secondary Infektion posts, which often use fictitious Anonymous-style hacker groups from a range of different countries as the source of forged documents, according to Graphika.

In this case, the authors of the story claim that, in the course of hacking employees of the U.S.-funded Central Reference Laboratory in Almaty, Kazakhstan, they discovered that the lab was responsible for the release of COVID-19 into the public.

Rather than a nefarious factory for new bioweapons, the Central Reference Laboratory in Almaty is part of a U.S.-funded nonproliferation effort aimed at giving steady employment to biologists in Kazakhstan, once home to Soviet biological weapons programs, and keep them from seeking employment in rogue state or terrorist bioweapons efforts. The authors of the fake story appeared to aim at ginning up fear and opposition to the U.S. funding and warned that the fake viral leak could prompt sanctions from China, an important ally and source of investment in Kazakhstan.

“This story only circulated in Russian, unlike other Secondary Infektion claims, but it was posted on exactly the same mix of blogging platforms by exactly the same sort of fake persona. If this wasn't Secondary Infektion, it was someone trying really hard to look like them," said Nimmo.

Others may have reached the same conclusion as The Daily Beast. In a recent update, cybersecurity firm FireEye vaguely referenced a disinformation campaign it attributed to Secondary Infektion which included “a false hacktivist persona to spread the conspiracy theory that the U.S. developed the coronavirus in a weapons laboratory in Central Asia.”

Election Meddling and Spy Games

The trolls behind the COVID-19 article and others identified by The Daily Beast are most likely part of a well-documented group of Russia-linked disinformation actors known as Secondary Infektion. The group, labeled after the Soviet Union’s “Operation Infektion” disinformation campaign, which sought to blame the HIV/AIDS outbreak in the '80s on the U.S. military’s former biological weapons research lab, was first labeled by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab in June 2019 after Facebook suspended a number of accounts operated by the campaign a month prior.

The group typically works in three stages, according to Nimmo. Propagandists first forge documents to further their narratives and plant them on small, obscure blogging platforms with single-use accounts created on the day of posting and never used again. Next, the authors translate the articles accompanying forgeries into as many as half a dozen languages like Russian, Spanish, and German and further spread the fake stories. Finally, trolls take the articles to larger social media platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, often creating still more single-use accounts to do it.

Secondary Infektion is notable for the sweeping breadth of forums it employs in order to spread its articles.“Pretty well all serious influence operations these days are cross-platform, but Secondary Infektion took it to extremes. They worked across literally scores of sites and platforms in different languages," Nimmo explained. Researchers have tracked the campaign’s articles across scores of often niche and obscure platforms, from British college forum TheStudentRoom to an Austrian local news platform, Mein Bezirk.

The network of Russian-linked trolls identified by The Daily Beast goes beyond just a single post on COVID-19 conspiracies. From at least 2016 through this year, trolls sought to spread disinformation on elections in the U.S. and Europe, pit Western countries against each other, and ruin Ukraine’s international reputation.

In December 2019, as impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump took place, Russian-linked trolls spread an article that falsely claimed Democrats colluded with a former KGB officer during the 2016 elections. The article, “Former KGB agent sponsored Democrats in the 2016 election,” falsely accuses Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk of having worked for Soviet intelligence during the Cold War and financing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

The theme of Democratic collusion with Ukraine to undermine Trump’s candidacy, often touted by President Trump and his allies, is a theme Russian intelligence operatives have pushed for years, according to The New York Times.

Relying on Rudy

Many of the Secondary Infektion stories used phony screengrabs or forged documents to further their narrative. By contrast, the authors of the fake KGB support story relied on the conspiracy theorizing of Rudy Giuliani and the Trump-cheering cable news channel OANN to push their story.

“Rudy Giuliani's recent visit to Ukraine exposed many secrets of the Democratic Party, which is trying to distract the public from its crimes through the impeachment of the incumbent US president,” the trolls wrote alongside links to OANN’s coverage of the impeachment scandal.

The Secondary Infektion crew also ventured beyond the relitigation of America’s 2016 presidential election to meddle in elections in Europe.

In advance of Sweden’s 2018 elections, the trolls used a series of fake conspiracies focused on the right wing nationalist Sweden Democrats party to interfere in Sweden’s 2018 election.Secondary Infektion propagandists forged a fake letter in stilted English purporting to show Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warning Poland’s foreign minister that “Russian special services are going to provide technical and material support to the Swedish Democrats and help them in the election campaign” as part of a hacking campaign.

“It bears the digital hallmarks of forgery,” said Sam Meyer, a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Meyer ran the Pompeo letter image through the Tungstène imagery analysis software and found that the image was based on a digital template bearing the State Department letterhead and Secretary Pompeo’s signature with the text digitally added separately.

Many of the the Secondary Infektion articles identified by The Daily Beast appeared aimed at dividing the U.S. from its allies in Europe.

Since its forces began occupying eastern Ukraine, Russia has tried to oppose the U.S. sale of lethal aid to Ukrainian forces, particularly the Javelin anti-tank missiles which could be useful in fending off Russian armor. As the Trump administration mulled the prospect of a sale in the fall of 2017, Russian trolls published a forged screenshot pretending to come from the Twitter account of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Syria. “Javelins from Ukraine will help #YPG/#YPJ fighters defeat #IS in Deir al-Zour. #JazeeraStorm #defeatDaesh.”

Except the tweet was never sent and neither American nor Ukrainian forces ever transferred Javelins to partner forces in Syria. The apparent goal of the forgery and accompanying article was an attempt to paint the Trump administration’s arms sale to Ukraine as reckless and to create tensions between the U.S., Ukraine, and Turkey, which has strongly objected to transfers of less sophisticated arms to Kurdish forces in Syria.

But not all of the articles fit into such neat thematic categories. At least one appeared aimed at diverting attention from or at least provoking confusion about a criminal case involving the theft of classified information from the National Security Agency.

Federal prosecutors charged former NSA contractor Hal Martin in 2016 with unlawfully taking home vast amounts of classified NSA data. Martin had initially come under suspicion as a result of an investigation into the publication of classified NSA hacking tools released by a group calling itself “The Shadow Brokers,” which some believe may be a front for Russian intelligence.

Martin was never charged with involvement in the Shadow Brokers leak. But in November 2016, a month after prosecutors arrested him, personas bearing the hallmarks of the Secondary Infektion campaign began posting articles falsely claiming that Martin had betrayed the identities of undercover CIA officers associated with the Bush-era torture program.

Another Secondary Infektion article took aim at what would seem an unlikely target for the Kremlin: former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. In 2018, while Medvedev was still serving as prime minister of Russia, the trolls used a fake screenshot of a nonexistent article from The Guardian to cast doubt on his political future, writing that Medvedev was “facing a whole bunch of problems, from lack of financing to health issues and even alcohol.”

Bang for the buck?

For all the effort put into the troll campaign, the impact appears to have been small to nonexistent. In 2016, IRA trolls operating Twitter and Facebook accounts racked up millions of views throughout the U.S. presidential election, but the greater scrutiny of Russian disinformation and more cautious operational security practices used by the Secondary Infektion have come at a steep cost in terms of reach.

None of the articles or forgeries identified by The Daily Beast appear to have been picked up and amplified by news outlets or social media users outside of Secondary Infektion.

"One of the biggest mysteries about Secondary Infektion is what the operators thought they were doing,” said Nimmo. “I've never seen so little bang to the buck."

In the history of documented Secondary Infektion articles, only one appears to have gained any traction—the leak of authentic U.K.-U.S. trade documents shortly before the British general election in 2019.

[Leaked: Secret Documents From Russia’s Election Trolls

RED SPILL

Spencer Ackerman,

Gideon Resnick,

Ben Collins

Trump’s New Favorite Channel Employs Kremlin-Paid Journalist

MOONLIGHTING

Kevin Poulsen]

The reach of articles identified by The Daily Beast is much shorter. The posts, published to obscure and niche web forums like WorthyChristianForums and DefendingTheTruth, garnered just a few dozen views according to view counters available on some of the sites. Some generated agreement or at least debate among a handful of forumgoers and social media users where they were posed, but they also generated derision and skepticism as well.

“Arthur,” one Reddit commenter wrote under a Secondary Infektion persona’s piece about Brexit, “you've done something that I couldn't imagine was possible. You've written a piece so poor that brexiteers and remainers can unite around how dreadful your opinions are. There's something in here to make everyone scoff.”

Others social media users noticed the pattern of single-use accounts posting articles on known Russian themes and found them appropriately suspicious. “New Reddit User. 1 post. Article about the east.” a Redditor commented on a post trying to stir up tensions between Hungary and Ukraine. “You almost got me Putin.”

Adam Rawnsley

adam.rawnsley@thedailybeast.com

dunno but jaylo headline banner

https://deadline.com/2019/09/rachel-maddow-msnbc-one-america-news-network-1202729817/

One America News Network, one of the rivals to Fox News for right-leaning viewers, filed a defamation claim against Comcast, MSNBC and Rachel Maddow on Monday, over Maddow’s claim that the conservative channel “really, literally is paid Russian propaganda.”

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego (read it here) claims that the defendants retaliated against One America because its president, Charles Herring, called out MSNBC’s parent company. Comcast, “for their anti-competitive censorship” in refusing to carry the conservative channel. In an email to Comcast’s president of content acquisition, Gregory Rigdon, Herring had sought carriage on Comcast’s cable platforms and stated his concern that the cable giant “opposes including another conservative counter channel to counter MSNBC,” according to the lawsuit.

A week later, Maddow opened her show by telling her audience that OANN “really, literally is paid Russian propaganda,” according to the lawsuit.

“Their on-air U.S. politics reporter is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government,” Maddow said in the July 22 segment.

Skip Miller, a partner at Miller Barondess who represents OANN, said in a statement: “One America is wholly owned, operated and financed by the Herring family in San Diego. They are as American as apple pie. They are not paid by Russia and have nothing to do with the Russian government. This is a false and malicious libel, and they’re going to answer for it in a court of law.”

Maddow made the claim after the Daily Beast ran a story by Kevin Poulsen reporting that one of One America’s on-air reporters, Kristian Brunovich Rouz, also was on the payroll for Sputnik, the Kremlin news outlet. One America then demanded a retraction.

But One America said in the lawsuit that “Rouz has never been a staff employee of Sputnik News. He worked as a freelancer for Sputnik News and his work there had no relation to his work for OAN. Rouz submitted articles to Sputnik on his own and would receive approximately $40 if the articles were accepted.”

The lawsuit seeks more than $10 million in damages.

A spokeswoman for MSNBC did not immediately return a request for comment.

ref

LOUIS R. MILLER (State Bar No. 54141) smiller@millerbarondess.com

AMNON Z. SIEGEL (State Bar No. 234981) asiegel@millerbarondess.com

MILLER BARONDESS, LLP 1999 Avenue of the Stars, Suite 1000 Los Angeles, California 90067 Telephone: (310) 552-4400 Facsimile: (310) 552-8400 Attorneys for Plaintiff Herring Networks, Inc

...

(“Rouz”). Rouz collects and analyzes articles from other sources and writes articles

based on those sources for OAN. Rouz’s articles go through OAN’s editorial

process before they are published. Rouz does not have decision-making authority

with respect to the content that is aired on OAN.

Rouz was born in the Ukraine. When he moved to the United States,

he had no friends or family here. To make ends meet, Rouz began writing articles

for Sputnik News in 2014. Sputnik News is affiliated with the Russian government,

but Rouz chose the topics and viewpoints of the articles he wrote for Sputnik News.

Rouz’s articles provided updates about various topics in global economics and

international finance.

The headlines of Rouz’s articles for Sputnik News include: “N. Ireland

Pessimistic About UK Economy Amid Weaker Regional Growth – Poll”; “South

Africa’s Struggling Utility Eskom Raises $361 Mln to Keep Lights On”; “Japan Q1

GDP Beats Expectations Despite Weak Consumer Spending”; and “Turkish Central

Bank Relaxes Policy, Warns Against FX Purchases to Support Lira.”

Rouz has never been a staff employee of Sputnik News. He worked as

a freelancer for Sputnik News and his work there had no relation to his work for

OAN. Rouz submitted articles to Sputnik on his own and would receive

approximately $40 if the articles were accepted.

On July 22, 2019, the Daily Beast—an online publication—published

an article entitled, “Trump’s New Favorite Channel Employs Kremlin-Paid

Journalist.” The article was written by Kevin Poulsen (“Poulsen”), also known as

“Dark Dante”—the first computer hacker ever to be charged with espionage against

the United States government.

28. Poulsen spent 17 months as a fugitive from the law before being

arrested in 1991. In 1995, Poulson pleaded guilty to seven counts of conspiracy,

fraud and intercepting wire communications. He received the longest prison

sentence ever for a computer hacker at that time. United States law enforcement

...referred to him as “the Hannibal Lecter of computer crime.”

Poulsen’s article identified Rouz as “on the payroll” of Sputnik News.

But Poulsen did not identify any facts tying Rouz’s work for OAN to Sputnik News

or the Russian government; and that is because there never have been, and are, no

such facts.

B. Rachel Maddow

Maddow is a liberal television host with a show on MSNBC called

“The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Maddow is obsessed with conspiracy-mongering about a connection

between Russia and President Donald Trump. Her obsession is so pronounced that

even other media outlets have called her out for her lack of journalistic integrity.

On March 28, 2019, for example, the Guardian published an editorial

entitled, “Will Rachel Maddow Face a Reckoning Over Her Trump-Russia

Coverage?” And a March 27, 2019, editorial published in Politico noted: “For the

past two years, Rachel Maddow has been a hero of her own spy-thriller.” The

editorial details Maddow’s “deep delusion” with Russian conspiracies.

On April 12, 2017, The Intercept published an article entitled

“MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Sees A ‘Russia Connection’ Lurking Around Every

Corner.” The article noted that MSNBC and Maddow have “played a key role in

stoking the frenzy over Trump’s alleged involvement with Russian meddling in the

U.S. presidential race[.]”

The Intercept conducted a quantitative study of all 28 episodes of The

Rachel Maddow Show in the six-week period between February 20 and March 21,

Russia-focused segments accounted for 53 percent of these broadcasts. In 16

of the 28 episodes analyzed, Russia comprised either all or a substantial part of the

“A-block,” the show’s headlining and lengthiest segment.

C. Rachael Maddow’s Malicious and False Claim that OAN “Really

Literally is Paid Russian Propaganda”

ref 2 tenn star

One America News Network (OANN) demanded retractions from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and The Daily Beast, threatening a lawsuit, after both suggested links to the network and Russian propaganda.

Kevin Poulsen of The Daily Beast wrote an article stating OANN’s Kristian Rouz “appears on segments for One America News Network – ironic given he is working for a Russian outlet fingered in the 2016 election attack.” That same day, Maddow stated on “The Rachel Maddow Show” that OANN “really, literally is Russia propaganda.”

Rouz does write for Sputnik, a Russian government-owned news outlet. He has “never had decision-making authority with respect to the content that is aired on OAN,” one cease-and-desist letter reads.

“His outside work for other media outlets has no relation to — or bearing on — his work for OAN,” according to a cease-and-desist letter.

Poulsen quoted former FBI agent Clint Watts, who suggested OANN employing Rouz means the outlet has merged with “Russian state-sponsored propaganda.”

“This completes the merger between Russian state-sponsored propaganda and American conservative media,” Watts said. “We used to think of it as ‘They just have the same views’ or ‘They use the same story leads.’ But now they have the same personnel.”

Miller Barondess, LLP is handling the case against on behalf of OANN.

“This is vile, sensationalistic reporting,” Miller wrote in a press release. “These defamatory statements must be retracted immediately. One America News Network has no connection to the Russian government or any other government — no connection whatsoever, financial or otherwise.”

“Kremlin propaganda sometimes sneaks into Rouz’s segments on unrelated matters, dropped in as offhand background information,” Poulsen wrote July 22, in which he referred to OANN as being endorsed by President Donald Trump.

If the stories broadcast by the Trump-endorsed One America News Network sometimes look like outtakes from a Kremlin trolling operation, there may be a reason. One of the on-air reporters at the 24-hour network is a Russian national on the payroll of the Kremlin’s official propaganda outlet, Sputnik.

The article also reads that OANN is “increasingly dedicated to conspiracy theories and fake news, and became overtly supportive of Russia’s global agenda.”

Maddow described OANN as a “boutique, little news outlet that is designed specifically for Trump mega-fans. It’s called One America … News Network.” She referred to The Daily Beast article during her show.

“We literally learned today that that outlet that the president is promoting shares staff with the Kremlin,” Maddow said July 22. “I mean, what? It’s an easy thing to throw out … ‘Hey, that looks like Russian propaganda.’ In this case, the most obsequiously pro-Trump right-wing news outlet in America really, literally is paid Russian propaganda.”

OANN’s lawyers have given Maddow and The Daily Beast until Aug. 15 to retract its statements, according to the cease-and-desist requests.

Poulsen declined to comment. Maddow and The Daily Beast did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Shelby Talcott is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.

TDB

https://www.thedailybeast.com/oan-trumps-new-favorite-channel-employs-kremlin-paid-journalist

no lnx

If the stories broadcast by the Trump-endorsed One America News Network sometimes look like outtakes from a Kremlin trolling operation, there may be a reason. One of the on-air reporters at the 24-hour network is a Russian national on the payroll of the Kremlin’s official propaganda outlet, Sputnik.

Kristian Brunovich Rouz, originally from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, has been living in San Diego, where OAN is based, since August 2017, reporting on U.S. politics for the 24-hour news channel. For all of that time, he’s been simultaneously writing for Sputnik, a Kremlin-owned news wire that played a role in Russia’s 2016 election-interference operation, according to an assessment by the U.S. intelligence community.

OF COURSE

Trump’s New Favorite Network Embraces Russian Propaganda

Kevin Poulsen

Rouz’s on-air reports for OAN include a wholly fabricated 2017 segment claiming Hillary Clinton is secretly bankrolling antifa through her political action committee. Clinton, Rouz claimed falsely, gave antifa protesters $800,000 that “went toward things like bricks, hammers, bats, and chains.”

Other smears target billionaire financier George Soros, a longtime Kremlin bête noire. In one segment, Rouz amplified a thoroughly debunked claim that Soros collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, when the Jewish philanthropist was 14 years old. Another Rouz story accused Soros of secretly funding migrant caravans.

Kremlin propaganda sometimes sneaks into Rouz’s segments on unrelated matters, dropped in as offhand background information. A segment on the Syrian rescue workers known as the White Helmets references “allegations of the White Helmets’ involvement in military activities, executions, and numerous war atrocities,” but doesn’t disclose that those “allegations” were hoaxes that originated with Vladimir Putin and his proxies.

“This completes the merger between Russian state-sponsored propaganda and American conservative media.”

— Clint Watts

In another report, Rouz cast Clinton’s criticism of Brexit as an extension of her “grievous insults and fake narratives against Russia”—an assertion that makes sense only in the context of Rouz’s multiple reports claiming Russia was framed for hacking Democrats.

In all of Rouz’s OAN segments reviewed by The Daily Beast, he is introduced as a “One America correspondent,” with no disclosure of his work for Russia’s state-owned media, where he continues to file stories daily, primarily on economic news.

“This completes the merger between Russian state-sponsored propaganda and American conservative media,” said former FBI agent Clint Watts, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “We used to think of it as ‘They just have the same views’ or ‘They use the same story leads.’ But now they have the same personnel.”

Rouz didn’t respond to email and telephone inquiries for this story. Reached by email, OAN President Charles Herring invited The Daily Beast to submit written questions about the network’s arrangement with Rouz. But after receiving the questions, Herring cut off contact.

Online records show Rouz graduated from Novosibirsk State University in 2010 and went on to earn a master’s degree in international relations at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. His byline first appears on Sputnik in December 2014.

A few months later, he emigrated to the U.S., settling in Los Angeles in the spring of 2015, where he played guitar for an indie rock band called White Tar.

“Oh shit, it's fucking Kristian! That's my ex-guitarist…”

— Jov Paradice

A former bandmate, whose stage name is Jov Paradice, told The Daily Beast that Rouz was secretive about his day job, except to say that he wrote articles about economics for a Russian company. In August 2016, Rouz worked for the Los Angeles PR firm the Hoyt Organization, according to a since-deleted tweet by the firm announcing his hire. He appears in an October 2016 photo on Hoyt’s Instagram feed, but isn’t readily apparent in subsequent photos. Hoyt didn’t respond to repeated email and telephone inquiries from The Daily Beast.

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Paradice said he and Rouz frequently clashed over their differing world views.

“We kind of had a thing musically, but we were total opposites,” said Paradice. “When Trump was getting elected, he went into full sports coat mode. He had an indie style before—the whole blurred-line-of-sexuality thing—then he was wearing red ties and a suit. I said, ‘I’m not getting on the stage with Trump.’”

In August 2017, Rouz said he was leaving the band to accept a job offer in San Diego, Paradice recalls. It was only recently that Paradice discovered what that job was, when a Facebook friend posted a One America video purporting to document a link between antifa and ISIS terrorists.

“I’m thinking, there’s something familiar here, and then I go, ‘Oh shit, it’s fucking Kristian!’” said Paradice. “That’s my ex-guitarist… His bullshit propaganda is good enough now that they gave him a tiny bit of a platform.”

Rouz joined OAN at a time when his Russian employer was coming under heightened scrutiny over its role in Putin’s election interference, and its efforts to expand its American influence.

[CHANNEL ZERO

The Hell of Working at Trump’s New Favorite Network

Kevin Poulsen]

In July 2017, Sputnik contracted with a struggling Washington, D.C.-area radio station to begin broadcasting Sputnik content 24 hours a day. Until then, the station played bluegrass music.

The move came just months after a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment named Sputnik, and its sister television outlet RT America, as players in Putin’s election-interference campaign. By September, the FBI was investigating Sputnik for potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The next month, Twitter announced it would no longer accept ads from Sputnik or RT.

The FARA issue was resolved in November 2017, when Sputnik formally registered with the Justice Department as an agent of a foreign power.

One America pushes some of the same false stories as Sputnik and RT, but with none of the legal entanglements.

Founded and helmed by 77-year-old circuit-board millionaire Robert Herring Sr., OAN launched in 2013 as an answer to the chatty, opinionated content of mainstream cable-news channels—and a place for viewers too conservative for Fox News. Under Herring’s direction, the network embraced Trumpism enthusiastically, starting in 2016.

Over time, the network became increasingly dedicated to conspiracy theories and fake news, and became overtly supportive of Russia’s global agenda. When Rouz joined, the network had recently shed a number of anchors and other staffers who’d bristled at the change.

Though it’s available in only a handful of cable markets, OAN’s viewership includes some influential figures, including the president of the United States. According to Media Matters, Trump has fallen for at least two fake stories after seeing them on OAN.

Kevin Poulsen

Sr. National Security Correspondent

@kpoulsen

Kevin.Poulsen@thedailybeast.com

almost 1400 results, interesting to compare to cherrypick list in lawsuit?

https://sputniknews.com/search/?query=kristian+rouz

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/extremely-demoralizing-cnn-reportedly-baffles-staffers-after-hiring-an-ex-trump-administration-flack-to-run-politics-coverage/

According to The Daily Beast, CNN staffers are angry and disheartened by the news that Republican strategist Sarah Isgur was hired as political editor for the network’s coverage ahead of the 2020 presidential election:

The hiring was met with a negative internal reaction, especially because many CNN staffers have been largely left in the dark on the controversial decision. While other marquee hires are often announced internally, as of Tuesday afternoon the company has not circulated any guidance to staff about Isgur’s new role, leading employees to wonder how much of a role she will have in day-to-day political reporting.

“It’s extremely demoralizing for everyone here,” one network editorial staffer told The Daily Beast.

“People are generally confused,” another editorial employee said, adding that the decision to hire a partisan operative for an editorial position comes off as “very bizarre.”

Isgur has previously advised several right-wing campaigns and organizations, including a Ted Cruz Senate run and Carly Fiorina’s 2016 presidential campaign. She most recently served as a spokeswoman for the Justice Department under former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a job for which the Washington Post reported she pledged her loyalty to the Trump agenda to get.

One key thing missing from her résumé, however, is any experience in journalism.

She has also been a consistently reliable right-wing partisan. Vox reported that on Twitter, she has called President Barack Obama “the new Nixon,” compared abortion to gun violence, spread conspiracy theories about Planned Parenthood, lied that “92 percent of jobs lost in Obama’s first term belonged to women,” scoffed at the idea that climate change is a national security threat, and attacked the media for pointing out that President Donald Trump pushed Birther conspiracy theories. She has also repeatedly attacked CNN itself, calling it the “Clinton News Network” and attacking them for correctly reporting that an event hosted by a right-wing hate group is “anti-gay” and “anti-abortion.”

CNN is, of course, no stranger to hiring controversial far-right personalities. The network hired Jeffrey Lord, a Trump surrogate who they had to dismiss after he tweeted a Nazi slogan, and Kayleigh McEnany, who has claimed transgender civil rights empower sexual predators.

But the difference is, these people were hired as commentators, to give their own opinions — for better or worse — in overtly political debate segments. It is extremely rare, The Daily Beast noted, for a news network to hire a political operative with no background in journalism as an editor. (CNN disputes the idea that she will steer editorial decisions, telling Vox’s Aaron Rupar that Isgur “is not leading, overseeing, or running political coverage” and will simply be “helping to coordinate coverage across TV and Digital.”)

The dissatisfaction by CNN staffers is a sign that the hire threatens to embarrass the network and undermine its credibility.