2016 Trump gang still in Russia propaganda business

[A] group of former Trump advisers and operatives have quietly helped build a pro-Russian website that frequently spreads debunked conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine, election fraud and vaccines.

Working alongside contributors for Kremlin state media, the former Donald Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos, his wife, Simona Mangiante, and others have become editorial board members of the website Intelligencer, which is increasingly becoming a source of news for those in the rightwing ecosystem.

  Pressway

You remember Papadopoulos - Trump's early 2016 foreign policy aide who was drunkenly giving info to an Australian diplomat, which started the Russian collusion investigations, and whom Trump claimed was no more than a coffee boy. BTW, he pled guilty in 2018 to lying to the FBI about contacts with Joseph Mifsud, the professor who was linked to the Kremlin and offered dirt on Hillary Clinton. Remember all that?

The site appears to have launched at the end of 2023 – and nearly half of Intelligencer’s board members are either former aides, surrogates or fake electors for Trump’s previous two campaigns.

[...]

Intelligencer appears to be gaining in popularity. It recently had its best month for internet traffic, with an increase of nearly 300% during August, according to data from Similarweb, and its articles have been shared on social media by the conspiracist Alex Jones, former Trump White House staffer Garrett Ziegler and former Trump aide Roger Stone.

“Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has increasingly been forced to rely on networks of proxies and influencers whose conspiracist ‘brand’ generates income and audiences through social media monetization and some of whom Russia has now been caught covertly subsidizing,” [Emma Briant, an associate professor of news and political communication at Monash University in Australia,] said.

The website’s opaque ownership structure makes it difficult to understand its financial backing, and there is no direct evidence of Kremlin funding. There is no corporate entity listed anywhere on the website, just a business address in Los Angeles.

[...]

Show hosts and guests frequently deny climate change, discuss culture war issues in the US, espouse pro-Russian viewpoints on the war in Ukraine, and spread conspiracy theories about Covid-19.

[...]

Many of the articles promote debunked conspiracy theories about vaccines and fraud in the 2020 presidential election, as well as stories that are aggressively anti-Ukrainian.

[...]

[Papadopoulos' wife, Simona Mangiante,along with fellow board member Igor Lopatonok, appears to have parlayed this work into a new documentary about the Hunter Biden laptop saga called Hunter’s Laptop: Requiem for Ukraine. According to social media posts, the documentary premiered on 5 September at the Trump International hotel in Chicago.

[...]

According to invitations for the Hunter Biden documentary premiere, the event was hosted by the Christian Orthodox Coalition, an organization which claims to educate Orthodox Christians on social and cultural issues. Four of the organization’s board members are also board members of Intelligencer, including Papadopoulos, Mangiante and Lopatonok.

[...]

Three other editorial board members also have close connections to the Trump campaigns. Leah Hoopes and Greg Stenstrom, both from Pennsylvania, have written a book falsely alleging the 2020 election was stolen. Both of them have been litigants in court cases challenging the results of the election in Pennsylvania, and Hoopes was one of Pennsylvania’s fake electors, who falsely signed paperwork saying that Trump had won the election.

[...]

“Intelligencer appears to be one of several [Russia-friendly] operations targeting the upcoming US elections, leveraging a network of far-right figures and disinformation tactics,” Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said.

[...]

“With an editorial board that reads like a who’s who of Putinist propaganda, Intelligencer is not your usual Russian ‘fake news’ site,” Briant said. “We may see more efforts like Intelligencer, which brings together cohorts of recognizable pro-Russian writers and consolidates their effort into a respectable-looking ‘news’ platform aiming to promote Russia’s influence in the US election and beyond.”

[...]

Eliason said that the website is funded out of pocket and the contributors contribute pieces because it “because it makes sense to them”.

Well, that's all that matters, surely.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Here comes another book on the Mueller investigation

“The Faking of RUSSIA-GATE: The Papadopoulos Case” [by Stephan Roh] is the latest in a stream of books aiming to capitalize on the chaos of this political moment. But it sheds new light on the expansive nature of Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s election interference and possible ties between President Donald Trump’s campaign team and Moscow. It also highlights Mueller’s interest in answering one of the probe’s biggest outstanding questions: whether the campaign knew in advance that Russia planned to interfere in the election.

[...]

In the spring of 2016, [shadowy professor, Joseph] Mifsud told a young Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” according to the special counsel’s statement of the offense against Papadopoulos, who was indicted for misleading federal agents about his conversations with Mifsud. [...] It is still not clear how Mifsud seemed to know in advance that Russia sought to compromise Clinton’s candidacy.

The lawyer allegedly questioned by Mueller’s team, Stephan Roh, is a German multimillionaire with ties to Russia. He hired Mifsud as a “business-development consultant” in 2015, and is Mifsud’s “partner and best friend” and “the money behind him,” Papadopoulos’s wife, Simona Mangiante, who worked for Mifsud briefly, told me.

He’s also in the nuclear-energy business: He acquired a small British nuclear consulting firm from scientist Dr. John Harbottle in 2005 [...]. Within three years, Severnvale Nuclear Services’ turnover went from under $100,000 to $44 million, per the BBC.

[...]

Roh and his co-author Thierry Pastor, who also knows Mifsud, write in the book that, upon arriving in New York City with his family in October 2017, “one of the co-authors” was “fished from the passport control” line at John F. Kennedy airport while his family “was retained with armed police force.” [...] He was then interrogated for “hours,” they write, by “a team of Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigating Russia-Gate.” The book alleges that he and his family were then “observed, followed, and taped, at every moment and every place in New York” by the FBI and that his family was assigned to “special rooms at the hotel” while security personnel “patrolled the corridors.”

[...]

The book further alleges that Mifsud is not a Russian spy but is actually “deeply embedded in the network of Western Intelligence Services.” Papadopoulos, too, is a “western intelligence operative,” the authors assert, who was “placed” in the Trump campaign by the FBI.

  The Atlantic

If true, I'm downgrading my already low esteem of the FBI. Carter Page is a nutjob. It actually seems plausible, however, because Page has said a lot of weird shit without any seeming concern for the ramifications. And he went before the House Intel Committee without a lawyer.

In that sense, the book is similar to one written recently by another obscure player detained and questioned by Mueller’s team earlier this year: Ted Malloch, a controversial London-based academic with ties to Trump associates Roger Stone and Nigel Farage. In his book The Plot to Destroy Trump: How the Deep State Fabricated the Russia Dossier to Subvert the President, Malloch argues that the apparent covert intelligence activity connected to the Trump campaign was not Russian, but Western.

Please don't let this shit be true. We know the intel agencies did not like Trump during the campaign. If they set up Trump and that becomes known, we can kiss our asses goodbye. There was enough Trump criminality and sleaze for him to do himself in without being set up. If he gets off because of something that stupid...Jesus wept.

Mifsud has virtually disappeared since his name was made public late last year. In their book, Roh and Pastor say that “the head of the Italian secret services contacted the President of LINK Campus, Vincenzo Scotti,” and recommended that Mifsud “disappear.” Since then, Mifsud “has been requested to hide, not to communicate, and not to speak to the press,” Roh and Pastor write. “He has been ‘put away’ and threatened to stay quiet.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.