The FBI opened Midyear Exam, its investigation of Clinton’s private server, which held evidence of influence-peddling, in July 2015. One year later, then-Director James Comey closed it with a press conference, calling her “extremely careless” but recommending no charges; he did so without advising the Department of Justice, which was unusual and inappropriate.

Twenty-six days later, on July 31, 2016, the Bureau opened Crossfire Hurricane, a full counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Special Counsel John Durham concluded in 2023 that neither the FBI nor the intelligence community “appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

Finally, in December 2019, an FBI field office took possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive, and in October 2020, Twitter and Facebook suppressed the New York Post story about it after FBI warnings of a Russian “hack and leak.”

The news media covered each episode as its own drama with its own unique cast of characters, and framed each incident in such a way so that the very idea that the FBI was abusing its powers lay outside of the Overton window. The media covered the email server as much ado about nothing, at best, and Clinton’s recklessness, at worst. The media framed the Russia story as a case of Trump’s conflicts of interest, at best, and Putin’s direct control of him, at worst. And the laptop story was, at best, about Republican persecution of an innocent man and, at worst, about Hunter Biden’s reckless behavior.

In every case, the media framed FBI officials as, at best, dogged investigators and, at worst, overzealous. Outside of openly pro-Trump right-wing media, few journalists covered the stories as the FBI abusing their powers for partisan reasons.

But it is now clear that a single thread ran through all three investigations, and it was one of partisan FBI agents and officials abusing their power in ways as extreme as J. Edgar Hoover did in the 1960s.

Read more

Ghent University rector Petra De Sutter told students and faculty at the opening of the 2025 academic year that universities must protect free inquiry and debate. “In times of increasing polarization, the university has a duty to foster adversarial debate,” he said last September. “At a time when an individual’s feelings about climate change or vaccination seem to carry as much weight as years of research, it is all the more urgent that young people learn how to ask critical questions,” he said. “Doubt means that we dare to question convictions…” He then said, “’Dogma is the enemy of progress.’ You might know it. It was Einstein who said this during his speech at the Sorbonne in 1929.”

Today, eleven months later, De Sutter has suspended the researcher who exposed the plagiarism of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who died last week in an apparent suicide. In a statement, De Sutter said, “the university takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.”

Read more

But what Acemoglu is proposing is a direct violation of the First Amendment, which declares clearly that the government must not take any action that limits free speech. Demanding that social media companies manipulate their algorithms, which are simply the step-by-step instructions that social media companies use to deliver content users are interested in, is blatant censorship.

Read more

Moderates say the party went woke on migration, race, and LGBT issues. A Democratic pollster called the party’s orthodoxy “noticeably out of step with what was electorally optimal or viable.” His firm found undecided voters broke for Trump 52 to 38, with five of their top eight stated reasons involving immigration.

Progressives say the party failed to deliver a populist economic message. A Sanders-aligned autopsy found that the Kamala Harris campaign courted suburban Republicans while ignoring working-class voters, and that strong populist economic messages outperformed democracy-threat messages among Pennsylvania blue-collar voters, 57% to 45%.

Read more

Leia este artigo em português

On January 8, 2023, hundreds of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro entered government buildings in Brasília, in an episode strikingly similar to January 6 in the US. Brazil’s President Lula, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, and much of the media across the West labeled these individuals “coup plotters,” “terrorists,” and “fascists.”

But many of the protesters neither broke the law nor committed any acts of violence. And in August 2025, Eli Vieira and I revealed evidence, including text messages between people working in Brazil’s Supreme Court, showing that Moraes had created a secret and illegal intelligence task force that used social media posts to justify the imprisonment of nonviolent protesters.

Now, a new trove of Supreme Court documents reveals that Moraes illegally demanded that Brazilian courts across the country tell him whether they employed any of the 2,119 people whose names turned up in January 8 court cases — arrested rioters, but also hundreds of people who were never charged with anything, and even a sitting cabinet minister.

Read the Key Leaked Document

7.05MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Read more

According to Democrats and most journalists, the FBI was justified in investigating Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, dropping its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s ties to Russia, not investigating Joe Biden’s ties to Ukraine and China, and dropping an investigation into former congressman Eric Swalwell's romantic relationship with an alleged Chinese spy. Trump, according to the AP, derides the Russia investigation “despite multiple government reviews showing Moscow interfered on behalf of the Republican’s campaign.”

But the evidence never justified the Trump investigation. A top CIA analyst told Public that a “pathological” former CIA Director, John Brennan, had put analysts “under duress” to say Russia favored and sought to help Trump in 2016, when the intelligence did not support that conclusion. Before then, the Justice Department’s Inspector General had found significant errors and omissions in the FBI’s FISA applications on Trump adviser Carter Page. And the Justice Department’s John Durham had concluded in his investigation that the FBI had relied on unverified memos from a former UK spy, financed by the Clinton campaign, to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump team.

Many of the FBI’s abuses of power have been reported before. There was coverage of how the FBI received warrants to spy on Trump aide Carter Page based on a July 2016 email that the Bureau, in five separate interviews, never once asked Page about. Reporters covered the FBI’s claim in its warrant application that Page had “met with” senior Russian officials when he had, in fact, only shaken a deputy prime minister’s hand, and spoken briefly with a staffer. And journalists wrote about how the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz documented 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions across four FISA applications targeting Page.

But now, new files released today reveal that the FBI walked away from a far stronger case against Rep. Eric Swalwell. The FBI opened its investigation in 2014 and named as its objective to “obtain sufficient evidence to indict and arrest Swalwell and Fang for violations of campaign finance laws and quid pro quo exchanges.” Christine Fang, known as Fang Fang, was a Chinese national whose parents the FBI identified as “known MSS intelligence officers,” a reference to China’s Ministry of State Security, that nation’s equivalent to the CIA.

The new files show Swalwell admitted to FBI agents that he had “physical relations with Fang” on multiple occasions. They also show that he confirmed that Fang referred interns to him, whom his staff placed in his campaign and congressional offices. And agents traced 2013 straw donations through conduits back “to Fang herself,” making her, in the Bureau’s words, an “illegal source of campaign contributions.” And yet on February 8, 2017, the FBI dropped Swalwell as a subject and narrowed the case to Fang alone.

Read more

Whether or not he killed himself, what led to his tragic rise and downfall is plain for everyone to see. While the family understandably blames the people who questioned Jason Arday, responsibility for his fall from grace belongs to the people who not only failed to hold him responsible for his plagiarism and false claims but also actively denied them and attacked the people who pointed them out.

The BBC has today published an article headlined, “Analysis: Jason Arday’s death will send shockwaves through a divided academia.” Let’s hope it does. But it should also send shockwaves through the media, especially the BBC, which in March 2023 broadcast a deeply irresponsible and error-filled documentary about Arday, a clip of which can be seen above.

The hagiographic documentary remains on the BBC’s YouTube page. Information in the documentary video and in the text below it includes multiple false claims.

Read more

And yet the result of it all, a new report published today by Health and Human Services (HHS) confirms, is the worst medical scandal since lobotomies. Researchers have found a 12-fold higher suicide attempt risk among adults who had gender surgery, either on their chests or genitals, than among those who did not. A Swedish study that followed every “surgically reassigned patient” for up to 30 years found death from suicide ran 19 times higher.

A Trump administration Department of Justice declaration cites video of Boston Children’s gender clinic director Jeremi Carswell saying puberty blockers are given out “like candy.” It cites Boston Children’s psychologist Amy Tishelman’s testimony that evaluation time for minors fell after 2017 from 20 hours to two and a half hours, which she called “reckless.” And it quotes the hospital’s website calling blockers “temporary,” “fully reversible,” and free of “any permanent changes.”

The Campaign for Southern Equality published tables of “Codes That Are Commonly Rejected by Insurance Providers” and codes commonly accepted, matching mastectomy to breast reduction and hysterectomy to pelvic pain. “This guide is essentially a template for how to commit medical fraud,” report contributor Haim testified to Congress in April 2025. “We should all remember that this is something that people go to prison for.”

The HHS reports note that puberty blockers cost insurers an average of $16,385 per patient per year. Vaginoplasty averages $53,645 per patient and phalloplasty $133,911. Revisions for urethral strictures, fistulas, and lost sensation add more. A typical pediatric patient costs about $3,000 per year, while a gender patient costs $25,000 to $75,000 over a lifetime before any surgery.

Read more

Yesterday, I reported on new evidence discovered by The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that adds significantly to the case that a single group of FBI agents, working on a task force then-FBI Director Christopher Wray had created, ran a secret and likely illegal operation called “Round River” to protect Joe Biden — an effort that culminated in Facebook and Twitter censoring the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Now, House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan tells Public in an exclusive interview that he received what he believes was the identical “defensive briefing” to the one the FBI gave to two U.S. senators, apparently to plant negative stories about investigators of Hunter Biden in the media.

“It was a farce,” said Jordan. “I remember talking to my staff about it as we walked to the elevators. We knew exactly what they [the FBI agents] were doing. They told us not to do what we were doing, which was looking into Hunter Biden. I mentioned it to [Senator Ron] Johnson at the time. I believe it was the same briefing they received.”

One of the documents released yesterday included a spreadsheet, apparently created by the FBI, of apparent “targets” (mostly Democrats) and “conduits” (mostly Republicans) of Russian disinformation. Number eight on the list of “conduits” for Russian disinformation was Jordan. Number one was a former attorney for President Trump, Rudolph Giuliani.

While Jordan could not recall the exact date he was briefed, we know the FBI briefed Johnson and Senator Charles Grassley on August 6, 2020.

Two weeks earlier, on July 20, Politico reported that “Democratic leaders are asking the FBI for an urgent briefing arising out of concern that members of Congress are being targeted by a foreign operation intended to influence the 2020 presidential election…Among the Democrats’ concerns is that a Senate investigation being led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has become a vehicle for ‘laundering’ a foreign influence campaign to damage Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden…”

Politico published an article by Andrew Desiderio on August 5, which begins, “Two top Republican senators on Wednesday denied they are pushing Russian disinformation, responding directly to charges from Democratic congressional leaders who have demanded additional public disclosures about the Kremlin’s interference in the 2020 presidential election.” Desiderio did not respond to a request for comment.

Those articles helped the FBI and Democrats to frame any discussion of Hunter Biden as Russian disinformation.

On October 15, the New York Times reported that intelligence agencies had warned Trump that Russian intelligence officers “were using President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani as a conduit for disinformation aimed at undermining Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential run.”

The timing is revealing. The New York Post the day before, October 14, published its first story about Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive. The FBI had obtained covert warrants for Giuliani’s iCloud account in late 2019, which was revealed when the April 2021 raid became public.

The October 15 New York Times story noted that the New York Post had reported on the Hunter Biden laptop and then added, “Some former officials who have not reviewed the material suspect it could be Russian disinformation,” and “Giuliani was dealing with people widely believed to be at worst Russian operatives and at best conduits for Kremlin disinformation efforts, said current and former officials.

Read more

In 2023, as part of the Twitter Files, I reported on a plan by FBI officials to spread disinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop as part of a scheme to censor and suppress information about the Biden family’s influence peddling. The files showed the FBI’s former General Counsel, who became Deputy General Counsel at Twitter in the spring of 2020, successfully persuading his colleagues to censor the New York Post article about the laptop under the pretext that it could be Russian disinformation.

Now, the White House has released documents from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) showing that the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force-Russia (FITF-R) in December 2019, one month after an FBI field office took possession of the hard drives from Hunter Biden’s laptop, “unofficially formed a group of analysts who utilized internal systems to gather any all derogatory information previously reported by confidential human sources (CHSs) on Joseph Biden, corruption, and other Ukraine related-topics (known as, the ‘Ukraine Narrative,’) including Burisma, Hunter Biden, Mykolva Zlochevskay, Ukraine Interference in 2016 US Presidential election to red flag the reporting as Russian disinformation.” (Bolded text in the original document.)

Read more

But there is less to Hong’s defeat than meets the eye. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the nation’s most high-profile democratic socialists, refused to endorse Hong, and did not campaign with her. “Bernie, AOC, and most national groups stayed out,” a progressive Democratic strategist told Politico. “Abdul El-Sayed was a great foot forward, Graham Platner was not, and we didn’t need our political reputation hanging on this race.”

Other DSA stars, such as Melat Kiros and Chris Rabb, who had campaigned for progressive primary candidates in Michigan and Colorado, also refused to campaign for Hong. Said a Democratic operative, “There’s a reason the institutional left mostly stayed away… The people who made those calls are relieved.”

Read more

The picture presented by the media over the last two weeks of Jason Arday, the youngest black professor ever hired by Cambridge University, is that of a unique plagiarist and fabulist who managed to independently fool prestigious institutions and publishers. Arday, who resigned on Wednesday, acted alone in his academic dishonesty, Cambridge implied when it announced it would conduct an investigation into Arday’s “appointment and tenure.”

Yet Arday’s rise was only possible because of Cambridge’s willingness to hire someone unqualified and to turn a blind eye to his plagiarism. Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher of biology who first brought Arday’s verbatim copying of a PhD dissertation to public attention, also found that the ten papers listed on Arday’s Cambridge faculty webpage demonstrated essentially no rigorous academic work. And David Harris, a professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, had notified Cambridge administrators about Arday’s plagiarism in 2023. When reporter Jack Grove investigated Arday’s plagiarism last year, he submitted 97 pages of evidence to Cambridge. Still, the university did nothing.

Arday was, to be sure, singular in his pathological deception. He said he was in the famous BBC documentary series, “Seven Up!” even though it had started filming two decades before he was born. Arday also recounted raising over £5 million for charity, running 600 miles in six days, and running nine marathons with a fractured fibula. In his book proposal for Simon & Schuster, Arday wrote that he had experienced “locked-in syndrome” for months after an accident before waking up miraculously.

But Cambridge accepted Arday’s outlandish lies because they built a story of overcoming adversity in the face of racism, ableism, and discrimination. The university’s press office played up the announcement of Arday’s appointment to the media, and the BBC, CBS News, and Good Morning America covered the hire as inspirational. Arday’s account of not speaking until age 11, and not learning to read and write until age 18, flattered a narrative the university welcomed.

Read more

The Jason Arday plagiarism and fabulism scandal at Cambridge should not distract universities from doing more to increase the number of black and minority professors, say many in the media. “By failing to do due diligence on Mr Arday before launching him, editorialized the Guardian last week, “the university has done a serious disservice to black and neurodivergent scholars more widely.”

What’s more, wrote a professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, “the idea that Arday benefited because he is Black is… ludicrous... The special treatment we achieve in the academia [sic] is abuse, not preferential treatment.” Notes the Guardian, racial “imbalances, which remain pronounced in many areas of public life, including academia, are the consequence of prejudices and discrimination, as well as unequal access to resources and opportunities.”

In reality, Arday rose not on his own original research but on his skin color, his transparently phony sob stories, and his ability to repeat left-wing dogma that Cambridge faculty wanted to hear. His research consisted of studies purporting to show widespread racism in universities, and yet more emphasis on black history and teaching white people that they are inherently racist. “We are so lucky to have you,” cooed Cambridge’s head of faculty for education, Hilary Cremin, to Arday in front of the BBC cameraman. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

In fact, the race obsession at Cambridge is typical of what has happened to Western universities over the last several decades.

Read more

And yet no journalist had asked Nolan tough questions about his choices until a Chinese graduate student did so a few days ago. The interview went viral on social media over the weekend. “Homer’s tone was celebratory, victorious, and your tone is emphatically not,” noted Yiyang Zhuge, a PhD student in political science at Boston College. “Does that say something about our age? Are you a bard for a civilization at dusk?”

Read more

“I wasn’t part of the problem” during Covid-19, insisted CNN’s Dana Bash in an interview with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday. “Let me just say, for the record, that I am not saying that the entire Covid reaction was accurate. It was a scary time, and people made mistakes.” Bash later added that “What we were doing in Covid… is getting the best information, the best science that we can and putting it out there.”

But Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary shows that the media was more interested in pushing specific narratives and promoting Fauci than it was in getting the “best information” to the public. On April 17, 2021, for example, Bash herself texted Fauci, “I just watched the whole Jordan thing. Again, you’re a better man than I.... As our friend Wolf Blitzer said to me yesterday – no one would have blamed you if you said simply ‘Mr. Jordan, go f--- yourself.’”

Bash was referring to a House Oversight Committee hearing in which Representative Jim Jordan pointed out many of the “mistakes” Bash now admits were made.

The next day, Bash sent Fauci another text “pointing out that Vanity Fair recently had a headline that said: Jim Jordan trips over his own asshole trying to debate Anthony Fauci.”

Read more

Such is the case with the 2026 Westminster Free Speech Prize winners. All three are Brazilian: Congressman Marcel Van Hattem and investigative journalists Eli Vieira and David Ágape. You can see me interview the three of them in the video above, after giving them the award, which comes with $25,000, in London in June.

The three men are among the most important advocates of free speech in the world, not just in Brazil, and have paid a heavy price for their courage, namely the threat of prison.

Read more

Read more

Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying before the Senate yesterday, refusing to answer questions over 100 times. Fauci stated that the chairman of the hearing, Senator Rand Paul, had an “obvious obsession” with prosecuting him.

In Fauci’s diary, newly released by Paul, he similarly paints himself as a victim, complaining about “far right radical idiots” and the “radical right-wing maniacs” who wrongly blame him for Covid policies. “The idiots like Rand Paul… do nothing but aim their criticism at me as if I am the person that’s doing the mandates,” Fauci wrote in October 2021.

But Fauci’s diary shows that he did, in fact, heavily shape vaccine requirements and messaging.

For instance, when the CDC’s advisory committee voted against recommending boosters for people with occupational exposure on September 23, 2021, Fauci “texted [CDC Director] Rochelle [Walensky] and I begged her to call me in order that I could explain to her how this would be a fatal mistake.”

Fauci then “literally begged her to override that decision” and “pleaded with her,” telling Walensky that if she did not overrule the committee “she would be forever branded as someone with no leadership capabilities at all.”

Following intense pressure and intimidation from Fauci, Walensky overruled her committee and recommended boosters for frontline workers. By insisting on this recommendation, Fauci ensured that states and employers could require boosters for healthcare personnel. New York, for example, explicitly tied its healthcare booster mandate to the CDC’s advice.

There is no “smoking gun” in Fauci’s diary, claimed the New York Times on Monday. “Rather, it echoes past disclosures showing Dr. Fauci wrestling with a fast-moving crisis as scientists’ views evolved.”

Yet the diary shows the extent of Fauci’s coordination with other officials to repeatedly hide and manipulate vaccine-related information. This coordination was not reflective of “wrestling with a fast-moving crisis,” but of intentional “noble lies” aimed at increasing vaccination rates at the expense of informed consent.

Read more

The New York Times would likely splash the story across its front page with a picture of the attacked reporters. The Washington Post, which says “democracy dies in darkness,” would warn of the return of fascism to Germany. And CNN and MS NOW would broadcast days of coverage of the story and demand the immediate capture of the violent individuals.

Many would quote the victims. “It was like a hunt,” said Marius Marx, an Apollo News reporter who was beaten by a mob. ”They didn’t treat us like fellow human beings. They just thought we were political enemies… that it’s morally correct to kick us.”

They would quote the Member of Parliament (Bundestag) Martin Sichert, who a local election committee on July 21 barred from running for his county’s top executive position, similar to mayor.

“I was shocked,” he told Public. “I’ve lived here my whole life and all my teachers at school told me that we have a working democracy and freedom of speech and now I’m just banned because I’m a member of a party that the other parties don’t like.”

They would note that many had spent years dehumanizing the people who were attacked as “far right.” “There were 30,000 people,” said Jonas Aston, another beaten Apollo News reporter, “and the message to them was, ‘You can punch them! You can hunt them! It’s okay.’”

And yet there has been no mainstream media coverage of these events in the U.S., and surprisingly little in Germany.

There’s no question that this is a major news story. “This is the first time that an election council has canceled a candidate because of political reasons,” said Sichert of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Election councils banned two AfD mayoral candidates last year, but they at least cited specific, ostensibly non-political reasons.

“I was shocked,” he told Public. “I’ve lived here my whole life and all my teachers at school told me that we have a working democracy and freedom of speech and now I’m just banned because I’m a member of a party that the other parties don’t like.”

On July 4, just hours before the leftists hunted and beat Aston and Marx, they and thousands of other protesters had tried to prevent them from holding a party convention.

The illegal blockage of the AfD meeting, and the failure of local police, forced its members to show up at 3 a.m. to get inside. Of the roughly 31,000 protesters, the police had estimated that over 2,000 were prepared for violence.

Meanwhile, the individuals who could have beaten Aston and Marx to death remain free.

And Sichert isn’t alone. “We know of 14 candidates who [election councils] wrote to beforehand and said, ‘We are highly concerned about you, and we invite you to the electoral council’ [to defend themselves].” Another AfD mayoral candidate, Reinhild Goes, may also be banned from running.

Read more

The results of these laws have been disastrous, says British philosopher Kathleen Stock. In a conversation with me about her convincing new book, Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death, Stock noted that doctors are killing people with treatable physical and mental conditions who could otherwise have lived for years or decades. Advocates in every country promised that strict safeguards would confine the practice to rare, hopeless cases at the very end of life, but that didn’t happen. The eligibility criteria instead expanded from terminal illness to chronic pain, disability, and psychiatric suffering.

Read more