How Attempts at Countering "Foreign Election Interference" Are Used To Squash Domestic Dissent.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein's FBI visit is just the latest in an increasingly authoritarian crackdown on dissident in the same of stopping "election interference".

Recently journalist Ken Klippenstien- formerly of the Intercept who now writes here on substack- had a visit from the FBI. The reason for this was that he recently published a confidential RNC info research document on Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential Candidate J.D. Vance. They claimed this was because the intelligence agencies claim (without evidence) that the documents were hacked by Iran but in reality they were “delivering what many would consider a chilling message: we know where you live, we know what you’ve done, we are watching” and Ken put it.

This seemed to be more of an intimidation tactic from the FBI to scare journalists like Ken away from publishing confidential material about powerful people. The visit was eerily similar to the time the IRS paid a visit to journalist Matt Taibbi’s house the morning before he testified at the House judiciary committee on the contents of the Twitter Files leaks. Not only was the timing of this visit too timely to be a coincidence but was extremely unusual conduct for the IRS. As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board noted:

Typically when the IRS challenges some part of a tax return, it sends a dunning letter. Or it might seek more information from the taxpayer or tax preparer. If the IRS wants to audit a return, it schedules a meeting at the agent’s office. It doesn’t drop by unannounced.

The FBI visit to Klippenstien’s House was similarly unusual- as Ken said- they had “No subpoena, no search warrant, no prior announcement and no claim of illegality.” In both cases, the intention is clear: to intimidate any journalists away from publishing classified or secret documents that embarrass people in high power.

The Visit to Ken Klippenstien also raises another disturbing trend, the use of “countering foreign election interference” to squash domestic dissent.

This trend really started in 2016 when intelligence agencies, mainstream media, and politicians repeated the claim ad nauseam that the DNC emails on WikiLeaks were stolen by Russia and Jullian Assange colluded with the Russians to publish them.

However, these claims of collusion between Wikileaks and Russia were not real. A former CIA official admitted to Yahoo News that the reason they decided to classify Wikileaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service” was because they could find no connection between Assange and Russia. As they admitted:

“There was a lot of legal debate on: Are they operating as a Russian agent?” said the former official. “It wasn’t clear they were, so the question was, can it be reframed on them being a hostile entity.”

Like most of the Russiagate stories, the claim of Russia hacking the DNC came from a private firm hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign, in this case, CrowdStrike. When Crowdstrike CEO Shawn Henry was asked in a secret 2017 testimony to Congress what evidence he had that Russia stole emails from the DNC server he admitted “There's no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated”. He went on to admit that the assessment that said Russia stole the emails was based on “circumstantial evidence” but that there was “no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated”.

The narrative painted in the Muller report to back up the claim of Russia being the Wikileaks source for the DNC emails is physically impossible (unless they were time-traveling Russian hackers). The Muller report alleges that Wikileaks received the email trove from Russian intelligence-controlled accounts called “Guccifer 2.0” and “DC Leaks” on June 14th of 2016 but this was clearly untrue as Assange had already announced that he had the DNC emails on June 12th.

Furthermore, the DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0 accounts were most likely accounts created by American intelligence to try to falsely tie Wikileaks to Russia. As journalist Aaron Mate noted in “Real Clear Investigations” the Guccifer 2.0 account publicly demanded credit for being the Wikileaks source for the emails, something that is “not standard spycraft” to say the least. The leaks that were released by the DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0 accounts also contained “easily discoverable Russian metadata.” such as the fact that “the computer that created it was configured for the Russian language, and the username was "Felix Dzerzhinsky," the Bolshevik-era founder of the first Soviet secret police.”

The Wikileaks Vault 7 leaks proved that the CIA was able to plant metadata on accounts to make it look like they were coming from foreign countries, which is likely what happened with the Guccifer 2.0 and DC leaks accounts. As former NSA official turned whistleblower William Binney pointed out the accounts were likely “contrivance to preemptively taint anything WikiLeaks might later publish from the DNC, by “showing” it came from a “Russian hack.”

After the Russiagate deception was done in 2016, the cause of “countering Russian interference” was used to crack down on anyone who questioned the official government narrative on anything.

Soon after the 2016 election, the Washington Post published an article based on a sketchy anonymously authored website called “Prop or Not” that accused alternative media outlets from across the spectrum like Truthdig, Black Agenda Report, Naked Capitalism, Ron Paul Institute and antiwar.com of being “Russian propaganda outlets”.

Facebook partnered with the pro-war think tank Atlantic Council to counter so-called “foreign disinformation” which led to anti-establishment pages such as pro-Maduro/Chavez outlets from Venezuela and anti-cop outlets being banned.

The Twitter files proved that the Neo-Con Thinks Tank Hamilton 68’s list of “600 Russian bots” were in fact not Russian bots and mostly American-based accounts but many of them got banned anyway based on them falsely being accused of being Russian.

Infamously in the 2020 election, “former” intelligence agents falsely claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop leaks were a “Russian disinformation operation” leading to the New York Post article reporting on them to be banned on all social media platforms. Mark Zuckerberg even admitted that the reason he banned the leaks on Facebook was that the FBI falsely told him it was “Russian disinformation”.

In this election, the attempt to counter “foreign influence” has led to more censorship than ever as the intelligence agencies are not just claiming that there is “Russian interference” but that there is now “Iranian interference” as well. The intelligence agencies have used claims of “Russian influence” to do FBI raids on RT (formerly Russia Today) writers’ houses as the FBI did to former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter.

The State Department used evidence-free claims of an RT connection to get the outlet “Africa Stream” banned on many social media platforms.

In a similar case to the Hunter Biden incident, the JD Vance leaks were banned from being shared on social media platforms (Including on X) and Ken Klippenstien, who released the leaks, had his account booted from X. This was reportedly because the Trump campaign asked X owner Elon Musk to do this based on claims that the leaks came from Iran. Ken eventually had his X account reinstated by Elon Musk because he wanted to save himself from being exposed as a complete free-speech hypocrite but as noted earlier Ken has now received an intimidating visit from the FBI for publishing the leaks.

The claims that the JD Vance leaks came from Iran are equally as dubious as the claims of Russian hacks in 2016 and 2020. The intelligence agencies have put out no actual evidence that Iran was behind them and the Microsoft report that is often trotted out to prove this claim is highly questionable, to say the least.

First, it was written by Clint Watts, a former Russiagate huckster who spread every false Russiagate claim such as the Trump-Russia collusion and the “Afghanistan bounties” hoax. He was also part of the “Hamilton 68” group which as noted earlier was caught falsely accusing accounts of being Russian bots.

Furthermore, the evidence outlined in the report falls almost immediately to any minimal scrutiny. The report accuses the website “Savannah Times” of being an Iranian intelligence-run outlet but it features articles that call Iran a “regime with reckless disregard for regional stability” and defends Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil. If the website is run by an intelligence agency it’s editorial line sounds far more like it is run by the Mossad than Iranian intelligence.

The report gives no evidence that Iran was behind the JD Vance leak, but aside from this the report is clearly highly questionable and is written by a discredited source with a terrible track record on issues of “foreign interference”.

What is also interesting is that the country we are always told is “interfering” in Western elections always happens to be the next country neocons want to go to war with. The claims of Russian interference paved the way to people supporting the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and now that the neocons are yet again turning towards the Middle East, claims of Iranian interference will be a useful tool to manufacture consent for the eventual American war there.

Representative Thomas Massie revealed that the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC assigned a personal “babysitter” to every Republican member of the house to tell them how to vote. AIPAC also brags about pouring money into primaries to unseat members of the house who are critical of Israel such as Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, but because Israel is not an '“official enemy country” the people screeching about foreign election interference are silent on this.

In reality, claims of foreign election interference exist to silence leaks about powerful people. From the DNC leaks to the Hunter Biden laptop to the JD Vance leaks, claims of foreign hacking are used to make sure leaks on powerful politicians in both parties are not published.

Furthermore, claiming that people dissenting from the official narrative of Western foreign policy are agents of an enemy country is the best way to silence criticism. Western foreign policy is more discredited than ever, for a year the world has seen Western countries back Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza where 9 out of every 10 deaths is a civilian. Every day, we see some of the most horrific war crimes in recent memory committed with Western-supplied weapons such as the recent images of civilians being burned alive after Israel bombed a refugee encampment outside of the Al Shifa hospital in Gaza.

Recently Hillary Clinton said the quiet part out loud when she admitted that if the U.S. government did not censor social media they would “lose total control” of the narrative. The proxy war in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, and U.S.-backed war in Lebanon are causing more and more people to be disillusioned with the official narratives on U.S. foreign policy, by claiming opposition to these wars is “foreign interference” the Western foreign policy elite will have the perfect excuse to silence dissident and regain narrative control.