This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Anger and fear have greeted the return to power of former US strongman Donald Trump, a corrupt far-white extremist coup plotter who is also a convicted felon and rapist, following this week’s shock presidential election result.

Ethnic tensions have been on the rise with members of the historically oppressed minority Black ethnic group reporting receiving threatening text messages, warning of a return to an era of enslavement.

In a startling editorial, the tension-wracked country’s paper of record, The New York Times, declared that the country had made “a perilous choice” and that its fragile democracy was now on “a precarious course”.

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President-elect Trump’s victory marks the second time in eight years the extremist leader, who is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of using campaign funds to pay off a porn star he had cheated on his wife with, has defeated a female opponent from the ruling Democratic Party.

Women continue to struggle to reach the highest office in the deeply conservative nation where their rights are increasingly under attack and child marriage is widespread.

This has prompted traumatised supporters of Vice-President Kamala Harris, who had been handpicked to replace the unpopular, ageing incumbent, Joe Biden, to accuse American voters of racism to sexism.

“It’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from Black . . . who do not want a woman leading them,” insisted one TV anchor, adding that there “might be race issues with Hispanics that don’t want a Black woman as president of the United States.”

Hateful tribal rhetoric
The hateful tribal rhetoric has also included social media posts calling for any people of mixed race who failed to vote for Harris to be deported and for intensification of the genocide in Gaza due to Arab-American rejection of Harris over her support for the continued provision of weapons to the brutal apartheid state committing it.

America Makes a Perilous Choice https://t.co/sKW5ZZa3Q3

— Xandre Rodríguez (@xandrerodriguez) November 6, 2024

“Victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan,” goes the saying popularised by former US President John F Kennedy, who was shot 61 years ago this month.

The reluctance to attribute the loss to the grave and gratuitous missteps made by the Harris campaign has mystified America-watchers around the world.

As an example, analysts point to her wholesale embrace of the Biden regime’s genocidal policy in the Middle East despite opinion polls showing that it was alienating voters.

Harris and her supporters had tried to counter that by claiming that Trump would also be genocidal and that she would ameliorate the pain of bereaved families in the US by lowering the price of groceries.

However, the election results showed that this was not a message voters appreciated. “Genocide is bad politics,” said one Arab-American activist.

Worried over democracy
As the scale of the extremists’ electoral win becomes increasingly clear, having taken control of not just the presidency but the upper house of Congress as well, many are worried about the prospects for democracy in the US which is still struggling to emerge from Trump’s first term.

Despite conceding defeat, Harris has pledged to continue to “wage this fight” even as pro-democracy protests have broken out in several cities, raising fears of violence and political uncertainty in the gun-strewn country.

This could imperil stability in North America and sub-Scandinavian Europe where a Caucasian Spring democratic revolution has failed to take hold, and a plethora of white-wing authoritarian populists have instead come to power across the region.

However, there is a silver lining. The elections themselves were a massive improvement over the chaotic and shambolic, disputed November 2020 presidential polls which paved the way for a failed putsch two months later.

This time, the voting was largely peaceful and there was relatively little delay in releasing results, a remarkable achievement for the numeracy-challenged nation where conspiracy theorists remain suspicious about the Islamic origins of mathematics, seeing it is as a ploy by the terror group “Al Jibra” to introduce Sharia Law to the US.

In the coming months and years, there will be a need for the international community to stay engaged with the US and assist the country to try and undertake much-needed reforms to its electoral and governance systems, including changes to its constitution.

During the campaigns, Harris loyalists warned that a win by Trump could lead to the complete gutting of its weak democratic systems, an outcome the world must work hard to avoid.

However, figuring out how to support reform in the US and engage with a Trump regime while not being seen to legitimise the election of a man convicted of serious crimes, will be a tricky challenge for the globe’s mature Third-World democracies.

Many may be forced to limit direct contact with him. “Choices have consequences,” as a US diplomat eloquently put it 11 years ago.

Patrick Gathara is a Kenyan journalist, cartoonist, blogger and author. He is also senior editor for inclusive storytelling at The New Humanitarian. This article was first published by Al Jazeera and is republished under Creative Commons.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A magistrate judge ordered a legal journalist on June 20, 2024, not to publish the name of a plaintiff that had mistakenly appeared on court documents in a revenge porn case. The ruling was overturned a month later.

Eugene Volokh — co-founder of the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy, a law professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University — was singled out in the ruling by Magistrate Judge Elizabeth S. Chestney as the only person who was barred from using the plaintiff’s name.

The case, initially filed in 2019, involves a woman who ended an extramarital affair with a man, who she said then posted revenge porn to several adult websites. The case was sealed to protect her privacy. She and the defendant later settled, but the question of whether the case was improperly sealed remained.

Volokh told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he initially noticed the case in an alert from Westlaw, a database of legal documents, and thought it raised First Amendment questions that he might want to write about, given his expertise as a free speech scholar.

Even though the case was sealed, the names of both the plaintiff and defendant were published in an opinion available on Westlaw, along with other documents that should have been sealed under the judge’s order. It’s not clear exactly why they were published, but Volokh said it appeared to be an error.

“It was just a simple mistake,” he told the Tracker.

Volokh moved to intervene in the case and have it unsealed. Chestney, the magistrate judge, agreed on July 18, 2022, to let him intervene but ruled that Volokh could not write about the case until a decision was made on unsealing the case.

“Professor Volokh may not blog or write about this case until any renewed motion to unseal has been granted,” the ruling ordered.

Volokh appealed the case to District Judge Xavier Rodriguez, who on Aug. 3, 2022, vacated the prior restraint language and said the entire case should be unsealed. Volokh then published the plaintiff’s name in a blog post in August 2022 since, he said, it was also the name of the case.

The plaintiff appealed the unsealing of the case to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that it should be partially sealed with certain personal information redacted.

The case then returned to Chestney to determine what exactly should be redacted and whether the plaintiff could retroactively use a pseudonym, Jane Doe.

In her June 20, 2024, ruling, Chestney ruled in favor of the retroactive pseudonym.

“And then to my surprise, she says that even though I don't have to take down past writings that mention the plaintiff’s name, I cannot use her name in future writings,” Volokh told the Tracker.

The ruling stated: “Professor Volokh may not, however, publicly disclose Plaintiff’s name or personal identifying information in any future writings, speeches, or other public discourse.”

Volokh again appealed and on July 16 Rodriguez vacated that prior restraint language.

“The order restricts Volokh from sharing information that is publicly available through his prior writings but allows for any of Volokh’s readers to share that same information,” Rodriguez wrote. “As such, the language at issue here is an unconstitutional prior restraint.”

Volokh detailed the ruling in a post on The Volokh Conspiracy.

The plaintiff could still appeal the ruling to the 5th Circuit.

Volokh said he was deciding whether to go back to his August 2022 article and redact the name.

But whether he uses her name in future articles, he added, should be a matter of editorial discretion, not a judge’s ruling.

“I think it’s important that this be a decision for the individual journalist, the individual speaker, and not something that they’re ordered to do,” Volokh told the Tracker.

Volokh said he sees this case as an example of the system working. But he noted that he was uniquely positioned to fight these instances of prior restraint.

“I should also acknowledge that maybe if I weren’t a law professor, if I weren’t a specialist on the subject, if I had to pay a lawyer to challenge the prior restraints, maybe the situation might not have come out as well,” he told the Tracker.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

On Tuesday night, police raided a condominium in Phnom Penh and detained several Chinese and Vietnamese nationals, as well as Cambodians, they say had set up a studio to film erotic videos.

Speaking to the media on Wednesday, Ministry of Interior spokesman Touch Sokhak said the order to raid the building in the capital’s Boeung Keng Kang district had come directly from Interior Minister Sar Sokha.

Attempts by RFA Khmer to contact the Ministry of Interior and the police for comment on the arrests went unanswered on Thursday, but National Police spokesman Chhay Kim Khoeun confirmed to local media that authorities are questioning the suspects to determine whether they will bring charges against them.

Convictions on charges of illegally producing pornography are punishable by up to a year in prison in Cambodia. Authorities have typically sent Cambodian women arrested in similar cases to the country’s Social Affairs Center for “rehabilitation.”

Ros Sotha, executive Director of the Cambodian Coalition for the Defense of Human Rights, or CHRAC, told RFA that the production of pornography has “seriously damaged the prestige of Cambodian women and degraded the national culture.”

"Cambodia is a civilized country that maintains peace of mind without being obsessed with greed, guilt, delusion and talk about sexual desire,” he said.

He expressed concern that the nation is becoming “a place for foreigners to conduct illegal business and force Cambodian women into situations that bring shame on society.”

But Ros Sotha also warned against the impact pornography might have on the public.

“These sex videos can provoke people to become sexually promiscuous and possibly commit sexual crimes such as raping their children or forcing sex on others without their consent,” he said. “This is an abuse of both our culture and the law.”

He called on authorities to crack down on such crimes.

Legality vs morality

While pornography is illegal in Cambodia, the process used to define what constitutes such content is less clear and increasingly fraught, as the nation walks a fine line between upholding traditional values and billing itself as a travel destination for budget-conscious backpackers and tourists.

In March 2018, a court in Cambodia handed British national Daniel Jones a one-year suspended prison sentence for using “pornographic” photos to promote a pool party in Siem Reap – home to the country’s famed Angkor Wat temple complex – two months earlier.

In handing down the maximum sentence, Judge Um Chan Thol said Jones had "unintentionally produced pornography that affects Khmer culture."

Authorities have also fined and deported several tourists for taking nude photos at Angkor Wat, which had implemented a ban on wearing “revealing clothing” at the site in 2016.

Translated by Yun, Samean. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

Photograph Source: DonkeyHotey – CC BY 2.0

“Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”

—Ruby Freeman, Georgia election worker

“Hey, you stupid slave nigger…You are in our sights, we want to kill you. If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch.”

—Abigail Jo Shry, Texas Trump cultist’s threat to Judge Tanya Chutkan

“They must serve as examples for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”

—Donald Trump on the Central Park Five

“Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”

—Richard Nixon,

Revenge porn is the GOP’s new black.

“I am your retribution,” Donald Trump, America’s bloated, bloviating Batman, declares.

“We’re going to start slitting throats on day one,” promises Ron DeSantis, glitchy governator of Florida, the state where history goes to die, and being comatose is touted as a virtue.

Meanwhile, in congressional hearings, the queen of laptop porn, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, parades explicit photos of a naked Hunter Biden and his redacted junk to score MAGA points against President Joe Biden. This conduct is relatively tame for the rabid Greene, who has labeled Pelosi a “traitor,” advocated for her assassination, and spread baseless innuendos when a homicidal home intruder fractured Paul Pelosi’s skull with a hammer.

It seems that Trump and his supporters will not be satisfied until MAGA cultists take down his political enemies and, ultimately, the country.

They are encouraged by Trump, who has always spoken, unfiltered, the language of vengeance and violence. In 1989, as a real estate mogul, he demanded the death penalty for the Central Park Five, the Exonerated Five since 2002, although Trump, who was found liable for sexual assault in the E. Jean Carroll case, refuses to acknowledge their innocence or to apologize. As a 2016 presidential candidate, he boasted of sexually assaulting women and condoned an attack on a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his campaign rallies. As president, he “joked” that police should rough up suspects they take into custody and once asked former Defense Secretary Mark Esper why White House demonstrators protesting the murder of George Floyd couldn’t just be shot.

Trump’s language, however inciteful, is protected by the First Amendment. His actions are not. And while Trump is many deplorable things – racist, psychopath, pathological liar, xenophobe, misogynist, and cis-supremacist – a fool is not one of them. He may notoriously boast that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” but, like the mafia dons he channels, he knows that rather than risk the consequences of committing such an act himself, it’s best to leave the dirty work to others. That is what minions and co-conspirators are for. After all, this is the bone-spurred no-show who promised his followers on January 6 that he would join them at the Capitol.

Despite his threats and intimidation, Defcon Don remains an imperiously impervious and untouchable pariah who, his 20-minute, whirlwind excursion to the Fulton County Jail aside, may never see the insides of an actual jail cell. The norms of the criminal justice system simply do not apply to him: mugshots are optional, perp walks are negotiated, arraignments are breezily expedited. Does anyone doubt that, unlike social media influencer Kai Cenat, if Trump had conjured up a flash mob in front of Trump Tower for a giveaway of mugshot¹ NFTs and a riot broke out, he and his followers would have been allowed to leisurely broker their arraignment dates, not arrested on the spot?

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, more than 400,000 Americans are currently being detained pretrial – but not the quadruplely indicted Trump. In Georgia, the “billionaire” braggart’s bond was set at a mere $200,000, $300,000 less than that of his former fixer Michael Cohen who was convicted of hush money payments to a porn star on Trump’s behalf. One would think that conspiring to subvert democracy is a more serious offense.

Trump has already orchestrated one insurrection and is determined to incite another. Yet he remains not only a free man but the GOP presidential frontrunner, converting his many indictments into political currency. Of the eight “law and order” Republican presidential hopefuls on the debate stage in Milwaukee, all but two declared they would support Trump for party nominee even if he were “convicted in a court of law.” These duplicitous defenders of the Constitution see nothing wrong with backing a man for president who has proven himself incapable of upholding and protecting it.

After much stalling, it appears that with Trump’s Georgia booking our system of justice is finally beginning to work. But we have gone through the motions before, including two impeachments and a civil case, only to see him evade accountability.

This matters little to his supporters who hold his First Amendment rights and their Second Amendment rights more important than the rule of law, despite the threat of inciting stochastic terrorism Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric poses to the nation.

Trump has made no secret about whom he deems to be his enemies. His words have already endangered the lives of Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis, New York County D.A.Alvin Bragg, New York A.G. Letitia James, and Washington, D.C. Judge Tanya Chutkan. Encouraged by their puppet master, Trump supporters wasted no time doxing the Fulton County grand jury. That most of his targets are black and women should surprise no one.

Fulton County Jail’s nominal “inmate” No. P01135809 has been repeatedly warned about his threats. Yet despite a few tentative toe-dips in the shallow pool of judicial equity, everything so far indicates that Trump is above the law, where he will remain so long as optics takes precedence over principle and the equal application of justice.

The optics of concern here is not that of a two-tiered justice system. Rather, it is that the sight of Trump’s conviction and imprisonment would send the wrong message to the world that America has become a Third World “shithole country.” Sadly, concern over such optics overrides any about the fate of our democracy should his crimes go unpunished.

Some seem to think that Trump’s disgrace and humiliation are punishment enough. The media point to the dilapidated, overcrowded conditions of the Fulton County Jail, which are good enough (or bad enough) for mundane criminals but apparently too “extreme” for the former president. Crocodile tears fully primed, the media mouths concern about the “nightmarish public health” conditions at the jail, fully aware that the odds of Trump spending a night – or any time – behind its bars are nil. And even if Trump were incarcerated, does anybody believe that he would be treated like any other inmate or come to share the same fate as LaShawn Thompson, whose body was found “dehydrated, malnourished, and infested inside and out with insects”? Or would maggot removal be added to the roster of duties of the Secret Service?

For some, the optics of Trump’s booking and scowling mugshot might inspire optimism that the system is finally beginning to work. But we have gone through the motions before with Trump, only to witness the gravity-defying farce of trickle-up justice. Of course, it has yet to be proven in a court of law that Trump conspired to steal the election, but the question remains: What consequences will he face if and when it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he has? Moreover, what happens if Trump is convicted of his felonies in New York and Georgia but wins the Republican primary and the general election? Will he be imprisoned? Will the big house become the new White House?

The threat remains that if Trump is not convicted, he will run for president in perpetuity if only to stay out of prison. As early as August 2020, years before his serial indictments, Trump telegraphed his intent to cling to the presidency “4eva.” The means to thwart his authoritarian ambitions exist, but their use will require a measure of political will that those currently in a position to act lack.

Some comfort may be taken in the fact that legal scholars have revisited the theory that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the so-called disqualification clause, which bars elected officials who have violated their oath to uphold the Constitution and engaged in insurrection against the United States from running for and holding political office, could be invoked to derail a Trump dictatorship that would see him and his allies enact political retribution against individuals and institutions responsible for his present predicament.

Realpolitik, however, reveals that its successful use is far from guaranteed. Except for New Mexico County Commissioner Couy Griffin, attempts in 2022 to invoke the clause to remove insurrectionist Republican officials from office have uniformly failed. In Georgia, the non-profit group Free Speech for the People invoked the clause in a suit to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene’s name from the ballot there. Similar campaigns were launched against North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, and Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar. None succeeded. And while Republican New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan is reportedly listening to those advocating use of the clause to block Trump’s name from appearing on ballots in his state’s presidential primary, and Florida lawyer Lawrence Caplan has filed a federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, it is unlikely that other Republican secretaries of state will cooperate in these efforts and far more likely that they will move to stymie them.

Still, a bevy of legal scholars and jurists, including Lawrence Tribe and J. Michael Luttig and William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, have argued that the disqualification clause is “self-executing,” claiming violators are automatically disqualified from running for and holding political office and that disqualification does not require a criminal conviction. As Luttig explained on CNN,

All officials, federal and state, who have a responsibility to put on the ballot candidates for the presidency of the United States…are obligated under the Constitution to determine whether Donald Trump qualifies to be put on the ballot. That is, they must determine themselves whether he is disqualified from being listed on the ballot by Section 3. Now, here’s how this will work: Any secretary of state or other state election official who’s charged with that responsibility will make the determination. Now, whether that person decides that former President Trump is qualified or whether he or she determines that he is disqualified by Section 3 and therefore doesn’t list him, that decision will be immediately challenged in federal court, and it will quickly move to the Supreme Court of the United States, where this decision will have to be made prior to the 2024 election.

Nonetheless, some serious doubts temper any optimism. Congress, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, can remove the disqualification, something it has done twice: In 1872, in the name of national reconciliation, it enacted the Amnesty Act, which lifted restrictions barring former Confederates from voting and holding office, and in 1898, it voted to end Section 3. The only other time Congress invoked the clause was in 1919 when it refused to seat socialist Victor Berger for his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I, a decision that was later overturned (Berger eventually served three terms). On the other hand, in the 1970s, Congress passed joint resolutions to grant Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis posthumous Section 3 amnesty. Here, too, the aim was national reconciliation in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War. According to New York City Bar, there is currently no congressional legislation to enforce Section 3.

Given its rightwing majority, placing one’s faith in the Supreme Court seems criminally naïve. Aside from the fact the initial intent of the clause has repeatedly been nullified by a desire for “national unity,” and with rumors of impending civil war now indelibly a part of the zeitgeist, it seems unlikely that Congress or SCOTUS will rise to the challenge.

Note

1. The Fulton County mugshots have proven anticlimactic, as they are little more than mostly dour DMV portraits. I had envisioned front view and side view shots, height backdrops, and handheld slates with names and inmate numbers on them. But I guess what’s good for Young Thug is good for Old Thug and his gang of eighteen.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John G. Russell.

“Some [creators/distributors of ‘deepfake’ pornography,” Nina Jankowicz writes at The Atlantic, “seem to believe that they have a right to distribute these images — that because they fed a publicly available photo of a woman into an application engineered to make pornography, they have created art or a legitimate work of parody.”

Jankowicz, who served as Executive Director of the federal government’s now-defunct “Disinformation Governance Board,” has good reason to be upset with the phenomenon of deepfake porn. She recently discovered that she’s been a subject of it. That’s presumptively both discomfiting and disgusting. I don’t blame her for not liking it one bit.

But creepy as deepfake porn — essentially using software to e.g. put a recognizable facsimile of a person’s head “on” the body of an actor in a pornographic video — may be,  it’s inescapably fiction and expression, and entitled to the same protection as other fiction and expression.

The title of Jankowicz’s piece is “I Shouldn’t Have to Accept Being in Deepfake Porn.” She DOESN’T have to. It doesn’t matter whether she does or not, because she isn’t in the porn. A photo of her — in fact,  an official US government portrait that’s in the public domain — is.

Jankowicz supports legislation that would “provide victims with somewhat easier recourse when they find themselves unwittingly starring in nonconsensual porn.”

But “nonconsensual porn” would consist abducting people and forcing them to engage in sexual acts on camera.  Jankowicz willingly sat for a photo that belongs to “the public” to do with as we wish.

Not everything disgusting violates rights, and only things which violate rights should be treated as crimes, or even actionable torts.

A 1996 Joe Klein novel and 1998 film, Primary Colors, featured  characters who were, recognizably, Bill and Hillary Clinton and members of the Clinton inner circle.  They’re portrayed as engaging in actions which may or may not have actually happened in real life, some of which arguably, to grab a Supreme Court ruling expression, “appeal to a prurient interest.”

Librarian Daria Carter-Clark, who had good reason to believe that one of the characters portrayed as having engaged in a sexual fling with the Bill Clinton character was based on her, sued for libel. She lost. Romans-a-clef — works in which real-life people and events are given fictional treatment — enjoy the same constitutional protections as other fiction.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

There are certainly some sick puppies out there, doing some sick things. We don’t have to like that, and it’s completely understandable when those targeted by such things feel wronged and damaged. But until and unless those sick puppies cross the actual line of coercion or violence, the only legitimate tool for changing their behavior is persuasion.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Hallie Lieberman.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Hallie Lieberman.

In late 2021, the right-wing site Conservative Beaver published a story falsely claiming the FBI had arrested Pfizer’s CEO for fraud.

It wasn’t Conservative Beaver’s first brush with fabricated news. The site had falsely claimed Barack Obama was arrested for espionage, Pope Francis was arrested for possession of child pornography and “human trafficking,” and the Pfizer CEO’s wife died after being compelled to take a COVID-19 vaccine. As Conservative Beaver pumped out these and other lies, Google placed ads on the site and split the revenue with its then-anonymous owner.

Its owner was eventually identified as a Canadian man, Mark Slapinski, after Pfizer threatened to sue him for defamation, and Google removed ads from the site in November of last year due to public pressure. Soon, Conservative Beaver went offline.

But today, roughly a year later, Slapinski is still making money from Google ads.

He runs the conservative political site Toronto 99 and uses the same Google publisher account he had for Conservative Beaver to collect ad revenue. Google simply allowed Slapinski to start a new site and keep earning money. It’s the equivalent of taking away an unsafe driver’s car instead of their license.

In the nearly half-trillion-dollar digital ad industry, Google sets the rules of the road. More than any other company, Google determines the online ads we see, what they cost and who gets paid for them. It runs the biggest search ad business and provides the industry’s leading tools for buying, selling and displaying ads.

And if you have a website and want to earn money from digital ads, you can join the Display Network, where Google places ads on what it has publicly said are more than 2 million websites and an untold number of mobile apps. It’s the modern equivalent of a national network of billboards on nearly every highway being controlled by a single company — and reportedly generated $31 billion in revenue for Google last year.

But if you’re Slapinski, Google’s Display Network has another benefit besides its market share: its secrecy. Google is the only major ad platform that hides the vast majority of its ad-selling partners. This means Google does not disclose all the websites and apps where it places ads or the people and companies behind them. The company conceals this information even after helping establish and publicly supporting an industry transparency standard for disclosing such sellers, which its competitors have largely adopted.

In response to questions, Slapinski denied running Conservative Beaver. “That’s fake news!” he wrote in a Facebook message, despite the large body of evidence he was behind the site. He acknowledged operating Toronto 99, but declined to explain why that site uses the same Google publisher account as Conservative Beaver. He did not respond to questions about Google ads and said he does not publish disinformation.

“I don't publish fake news,” he said. “I follow strict editorial standards.”

Google’s embrace of publisher confidentiality means roughly 1 million publishers can remain anonymous to companies and individuals who buy ads on its network to reach customers. This opens the door to a range of abuses and schemes that steal potentially billions of dollars a year and put lives and livelihoods at risk due to dangerous disinformation, fraud and scams.

Google’s ad business helps fund dangerous disinformation that puts public health and democracy at risk around the world, earns money from millions of gun ads while publicly claiming to block them, and allowed a sanctioned Russian ad tech company to harvest data on potentially millions of people, including possibly those in Ukraine, putting their security and privacy at risk.

It all makes the Display Network one of the world’s most lucrative black boxes. Ads are placed where they shouldn’t be. Money flows to someone other than the intended website or app owner. Publishers of banned sites can easily keep collecting ads and revenue from unsuspecting brands. But because of Google’s allegedly monopolistic dominance of the digital ad industry, companies ranging from mom and pop shops to the biggest brands in the world keep shoveling money into it, hoping for the best.

• A seller refers to an entity with ad space available for purchase. This is typically a publisher that runs websites and/or apps and makes money selling ads. ProPublica is a seller; Candy Crush is a seller. Or it can be an intermediary like an ad consultancy that works with many publishers to help them earn ad revenue from Google ads.
• The advertiser is the buyer.
• An ad network like Google’s Display Network aggregates the ad space available from sellers and makes it available for buyers to purchase via an automated auction system.
• Once accepted into the Display Network, each seller is given a unique ID that looks like this: pub-6728307037029826. A seller can use their ID on multiple websites or apps. A seller can also have multiple IDs. Money earned from ads placed on these properties is deposited by Google into the seller’s account(s).
• Ad networks like the Display Network release a public list of sellers they work with. This is called a sellers.json file. It is supposed to confirm if an ID is active in Google’s system, whether it belongs to a publisher or intermediary and the person/company and domain(s) associated with it.
• But unlike every other major ad network, Google’s sellers file is almost completely confidential. It is mostly a list of IDs like pub-6728307037029826, with no company, individuals or domains listed.

Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the company uses a combination of human oversight, automation and self-serve tools to protect ad buyers and said publisher confidentiality is not associated with abuse or low quality.

“We want to see more publishers embrace greater transparency, and we conduct regular outreach to our partners to explain the benefits of opting out of confidentiality,” he said. “We do see a lag in consent among small-scale publishers, which may be because they are unaware of this option, or because their account includes personal information and they have legitimate privacy concerns.”

Aciman said the vast majority of ad revenue from Google’s systems goes to publishers who do not keep their information confidential.

ProPublica spent months trying to crack open Google’s black box ad business. We wrote thousands of lines of code to scan more than 7 million website domains looking for Google ad activity, sourced and analyzed data on millions more domains from half a dozen data partners, and spoke to some of the most knowledgeable experts about Google’s display ad business.

In the end, we matched 70% of the accounts in Google’s ad sellers list to one or more domains or apps, more than any dataset ProPublica is aware of. But we couldn’t find all of Google’s publisher partners. What we did find was a system so large, secretive and bafflingly complex that it proved impossible to uncover everyone Google works with and where it’s sending advertisers’ money.

Alongside reputable publishers and popular games and online tools, we uncovered scores of previously unreported peddlers of pirated content, porn and fake audiences that take advantage of Google’s lax oversight to rake in revenue.

In one example, a Bulgarian company helped scores of piracy sites with close to 1 billion monthly visitors earn money from Google ads. Most alarming, Google knew from its own data that these sites were engaging in mass copyright theft, yet it allowed the sites to receive ads and money from major brands such as Nike and HSBC Bank right up until we contacted Google.

As for what else lurks in the black box, only Google knows.

Each time someone visits Toronto 99, the site sends digital requests to Google asking it to place ads on the page. Each of those requests contains this series of numbers and letters: pub-5958167306013620.

It’s a unique ID that identifies Slapinksi’s Google publisher account, much like how your Social Security number identifies you to the government. Google issued Slapinski the account ID when it accepted him as a publisher in the Google Display Network, greenlighting sites he launched to receive ads. The same ID was used by Conservative Beaver.

Google has issued millions of account IDs in the more than 200 countries where its Display Network is active. Anyone operating a website or app in those countries can apply to join.

Once a publisher has an ID, they can add it to new sites and apps that they operate, as Slapinski apparently did. Google also allows publishers to register for more than one ID. The result is an ad network with millions of constantly shifting publishers, sites, apps and IDs.

To help ad buyers navigate this murky ecosystem, ad networks are supposed to disclose a list of the publisher accounts they work with. For Google, this list — which is called a sellers.json file or sellers list — should contain all the websites and apps Google has authorized to earn money in its Display Network, from big publishers like The New York Times to small bloggers. When done correctly, the list should allow advertisers to match Slapinski and the ID pub-5958167306013620 to Toronto 99 and block the site if they wish.

Google itself helped create this concept three years ago and publicly champions it and related standards, saying they “provide advertisers with a greater visibility into the overall supply chain, which can help them inform future buying decisions.”

But among the roughly 1.3 million IDs in Google’s sellers list, over 75% are marked “confidential” and contain only the ID, including Slapinki’s. It’s the default setting in Google’s system. ProPublica’s Google ID was also marked confidential but is being changed to disclose the organization name and affiliated domains.

As of this fall, only 23% of Google’s records listed a person or company name, and just 11% also included the domain of their organization. Google’s competitors almost always publicly list all account IDs alongside such information as the name of a person or company connected to it and the associated domain or domains.

Google’s list of the websites and apps it provides ads to has far more confidential and partially confidential entries than its competitors, meaning it hides either the name or the domain associated with the account, or both.

On their own, a list of these IDs provides no useful information — it’s like wiping the names from your phone’s contact list, leaving just the numbers.

The upshot is that the largest ad network in the world won’t reveal the identities of the vast majority of its publisher partners. The risks go beyond a lone disinformation peddler like Slapinski. Legislators, including Sen. Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have warned that the opaque and fraud-ridden digital ad ecosystem led by Google poses a national security risk. Each layer of confidentiality further obscures where money and consumer data flows in the digital ad industry, undermining trust and exacerbating risks.

“The lack of transparency and regulation in the digital advertising space is an issue that I have been concerned about for many years,” Warner said in a statement to ProPublica. “Unfortunately, the industry hasn’t improved its practices since I first raised concerns back in 2017, as advertisers consistently appear to lack meaningful control over the types of content that is seen alongside their ads and are oftentimes completely unaware of where their advertisements are being displayed.”

Last year, Warner and a bipartisan group of senators expressed alarm that Google and other companies share data about Americans with undisclosed foreign partners as part of the ad buying and selling process, and that billions of dollars flow through Google to unknown parties around the world.

After the U.S. sanctioned several Russian websites following the invasion of Ukraine, ad tech researcher Krzysztof Franaszek showed that two months later, Google continued to allow many of them to earn money from ads. He also revealed the company placed ads on other sanctioned Russian, Iranian and Syrian sites for years. Critically, nearly 90% of the sanctioned sites earning money from Google ads contained no identifying information in Google’s master ad sellers list, according to Franaszek. Like Slapinski, their accounts were confidential, listing nothing more than a Google account ID.

Aciman said Google works to comply with all relevant sanctions and emphasized that publisher confidentiality should not be seen as nefarious.

“By no means does confidentiality indicate that a publisher is engaging in fraud or other nefarious activity,” he said. “The vast majority of our publishers, including those who are listed as confidential in their sellers.json, are well intentioned, policy compliant, and contribute to the overall vibrancy of our network.”

But industry experts and critics say there’s no way to prove that without Google meeting the same standard as its competitors.

“Google has manufactured a uniquely explosive situation: sending billions of ad dollars everyday to unknown individuals around the world. It is effectively one of the largest dark money transfers in the world — and it’s funded by all our ad campaigns,” wrote Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin of the Check My Ads Institute, an ad industry watchdog, in a recent article.

They called upon Google to release a full deanonymized sellers file.

Google’s actions thus far suggest major changes are unlikely to happen quickly. The company waited a year after other ad networks began publishing their sellers files to release its own, overwhelmingly anonymous version in 2020. Following pushback, the company offered excuses, including having to update help center documentation, conduct training and contact all the account owners. The company also said there could be privacy and security risks to requiring all of its publisher partners to disclose the individual or company associated with an ID. It said things would improve.

Two years later, Google has increased the total number of fully public entries in its sellers file from 5% to 11% — still by far the worst in the industry. Google’s file also carries a notice not seen in its competitors’: “This file is a beta and is unverified.”

Google declined to comment on the notice. Aciman said publisher transparency is a “critical” part of the ad ecosystem, and pointed to a Google Help Center article that encourages publishers to make their information transparent.

“Google has a unique publisher base and we want to ensure we’re balancing both industry transparency and publisher confidentiality and choice,” he said.

But as of today, new publishers signing up with Google’s ad network are still confidential by default.

After months of data collection and analysis, 70% of the account IDs in Google’s sellers file were matched to one or more websites or apps (11% of these were accounts that Google provided public information on). But 30% of these accounts weren’t declared by Google or in our or our partners’ data, leaving us and Google’s advertising partners in the dark about where their money might be getting spent.

So we attempted to do what Google would not: connect the company’s list of more than 1 million account IDs to the actual sites and apps where ads appear. We were able to match almost 900,000, or 70%, of the accounts in Google’s file to one or more domains or apps and found over 5 million sites that are or were associated with Google publisher accounts. But over 380,000 account IDs remain ghosts, perhaps never used by the entity that registered them or used in a way our data couldn’t capture, perhaps active on a mobile app or site outside of the roughly 300 million available to us in our data and that of our partners.

Some accounts were associated with hundreds of sites, some moved from site to site like a game of whack-a-mole, some were seen on sites before or after being publicly listed in Google’s sellers file. And thousands of accounts are added and removed to the file every week, rendering a given week’s list of publishing partners almost immediately obsolete. This effectively prevents ad buyers from having a basic understanding of the sites and apps where their ads could appear, and who they fund as a result.

Google’s reasons for not disclosing its publisher partners are “rubbish,” according to Ruben Schreurs, the chief product officer of Ebiquity, a media research company that has worked with such brands as L’Oréal, Sony, Nestlé, and Audi. He said it’s in Google’s business interest to keep ad buyers in the dark, because the Display Network is filled with sites and apps most advertisers would not want to do business with.

“They have so many obviously nefarious or even sanctioned partners that use Google’s technology,” Schreurs said.

Our effort to deanonymize Google’s vast network of publishers revealed a bewildering array of sites and apps. There are news and sports sites in many languages, food blogs, utility sites such as spell-checkers and percentage calculators, and gaming sites. There are sources of disinformation, such as OANN and many others around the world, and the fetish site WikiFeet, which features photos of women’s feet, often without their permission.

In spite of a policy banning sexually explicit content, we found Google placing ads on adult sites like Sexlexikon.net, iSexyChat and Female Prison Pals. On the last of these, Google showed ads to us when we visited pages with photos of female inmates in the United States accompanied by their responses to a questionnaire with prompts such as their favorite sexual position and the age at which they lost their virginity.

Since Google doesn’t release a list of the sites and apps where it places ads, ad buyers ranging from major brands like Nike to small local businesses can’t exclude all of the unsuitable publishers in Google’s network. They can preemptively block problematic sites and apps they know about, but then they must await reports from Google about where their ads were placed.

Even then, Google keeps customers partially in the dark. In most campaigns, the company conceals a percentage of ad placements. This means Google does not reveal all the sites and apps that received the ads and associated revenue. Call it the black hole in Google’s black box.

In an example revealed by watchdog group Check My Ads in May, 10% of all the ads in a million-dollar campaign run via Google were listed as “anonymous” in the report generated for the advertiser. Roughly $100,000 worth of ads were placed on sites and apps, but Google wouldn’t say which ones. (The campaign data was shared with Check My Ads on the condition it not name the brand that ran the ads.)

Schreurs analyzed $1 billion worth of ads placed for his company’s clients and found that 3.6%, or $36 million worth, went to unknown websites and apps. Google isn’t the only company that conceals a percentage of advertiser placements and spending. But the company combines the practice with other methods of obfuscation, like its largely anonymized sellers file, that thwart transparency and accountability.

Google also doesn’t allow ad buyers to block by account ID. Even if buyers know that pub-5958167306013620 is the publisher account for the owner of Conservative Beaver, they can’t direct Google to block their ads from appearing on sites or apps using that ID.

Aciman said the company is currently beta-testing a tool that allows ad buyers to block by seller ID.

“This would enable buyers to block confidential sellers by adding those sellers to their blocklist,” he said. “The tool is expected to launch for general availability in 2023. This would go beyond our existing tools that provide advertisers with robust controls that lets them decide where their ads appear.”

Schreurs said Google has a financial interest in concealing which sites and apps it works with. The company earns money by taking a cut of each ad placement — the higher the volume, the more Google makes. To maintain that volume, the company needs to work with low-quality and risky publishers, he said.

“We all know that most of Google’s inventory is crap,” he said.

Aciman disputed the quality concerns and said that most of the money flowing through Google’s ad system does not go to confidential publishers. In late 2020, a Google executive said more than 90% of revenue goes to the small percentage of partners that are publicly identified in its sellers file. Aciman said the percentage is even higher now.

If that’s true, it begs the question of why Google risks working with so many sites and apps. But the concerns about Google’s ad network go beyond the hidden identities of its publishers and sites.

Last year, a marketer working for a Fortune 500 company launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign.

The goal was to reach business owners in the U.S. by placing digital ads on websites and apps in Google’s Display Network. Using Google’s DV360 ad buying tool, the marketer entered details about their desired audience, uploaded a list of risky or otherwise inappropriate sites and apps to block from receiving ads and launched the campaign. The marketer said they were not authorized to share campaign data publicly, and did so on the condition that their name and that of the Fortune 500 company not be disclosed.

Over the next few months, Google placed more than 1.3 trillion of the company’s ads on over 150,000 different websites and apps. The biggest recipient of ads — more than 49 million — was a website called PapayAds. The company was registered in Bulgaria less than two years ago and lists one employee, CEO Andrea De Donatis, on LinkedIn. Its site is a single page that says it helps publishers increase their ad revenue. PapayAds has just one ad slot on its page, which is presented as a demo for prospective clients to see what banner ads look like. One of its customer testimonials comes from someone using a pseudonym.

That’s not the only time De Donatis used fake or misleading names. PapayAds is among the small percentage of Google partners that list both the name or names of people associated with the company and its domain in Google's sellers file. At least two of PapayAds’ sellers accounts list the name of De Donatis. But the rest are registered to his girlfriend, his brother and a set of dubious names that Google and De Donatis confirmed are also not associated with the company. One account is in the name of Luca Brasi, the famed character in the first Godfather film.

It seems impossible that 49 million ads were legitimately placed and viewed on PapayAds’ site over the span of several months. In an interview with ProPublica, even De Donatis expressed skepticism. “I don’t have an explanation for this,” he said, adding that he does not recall receiving payment for such a large volume of ads.

Google declined to comment on the campaign, rendering the 50 million ads it charged a Fortune 500 company for one of many mysteries of its black box.

But the story of Google’s relationship with PapayAds goes deeper. It also includes a possibly related scheme involving online piracy, fraudulent advertising and fake online traffic. And even after discovering at least part of the operation, Google didn’t take steps to remove PapayAds or the many piracy sites it works with from the Display Network.

Here’s how the scheme worked. First, PapayAds signed up website publishers to help them earn money from ads. At least 679 websites list PapayAds as their Google Ads partner, based on our findings and data from Well-Known, a site that tracks advertising systems. This means these sites publicly declare that they use PapayAds account IDs to help receive ads and money from Google.

Nearly all of the of PapayAds client sites we examined specialize in publishing pirated versions of Japanese comics, known as manga, or Korean comics, known as manhwa. Others feature pirated Japanese animated films and shows, or pornographic manga known as hentai. Google and other ad networks ban ads from appearing on copyright infringing content. Google also bans ads from appearing on pages containing hentai.

This past summer, PapayAds used code that misled Google and ad buyers into thinking Google ads were being placed on PapayAds’ site when they in fact appeared on manga piracy sites, according to Pixalate, a digital ad fraud protection and privacy compliance company that examined PapayAds at our request.

De Donatis described this as a “test” he attempted with some manga sites, and said his company did not realize it broke Google’s rules. PapayAds is merely providing a service to clients approved by Google, he said.

“I’m just providing some IT technology,” De Donatis said. “I don’t think I did anything bad.” (His first language is Italian, but he spoke English during two phone interviews.)

Pixalate also found the operation included an element of deception to maximize profit: bots. It found that some of the web traffic on PapayAds and its manga piracy partners was automated. Bots artificially inflate the number of ads viewed on a website, thereby increasing revenue.

“I can tell you that we never used bot traffic or fake traffic,” De Donatis said.

Pixalate’s findings did not attribute the automated traffic to a particular entity. It’s possible the bot activity was connected to PapayAds’ clients or another entity.

Google detected the improper activity over the summer and withheld the associated ad revenue earned by PapayAds clients from their August and September payments, according to De Donatis. According to Google policy, that money should have been refunded to advertisers.

De Donatis didn’t say how much was withheld, but described it as a large amount relative to his and his partners’ typical earnings. (He claimed on his LinkedIn profile that PapayAds generates $400,000 in revenue per month, but removed that information after speaking with ProPublica.)

Google declined to comment on the withheld revenue and overall scheme. Speaking generally, Aciman said the company is “engaged in a comprehensive effort to detect and stop invalid traffic, which is powered by a combination of technology, operations teams, and policy.”

But what did Google do after detecting what by industry definition is an ad fraud scheme involving a set of manga piracy sites filled with stolen content? It kept placing ads on them, and kept working with PapayAds up until being contacted by ProPublica.

This occurred in spite of the fact that Google has at least two years of data showing that many manga sites working with PapayAds are serial copyright infringers.

We selected a sample of 50 manga sites from the list of more than 650 sites that publicly said they work with PapayAds to receive Google ads. Data from Google’s transparency report shows that since 2020 Google has removed 1.9 million of these manga sites’ URLs from search results due to copyright infringing content. Yet 34 of the 50 sites appeared in the Fortune 500 company ad buy under their own domains, and the full list of 50 continued to receive Google ads until very recently.

Google could see in its own data that these sites were engaging in mass piracy, and that they were working with PapayAds to receive ads and revenue. But it did not take action to kick them, or PapayAds, out of its ad system.

The 50 sites in our sample collectively received close to 750 million visits in September, according to analytics company Similarweb, and were able to make money from that traffic thanks in part to Google. We were shown ads placed by Google for major brands including Nike, Sephora and HSBC Bank when visiting manga piracy sites. The brands did not respond to requests for comment.

Jalal Nasir, the CEO of Pixalate, expressed concern that Google is directly placing ads on such obvious piracy sites.

“I’m a little surprised that Google with their big team is not able to detect this stuff happening,” he said.

Nasir also said it’s a huge red flag that PapayAds does not have a privacy policy, a requirement for any Google partner and a necessity for compliance with data protection laws. “Do they have proper due diligence in place?” he said of Google.

After speaking with ProPublica, De Donatis added a privacy policy to his site. He said he’s not responsible for the content of the sites that use his platform, and noted that nearly all of the manga sites were approved by Google to receive ads before signing on with him.

“Like 90% of them already have Google ads when they come to us,” he said.

Google also failed to take action against PapayAds and the raft of manga sites it works with after being warned about them almost two months ago. Rocky Moss, the co-founder of fraud detection company DeepSee, identified PapayAds as a major player helping piracy sites earn money. On Oct. 25, he emailed his contact at Google to draw their attention to the company.

“Just wanted to flag a particularly egregious pirate traffic seller,” he wrote. Moss attached an image of a concerning ad he’d seen placed on Reaper Scans, a manga piracy site working with PapayAds for which Google has received and acted on thousands of copyright infringement reports.

The advertiser in question? Google.

Moss said the tech giant’s inaction is disappointing but not surprising.

“There are good people working at Google who want to do the right thing. They just can’t get the approval to solve the problem,” he said.

After we contacted Google with our findings, the company removed all of PapayAds’ seller accounts.

“We are in the process of reviewing the specific sites shared with us by ProPublica and have already removed ads from several and have terminated the accounts associated with PapayAds,” Aciman said. “We will continue to take action as we detect any additional policy violating content.”

Nasir and Moss expressed dismay that Google failed to stop PapayAds and the piracy sites sooner. They said there are likely an untold number of companies like PapayAds operating in the Display Network.

“It’s probably a drop in the ocean of what’s happening out there,” Nasir said.

Jeff Kao contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Craig Silverman and Ruth Talbot.

Mercenaries, and now, we have a blue blood son, grandson to Robert Kennedy, heading out to Ukraine with some sad sack ideas about what he in the name of Hell is going to do in that country?

Yep, RFK Jr., let out the news recently, on Megyn Kelly. The newspapers picked it up:

“He felt that he shouldn’t be arguing about it unless he was willing to have skin in the game and take his own risk,” Kennedy said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” of his son’s decision to go to the war-torn country.

Kennedy said his son signed up for the Foreign Legion at the Ukrainian Embassy and was a drone pilot before he was promoted to a “machine gunner.”

“He didn’t have any military experience and kind of talked his way into the unit,” he added. “He’s been in firefights, mainly nighttime, and a lot of artillery fights with the Russians.”

“He had a job for a law firm, a really good law firm in Los Angeles, and I was looking forward to him living with me for the summer,” he said of his son’s initial plans.

When probing him further about Conor Kennedy’s plans, his son said, “I’m not going. I want to talk to you. I don’t want you to ask me what I’m doing.”

“I was like, ‘Um…,’” he explained. “And he said, ‘I will explain it to you at some point, but I do not want you to ask me now, and if you could just respect that it would mean a lot to me.’ So I did.”

We can discuss what the role of parenting has to do with bringing up children who might find it necessary to shoot at people to get skin in the game. Now, Conor is 28, that is, 28 years old, not months, yet as a teacher of many souls over four decades, I can say he is most certainly arrested developed (so many American men are), and this whole idea of having skin in the game is beyond insane. Kind reader, what were you doing at age 28? Wanting skin in the game? Which game? Hmm, I went to Central America before age 28, and I was working with refugees in Arizona in my 19 to 21 years of age time frame. I was involved in journalism, too, young, at 17, and then reporting on some things like El Salvadorans perishing in the desert near where I was headquartered, and some on the drug tunnels down also near Bisbee. Also, reporting on the military putting up aerostat balloons along the border to try and capture undocumented workers. I even did a story on some of those Posse Comitatus folk, the border patriots (sic) who went out there armed and lock ‘n’ loaded.

Nope, no blue blood in my line. Yep, plenty of military around me with an old man in cryptology in the Air Force and then Army. Germany, France, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Yes, and I am named after a grandfather who was a WWI pilot in the Germany navy-air force, flying triple-wing planes. He was in post-WWI Germany, seeing the wheelbarrows of  Deutsche Marks for a loaf of bread. He also — before the German loss — in the Battle of Jutland, on a ship, the Rostock, that was hit and distressed with hundreds dead. He floated on the flotsam of war and watched the battle ensue and then the two sides with white flags came into the war theater to pick up the wounded and dead.

And, of course, I had Irish and Scottish and English and Canadian family in that war, but also in WWII. Uncle Ian was on a submarine for the British, and German family members on the Russian front, and alas, relatives who survived the bombing of Dresden.

Yeah, I heard stories about Paul Haeder’s exploits on a tall sail ship learning how to be a soldier, and listened intently his war experiences, and learned about his post-WWI life, and his life in Iowa and South Dakota (my grandfather ended up in Iowa and South Dakota as the last of seven brothers who hit Ellis Island before WWI). Paul found work as a former lieutenant impossible — coal mining and “working” the food trains with orders to shoot fellow Germans, per the Pinkerton outfit, if they rushed the trains for food, bread, foodstuffs. That wasn’t Paul Haeder’s ethos, so he never did the dirty deeds of shooting Germans hungrier than rabid dogs.

Now, of course, forgotten history of that putrid, Patton and MacArthur, and their dirty deeds killing their own veterans:

In 1932, 17,000 former soldiers marched on Washington, D.C. to demand wartime pay owed to them. The Great Depression ravaged the country, and a president took desperate measures to disperse the angry veterans.

Tanks rolled down the streets. Soldiers held people at bayonet-point. Veterans and their families took lungs full of tear gas. People died.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur — then the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff — led the 12th Infantry Regiment and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment into the fray.

The cavalry regiment contained six Renault FT tanks commanded by Maj. George Patton. The Army troops, with bayonets affixed to their rifles, charged into the shanty town and launched tear gas into the crowds. (source)

Skin in the game? Hmm. So, growing up on air force bases, army posts and outside Paris, on SHAPE and NATO compounds, I was truly interested in the stories of men and women, and the accounts of dudes who were in Vietnam, or hanging onto my old man’s Korea stories and his recalling about what happened in Vietnam, though he was pretty much a zipped up mouth on those wars. He worked in NATO caves in France and Germany, as a signal corps warrant officer, and we all in the family had to have FBI-level background checks.

I wonder what a 13-year-old is doing learning about Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez, Che Guevara, and much much more? That was me. I learned about Ho Chi Minh from some of my older sister’s friends who had come back from Vietnam, mentally wounded, hooked on smack, some wounded physically, and most anti-American, anti-War.

No blue blood in my family.

Look, yes, I am trauma informed, and this image, or these two, are full of context and whatever this Conor believes in, in terms of killing humans, Russians, and some of them, if he was a drone operator, civilians, that would be an interesting discussion and debate.

So, listening to RFK, Junior, Conor’s dad, I stuck with him throughout the wide-ranging two-hour Megyn Kelly interview, which in my mind is less of a journalistic interview and more of the same old celebrity cultish thing a multimillionaire Kelly was doing (interviewing) with another multimillionaire, RFK, Jr.

I wrote this to a fellow writer I respect, and who publishes many amazing pieces. He’s a bit older than I am, I believe. Here:

Yeah, ECC, we have this fascination with blue blood, the Kennedys, Bush, those coming out of Ivy League schools, who are millionaires who hang with billionaires.

His son, well, has to be judged on what he was doing, and alas, Ukraine is the most corrupt nation in the world, in some sense. So, there are many issues tied to what the quality of his character is.

He’s a mercenary, and this is war porn. He wasn’t even in any military. He talked his way into the Mercenary Legions. Lied. Oh, he is an athlete, which is a big Kennedy thing.

The entire thing will give this kid a cleared pipeline to multi-millions, and his book will be coming out soon, Oprah-approved, soon.

The kid (man, age 28) wouldn’t even tell his parents where he was going, what he was up to. That is something deeply troubling to me because I have friends and a spouse who have been estranged by their children. There are Facebook groups with the title “Mothers of Estranged Children.” Many of these women were just hard working single mothers, and something snapped in the children. There are 70 year old women who have never met children’s children, and even great grandkids. This is pretty deeply ingrained in my own background in trauma informed case management with homeless civilians and veterans and those hooked on drugs and those just released from prison.

I’m 65, been to Central America as a journalist, covered the US-Mexico border, been with US military as a college instructor at the Sergeant Major Academy at Fort Bliss. My old man was in 32 years. Air Force and then Army. Clandestine stuff, crypto stuff. We ended up in the Azores and then Germany and France and UK. I got to see and hear a lot of stuff. I am, was early, anti-military on so many levels

Very young (13) I was already seeing the destruction of the world through the military state, through corporate malfeasance, through the professional managerial class, and the lawyer class.  This kid (man) at this age, 28, is really going to be part of the problem for socialists and social-environmental-cultural warriors like myself, and anyone who might come up as decent, smart and thoughtful adults in our current generation. We have a lot of work to do, and putting one’s effort into machismo, into this trip into a corrupt place, thinking Putin is a Gangster, well, what sort of upbringing did he have?

FYI: In the Megyn interview RFK admits he got the mRNA, and so did his children, 7.

Whew. Amazing, no, ECC.

Trauma, man. So much trauma in the Kennedy family. Epigenetic, and who the hell knows what kind of trauma is in Conor’s immediate family. I am trauma informed, so I can’t judge too much on that level.

Then, Aaron and Gabor Mate, an older interview, on the trauma, the mental illnesses and pain that propelled people to believe in Russia Gate.

Thanks, ECC. A real interview with you one of these days?

Here’s the show’s low down blurb:

Megyn Kelly is joined by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., author of “A Letter to Liberals,” to discuss COVID pandemic orthodoxy, the need for discussion and debate, the elimination of freedoms due to the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci demanding blind faith in authority, the important issue of whether the COVID vaccines prevent transmission, myocarditis risk from COVID and from vaccines, rise in “unexplained” deaths in a post-COVID vaccine world, the truth about how many lives COVID vaccines saved and lost, the lack of important data needed to understand the rise in deaths post-COVID, what Fauci said about vaccines that could have an adverse effect before the COVID vaccines were available, the absurdity of the new booster which was only tested on eight mice and no humans, Pfizer’s involvement in the Trump administration, Alex Berenson and tech censorship, RFK’s disbanded “vaccine safety” commission, Scott Gottlieb and our supposed medical elite, American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations, problems with the VAERS system, personal backlash from family and friends, his views of Donald Trump then and now, Herschel Walker and our politics today, the war in Ukraine, American imperialism, RFK’s personal connection to the war as his son Conor was fighting in the country, and more.

Look, these issues need to be discussed. In the interview, there is discussion about Trump, about politicians’ public lives versus private lives, and how we weigh the bad people perpetrate in their families, in their own house and jobs, their personal personas, against the good their policy and governance might come off as part of their public life. My writer friend was upset that RFK, Jr. calls Putin a thug and gangster, while at the same time, RFK JR does speak out against the cancel left, against the war drumming and against the endless pit of money and arms for nothing to ZioLensky. Kennedy laments that there is $7 a gallon of gasoline in California, equating that to the war/Putin (?), but really, the USA is (has been for decades) in a major free-fall, and, people are struggling with double-triple-quadruple cost of living; i.e., food, coffee, drugs, and now Pfizer, who got the jab approved by CDC for children’s yearly vaccination, well, they also announced the company will be upping the price of the dirty jab, to $110 a shot, which is four times the current price.

I wonder what these lawyers working for these outfits have in terms of skin in the game? Will they head to Yemen to see what it’s like to have USA-UK supplied bombs to Saudi Arabia. Skin in the game in Haiti stealing that country’s resources and stealing the coffers? Which skin in the game will the American put forth who wants to know what it is to take on a stand on any issue psychologically and intellectually without having to put one’s ass in the game?

It is a blue in the face routine now attempting to talk about Nuland and Maidan, about the Donbass and the ethnic cleansing? All of the history of Putin wanting diplomacy, wanting to be part of the Eurozone, to be on good terms with Germany, and to advance nuclear weapon decommissioning.

The thuggery and gansterism RFK Jr. and Conor Kennedy espouse about Putin, that’s way off, sort of brainwashed opinion. Putin is a million times more informed and sensible than Biden or Blinken. They have skin in the game, a la Raytheon et al.

Here, trauma, and what exactly is-was-continues to go on in the minds of Russia Gate freaks:

GABOR MATÉ: What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues?

You can look at that. Or you can say there must be a devil somewhere behind all this, and that devil is a foreign power, and his name is Putin, and his country is Russia. Now you’ve got a simple explanation that doesn’t invite you or necessitate that you explore your own pain and your own fear and your own trauma.

So I really believe that really this Russia gate narrative was, on the part of a lot of people, a sign of genuine upset at something genuinely upsetting. But rather than dealing with the upset, it was an easier way to in a sense draw off the energy of it in to some kind of a believable and comforting narrative. It’s much more comforting to believe that some enemy is doing this to us than to look at what does it say about us as a society.

I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one.

AARON MATÉ: Because you think Donald Trump himself is traumatized?

GABOR MATÉ: Oh, Donald Trump is a clearest example of a traumatized politician one could ever see. He’s in denial of reality all the time. He is self aggrandizing. His fundamental self concept is that of a nobody. So he has to make himself huge and big all the time and keep proving to the world how powerful and smart, what kind of degrees he’s got and how smart he is. It’s a compensation for terrible self image. He can’t pay attention to anything, which means that his brain is too scattered because it was too painful for him to pay attention.

What does this all come down to? The childhood that we know that he had in the home of a dictatorial child disparaging father, and a very weak

AARON MATÉ: Fred Trump, his father.

GABOR MATÉ: Who demeaned his children mercilessly. One of Trump’s brothers drank himself to death. And Trump compensates for all that by trying to make himself as big and powerful and successful as possible. And, of course, he makes up for his anger towards his mother for not protecting him by attacking women and exploiting women and boasting about it publicly. I mean, it’s a clear trauma example. I’m not saying this to invite sympathy for Trump’s politics. I’m just describing that that’s who the man is. And the fact that such a traumatized individual can be elected to the position of what they call the most powerful person in the world speaks to a traumatized society.

And like individuals can be in denial, a society can be in denial. So this society is deeply in denial about its own trauma, and particularly in this case about the trauma of that election. So one way to deal with trauma is denial of it. The other way is to project onto other people things that you don’t like about yourself.

Now, it’s only a matter of historical fact. And no serious person, no serious student of history can possibly deny how the United States has interfered in the internal politics of just about every nation on earth.

There is lots of skin in the game for all of us surviving in various stages and steps trauma. How many countries has the USA bombed, sanctioned, proxied, and stolen from? That is another fun thing, right, visiting those countries and donating some mutual aid support — skin in the game — by planting trees, feeding children, digging water systems. But putting on combat gear and playing tin soldier with live rounds and drones, hmm, that is an interesting skin in the game.

Here, Jim Chambers, from the rich and famous Cox news-cable family, he too went to Ukraine, Donbass, as a reporter:

When I asked him about his perspectives on the conflict now, versus when he made the decision to come over, his repeated emphasis was that he had been “extremely uninformed” when he was still in Alabama and relying on the narrative being spun by Western media. “I can tell you that I was very surprised to see most women and children still at home and living normally in all the major Ukrainian cities I went to. And when I was detained here in Donetsk, it was the first time I had been able to speak to any Russians or Russian-speakers from Donbass. There’s a side of the story that we’re not getting in America.” He noted that even from his cell in Donetsk, he had been hearing constant explosions, every day, coming from Ukrainian shelling of the city, something he had never anticipated. “Nothing in the Western media shows you that this is a civil war, and one that’s been going on a long time.” He didn’t go as far as disavowing the Ukrainian state, or endorsing the Russian “special military operation,” but he repeatedly said to me, “If I had known the truth about what was going on over here, I would never have made the decision to come. I regret it.”

Feelings of sympathy for a man in a life-and-death predicament, who at face value seems to have been duped into his decision, above all else, are completely understandable. But some on the Donetsk side of the conflict aren’t shedding many tears for him, or for similar detainees. Russell “Texas” Bentley is a U.S.-born veteran of the DPR armed forces, having served from 2014 to 2017, and he is a resident of Donetsk. Bentley shared with me his thoughts on Drueke and those like him.

“Yeah, a lot of these punks were just too big for their britches, and that’s almost forgivable. But what they wanted to do was come here to kill, and if the shoe had been on the other foot, they wouldn’t have hesitated. I was behind Ukrop [Ukrainian] lines twice, and didn’t fire a shot either time. Every single battle I was ever in was defensive. We held a position, and the Ukrops came to attack us, and they’d have killed us all if they could have. So, it will be an educational experience for them, hopefully give them a bit of a head start in their next life.” (source — ‘I Regret’ Being a Mercenary in Ukraine: Conversation with U.S. POW Detained in Donbass)

“Here is Texas Russell Bentley: From Texas to Donbass: Meet the American fighting Ukrainian fascists”

I used to show lots of movie clips to my students in Texas, New Mexico, Washington and Oregon. Lots of controversial (sic) books, and tons of articles and professional journal studies. Controversial, in their face, and much of it was during Reagan’s illegal wars, Panama, Bush One and Kuwait and Iraq, Bush Two, Iraq, Clinton, even Obama. Many many complaints about exposing youth and older students to things that went boom in their heads. Everything was on-limits, no holds barred. We talked, debated and then I got students to research and think critically and with the right tools of rhetoric, a la centuries of clear thinking, proposing, comparing and contrasting, looking at causes and effects, all of the ways we classify, argue, persuade, define and connotate and how we engage in those techniques of propaganda, and how to get through with objectivity and then what powerful tools narrative writing can give us. Pat Tillman — Conor, ever see him?

Here, the full movie, free, on You Tube. The Pat Tillman Story.

Look, RFK Jr. did say that we are imperfect, that is, the human race. He was stating how Hershel Walker can be candidate X, antiabortion vis-à-vis policy, but in his own life, having been a part of abortions with his spouses and partners, that is just the contradictory way of politics. It all makes sense as a Catholic who believes in redemption. I am not going to knock that. Conor, becoming a high priced lawyer one day, well, maybe he will do great things for humankind.

Maybe doing the mercenary thing in Ukraine will give Conor better perspectives. Now, Russell Bentley, I have had email exchanges with him. Yes, he has hit some of the same places I have hit — El Paso, Tucson, etc. He went to Donbass, and he married a Ukrainian-Russian, and he lives in the Donbass and reports from the Donbass. Yes, he sent me his memoir:

Robert Kennedy said he is not doctrinaire or hard-headed, and that he learns and changes over time. He repeats how he was working as an environmental lawyer, and that he was part of Riverkeeper, for which there are over 350 rivers around the world with a keeper testing water, supporting the river life and acting as a pied piper for a healthy river. He was suing over poisons in the rivers, mercury. He stated that he was dogged by some women at one of his talks. One woman gave him a stack of briefs and reports on mercury preservatives in Vaccines and other issues tied to vaccine injuries. The vaccine fight he was not a part of for years, until persistent citizens and a medical doctor brought it to his attention. I understand that old saw, “No one is perfect . . . Homo Sapiens is a messy, troubled species.”

That’s a given And we all have skin in the game when it comes to peace, life, truth, and reconciling our own trauma with healing and loving thy neighbor. The whole Putin is a Gangster thing is interesting, for sure, and alas, Capitalists Are Gangsters, sure, I get to deploy that one all the time. Murder Incorporated, the Value of Nothing, the Sociopathic Rich, and so much more I can also utilize as descriptors of the USA, then and now. Did Conor take in that book, War is a Racket? Did he weigh Butler’s words with the reality of Russia wanting Minsk II to be abided by before signing up for weaponizing his idea of skin in the game? What was Nuland doing in Kiev? Biden and Hunter? Are we all going to default on redemption for any sin? That we are all imperfect souls? Did Conor have real deep talks with people outside the frame of Putin is a Gangster?

I recommend reading, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). The book, and now, a 2022 German movie of the book:

“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”

― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Yes, banned.

Remarque’s novel saw censorship outside of Germany as well. In the United States, the English translation was banned in Boston on grounds of obscenity; and in Chicago, U.S. customs had seized any volumes which had not been expurgated. Austrian soldiers were forbidden to read the novel, Czech military libraries removed copies from their shelves, while Italy banned the novel entirely due to its anti-war, pacifist agenda. Despite its success, or perhaps because of it, Remarque had his German citizenship revoked and was forced into exile. Just before the onset of World War II in Europe, Remarque and his wife left Switzerland for the United States. They became official U.S. citizens in 1947. (source)

Now? The sides, that is, the many sides, to Ukraine and Nazis and Bandera and Zelensky and Coups and USA and CIA, and then, Putin and Russian demands for stopping the existential threat of NATO moving east with all their bombs bursting in air. John Pilger stated it correctly recently:

Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and ‘think-tanks’, such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labeled those spreading Chinese influence as ‘rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows’ and called for these ‘pests’ to be ‘eradicated’.

News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’.

Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the ‘conflict’ of ‘two narratives’. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.

The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople.  While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.

This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs.  In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to prime minister Lloyd George: ‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.’ (‘Silencing the Lambs — How Propaganda Works‘)

Then, on a sad and inspiring (for some) note tied to other types of humans who might be coming to Donbass to fight what they believe is the good fight.

That’s Alex Castillo, who was a fighter in Donbass since 2014. From Spain, but born in Columbia. It’s a tough comparison, right, Kennedy and Castillo. This man had skin in the game, family in the game, was there to defend the people of Donbass being murdered by Ukraine, vis-a-vis USA material and training and NATO beefing up.

He was a communist, too, which is contrary to the bleeding heart liberals who are wrapped in blue and yellow and demand more more more for Zelensky, who has rounded up communists. Russia, by the way, isn’t communist, since so many Americans I will send this article to might need some reminding.

Russell Bentley is in Donbass and was in the fighting groups with Castillo. Bentley is a communist, colorful, sometimes bombastic, but not afraid to call a spade a spade, and he has that robust energy still in his older age days (63) of someone critical of USA, of Ukraine and of Russia’s decision makers who Russell believes have really messed up the fight against the AFU and Azov folk in Donbass region.

But he has tributes for Castillo, just recently killed in fighting:

Alexis was a true Communist, and a real Internationalist. He often spoke of going to Syria or Venezuela or Cuba after our victory here in Donbass, to defend the people and the socialism there. He did not love war, not by any means, he hated it, as we all do here, as all decent people do, but he was good at the job, and the job needed to be done. As all combat veterans know, we are all born with only so much luck, and the more time you spend in the places where the bullets fly, the closer you get to the day your luck runs out. Alexis spent 8 years as a front line soldier, a sniper in a Spetsnaz unit, and he never, ever hesitated when it was his turn to go. And when his time came to meet death, two weeks after our good friend Elia was killed, Alexis met it like a hero, advancing on the enemy with a weapon in his hand. Alexis was truly a Che Guevara of the 21st century, and Alexis had said, as did Che, “I do not care if I fall, as long as another ear hears my battle cry, and another hand picks up my gun.” (“Adios, Alex Castillo: A Donbas hero falls on Oct. 28″).

Any sort of tribute to a fighter like Castillo in the circles I intersect with is verboten, literally. Cancelled, called a traitor, called a Putin lover, called a Trumpster, called any number of names that are completely antithetical to who and what I am. Or, you might end up in a Michigan Democratic rally, with Obama stumping, and god forbid you confront Obama about his administration’s work in Ukraine in 2014, and not only will you get the swarmy and bs Obama folksy retort — “We are all friends here . . . you’ll have time to speak” — but you will get those blue democrats, men, women, children, old and young, hating on Russia and just not ready for any pushback against their multimillionaire-soon-to-be-a-pro-basketball-team-owner Obama. Yelling, “Down with Russia . . . Putin is our enemy.” You know, no antiwar chants, or chants of peace talks, or chants against escalation, of nuclear saber rattling by Biden. Obama is truly a stump. These are his rallies in Michigan, and he was in Oregon, stumping for the democratic candidate for governor. What’s that got to do with ex-President’s multimillionaire package?

I know it’s “only” Jimmy Dore below covering that Michigan event, but heck, no pushback from mainstream media, so here, watch Democratic Party rally with Obama pushed through the Dore seive: “Peace Activists Heckle Obama Over Nuclear War”

All those dead Ukrainians, and Russians, and fighters like Castillo, and this is the end result for so many of them — what they leave behind:

​We are in some very sick and strange times —

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Nguyen Thi Thanh Loan, also known as Milona, was ordered to pay an administrative fine of 10 million Vietnamese dong (U.S. $425), reports said Tuesday, citing a statement from the Internal Security Office of the Thai Binh Provincial Police.

Milonia, a 26-year-old from An Vinh village in Thai Binh’s Quynh Phu district, made the comments as she livestreamed herself playing League of Legends on Facebook’s gaming platform at the end of August.

“People who often watch 18+ [adult] movies tend to be a little bald,” Milona said during the livestream, a video clip of which later went viral on social media. 

“Perhaps as they don’t do a damned thing but watch 18+ movies at home all day, state presidents all go bald,” she said. “Their f***king heads only have a few hairs left, right? Because they don’t do any f***king things but stay at home to watch 18+ movies.” 

Milona, who has more than 200,000 followers on Facebook and is a well-known streamer, did not mention specific heads of state or specific countries, but many Vietnamese Facebook users and state media suggested that she should be punished if she had referred to one of the country’s four top leaders.

But rights lawyers told RFA Vietnamese at the time that authorities were overreacting to her comments, which appeared to have been made in jest.

Expression restricted

Dominated for decades by the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam, the Southeast Asian nation has little tolerance for dissent or statements that insult the country’s leaders.

Authorities in Binh Thuan province’s Phan Thiet City recently fined another Facebook user, known as N.T.N., 7.5 million Vietnamese dong (U.S. $320) for posting an altered image of Communist Party Politburo member and Permanent Member of the Secretariat Vo Van Thuong, saying the post had “humiliated [Thuong’s] honor and prestige.”

Freedom House, a U.S.-based non-governmental organization, ranked Vietnam as “not free” in its 2022 “Freedom in the World” report.

“Freedom of expression, religious freedom and civil society activism are tightly restricted,” the organization said in the report. “The authorities have increasingly cracked down on citizens’ use of social media and the internet to voice dissent and share uncensored information.”

A spokesman at Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs disagreed with the assessment, saying that Freedom House had given “biased assessment and prejudice, which are drawn on false information about Vietnam.”

Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Vesna Maric.

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The South Dakota attorney general has closed its investigation into billionaire T. Denny Sanford for possession of child pornography and is not filing charges, according to a notice the office sent to a judge Friday.

The office “has completed its investigation” and “has determined that there are no prosecutable offenses within the jurisdiction of the State of South Dakota,” deputy attorney general Brent Kempema wrote.

The attorney general’s office provided no details on how that decision was made or whether Sanford is being investigated in any other jurisdictions or by federal authorities.

“Mr. Sanford appreciates the public acknowledgement by the SD Attorney General’s office” that the office’s Division of Criminal Investigation “has concluded its investigation and they have found no prosecutable crime,” one of Sanford’s attorneys, former South Dakota attorney general Marty Jackley, told ProPublica.

In 2020, ProPublica first reported that South Dakota authorities had started investigating the state’s richest man and had referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Earlier this year, South Dakota officials acknowledged Sanford was still being actively investigated by federal and state authorities.

The Department of Justice declined to comment about whether its probe was still open.

The investigation of Sanford started with a tip from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, court records show. The center is a private nonprofit that operates a tip line where people and companies can report images of suspected child sex trafficking and abuse. The organization’s staff reviews the tips and refers them to law enforcement.

Investigators obtained five search warrants in 2019 and 2020 for Sanford’s email, phone and internet data. It’s unclear what, if anything, investigators found in the searches.

ProPublica won access to the search warrants after more than a year of litigation that reached the state’s highest court. Sanford unsuccessfully asked the courts to conceal the search warrants, which are supposed to be publicly accessible under state law, and to block ProPublica’s reporting.

ProPublica is continuing a legal effort to obtain other records filed with the court that detailed why there was cause for those warrants. Sanford is fighting to keep those records private.

Sanford’s attorney has previously said that Sanford’s email account was hacked and being used by someone else.

In a new filing Friday, another of Sanford’s lawyers said a forensic examination of Sanford’s email account “uncovered the specific name of an individual other than the Implicated Individual having gained access.”

“Further evidence includes corroborating evidence of hacking,” Sanford’s attorney wrote, without providing any details.

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This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Robert Faturechi.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Jelena Prtorić.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Jelena Prtorić.