Alexandra Chalupa claimed DHS and DOJ worked with Anonymous group tied to fugitive hacker and convicted bomber

UPDATE - On 12/5/19, fugitive hacker Commander X tweeted that he was granted emergency refugee status in Mexico. In an open letter addressed to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Christopher Doyon wrote, "I request that I be well received, and that I be granted emergency refugee status due to the current threats against my life and liberty by ex-officials of the US government currently involved in the security contracting industry."

Commander X added, "For nearly ten years I have been the target of a campaign of persecution directed against me by the US DoJ and the FBI for my human rights work online, as well as my close association with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange - and my online defense of both."

Doyen vowed to share "working computer code" that the CIA & NSA "use in their network operations and surveillance against" Mexico. He wrote, "If the nation of Mexico will grant me sanctuary, I offer to brief members of your Executive branch, including the President himself - on the nature, extent, and scope of the threat posed to your civil society, economy, and democratic process by the government of the USA through the agency of the CIA & NSA."

"Why have I never heard of Alexandra Chalupa's claim that the United States Department of Justice teamed up with an offshoot of Anonymous known as 'The Protectors'?" @The_War_Economy asked on Twitter in 2018.

There may be two reasons why the mainstream media has stayed away from reporting on the former DNC contractor's work with sketchy characters in 2016, and barely followed-up on a 2017 Politico story about her meetings at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington to get foreign officials to "expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia." The foremost reason is because most journalists report on one side or the other, and there aren't many liberal-leaning reporters who want to give any credence to alleged shenanigans committed by Democrats. But, at the same time, there are conservatives who absurdly claim that reporting on this somehow negates the very real Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The second thing may be fear, since two of the sketchy characters include a convicted bomber and a cyberstalking deadbeat dad, who have terrorized and falsely sued journalists, websites and media organizations.

On November 9. 2016, Alexandra Chalupa wrote on Facebook, "Homeland Security/DOJ teamed up with a group that is part of Anonymous based in Washington, D.C. called 'The Protectors."

"This group saw a lot of activity during Election Day from the Russians and believe that the voting results projected don’t match the internal and public polls because the voting results were manufactured in favor of Trump in heavily Republican counties in key states, and voting results may have been decreased for Clinton in key Democratic counties via malware that was placed by the Russians when they hacked the election systems of more than half our states," Chalupa wrote.

I helped expose "The Protectors" as a hoax in November of 2012. As I noted seven years ago, "On November 16, Wonkette's Rebecca Schoenkopf blogged about an unsubstantiated claim that 'Anonymous had stopped Karl Rove from hacking the election by hacking Orca,' and added 'we think' to the headline."

"Former Democratic operative Neal Rauhauser - who has spent the last two years trolling and harassing conservatives and even liberal critics [including me] - has claimed responsibility for many political hoaxes, in the past, and appears to be one of the driving forces behind this one," I added.

However, perhaps it wasn't a hoax, and a fugitive hacker did hack into the 2012 election.

In his book, "Dark Ops: Anonymous Story", Christopher Doyon aka Commander X claims that on November 6, 2012 he "hacked into the national election in the USA" from a Starbucks in Toronto. "No, seriously," he insists.

"The manifesto for the hack was simple: to find any way we could to destabilize and de-legitimize the 2012 national election in the USA. It was an apolitical approach, we would not attempt to favor either candidate. In fact we would take pains not to. Instead the goal we settled on was in showing easily we hacked in, doing some random damage - and then putting out a statement after detailing the hacks and pointing out the obvious fact that if we could do it, others probably also did too. This line of argument ultimately leading to - no one actually knows who did win the national election in the USA. And whomever they crown would be thus de-legitimized by those lingering questions, and the entire democratic process in the USA would be brought into question over the doubts whether it could ever be secured from network hacking attempts."

X claimed he spent a year-and-a-half working on this operation with his "Crew", and that included "days researching white papers and YouTube videos on proof-of-concept hacks against everything from individual voting machines to the ORCA electronic vote counting systems."

"The latter ended up as our primary attack vector for Florida and Ohio," Doyon wrote.

However, X claimed that "one of the six people in [his] Crew turned out to be a snitch working as a Confidential Informant for the FBI." Without any proof, X fingers Locke as the person who got him "vanned" by the FBI when he was chased and arrested outside of a San Francisco coffee house. Since he was meeting his attorney, Jay Leiderman, at the time of his arrest, it's also possible the feds were wiretapping his communications.

But X and his four remaining alleged co-conspirators - who he names as Gh0stAn0n, Vect0r, PizzaMan and DigitalTerrorists - decided to press on without Locke.

"Days later we packaged the whole thing up and sent it to the media. We invented a Crew in Anonymous called the Protectors of Democracy (a name that still makes me want to vomit), gathered what little forensic evidence we had on the GOP, and blasted the entire thing to the world's media outlets. To their credit, several had the balls to actually go with the story. In the underground, the whole thing became a bit of a legend. Anonymous has been credited with many amazing things but saving the election for Barack Obama has to be right up there near the top of the 'most epic list'. Sort of ironic since Obama has tormented, tortured, jailed and even killed more Information Activists in his eight years than all other previous Presidents combined. Hell of a way to show your gratitude."

"Several months later, the hacker I have called 'Vect0r' live tweeted as he went out on Golden Gate Bridge and threw the laptop he had done the election hack with into the San Francisco Bay," X wrote. "He then left the Underground, got a good paying job as a White Hat security consultant - and never looked back."

"Postscript: I reiterate here the offer I have made publicly in recent months, to both the USA and Russian governments. I will gladly return to the USA in order to offer testimony and evidence to Congress regarding the election in the USA, the above report - and how to end the war between the world's Black Hat hackers and the government of the USA by ceasing political persecution of Information Activists and reforming the CFAA. I will only give testimony to Congress or directly in person to President Trump, and I will never debrief either the FBI oir the CIA. I will require in advance a full Presidential Pardon, and a guarantee of Full Immunity when I testify."

Doyon added: "The counter proposal is addressed to the Russian Government. I will happily travel to Moscow and testify under oath in the Duma regarding the details of the above report. The Russian people, and their government - have been so brutally maligned in the West that I feel they deserve to hear the Truth from someone who is actually on the inside of the Hacker Underground. I will require full and permanent political asylum and transport from Canada to Russia."

Five days before he was set to go to court in February of 2012, Doyon issued a press release called “Commander X escapes into exile.” As The Smoking Gun reported in March of 2012, "A lawyer for Christopher Doyon, a homeless 47-year-old who calls himself 'Commander X, recently told a federal judge that his client 'has fled to Canada,' according to a filing in U.S. District Court in San Jose." The story added, "As a result, an arrest warrant has been issued for Doyon, who is pictured in the above United States Marshals Service mug shots."

Convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin's Velvet Revolution website linked to the letter that the Protectors released in 2012, and former Project Vigilant associate Neal Rauhauser hyped it on a podcast. Rauhauser and Kimberlin have been accused of committing swattings, cyberattacks and countless political hoaxes together. I was absurdly accused of making fake 911 calls to get police to harass bloggers who reported on Weinergate and Kimberlin, and was sued by a lawyer I outed for using a fake name, while asking for people to attach their real names to offensive cartoons of Muhammad. The attorney for Aaron Worthing/Walker was Dan Backer, who later became the Treasurer for a Trump SuperPAC. Patrick Frey, a deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles who blogs as Patterico, falsely accused me of swatting him and working with Rauhauser and Kimberlin, but the judge dismissed the Dan Backer led multi-million dollar bizarre conspiracy theory lawsuit, which conservatives like Law Professor Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck and Ali Akbar promoted and helped raise thousands of dollars slandering me.

I don't think Kimberlin had anything to do with the swattings, but it's possible that Patterico and Rauhauser worked together on them. However, Patterico is correct that the Protectors letter sounds like it was written by Neal Rauhauser. "We may just put all our evidence into a tidy little package and give it to a painfully bored nemesis hanging out in a certain embassy in London," the letter ends, as Patterico notes, and Rauhauser has used the term "tidy little package" before. In a Daily Kos diary post ten years ago, Rauhauser wrote, "Their only choice Huckabee as VP with an aging, tottering McCain't is likely the only thing that'll keep the Republican base in line ... disaster ticket for the country if they should win(read:steal another election) but dream ticket for Democrats - something for everyone to hate all in one tidy little package."

Both Kimberlin and Rauhauser have been involved in lengthy lawsuits against bloggers, media organizations and website owners, so that's probably why most journalists refuse to probe this wacky never-ending saga.

More to come...

Day before Assange indictment, Chelsea Manning claimed she chatted 'with multiple people' at WikiLeaks, but her 2013 statement referred to 'an individual'

Hours after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in London today, a March 6, 2018 indictment was unsealed by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, which stated, "On or about March 8, 2010, Assange agreed to assist [former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea] Manning in cracking a password stored on United States Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network, a United States government network used for classified documents and communications.” Manning was jailed one month ago for refusing to testify before a grand jury about her contacts with WikiLeaks. A day before the indictment, on March 5, 2018, Manning responded to a question after a lecture she gave at UCLA, which asked about her "interactions" with Assange.

"No idea," Manning claimed roughly 56 minutes into the posted video of the lecture. "Whomever I was communicating with...I mean it was...I can say this...It was multiple people I was communicating with."

She added, "That is the thing about the Internet...and the tools that we're using...because I don't want to be identified...and they sure as hell don't want to be identified."

"But it was multiple people," Manning insisted. "It was not one person."

However, in her March 13, 2013 statement during her court martial, Manning seemed to suggest that she was speaking with "an individual."

"Almost immediately after submitting the aerial weapons team video and rules of engagement documents I notified the individuals in the WLO IRC to expect an important submission," Manning's statement said. "I received a response from an individual going by the handle of 'Ox' - at first our conversations were general in nature, but over time as our conversations progressed, I accessed this individual to be an important part of the WLO."

Manning noted, "Due to the strict adherence of anonymity by the WLO, we never exchanged identifying information."

"However, I believe the individual was likely Mr. Julian Assange, Mr. Daniel Schmidt, or a proxy representative of Mr. Assange and Schmidt," Manning's statement continued. "As the communications transfered from IRC to the Jabber client, I gave 'Ox' and later 'pressassociation' the name of Nathaniel Frank in my address book, after the author of a book I read in 2009."

Manning added, "After a period of time, I developed what I felt was a friendly relationship with Nathaniel. Our mutual interest in information technology and politics made our conversations enjoyable. We engaged in conversation often. Sometimes as long as an hour or more. I often looked forward to my conversations with Nathaniel after work."

A chatlog of Manning's communications reveals that on March 17, 2010, "Nathaniel Frank" told her, "will be doing an investigative journo conference in Norway this week end, so may be out of contact most of the time."

As this picture shows, Assange attended the Norwegian conference on investigative journalism (SKUP) on March 20, 2010. A statement by Assange released on March 26, 2010, noted, "On Thursday March 18, 2010, I took the 2.15 PM flight out of Reykjavik to Copenhagen–on the way to speak at the SKUP investigative journalism conference in Norway."

Earlier today, I tweeted, "On 12/6/13, after I criticized @kpoulsen for not reporting for @wired that it may be tough to prove Assange was or always was "Nathaniel Frank" in convos with @xychelsea, @WikiLeaks tweeted that Manning's statement suggested as much, too. I presume JA will stick to that defense."

Former "senior Trump campaign official" Steve Bannon was "directed" by Breitbart editor Matt Boyle, not Trump, to contact Roger Stone

Many media accounts based on the January 24, 2019 indictment of dirty trickster Roger Stone might be misinterpreting a phrase in paragraph 12, and some are wrongly presuming that the Special Counsel investigation is suggesting that "a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE" by the president. However, it most likely refers to "a reporter who had connections to a high-ranking Trump campaign official", which is mentioned in paragraph 16.

"After the July 22, 2016 release of stolen DNC emails by Organization 1, a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign," the indictment stated. "STONE thereafter told the Trump Campaign about potential future releases of damaging material by Organization 1."

Dan Mangan reported the next day, "Organization 1 refers to WikiLeaks. A source has told CNBC that the senior campaign official was Steve Bannon, who later served as senior advisor to Trump once he was elected president."

But Mangan quotes a tweet by Washington Post White House reporter and CNN political analyst Seung Min Kim quoting Democratic House Intel Chair Rep. Adam Schiff's statement that the "Committee will be eager to learn just who directed a senior campaign official to contact Stone about additional damaging information held by Wikileaks, one of the publishing arms of Russian government hackers."

"It’s difficult to dismiss that as some coincidence, drafting error or a careless choice of words. The people who write these things parse them endlessly, and had to know that line would stick out," Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake argues, before adding, "Considering that, some have theorized it’s a reference to Trump himself."

Blake concludes, "Who else would direct a 'senior Trump Campaign official,' after all?" However, the email sent by Boyle certainly could be characterizing as a form of direction, and the word "directed" has two definitions.

Most readers are focused on the first definition - "control the operations of; manage or govern" - but the second definition doesn't insist on the director of having a authoritative position: "aim (something) in a particular direction or at a particular person."

On January 11, 2018 the NY Times published the email from Matt Boyle to his former boss, Steven Bannon.

Former Breitbart News White House reporter Lee Stranahan, who now hosts a radio show on the Kremlin-funded Sputnik noted the theory that it was Boyle during a video shot at a Roger Stone hearing on January 25th.

Russian 'troll factory' lawyer represented Breitbart News companies in libel case

A US attorney has garnered a lot of media attention for defending a Russian troll factory accused of allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, but his prior work for the Trump-friendly website Breitbart News - which has been accused of publishing fake news - has been ignored by the press.

In April of 2018, it was revealed in court filings, that "[a] Russian company charged with helping fund a Russian propaganda operation that allegedly tampered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has retained two Washington lawyers to handle its defense." Reuters reported,"Concord Management and Consulting LLC, will be represented by Eric Dubelier and Katherine Seikaly of the law firm Reed Smith, the filings say." Concord was one of three firms located in Russia that were accused by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller "in a February indictment of a conspiracy to defraud the United States."

The indictment stated, "Defendants CONCORD MANAGEMENT AND CONSULTING LLC and CONCORD CATERING are related Russian entities with various Russian government contracts. CONCORD was the ORGANIZATION's primary source of funding for its interference operations. CONCORD controlled funding, recommended personnel, and oversaw ORGANIZATION activities through reporting and interaction with ORGANIZATION management." Russian businessman Evgeny Prigozhin who is suspected of being the owner of Concord was also indicted, and he reportedly has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"Prigozhin, nicknamed 'Putin’s cook' because of his catering business that has organized banquets for Russian President Vladimir Putin and other political figures, has been quoted by the RIA news agency as saying he was unfazed by the indictment," Reuters reported.

As John Simerman reported for the Advocate on May 20, 2018, "the Tulane University graduate had a hand in some controversial cases," and "also played a key role in a case that featured perhaps the most infamous episode of prosecutorial misconduct in New Orleans in a generation."

Dubelier was blamed by a judge for withholding a confession in a point-shaving college basketball case in 1985, and "led the trial team that helped ship John Thompson off to death row" that same year. "Thompson was staring at an execution date in 1999 when a defense investigator unearthed a lab report that undermined his conviction in an earlier armed robbery trial that Dubelier had also prosecuted," Simerman reported. "Dubelier, the lead prosecutor in Thompson's subsequent murder trial, used the earlier armed robbery conviction to persuade a jury to hand Thompson a death sentence."

As Simerman noted, Dubelier gained a lot of media attention "for his feisty courtroom advocacy", and has "presented an aggressive challenge to the indictment." He has accused prosecutors of lying and claimed that Mueller was "conjuring up a 'make-believe' crime in the indictment for political reasons."

In October, ABC News reported that Dubelier argued Mueller's indictment was an attempt to "regulate what people say on the internet.” Ironically, President Trump has tweeted many times that mainstream media stories he considers "fake news" should be regulated, and the press is the "enemy of the people."

Earlier today, Tierney Sneed reported for Talking Points Memo, "A federal judge on Monday reamed the American lawyers for a Russian firm charged by special counsel Robert Mueller for the lawyers’ 'unprofessional, inappropriate, and ineffective' court filings." Dubelier accused Judge Dabney Friedrich of "some bias" after she told him to "knock it off."

In an October 5, 2013 court filing, Dubelier represented Susannah Breitbart, after attorneys for former U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod substituted Andrew's widow in a defamatory lawsuit, a year-and-a-half after he suddenly died. Josh Gerstein referred to him "as Breitbart companies lawyer Eric Dubelier" in a Politico article published on July 21, 2014. In late 2015, Sherrod settled her case over a "selectively edited" video which cost her her job with the Obama Administration, but the terms have remained confidential.

According to www.law360.com, Eric A. Dubelier also represented BREITBART HOLDINGS, INC., BREITBART NEWS NETWORK LLC, BREITBART.COM LLC, and BREITBART.TV LLC in the Sherrod case. A notice of appearance was filed by Dubelier on July 17, 2014 for all four of the Breitbart companies.

Breitbart News was co-founded by Steve Bannon in 2007, and five years later, after Andrew Breitbart died, Bannon took over as executive chair of Breitbart News LLC. Bannon left Breitbart News to advise Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race, but after serving as the White House Chief Strategist for seven months in 2017, he returned to the website, which has almost unconditionally supported Trump, and dismissed the Russia probe as a "witch hunt."

Last October, Samantha Cole reported for Motherboard, that editors for Wikipedia voted that Breitbart "should not be used, ever, as a reference for facts, due to its unreliability.”

"Breitbart, a far-right conservative media website, has come under scrutiny—such as when it vehemently supported Alabama politician and alleged pedophile Roy Moore, when it shilled for scam cryptocurrencies through its newsletter, or when it fueled racist narratives about black NFL players," Cole wrote. "Wikipedians decided that because fact checkers have found much of Breitbart’s coverage to be 'misleading, false or both,' they won’t abide it as a source of fact anymore."

"Right-wing news site Breitbart News has apologized to German football star Lukas Podolski after publishing a photo of the 32-year-old former international player accompanying a story about human traffickers operating between Morocco and Spain," Haaretz reported on August 21, 2017. Breitbart admitted, "There is no evidence Mr Podolski is either a migrant gang member, nor being human trafficked."

(Editor's Note: I've worked on a few articles published at Breitbart News, including this story, where I'm named, but I've never been paid by them. Or Russia, as far as I know.)

Progressive radio host regrets texting Roger Stone about 'big news' regarding Hillary Clinton

On late Wednesday evening, Anna Schecter reported for NBC News that "Roger Stone exchanged text messages with his alleged WikiLeaks back channel about imminent 'big news' harmful to Hillary Clinton's campaign six days before WikiLeaks released hacked emails from former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, according to new messages released by Stone."

However, progressive radio host/comedian Randy Credico claimed on Twitter that the "story regarding Stone...by NBC News was meant to divert attention from" a Wall Street Journal article written by Shelby Holliday and Aruna Viswanatha published on Wednesday. "Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office is exploring whether longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone tried to intimidate and discredit a witness who is contradicting Mr. Stone’s version of events about his contacts with WikiLeaks, according to people who have spoken to Mr. Mueller’s investigators," Holliday and Viswantha reported.

Earlier today, Credico told me - via direct messages on Twitter - that the former campaign adviser for President Donald Trump was "cherry picking information" in order to pretend that the radio host who interviewed Julian Assange for WBAI Radio in August of 2016 was a "back channel" for WikiLeaks.

According to texts that Roger Stone shared with NBC News, Credico texted the "political hitman" on October 1, 2016 that there would be “[b]ig news Wednesday" and, as a result, “Hillary’s campaign will die this week."

Credico explained that he "started out as a [Bernie] Sanders supporter and was upset," and that he had switched to Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein after the Vermont senator dropped out and endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"I was hoping that Hillary would not win by 20 points," Credico added. "[T]he day that Trump won I was at a Stein event and when I started seeing results favoring Trump I knew he was going to win and I walked home more depressed than I've ever been in my entire life." The progressive radio host who supports WikiLeaks called his interactions with Stone a "big mistake."

NBC News also reported that Credico texted Stone on October 3, 2016, "Why can't you get Trump to come out and say that he would give Julian Assange Asylum[?]"

Credico argues, "I wasn't doing it for a pardon", and that "it was a bad calculation." If "you want to look at the state of the nation under Trump I'll probably never get over it."

"I was not a back-channel and I stand by my testimony in front of the grand jury," Credico said. "Stone is cherry picking information." Credico then compared himself to French officer Alfred Dreyfus, who was falsely convicted of treason in 1894, but wasn't fully exonerated until 1906, even though evidence suggested that another officer had actually acted as a spy for Germany. Like Credico, Dreyfus was of Jewish descent, and many French journalists suspected that anti-semitism played a factor in his wrongful conviction.

"I'm ready and I've told my lawyer this to revoke my 5th Privileges and go before the house Intel committee and tell them everything," Credico said.

Credico then provided details about his actions during the late September to early October of 2016 time period. "I was in London the 28th, 29th and 30th and came back on the 1st to New York. I spent 3 days with a fellow by the name of Barry Crimmins, a political satirist who died 5 months ago. I dropped off a letter from the station that I was working for WBAI at the embassy. And left on the 1st."

He said he "never had any information" regarding any WikiLeaks-related drops regarding Clinton, and that he would "swear on the soul of [his] grandchildren" that he is telling the truth.

"Stone had been talking about a back channel for ages," Credico said. "So he put me in that role." Credico explained, "I was basing my prediction on public statements made by WikiLeaks that they would do something in October. So I said wow this is going to be a bad week for Hillary. Cuz I was expecting them to do something."

The Wall Street Journal reported, "Prosecutors also are examining messages between Messrs. Stone and Credico that involve the radio personality’s decision to assert his Fifth Amendment before Congress, according to a person familiar with the probe...In emails sent to Mr. Credico and reviewed by the Journal, Mr. Stone threatened to 'sue the f—' out of him, called him 'a loser a liar and a rat' and told him to 'prepare to die c— sucker.'"

On November 2nd, CNN reported, "Investigators have been examining the text messages and emails and questioning witnesses about whether there was an attempt to harass or intimidate Credico, according to people familiar with the matter."

"The messages raise the possibility that Mueller could pursue obstruction or witness tampering charges against Stone," the CNN story by Sara Murray added."

Firm tied to consultant who obtained stolen data from Guccifer 2.0 scrubbed FLA GOP from client list

(Editor's note: I wrote this story on June 1st, and it's mostly based on prior blog posts. I'm working on a follow-up story, but I think this is probably the best version of what I've reported, so far. However, I still need to add some screenshots.)

A consulting firm's website tied to a blogger who collaborated with Guccifer 2.0 - the alleged DNC hacker that has been accused by many US intelligence officials of working for Putin and Russia to help sway the 2016 election for Trump - was scrubbed to remove the Republican Party of Florida as a client, perhaps on election eve. His name and biography were also erased, along with the firm's president and founder.

According to his LinkedIn resume, the once-anonymous blogger from HelloFLA.com who the Wall Street Journal outed last week as "a Republican political operative in Florida named Aaron Nevins" has been a partner at Richardson Partners, since November of 2012..

At some point in the last week, Nevins updated it, and it now says he left the firm in April. But his LinkedIn page still lists www.richardsonpartners.com as his company website.

As an archive.org link from October of 2013 reveals, the website once claimed the Republican Party of Florida was one of "[p]ast and current Richardson Partners clients" that "include a diverse group of corporations and candidates throughout Florida and across the nation."

However, at some time between April 1st, 2016 and November 7, 2016, the website was scrubbed to remove the Florida GOP as a client. There aren't any saved screenshots between those dates, so it's possible that the reference was removed on the day before the 2016 election.

Before it vanished, the Guccifer 2.0 collaborator's biography stated: "Aaron Nevins is founder and managing partner of Chelsea Road Consulting. He brings to Richardson Partners almost a decade of experience serving in senior level positions in both bodies of the Florida Legislature. His relationships with key policy makers in both chambers of the Legislature, as well as local government, helps to provide our clients with a direct line of communication with legislative, executive, and municipal leaders, and their staff."

"He has a candid ability to review, evaluate, and provide an assessment of upcoming legislative actions, and his extensive knowledge of the Legislative process provides our clients with a critical advantage when dealing with governmental entities," it said.

Currently, the About page only shows a message stating, "No Results Found."

Nevins and Richardson haven't responded to queries over Twitter asking why all these changes were made to their website before last year's election, and the HelloFla! blogger wouldn't explain why he made the change to his LinkedIn page.

It wasn't until December 13, 2016 that the New York Times reported that "Guccifer 2.0's most important partner was an obscure political website run by an anonymous blogger called HelloFLA!, run by a former Florida legislative aide turned Republican lobbyist," and he "sent direct messages via Twitter to Guccifer 2.0 asking for copies of any additional Florida documents." The May 25th WSJ article adds that "Nevins confirmed his exchanges after The Wall Street Journal identified him first as the operator of the HelloFLA blog and then as the recipient of the stolen DCCC data", which included documents that "analyzed specific Florida districts, showing how many people were dependable Democratic voters, how many were likely Democratic voters but needed a nudge, how many were frequent voters but not committed and how many were core Republican voters—the kind of data strategists use in planning ad buys and other tactics."

Nevins claims to the WSJ journalists, that "he didn’t use any in his consulting business, which includes running grass-roots-style campaigns for corporations and wealthy landowners seeking to influence local politics."

According to his Twitter profile, Todd L. Richardson is the "[p]resident of Richardson Partners, a South Florida based public affairs & communications firm". In 2014, a Tampa Bay, Florida third-party political organization tied to Richardson called "Floridians for Integrity in Government" released flyers against a Florida candidate, who allegedly rejected a bid by Todd to handle his city council campaign. "It has received nearly $1.4 million in donations since it started in 2012," and "[m]ost of its recent donations have come from the "Florida Leadership Committee", the Sun-Sentinel reported.

In another 2014 race, Republican Ellyn Bogdanoff lost to Democratic state Sen. Maria Sachs, even though Richardson's group helped pay for advertising that "blanketed the airwaves", since the Florida GOP gave her "no direct support", and she entered the race late. "The Floridians for Integrity in Government political committee got most of its funding from another PAC, the Florida Leadership Committee," Dan Sweeney reported for the Sun-Sentinel on November 11, 2014. "And that PAC, in turn, is closely associated with state Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater."

At his LinksTraveler website, Richardson blogged that he "had an opportunity to visit Trump Turnberry two days before the opening round of the 2016 Open Championship at Royal Troon." He said new renovations "easily puts this legendary links course, on the west coast of Scotland, into one of the top courses in the world."

On January 17, 2017, Richardson Partners collected $2,500 and on February 3, 2017 was paid over $3550 for communications for the successful Scott Singer City Council 2016 campaign in Boca Raton. Singer won his seat unopposed three years ago, and his "challenger" last year, was - according to a Sun-Sentinel editorial endorsing him - "Patti Dervishi, a mostly retired Realtor who rants about development and whose rambling, unfocused answers show that she has not prepared herself for a council race," who was "unqualified."

The firm also earned over $9,000 working for the unsuccessful Joseph JB Bensmihen for Congress campaign in Palm Beach County in 2015.

On November 12, 2016, in response to a question "Could hackers hack each state's voting system so that Donald Trump is elected president?" posted in August, Nevins responded, "The fact that it would be much harder to hack 50 separate state systems, or even enough of them in the key places where it would matter (and not get caught) is reason enough to keep the electoral College."

He added, "If we went with the national popular vote, you would only need to ballot stuff in one sympathetic state to cheat."

On October 20, 2016, Brittany Wallman reported for the Sentinel, "Aaron Nevins, a 35-year-old Republican voter in Broward and former staffer for ex-state Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff, said he's going to shut down U.S. 441 on Election Day for an automobile race."

Before the shut down was canceled, Nevins told the newspaper he wasn't a supporter of Trump, and that he is "not coordinating with the Republican Party or Roger Stone or any of those people." The Wall Street Journal reported that Guccifer 2.0 "sent a link to the blog article to Roger Stone, a longtime informal adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump, along with Mr. Nevins’ analysis of the hacked data." Nevins told the Sun-Sentinel that "he didn’t have any dealings with Stone about the material," but "he had a group dinner with Stone three or four years ago and hasn’t seen or spoken to him since."

The Florida paper also noted that Nevins "doesn’t believe he is facing any legal jeopardy over the matter, and he has not been contacted by any investigating authorities." He said, “The way I look at it, I was acting as a journalist," and that he forwarded the stolen data to journalists, not to political campaigns", because he "felt forced to publish it.”

But Nevins does believe that if he "used it for a political campaign without releasing it" or only sent "it to political operatives around the state we would be having a different conversation, probably from a jail cell.”

Updates To Stories

There are many recent updates to my last few articles, but the biggest one is to a December 1, 2015 story I published called "New York Times journalist Michael Schmidt wrongly reports on Hillary Clinton emails again."

Although the original article should be read to learn more about Schmidt's misreporting, this is the entire new update I added over the last few days due to recent news events and more research I completed. If you appreciate my hard work, please contribute to my PayPal account ronbrynaert@yahoo.com, since I keep working hard on this story - for years - but have never earned a dime for it.

(Updates added from June 8 to June 12, 2017, in light of recent news events.)

6/8/17 Update: Why is the following significant? Essentially, the adviser to former FBI Director James Comey - who once worked with him in US Attorney's office - has been a source for New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt for at least nine years. Schmidt reported many things incorrectly about Hillary Clinton during her unsuccessful 2016 presidency campaign, but he also got a lot of great scoops. Some Clinton supporters believe Comey may have violated the Hatch Act just before the election, and - one of the reasons - he was fired by President Trump as FBI director was due to wrongful testimony regarding her longtime aide, Huma Abedin.

On November 2, 2016, a NYT article - Schmidt co-wrote - reported, "Daniel C. Richman, an adviser to Mr. Comey and a Columbia University law professor, argued that despite the backlash, Mr. Comey’s decision to inform Congress preserved the F.B.I.’s independence, which will ultimately benefit the next president."

Defending Comey, Richman told the paper: "Those arguing that the director should have remained silent until the new emails could be reviewed — even if that process lasted, or was delayed, until after the election — give too little thought to the governing that needs to happen after November. If the F.B.I. director doesn’t have the credibility to keep Congress from interfering in the bureau’s work and to assure Congress that a matter has been or is being looked into, the new administration will pay a high price."

Schmidt and Richman appeared as guests during alternate halves of a PBS NewsHour broadcast last Halloween, three days after Comey sent his October 28 letter - to eight Republican chairmen of Congressional committees, seven Democratic ranking members and vice chairman of the Select Committee of Intelligence Sen. Dianne Feinstein - in order to "supplement [his] previous testimony" that the FBI had "completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton's personal email server." The letter was very brief, but reverberated at the end: "I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony."

"In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote. "I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review those emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation."

On May 3, 2017, editor-in-chief Nate Silver claimed at FiveThirtyEight - which is now owned by ESPN, but had a "partnership agreement" and was published at the NY Times from 2010 to 2012 - that this letter "upended the news cycle and soon halved Clinton’s lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the Electoral College." Silver also noted, "The article that led The New York Times’s website the morning after the election did not mention Comey or 'FBI' even once — a bizarre development considering the dramatic headlines that the Times had given to the letter while the campaign was underway."

On the October 31st NewsHour show, New York Times reporter Schmidt - who was criticized a few times by the Clinton campaign for misreporting that had to be corrected - brought up the "classified" word first, and didn't note that there weren't any emails that were marked classified before they were sent by the Democratic presidential candidate and her former State Department staffers to private accounts. "That’s the real question here, whether any of the e-mails they’re in possession of are ones they had before that they know are classified or they know they looked at or if these are entirely a new batch," Schmidt said.

Schmidt defended the letter and wrongly predicted: "I sort of find it hard to believe that the FBI would go with such an aggressive step of telling Congress without really having some idea of what is truly here. If these end up to be just a bunch of duplicates, then this will have been a big hubbub over nothing." Politico's Josh Gerstein countered that "Comey might have violated Justice Department policy," and said, "We know from our other reporting that Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates strongly advised Comey against sending the letter, but he felt he needed to, so he did it anyway."

Without realizing that her next guest had been a Schmidt source for many articles, host Judy Woodruff asked him, "Is it your understanding from your reporting that FBI officials already know what’s here or are they truly looking for something unknown?" The New York Times journalist responded, "If you look at Director Comey’s letter to Congress, he basically says, we haven’t had a chance to look at these yet...so I wonder what the FBI really knows here. And did that lead them to push as far as they did?"

When asked if "Comey acted because of pressure of some sort from FBI agents who felt that he wasn’t being tough enough on Hillary Clinton", Schmidt said, "I find that hard to believe."

"I think that the line FBI agents who really knew what was going on with the e-mail investigation understood why Director Comey came out and said that the bureau wasn’t recommending charges," Schmidt said, before adding, "I think they realized that there wasn’t criminal intent there," and "So the idea that Director Comey would do this facing some insurrection by FBI agents, I think, is probably not true."

In the following half of the NewsHour broadcast, Woodruff welcomed Richman, introducing him as a "professor at Columbia Law School...a former federal prosecutor, himself, and current policy adviser to Director Comey." Richman sounded much like Schmidt, when he said that Comey was "protecting the credibility of the organization and of his own credibility with Congress," and had been "confronted with very little notice with a trove of e-mails that appeared to be pertinent."

Woodruff's other guest, Arent Fox attorney and partner Peter Zeidenberg - who "spent 17 years at the Justice Department as a federal prosecutor" and "also joined 100 others in an open letter critical of Comey’s actions" - said he thought the then FBI director was "premature to notify Congress before he had had a chance to actually examine these e-mails," that "it was a mistake," adding, "And, frankly, I think it was irresponsible to do it and drop this bomb."

"And, as Josh Gerstein mentioned, it’s very possible, if not likely, that all these e-mails have been looked at already," Zeidenberg told Woodruff. "They could all be duplicates."

Woodruff asked Comey's spokesman if there was "inconsistency", since, that day "the Clinton campaign and others pointed out that there is now new reporting that Director Comey didn’t want it to be known that the administration had confirmed that the Russians were behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, arguing that it was too close to the election, that this would influence the election."

Five months before Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway would catch heat over "alternative facts", Richman said, "There is only inconsistency, in the sense that there are really different facts."

Richman added: "And I certainly don’t know all the facts with regard to the internal deliberations with regard to the Russian hacking. But, yes, it certainly is the norm that the department doesn’t confirm or deny investigations and doesn’t confirm or deny the focus on any particular party."

"James Comey told a Senate committee on Thursday he was behind the leak of a memo he wrote that said President Donald Trump asked him to stem the FBI’s investigation to former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn," Max Kutner reports for Newsweek. "The account appeared in The New York Times in May, days after the president fired Comey as FBI director."

Kutner adds: "Comey did not name the friend, but Columbia Law School professor Daniel Richman reportedly confirmed he is that person to the Financial Times and CNN. In an email to Newsweek, he declined to comment."

"Richman’s faculty webpage says he is 'currently an adviser to FBI Director James B. Comey.' The New York Times previously quoted Richman in multiple articles about the former FBI director, around the same time the newspaper published the Flynn article. A New Yorker article in May quoted him and described him as Comey’s 'unofficial media surrogate.'"

"The professor is a former federal prosecutor and served as chief appellate attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where Comey also worked," Kutner notes. NBC News adds: "Richman and Comey’s ties run deep, and the pair has been friends for 30 years, the law professor told NBC News last fall."

Schmidt's byline appears on multiple Comey stories that quote Richman, including "F.B.I.’s Email Disclosure Broke a Pattern Followed Even This Summer" (1/11/16), "Comey Tried to Shield the F.B.I. From Politics. Then He Shaped an Election." (4/22/17), and "‘Enough Was Enough’: How Festering Anger at Comey Ended in His Firing" (5/10/17).

Schmidt has cited Richman as a source - on the record - for his New York Times articles going back at least nine years to 2008, when he reported many stories related to drugs and baseball.

Some examples include: "Canseco Is Said to Seek Favor to Omit Name" (1/24/08), "Motion Would Take Aim At Clemens's Top Lawyer" (2/26/08), "Balco Prosecutors Target Trainer’s Wife" (2/20/08), and "Contradictions in Kirk Radomski’s Book Could Benefit Clemens" (1/25/09).

Schmidt has apparently ducked questions from multiple media organizations regarding his outed relationship with Richman, but he probably isn't the only journalist at the Times and other outlets that has used the former FBI director's friend, colleague, advisor and spokesman as an unnamed source for articles that have been published regarding Russian interference in the 2016 elections, Clinton and Abedin controversies surrounding the use of a private email server, and the presidential race itself.

However, Schmidt got a lot of things wrong in his reporting for the New York Times and in other media appearances, such as the PBS broadcast, but doesn't seem to care or ever apologize for his role in creating - arguably - "fake news". Despite being part of the story, on June 8th, Schmidt conducted a Facebook Live discussion video for the New York Times called "Key Takeaways From Comey's Testimony." One reader asked if Comey would face any "legal repercussions" for "leaks" from himself and "friends" to the media. Schmidt never mentions his source by name.

"Comey explained today how he had instructed one of his friends to put out to the media the contents of one of these memos," Schmidt said, then placed both hands against his chest to add, "I was the recipient of that memo." On May 16, Schmidt had reported, "The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey's associates read parts of it to a Times reporter." Schmidt said he didn't think Comey would face any "legal jeopardy" because the "contents of the memo were not classified."

Schmidt claimed "Comey went to great lengths to make sure that the memos were not classified I believe, in part, because if he ever needed to get them out there, that made it much easier." He added, "If they were classified it would have been very difficult to declassify them and get information from them out."

As noted above, the original article can be found at this link.