30th Aug 2022

October surprise’ (How the FBI & CIA Are Rigging Elections)

To report federal election fraud, intimidation, or suppression contact the United States Attorney’s Office Election Day Hotline at (603) 230-2503. Inquiries and complaints may also be submitted through the United States Attorney’s website at www.usdoj.gov/usao/nh by clicking on the “email us” link.

"In principle, an October Surprise would work by shifting voters’ attentions and causing them to focus on some aspect that causes some voters to either change their vote or change their likelihood of voting," Joshua D. Clinton, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, wrote me in an email, succinctly summing up the stakes.

The CIA deliberately leaked classified information to undermine the 2004 election

The Plame affair (also known as the CIA leak scandal and Plamegate) was a political scandal that revolved around journalist Robert Novak's public identification of Valerie Plame as a covert Central Intelligence Agency officer in 2003.

In 2002, Plame wrote a memo to her superiors in which she expressed hesitation in recommending her husband, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, to the CIA for a mission to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had arranged to purchase and import uranium from the country, but stated that he "may be in a position to assist". 

Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, had been sent to Africa by the CIA to investigate the claim in 2002 before the Iraq War began. He reported back that it wasn’t true, but then heard the president tell the American public that Iraq had indeed purchased the uranium.

President George W. Bush stated that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, 

Wilson responded by writing an article in the New York Times headlined, “What I didn’t find in Africa.”

Wilson argues that, in the State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush misrepresented intelligence leading up to the invasion and thus misleadingly suggested that the Iraqi government sought uranium to manufacture nuclear weapons.   

A week after Wilson's op-ed was published, Novak published a column in The Washington Post which mentioned claims from "two senior administration officials" that Plame had been the one to suggest sending her husband. Novak had learned of Plame's employment, which was classified information, from State Department official Richard Armitage. David Corn and others suggested that Armitage and other officials had leaked the information as political retribution for Wilson's article. (Wikileaks)

There was outrage. Who within the government could have leaked this information? Who exposed a CIA operative jeopardizing the lives of both her sources and other agents? This was treason.

Instead of confronting Wilson on the issue, the White House officials embarked on an anonymous 'whispering campaign' designed to discredit ... (the Wilsons) and to deter other critics from speaking out.

Libby told a grand jury that Cheney was so upset about Wilson's allegations that they discussed them daily after the article appeared. (FOXNews)

Then U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the CIA leak investigation. His deputy attorney general, a fellow named James B. Comey (yes, the same guy who would become FBI director) acting in Ashcroft’s place appointed Patrick Fitzgerald special counsel in charge of the investigation (yes, the same guy who would become the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and eventually bring charges against Rod Blagojevich).

Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was found guilty of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice.

But Libby was never charged with leaking information and Bush spared him prison time by commuting his sentence in 2007. It was a decision hailed by conservatives, who now drone on about the dangers posed by government employees who leak information to the news media. (ChicagoSunTimes)

The scandal led to a criminal investigation; no one was charged for the leak itself. Scooter Libby was convicted of lying to investigators. His prison sentence was ultimately commuted by President Bush, and he was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2018. (Wikileaks)  

The only thing learned from the Plame investigation is that our own government often churns out disinformation for public consumption, just as the Russians have done.

James Comey and the FBI's October Surprise

ThoughtCo: A scandal over Clinton's use of a personal email server as secretary of State had dogged her through early parts of the campaign. But the controversy appeared to be behind her in the waning days of the 2016 election. Most national polls in October and the first days of November showed Clinton leading Trump in the popular vote count; battleground-state polls showed her ahead, too.

But 11 days before the election, FBI director James Comey sent a letter to Congress stating he would review emails found on a laptop computer belonging to a Clinton confidant to determine whether they were relevant to the then-closed investigation of her use of the personal email server. The letter cast Clinton's election prospects into doubt. Then, two days before Election Day, Comey issued a new statement that both confirmed Clinton did nothing illegal but also brought renewed attention to the case.

Clinton directly blamed Comey for her loss after the election. "Our analysis is that Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum,” Clinton told donors in a post-election telephone call, according to published reports. (ThoughtCo)

Top Democrat: The FBI helped Trump with its email announcement

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she was “shocked” to read the short letter FBI Director James Comey wrote to congressional leaders to notify members that the agency was examining new emails.

Feinstein concluded: “It’s too bad Director Comey didn’t take those gaping holes into consideration when he decided to send this letter. The FBI has a history of extreme caution near Election Day so as not to influence the results. Today’s break from that tradition is appalling.” (BusinessInsider)

FBI Director James Comey Manufactures an October Surprise

America had such nice plans for the weekend. Most people were getting ready for some World Series baseball, looking through Party City for that last slutty Ninja Turtle costume, maybe even spending a few hours in line for early voting. The last thing most Americans expected this Friday afternoon was a shameless unprofessional and utterly contrived “October surprise” courtesy of FBI Director James Comey. Yet here we are, with the 24-hour cable news stations in a feeding frenzy over the new investigation that is a lot more sound than legitimate fury.

On July 5 this past summer, Comey, a Republican who had been appointed by President Barack Obama as an appeasement measure, held a press conference about the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. The investigation had concluded that Clinton had engaged in no wrongdoing in the treatment, sending of or deletion of her emails. Comey noted that Clinton was careless and should have been more responsible, but said that nothing she did rose to the level of a criminal investigation. This bit of editorializing, not to mention holding a press conference to end an FBI investigation, was extremely inappropriate and, according to Matthew Miller, former director of the Justice Department’s Public Affairs Office, a “gross abuse of his power.”

Why were we even hearing about Clinton’s emails? Republicans in Congress, desperate to find some smoking gun for the Benghazi, Libya, conspiracy, expanded their investigation into Clinton’s emails. They found nothing. No smoking gun. Not even a half-lit cigarette. Democrats cheered, and Republicans, led by Donald Trump, screamed that the FBI director was in Obama’s pocket.

On Friday, Comey sent a letter to eight Republican chairs of congressional committees informing them that in the last 24 hours, the FBI had found new emails that “may” be pertinent to the previous Clinton investigation, and that, therefore, he would be looking into them. No timeline for the investigation was given, no explanation of where the emails were from, no context regarding why they were just found. Most importantly, the FBI director told eight members of Congress but did not send a letter, smoke signal, Snapchat or any sort of heads-up to the White House or Obama’s staff.

One clear example is that the emails in question are not from any device in the possession of Hillary Clinton. They are emails from a separate investigation into Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman from New York and the former husband of Clinton adviser Huma Abedin.

Surely, in the next 36 hours, there will be those arguing that Comey had no choice. That upon new emails being discovered, even from a separate investigation, he was legally obligated to inform Congress that there would be additional work on the Clinton email case.

That is simply not true. The FBI was well within its power to examine the new emails, determine if they were pertinent to the case and then inform all of the relevant actors, which should definitely have included the White House. Comey knew his "letter" to Republicans in Congress would get leaked, and he knew full well that it was a Dhalsim-level stretch to connect the name Anthony Weiner to the Clinton campaign. Such clearly partisan maneuvering is unbecoming of an FBI director, but utterly expected when the Democrats insist on appeasement appointments instead of defenders of the law. (TheRoot)

NY Times Concludes James Comey Gave Election to Trump, But What About The Times Itself?

Today, the New York Times is out with a comprehensive report into how FBI Director James Comey handled investigations into both presidential candidates during the 2016 election. Their conclusion seems to be that Comey, in overreacting to Hillary Clinton’s self-inflicted wounds, effectively handed the election to Donald Trump.

On the surface, the reasoning behind this thesis is rather sound. Comey made a show of reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server less than two weeks before the polls closed. Meanwhile, there was (and still is) an ongoing FBI investigation of whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, about which Comey was completely silent.

Perhaps the most interesting/telling thing about the piece in The Times is that it was this very belief that Hillary was sure to win which probably forced Comey, against FBI policy, to come out publicly. After all, the thinking went, if he sat on the revelation that there were new emails to investigate and this then came out after she won the election, the credibility of the entire FBI would suddenly be in grave jeopardy (especially when Trump had been continually claiming that the election was “rigged”).

From Comey’s perspective this feels, while intellectually defensible, mostly like a classic butt-covering maneuver. It sure seems like they could have done some cursory investigation first to determine if it was likely that anything significant came from the “new” batch of suddenly found emails, before making such an incendiary pronouncement. It is fascinating to note that, according to The Times, had the FBI known they could have gotten through all the emails before the election, this is exactly what they would have done.

So basically it now appears we elected Donald Trump our president because no one at the FBI realized that they had the ability to scan through all these documents and quickly realize that there was nothing significant, or even really new in them. Seriously?!

Missing from all of this analysis however is the metaphorical elephant in the room. That is, had the news media, of which The Times is of course a leading influencer, not completely overreacted to what was essentially little more than a technical communication, the impact would likely have been minimal and hardly decisive.

I wrote at the time of the Comey letter that the media was grossly overreacting to the story because I sensed that there was nothing really there. It turns out I was dead right about that, but I was also extremely wrong about the ultimate result that this media freak-out would provoke.

The ingredient of this cake is the “connection” that these emails had to the investigation of Anthony Weiner’s alleged sexting of an underage girl. Even though it was technically completely irrelevant to the essence of the story, this juicy angle spread gasoline on an already combustible story. From the media’s perspective it made the development WAY more titillating, and for voters it made it all appear far more unseemly and scandalous. (MediaITE)

Newly Released FBI Documents: Israel Secretly Helped Trump Win 2016 Election

Dozens of affidavits that were filed by the FBI as part of Trump adviser Roger Stone’s investigations as well as his trial were released on Tuesday after several press outlets petitioned for their disclosure.

The agents’ affidavits featured references to the State of Israel as well as the “Prime Minister.” They described how there is an uncertain interference with what the document only refers to as the ‘October surprise’. This ‘surprise’ was apparently a ploy to damage Hilary Clinton in favor of Trump in the lead-up to the 2016 election campaign. The details however, are completely blacked out in the depositions.

WikiLeaks Reveals DNC Elevated Trump to Help Clinton

According to an email from Marissa Astor, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook’s assistant, to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, the campaign knew Trump was going to run, and pushed his legitimacy as a candidate. WikiLeaks’ release shows that it was seen as in Clinton’s best interest to run against Trump in the general election. The memo, sent to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) also reveals the DNC and Clinton campaign were strategizing on behalf of their candidate at the very beginning of the primaries. “We think our goals mirror those of the DNC,” stated the memo, attached to the email under the title “muddying the waters.” (Observer)

The Biggest October Surprise

I just asked about the spate of pipe bomb devices sent to prominent members of the press and political class known for disagreeing with President Donald Trump. As of Friday, ten days before the midterm elections that will determine the party sway of the House and Senate—and, depending on whom you ask, the future of the republic—at least 14 such packages had been discovered. (That morning, police arrested a 56-year-old registered Republican named Cesar Sayoc in connection with the suspicious packages, none of which had detonated or appeared to have caused harm. He was soon charged with at least five federal crimes.) (Vice)

FBI Officials Told Agents Not to Investigate Hunter Biden Laptop ahead of 2020 Election,

Whistleblower Says (National Review)

A whistleblower claims FBI officials instructed agents not to investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 presidential election, saying the bureau was “not going to change the outcome of the election again,” according to Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.)

“The tactic that Trump is using to exert this control over the Republican Party is extortion,” Former Attorney General William Barr said of his former boss. “What other great leader has done this? Telling the party, ‘If it’s not me, I’m going to ruin your election chances by telling my base to sit home. And I’ll sabotage whoever you nominate other than me.’ It shows what he’s all about. He’s all about himself.”

Fact Check-Does ‘2000 Mules’ provide evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election?

A documentary directed by conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza claims it can prove widespread fraud was carried out during the 2020 presidential election in the United States. Reuters Fact Check examined the main claims presented in the film and did not find any concrete evidence definitively showing proof of fraud.

Reuters looked into a video posted in May claiming to show one such “mule”. Pennsylvania county authorities debunked the “evidence” by confirming it showed a designated agent dropping ballots off on behalf of individuals who are unable to (here).

Fact check: Georgia investigation into alleged ballot harvesting is not evidence of election fraud

The former president claims ballots were sold there for $10.

“Where did all those votes show up from in Georgia, where it was just revealed they sold ballots for $10 a piece,” Trump said in a statement, which was shared to Twitter on Jan. 6 by his spokesperson Liz Harrington in a tweet that accumulated more than 4,000 interactions in a day.

Trump's reference to selling ballots for $10 significantly misstates a claim made by a conservative group – which has also not been verified by election officials. True the Vote, a conservative organization that defines itself as a voter integrity group and has previously filed 2020 election lawsuits backing Trump, claims a person who it has refused to publicly identify was paid $10 each for ballots that he gathered from others.

Trump referenced this claim while asserting the 2020 election was "rigged," but True the Vote is not claiming or presenting any proof the ballots were fraudulent. (USAToday)

Doug Collins:

FBI Just helped Trump Win in 2024

Former congressmen Doug Collins and Peter King join us to discuss the F.B.I raid on Mar-a-Lago and the impact it has on future elections.

Was Mar-a-Lago search a win for Trump?

CNN's Chris Cillizza responds to the argument that the FBI search of former President Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort could help him more than it would hurt him in his potential bid for re-election in 2024. (CNN)

Sources told The Washington Post that Trump believed the FBI raid would benefit him as it looked like the Justice Department had overreached.

"He feels it's a political coup for him," one friend who had spoken with the former president multiple times told The Post, speaking under the condition of anonymity.

Trump believed the raid would cause Republicans to rally around him, the report says, and would create more support for a potential presidential bid in 2024. (BusinessInsider) READ MORE: Trump wanted the FBI to Raid Mar-a-Lago

Former Congressman Charged with Ballot Stuffing, Bribery, and Obstruction

A former U.S. Congressman was charged in an indictment unsealed today, with conspiring to violate voting rights by fraudulently stuffing the ballot boxes for specific candidates in the 2014, 2015, and 2016 primary elections, bribery of an election official, falsification of records, voting more than once in federal elections, and obstruction of justice. (Justice.Gov)

Ronald Reagan’s “October Surprise” Plot Was Real After All

A batch of quietly released documents confirms what many have long suspected: Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign worked behind the scenes to delay the release of US hostages in Iran, for the benefit of Reagan’s election campaign.

Gary Sick, who was Carter's chief aide on Iran during the hostage crisis, claimed in his book October Surprise that Reagan's campaign manager, William Casey, reached out to the Iranians to ask them to delay releasing the hostages until after the November elections.

The allegation, doggedly pursued by the late investigative journalist Robert Parry, spawned books and even a 1992 congressional investigation, which determined there was “no credible evidence supporting any attempt or proposal to attempt by the Reagan Presidential campaign . . . to delay the release of the American hostages in Iran.” Parry and others looking into the case were attacked in the media, with much of the issue revolving around whether or not Reagan’s campaign manager and (later) free press–hating CIA director William Casey had traveled to Madrid on a particular date to meet with Iranian government representatives.

Well, nearly seventeen years after the House October Surprise Task Force concluded that the whole idea was bunk, there is a bombshell story based on documents donated to Yale from the offices of David Rockefeller, the former chairman of Chase Manhattan Corporation.  

Rockefeller’s chief of staff, mandated that the documents should stay sealed until Rockefeller’s death, which came in 2017. 

Ostensibly a story about how Rockefeller and Chase worked behind the scenes to win their client, the repressive Shah of Iran, safe haven in the United States, this nugget appears about halfway through:

[T]he team around Mr. Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican with a dim view of Mr. Carter’s dovish foreign policy, collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage what it derisively labeled an “October surprise” — a pre-election release of the American hostages, the papers show.

The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives.

“I had given my all” to thwarting any effort by the Carter officials “to pull off the long-suspected ‘October surprise,’” Mr. Reed wrote in a letter to his family after the election, apparently referring to the Chase effort to track and discourage a hostage release deal. He was later named Mr. Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco.

In exchange for no net gain in released U.S. citizens, President Reagan authorized the delivery to Iran—from U.S.-supplied Israeli stockpiles—the following advanced weapons:

Aug. 20, 1985: 96 TOW missiles

Sep. 14, 1985: 408 TOW missiles

Nov. 24, 1985: 18 HAWK missiles

Feb. 18, 1986: 500 TOW missiles

Feb. 27, 1986: 500 TOW missiles

May 25, 1986: HAWK spare parts

Aug. 3, 1986: HAWK spare parts

Oct. 28, 1986: 500 TOW missiles 

Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters report led by Lawrence Walsh makes clear, President Reagan hoped to secure the release of U.S. hostages being held in Lebanon in exchange for U.S. weapons. The scandal stained the president’s reputation, after he first went before the American people and proclaimed “We did not—repeat—did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we,” but four months later admitted “what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages. This runs counter to my own beliefs.”  (CFR.org)   

Election fraud Chicago style: Illinois’ decades-old notoriety for election corruption is legendary 

He went to “every hotel and flophouse in the West Sideward to pay for votes and obtain lists of people who had died or moved and would not be voting.”

Democrats in Illinois were deeply concerned about voter turnout in the November 2014 elections.

A political scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago concluded, “The Chicago metropolitan region has been the most corrupt area in the country since 1976,” in an obdurate race to the bottom with Louisiana’s record. According to that 2012 study, Illinois is the third-most corrupt state in the union, after New York and California.

In addition, four consecutive corrupt governors and nearly one-third of Chicago’s one hundred alderpersons since 1973 have been convicted of corruption, mostly involving bribes to influence government decisions or for personal financial benefit. Yet corruption is not a one-party party: the Republicans dominating the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Mississippi have had the highest number of corruption cases in the country in the last four decades, when states are ranked by convictions of public officials per capita.

Illinois’s decades-old notoriety for election corruption is legendary. Many people still remember stories about the first Mayor Richard A. Daley rigging the presidential election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, for example, but even in those times, electoral fraud was probably common in local elections. In fact, the bigger news in the 1960 election was that State’s Attorney Benjamin Adamowski, a Republican running for reelection, was posed to run against Richard J. Daley in the next mayoral race. Common knowledge attributed his loss most definitely to fraud.

Election officials knew about and permitted some patronage to continue, even when it bordered on fraud—at least until they themselves were caught. In the Chicago and Illinois general election of November 1982, twenty-six people, a majority of them election officials, were indicted for election fraud in federal court. The case was brought by Dan Webb, the Republican US attorney, who had federal jurisdiction since the ballot included a congressional race in addition to local and state offices. People accused Webb of targeting Democrats, but officials of both parties used illegal practices to maintain their hold on office. 

Witnesses accused the defendants of forging signatures, impersonating voters, registering ineligible voters, “assisting” older or disabled voters, bribing voters, illegally dispensing and voting absentee ballots, and using weapons and force to persuade voters and campaign workers. One official was accused of running a ballot through the tabulator two hundred times in order to increase his candidate’s margin of victory.

A Chicago Tribune investigation of massive fraud, published in January 1983, led Webb to announce that his investigators would “use a computer” (which was at the time an innovative crime-fighting technology) to determine how many dead people were registered to vote or registered in more than one location throughout the city’s 2,910 precincts. Overall, 10 percent of Chicago’s one million votes for governor, mayor, city council, and other public officials were alleged to be fraudulent. “The fraud we uncovered in these indictments is so great, the scheme so intense, that the exact number of votes stolen in the November elections is unknown,” Webb announced at a press conference revealing the arrest of ten officials on the city’s West Side.

Webb’s case focused on activities in the Seventeenth Precinct in the Twenty-Seventh Ward, where votes were bought and sold for a cup of cocoa, two dollars, a glass of wine, or a cigarette. The ringleader was Democratic precinct captain Raymond Hicks, who coordinated ballot box stuffing with the assistance of precinct election judges.

Elsewhere in the precinct, the “standard operating procedure” for stealing votes was similar. Hicks, who pleaded guilty in exchange for testifying against others, recounted “visiting every hotel and flophouse in the West Side ward to pay for votes and obtain lists of people who had died or moved and would not be voting.”

Throughout press coverage of the trials, newspaper reporters stressed that Hicks and his codefendants faced up to fifteen years in federal prison for defrauding voters. When the sentences were announced in December 1983, however, federal judge James Moran punished the conspirators lightly. Hicks received the longest sentence, nine months on work-release at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, with an additional five years on probation.

In another Chicago case involving election fraud, city jobs, and Democratic ward bosses, US Attorney Webb brought indictments against Edward “Captain Eddie” Howard and Thomas Cusack, who he contended were loyalists to Thirty-Ninth Ward alderman Anthony Laurino. The key witness had been promised a city job by Howard if he helped cast absentee ballots for fictional, nonexistent, or deceased ward residents. In addition, a Democratic election judge and her daughter, a Republican election judge in the same precinct, permitted Howard to cast a ballot for another family member, a marine stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. A jury ultimately convicted Howard on twenty-three counts; he received nine months of work-release and five years’ probation. Cusack, convicted on fourteen counts, received six months’ work-release and five years’ probation. (Salon)

New Court Filing Reveals How the 2004 Ohio Presidential Election Was Hacked

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio’s 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio’s vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush’s unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell’s company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State’s election night server layout system.

Project Censored named the outsourcing of Ohio’s 2004 election votes to SmarTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee to a company owned by Republican partisans as one of the most censored stories in the world.

On December 14, 2007, then-Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, who replaced Blackwell, released her evaluation and validation of election-related equipment, standards and testing (Everest study) which found that touchscreen voting machines were vulnerable to hacking with relative ease. (TruthOut) Download the Plaintiffs’ Brief here [zip].

JFK and the stolen election 

The Electoral College solidified former Vice President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 general election. Despite President Trump’s frequent claims, no evidence of widespread voter fraud has been found in swing states such as Georgia or Pennsylvania or any other state, including Illinois.

But in 1960, some irregularities in Illinois votes, specifically the ones in Chicago, prompted calls for an investigation from Republicans over then-Sen. John F. Kennedy’s victory. The saga played out in the pages of the Chicago Daily News.

“Fewer than 100,000 votes out of a total of 69 million cast in the Nov. 8 election may decide whether Vice President Nixon or Sen. Kennedy is to be our next President,” William Harrison Fetridge, chairman of the Nixon Recount Committee of Illinois, told the Daily News on Dec. 5, 1960.

Fetridge name-dropped Chicago as one of the cities “where entrenched political machines control the election machinery,” alleging voter fraud. A lawsuit later filed accused Cook County of digging up “Kennedy voters from the cemeteries of Chicago.” (ChiagoSunTimes)

CIA Espionage Orders for the French Presidential Election WikiLeaks

All major French political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA’s human (“HUMINT”) and electronic (“SIGINT”) spies in the seven months leading up to France’s 2012 presidential election. The revelations are contained within three CIA tasking orders published by WikiLeaks as context for its forthcoming CIA Vault 7 series. Named specifically as targets are the French Socialist Party (PS), the National Front (FN) and Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) together with current President Francois Hollande, then President Nicolas Sarkozy, current round one presidential front-runner Marine Le Pen, and former presidential candidates Martine Aubry and Dominique Strauss-Khan.

The CIA espionage orders published are classified and restricted to U.S. eyes only (“NOFORN”) due to “Friends-on-Friends sensitivities”. The orders state that the collected information is to “support” the activities of the CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)’s E.U section, and the U.S. State Department’s Intelligence and Research Branch. READ MORE: DOCUMENT.

1947-1948, Italy: Nazi Loot used to Rig Election

The Italian communist party was favored to score heavily in the 1948 elections. This created such alarm in Washington that George Kennan - the foremost, long-range strategist for the U.S. government - advocated U.S. military occupation of the Foggia oil fields.

Washington's apprehension was shared and enthusiastically fuelled by the Holy See. The church's hierarchy was under severe economic and political pressure in Eastern Europe. The prospect of a Communist electoral victory in Italy coming on the heels of Communist gains in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland was viewed as the most profound material crisis the church had seen in centuries.

The election campaign was a major test of clandestine political warfare strategy. Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, James Angleton, William Colby and other top-ranking U.S. intelligence officials put together a crash program of propaganda, sabotage and secret funding of Christian Democratic candidates designed to frustrate the Italian Communist party's ambitions.

Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper and a score of other prominent Americans made radio broadcasts to Italy warning against the Communist electoral menace. A CIA-financed media blitz showered Italian newspapers with articles and photographs expressing American munificence and Communist atrocities, both real and manufactured. The archbishops of Milan and Palermo announced that anyone voting Communist was prohibited from receiving absolution or confession. Eugene Cardinal Tisserant proclaimed that Communists "may not have a Christian burial or be buried in holy grounds. "Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York served as a go-between in CIA-Vatican negotiations. "The Vatican [has] been promised that U.S. funds would be made available to assist in the presentation of the anti-Communist appeal to the Italian public," Spellman wrote after a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marshall.

The U.S. government, the cardinal said, had secretly "released large sums in 'black currency' in Italy to the [Roman] Catholic Church. "A substantial part of this "black currency" for clandestine activities in Italy came from captured Nazi assets, including money and gold that the Nazis looted from Jews. In 1941, the War Powers Act authorized the U.S. Treasury's Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) to serve as a holding pool for captured Nazi valuables - currency, gold, precious metals, stocks and bonds - seized as the Germans or other Axis governments tried to smuggle them out of Europe. The captured wealth, which eventually totalled tens of millions of dollars, included substantial amounts of blood money that the Nazis had pillaged from their victims.

The ESF was authorized to safeguard the portion of the Nazi hoard that had been uncovered and confiscated by the U.S. This money became a secret source of financing for U.S. clandestine operations in the CIA's early days. The first known payments from the ESF accounts for covert work were made during the hotly contested Italian election. The CIA withdrew $10 million from the fund in late 1947. (By Christopher Simpson)

Do yourself a favor. Think for yourself. Be your own person. Question everything. Stand for principle. Champion individual liberty and self-ownership where you can. Develop a strong moral code. Be kind to others. Do no harm, unless that harm is warranted. Pretty obvious stuff...but people who hold these things in their hearts seem to be disappearing from the earth at an accelerated rate. Stay safe, my friends. Thanks for being here.

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