Donald Trump 2018

Hugo Stiglitz · August 27, 2018

This is a major doxxing.

Article is very long.

Revealed: Notorious Pro-Trump Misinformation Site True Pundit Is Run By An Ex-Journalist With A Grudge Against The FBI

How former-award-winning journalist Michael D Moore came to run a site filled with false reports and conspiracies.

By Craig Silverman

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/revealed-notorious-pro-trump-misinformation-site-true

Posted on August 27, 2018, at 2:57 p.m. ET

Days after former FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified in a closed-door meeting with the House Oversight and Government Reform and House Judiciary committees, pro-Trump website True Pundit published an explosive — and false — report about what she said.

The article cited anonymous “well-placed FBI sources” to claim Page revealed that Chinese hackers had accessed Hillary Clinton’s private server, stolen her emails, intercepted hundreds of top-secret documents including even the president's daily schedule — and that the FBI knew about it and did nothing.

In response, Page’s lawyer spoke publiclyto say the story was unequivocally false. Even Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert — who has pushed the as-yet unproven claim that a foreign power “other than Russia” gained access to Clinton’s server — disputed the story about Page. He told Fox News she “apparently didn’t know” about anything related to China, directly contradicting True Pundit.

Regardless, the false story generated more than 22,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook, and was a hit on Twitter, where famed Trump supporter Bill Mitchell shared it. (The story was also copied by notorious fake news peddler YourNewsWire, which generated another 77,000 Facebook engagements.)

The most Twitter engagements for the article were generated by the owner of True Pundit, who uses the handle @Thomas1774Paine and goes by the historical pseudonym Thomas Paine. He shared the link more than 25 times to his close to 200,000 followers, generating thousands of retweets and likes.

“MSM Quiet on This One -- Wonder Why?” Paine tweeted, suggesting big media outlets were covering up his false scoop.

It was classic Paine: publish a false story that paints the FBI and Hillary Clinton in a bad light, credit the information to anonymous sources, and claim the mainstream media is covering it all up.

Since launching the site in June 2016, Paine and True Pundit have carved out a unique niche among the news grifters capitalizing on our conspiracy-laden, deeply polarized information environment. As New York Magazine noted in a piece debunking two True Pundit stories, Paine is “fluent in the paranoid language of 2016 social media.”

Paine combines the use of a pseudonym with almost exclusive use of anonymous sources to establish the persona of a deeply connected reporter with a vast network of FBI, law enforcement, and government sources. As with the Page story, he adds false or conspiracy-filled claims to real events or documents in order to create the impression of being rooted in fact. And the retweets, traffic, and supporters have rolled in.

True Pundit is frequently cited by other hyperpartisan and conspiracy websites, and its stories are shared by prominent pro-Trump figures such as former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, actor James Woods, and others.

One of Paine’s 2016 stories even led to an email exchange between then–FBI director James Comey and his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, about whether True Pundit really had sources inside the FBI. Paine, of course, seized upon that as evidence that he’s as well-sourced as he claims. (He loves to criticize the bureau: The site has used the phrase “Federal Bureau of Incompetence” in the headline of five different stories.)

The question of who’s behind True Pundit has itself become the source of wild theories. Viral #resistance tweeter Seth Abramson dedicated an 84-tweet threadto True Pundit and Paine. Abramson argued that True Pundit is run by “a cadre of pro-Trump FBI agents and intel officers — some active, some retired — [who] conspired to swing the election to Trump.” (Another Twitter user investigated the account and concluded it’s a fake persona concocted by the Trump campaign’s social media team.)

More credibly, Zachary Elwood, an authorof poker books who also investigates social media accounts, published a detailed investigation of True Pundit at whoistruepundit.com that revealed a litany of details about Paine’s identity.

Among the many clues: Paine and his lawyer say he is based in the Philadelphia area; he has talked publicly about covering the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 as a newspaper reporter; he used to run a Twitter account called @HockeyIntel before changing his handle to @Thomas1774Paine; and he once tweeted a photo of what he said is his Gerald Loeb Award, a prestigious business journalism prize.

Could Paine really be perhaps the best-sourced reporter in America when it comes to big cases being investigated by the FBI, NYPD, and other agencies? Is he someone federal agents would leak incredibly sensitive information to, at the risk of being fired and/or prosecuted? Or is he using his pseudonym to conceal relevant details about his background that further undermine his many dubious claims?

To get answers, BuzzFeed News investigated Paine and True Pundit’s social media accounts, business and court records, and other publicly available information. They reveal that Thomas Paine is in fact Michael D. Moore, 51, a Pennsylvania man with a background in journalism, a criminal record as a result of an FBI investigation, and a long history of shady and illegal business practices.

After being contacted for comment, Moore did not respond and instead published a story on his website confirming BuzzFeed News' reporting.

Just as Paine has publicly stated, Moore won a Loeb Award in 1996 while working for the Record, a New Jersey newspaper. He also authored at least some coverage of TWA Flight 800: A copy of the front pageof a New Jersey newspaper from Sept. 12, 1996, features a story with his byline that examined airport security in light of the crash. (To read how BuzzFeed News found Moore, see the section, “Connecting Michael D. Moore to True Pundit and Thomas Paine” at the bottom of this story.)

Paine has also talked publicly about leaving journalism in the late ’90s to work in “intelligence.” During that same time period, Moore created a company called Dig Dirt that he described as an investigations service. He left his newspaper job to work on it full-time. The company’s site is now offline, but as recently as the fall of 2016 it contained language that directly echoes the messaging of True Pundit.

“We subordinate our desire for public recognition and publicity to the ever-growing need for confiendiality [sic] and LOYALTY. Old School,” said the Dig Dirt site.

True Pundit’s Patreon says it’s “creating old school journalism,” and the Paine Twitter account constantly refers to things as “old school.”

The Patreon’s description also says True Pundit offers “investigative intelligence unmatched elsewhere.”

Dig Dirt’s tagline? “Investigative intelligence.”

Moore also has a connection to the FBI that could explain True Pundit's fixation with the agency: he was arrested by federal agents in November 2011 for running two websites that sold pirated hockey DVDs and downloads. Months earlier, FBI agents executed a search warrant on his home and carted off the equipment he used to pirate hockey games and other content.

Moore pleaded guilty to one count of copyright infringement in June 2013. He was sentenced to time served of one day in prison, a year of house arrest, and three years of supervised release. During his release he had to provide monthly income statements and facilitate the “investigation of his financial dealings,” according to a sentencing document filed on June 17, 2013.

And so, almost exactly three years later, with probation and its financial disclosure requirements behind him, Moore launched True Pundit.

He didn’t waste any time pumping up its credentials. “True Pundit has folks who worked for the FBI and other agencies on staff,” claimed one of the site’s earliest articles.

Moore's hastily-published admission that he is in fact Thomas Paine made it clear that his case later fed his motivation to start a site that would hit back at the FBI.

"These bastards — and their bosses — were going to pay for violating my family. My kids. My home. One way or the other, I would have the last word," he wrote. "As I have throughout my life and career. And I was going to have to go back into journalism to even the score.

Many would have found it hard to believe that a man who’d been recently been arrested by the bureau, and pleaded guilty, now had former FBI employees on staff at his just-launched website.

But no one knew that True Pundit was the work of Michael D. Moore. Instead, it was Thomas Paine, his Loeb award, and all of his impressive-seeming anonymous sources pumping out frequently false stories to fire up the pro-Trump base.

When he launched True Pundit, Moore was careful to cover his tracks. He registered the domain privately, and later created a Delaware limited liability corporation, True Pundit Media LLC, through a third-party administrator. (Delaware LLCs do not require that the beneficiaries be publicly disclosed.)

Moore appears to have avoided using existing personal emails or social media accounts as contacts or administrators for his new project, or even to promote the site. This level of operational security makes sense in light of the fact that one of Dig Dirt’s main services was finding people. Moore knew how to hide.

It's very hard for a legitimate individual to become invisible," he told the Columbus Dispatch in a 2000 article about his company.

Like True Pundit, Dig Dirt boasted of having strong connections to the intelligence and law enforcement communities.

“To enhance DigDirt.com's investigative arsenal, the company also uses a number of former federal agents who spent their respected careers in agencies including the Secret Service, Central Intelligence Agency and Internal Revenue Service among others,” read the company’s About page in October 2000.

It’s unclear to what extent, if at all, Moore was in contact with former federal agents while running Dig Dirt. His website also made the eye-popping claim that in just a few years of operation the company had solved “more than 20,000 cases in over 100 countries.”

Rather than describing the company as a global investigative or intelligence agency, media articles about Dig Dirt that quoted Moore typically described it as an “online research firm,” “information broker,” or “public-records search firm.”

Dig Dirt was also the source of negative online comments from private investigators who used the service. One thread of messages on alt.private.investigator included complaints about being overcharged for services that didn’t work, having prices raised without notice, and receiving incorrect data. Moore’s subsequent businesses, including his illegal DVD and downloads operation, also left a trail of irate customers who said they’d been ripped off.

Moore started and ran Dig Dirt while he was still working full time as a reporter for the Record, a newspaper in New Jersey. In 1996, the year he shared a prestigious Loeb award with two colleagues, the paper found out about Moore’s side hustle and opened an internal investigation.

Editors were concerned he might have used his press access to public records to benefit his business. Moore was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, though the paper’s editor said the business “very clearly created the appearance and potential for a conflict of interest,” according to an article in Editor & Publisher.

Moore resigned and spoke out about what he felt was mistreatment at the hands of the paper’s leadership. "I think it's a problem when colleagues are actually investigating you with the permission of the newspaper," Moore said. "It's like a bad movie, and that's the main factor why I couldn't go back to work there."

Criticism of mainstream media now permeates the work of True Pundit. “One of the reasons you launch your own media site is to say what the main-stream media and other pundits simply won’t say. It’s called the truth,” he wrote in one story. (Moore’s also not a fan of BuzzFeed, or of the author of this story.)

But in spite of his disdain for traditional media, Paine’s Twitter bio claims some very mainstream accolades. It identifies him as a winner of a Loeb, which is true. It also claims Paine/Moore is a "2-Time Pulitzer Prize” investigative reporting nominee, and that he received a“George Polk Political Reporting” nomination. Neither is true. The Polk Awards does not announce nominees, only winners. The Pulitzers began announcing “finalists” in 1980, and Moore has never been one.

The Polk Awards told Elwood, the independent researcher, that True Pundit submitted a story for consideration for the 2017 awards. Anyone can make a submission; it is not a “nomination.” But True Pundit published a false articleclaiming it had received a "coveted" nomination anyway. (The Paine Twitter account has also falsely claimed to have won a Polk Award.)

Once out of journalism in the late ’90s, Moore became embroiled in lawsuits. In 1999, he sued the Washington law firm Steptoe & Johnson for $10 million. Moore’s suit alleged that people working for the firm had hacked into Dig Dirt’s websites hundreds of times, posted defamatory messages about him online, “and tried to cover it all up by doing their evil deeds under an e-identity swiped from an Alexandria, Virginia, furniture store owner,” according to a report in Wired at the time.

One key element of the case involved Moore’s ownership of a domain name that was similar to the URL of a competing investigation service used by the law firm. Moore in part alleged that the firm’s people had attempted to penetrate his systems via that URL. The firm, however, said the visits to the website were a mistake and the result of Moore cybersquatting on the domain.

The suit was dismissed with prejudice in August 2000 by agreement of all parties.

Also that year, Moore’s cybersquatting came back to haunt him. He was ordered to pay $25,000 in damages for squatting on six domains that contained names of law firms. When representatives of the firms contacted him to object to his ownership of the URLs, Moore asked for money, according to a news brief from the International Trademark Association.

The complaint also claimed that Mr. Moore diluted and detracted from the distinctiveness of the firms' trademarks by using the domain names to advertise his investigative services business,” it said.

Delaware corporate records indicate that Dig Dirt still owes $525 in back taxes dating from 2003, and that the company has not filed an annual report since 2000. It’s unclear how active Dig Dirt was from 2000 onwards. A scaled-down version of the website remained online until late 2016 before being taken fully offline after True Pundit launched. Moore, however, had long been working on other businesses by then.

As early as 2007, according to website archives and domain ownership records, Moore was selling Irish peat logs. That company soon became the focus of angry customer reviews online.

“I too could not get a response from either irishpeat.com or moore and assosciates [sic] … It's been over 5 weeks and I have not received my item,” read one reviewfrom 2009.

Others also complained of paying for but not receiving their orders. The same kind of complaints can be found online about hdhockey.com and broadstreetbullies.com, the sites Moore used for his illegal hockey DVD and downloads business. It was in operation as early as 2006, according to a federal indictment. Domain records from DomainTools suggest both sites may have changed ownership as early as 2004. (Moore also owns a company called Moore & Associates that was registered in Pennsylvania in 1999, according to state records. It’s unclear what this company does, but it remains active.)

I've been after this douche for years after he ripped a ton of people on here years ago. Kharma [sic] is a bitch!” wrote one person on the hockeyfights.com message board after learning of Moore’s arrest. The thread was soon filled with others who said they had paid for DVDs that never arrived. (One person, however, said he’d received his order.)

Even today, Moore is still engaged in his old habit of copyright infringement. Patrick Brown, CEO of Liftable Media, which publishes Conservative Tribune and the Western Journal, told BuzzFeed News he would be contacting True Pundit to demand it stop “stealing the first 10 paragraphs or so of our content” in articles on the site. (True Pundit has many articles that consist entirely of several paragraphs of a story published elsewhere, with a link to “read more.”)

“We will be reaching out to True Pundit to ask them to cease and desist regarding the text,” Brown said in an email.

The True Pundit YouTube channel was also terminated at some point since early June due to “multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, deceptive practices and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations.”

Given that he was busy selling Irish peat logs and pirated hockey content, it’s difficult to know how much, if any, investigative work Moore did in the decade or more before launching True Pundit. And when the site launched he had been out of journalism for roughly 20 years.

Did Moore maintain whatever contacts he might have had in the heyday of Dig Dirt and his newspaper career? Would these contacts have reengaged with a convicted criminal fresh off probation and now writing under a pseudonym? And what useful current information could longtime former agents have about current investigations and cases?

What’s clear is that Moore’s background in journalism, at Dig Dirt, and in online marketing gave him the skills needed to create incredibly suspect and outright false stories that spread widely among pro-Trump networks on Facebook and Twitter. True Pundit’s bread and butter — what drives viral traffic to the site and inspires Paine’s supporters on Patreon — are the stories often credited to its “investigative bureau.”

A review of True Pundit’s top-performing content on Facebook and Twitter reveals many false stories and those built on big unverified claims that veer into the realm of conspiracy. Its biggest hit on Facebook is a November 2016 story that helped contribute to the creation and spread of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. It has generated more than 174,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook, been shared on Twitter more than 15,000 times, and received more than 19,000 upvotes and comments on Reddit.

“BREAKING BOMBSHELL: NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes with Children, Child Exploitation, Pay to Play, Perjury,” read the headline.

The story was built on the recent news that the FBI had reopened an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails after discovering messages on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

In the end, the FBI found that the emails in question were largely duplicates, and soon closed the investigation. But before that happened, True Pundit quoted “NYPD sources” to claim that there was enough information on the laptop “to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life.”

It quoted one “NYPD Chief” saying, “What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach.”

The story also claimed that this senior NYPD officer was ready to go public with the contents of the laptop if they were not released by the FBI. But in reality, no incriminating information was found on the laptop about perjury, money laundering, or child exploitation related to Clinton or any of her advisers. And in spite of the anonymous “NYPD Chief” declaring the emails had “turned [his] stomach,” no such emails ever surfaced. (Weiner pleaded guilty to federal obscenity charges related to text messages and Skype chats with a minor.)

Clinton is a frequent target of the site. True Pundit was the source of the made-up claim that Clinton once asked “Can’t we just drone this guy?” about Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Paine’s report cited “State Department sources” and relied on a total misrepresentation of standard State Department language. The story was soon amplified by WikiLeaks itself, as well as by Infowars, Russia Today, and others. It generated more than 83,000 engagements on Facebook and was shared on Twitter more than 80,000 times. (It's also the story True Pundit submitted for a Polk Award.)

The false claim that Hillary Clinton used a tiny earpiece during one of the presidential debates also originated with True Pundit. It cited “NYPD sources involved with the NBC forum’s security detail.” Fox News, Infowars, and otherspicked it up. (Donald Trump Jr. also tweeted the resulting Infowars story.)

The site has also falsely claimed that Clinton used hand signals with one of the debate moderators during a 2016 presidential debate, and that she was drunk one morning before a campaign rally.

The FBI is another favorite target. The site published a series of conspiracy-laden stories alleging that the bureau’s leadership covered up evidence suggesting that Las Vegas mass shooter Stephen Paddock was not alone. One story also falsely claimed Paddock was a member of Antifa and that “FBI & Vegas police worked hard to conceal Paddock’s politics.”

The site also speculated that Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooter Omar Mateen was an FBI informant, and that the agency was trying to cover that up. Moore later updated his theory to say “definitively” that Mateen was either an FBI informant or he was somehow radicalized by FBI informants during a botched operation. (Neither are true, though Mateen’s father was an informant.)

More recently, True Pundit has been focused on stories that paint the picture of a broad conspiracy involving every US intelligence agency, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, former attorney general Loretta Lynch, British intelligence, Sen. John McCain, former US attorney Preet Bharara, former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, and others in an illegal plot to prevent Trump from winning the election.

The site has also claimed that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Michael Flynn were allwiretapped as part of this plot as early as 2015. (It’s no surprise, then, that in one of his YouTube appearances as Paine, Moore voiced praise for Infowars conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, a major proponent of the Qanon conspiracy theory.)

David Gomez is a former FBI national security executive who reviewed several True Pundit stories at the request of BuzzFeed News. He said some displayed a lack of understanding about basic FBI procedures.

"The key thing that I took away from those stories is that a lot of the quotes and a lot of the factual situations that he relates do not ring true based on my 28 years of experience in the FBI," Gomez said in an interview.

Gomez said it's possible True Pundit is in touch with a former agent or two, but said the articles do not reflect the work of someone with high-level bureau sources and insight into ongoing investigations.

I think he may have one or two people that’s he talking to on a regular basis. I think it would be the same person providing a similar type of information," Gomez said. "But I also think, and it’s clear from his writing, that he’ll also take a bit of what someone says and spin it. And I don't for a second believe his quotes."

In some cases, Moore (as Paine) later claimed his “exclusives” were correct when news broke that was tangentially related. His story that helped feed the Pizzagate conspiracy now carries five bullet points at the top that reference subsequent events as if they support his initial report.

The fact that Weiner later pleaded guiltyto federal obscenity charges is cited as proof of True Pundit’s claim that his laptop would show evidence of “Child exploitation” and “Sex crimes with minors (children).” In reality, the laptop was originally obtained by law enforcement as part of its investigation into Weiner for exactly those reasons. But none of True Pundit’s claims about the laptop having evidence of crimes by Clinton or others proved true.

None of that stopped the site from boasting in June of this year that its story was correct. As evidence, it cited the FBI inspector general’s report about bureau activity leading up to the 2016 election. In a section about Weiner’s laptop, the report contained a reference to “crime against children” and the “sexual exploitation of children.” As noted above, the investigation into him sexting with a minor was why law enforcement obtained his laptop in the first place. Neither reference to child exploitation in the report was connected to Clinton or anyone other than Weiner.

True Pundit claimed vindication anyway. “So who in the media or some of the other half-witted critics out there in social media land are going to be the first to apologize for hammering True Pundit’s reporting in 2016?” its story asked.

Any of the above stories alone should do deep damage to a site’s credibility, and its ability earn revenue and attract an audience. But the opposite has happened for True Pundit, according to traffic measurement services Alexa and SimilarWeb.

Over the past period of nearly a year, as other conservative sites struggled with low or inconsistent traffic, True Pundit has enjoyed a climb in audience.

Moore also sells True Pundit merchandise, has close to 250 people supporting a Patreon, and earns advertising revenue thanks to an arrangement with Revcontent. (A 2017 analysis by BuzzFeed News found that Revcontent was monetizing more fake news sites than any other ad network. The company respondedby labeling the story fake news.)

For a period this summer, True Pundit was also working with Intermarkets, a Washington ad firm that handles advertising for the Drudge Report, among other prominent conservative sites.

“We no longer work with Truepundit.com,” said Kary Jones, the manager of publisher development for Intermarkets, in an email to BuzzFeed News. “You can reach out to them directly.”

Jones did not answer follow-up questions about how long they worked together or why the relationship ended.

Unmasking Moore and revealing his criminal history, potential grudge against the FBI, lack of recent work in journalism or investigations, and string of false stories attributed to anonymous sources should cause many to discount True Pundit as a source.

But the reality is his audience is already invested in his fake scoops about the deep state, out-of-control federal agencies, and child exploitation. They will almost certainly stay with him. Moore can simply portray himself as yet another victim of the FBI, mainstream media, and deep-state complex, all while promoting his Patreon and True Pundit merchandise.

Before he became Thomas Paine, Moore was @HockeyIntel on Twitter. With that account, he showed a particular interest in smaller leagues such as the United States Premier Hockey League. He also displayed the same combativeness and ego that would come to the forefront when he later switched to @Thomas1774Paine. (Twitter allows people to swap one username for another and keep their followers and old timeline.)

But prior to taking on his Paine account and persona, Moore unwittingly left enough clues on his old hockey account to connect the dots.

As part of his research into True Pundit, Zachary Elwood collected old tweets that referenced @HockeyIntel. BuzzFeed News noted that another Twitter account, @Dig_Dirt, often replied to threads to support @HockeyIntel’s comments.

In one 2014 tweet, @Dig_Dirt jumped in on a thread between @HockeyIntel and another account. The phrasing of the tweet (“As a parent … we know the scoop.”) suggested the same person might be running both @Dig_Dirt and @HockeyIntel:

That account had earlier shared a YouTube video of a young defenseman with the last name Moore. The person running @Dig_Dirt also spoke about the player in another tweet as if they were his parent. From there, BuzzFeed News was able to determine that the player’s father is Michael D. Moore. Research on Moore quickly revealed he fit all of the disclosed characteristics of Thomas Paine’s real identity.

Another link between Moore and True Pundit is that the @Thomas1774Paine Twitter account has twice praised tweets sent from the Twitter account of the sports apparel company run by Moore’s son, the former hockey player.

In the end, Moore’s careful work to conceal his true identity was undone by a sockpuppet account and a father’s pride.

Bozo_Casanova · August 27, 2018

Post Without End, Redux

Js1 · August 27, 2018

Oop

DigDug · August 27, 2018

2 minutes ago, Js1 said:

Oop

He must really miss Robin Leach

Newdoc · August 27, 2018

3 minutes ago, Js1 said:

Oop

I give it 50/50 odds on the quick full staff return was either Trump’s pettiness or his hiring of completely incompetent WH staff. Flip a coin.

Js1 · August 27, 2018

4 minutes ago, Newdoc said:

I give it 50/50 odds on the quick full staff return was either Trump’s pettiness or his hiring of completely incompetent WH staff. Flip a coin.

Schumer and McConnell both requested DOD provide support for all government building flags be at half-mast through McCain's interment. So probably all week.

Totally because of Trump's pettiness.

Edited August 27, 2018 by Js1

Message Board User · August 27, 2018

6 minutes ago, Js1 said:

Oop

what a liberal cuck

Hank Kingsley · August 27, 2018

I'll put a million on Trump's pettiness. Easy money.

Longhorn_Fan68 · August 27, 2018

3 minutes ago, Hank Kingsley said:

I'll put a million on Trump's pettiness. Easy money.

Just give it to Trump and he can make you a billionaire!

SameSame · August 27, 2018

10 minutes ago, Js1 said:

Oop

So the American public had to overwhelmingly guilt our President in to showing the slightest bit of respect for a United States war hero. Just completely messed up and petty.

DiceHands · August 27, 2018

Just a reminder that republicans were trying to politicize Mollie Tibbetts death and we just had a mass shooting at that madden tournament yesterday and none of them are saying a word about it because the dude is white and american.

They dont give a fuck about any of these people.

Edited August 27, 2018 by DiceHands

Buzzrock · August 27, 2018

1 hour ago, BrickHorn said:

Do not confuse “unfavorable” with “not objective.” Objectivity is not accomplished by saying an equal number of positive and negative things. It is accomplished by relying on facts to uncover the truth. Sometimes that truth is unfavorable to one side in a dispute. If the truth is one-sided, then objective reporting must also be one-sided.

I do we wish we had more objective media. The only guy I follow who puts almost no color on things is Jamie Dupree.

http://jamiedupree.blog.ajc.com/

He happens to have a very unfortunate but very interesting story:

https://www.ajc.com/news/national/jamie-dupree-silenced-illness-harvests-new-voice-from-old-tapes/3xS3XmkHfcfxMpjmZU4wNM/

Hank Kingsley · August 27, 2018

Brisketexan · August 27, 2018

1 minute ago, Hank Kingsley said:

If it takes you 48 hours to find a way not to be a total asshole....you're a total asshole.

SameSame · August 27, 2018

Fuck Pence too, eat a rancid dick you fuck.

NameAlreadyInUse · August 27, 2018

45 minutes ago, TornACL said:

Why doesn't he know how to sit in a chair correctly? He is such a fucking weirdo.

I've been wondering the same thing. He has to have heard somewhere that sitting like that makes him look more powerful. He also heard the extra long tie makes him look thinner and that red ties show you mean business. Its inexplicable otherwise why he'd be doing any of these things these days.

SameSame · August 27, 2018

4 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Trump is currently doing a media event where Mexico officials congratulate him for his tremendous success on speaker phone in the Oval Office.

This is Trump taking control of the media away from the other developments in the news.

He didn’t have to make this a big TV production but he is.

Quality media manipulation.

Brisketexan · August 27, 2018

1 minute ago, SameSame said:

Fuck Pence too, eat a rancid dick you fuck.

You think that's punishment?

Chad Fuck · August 27, 2018

Just now, SameSame said:

Narrator: They hadn't.

Buzzrock · August 27, 2018

1 minute ago, SameSame said:

"Now that I've solved our trade issues with Gina, and completely denuclearized North Korea with the help of the lovely and amazing and talented Kim Jung Un, I've now insured that everything will be perfect with Mexico. At this rate I'll be done with this presidency and can leave office by the end of the year."

Hank Kingsley · August 27, 2018

"As you wish, Mother".

ChiTownDoc · August 27, 2018

3 minutes ago, SameSame said:

Fuck Pence too, eat a rancid dick you fuck.

Pence: "Oooohhh, please!"

ChiTownDoc · August 27, 2018

7 minutes ago, Hank Kingsley said:

LOL, could it be any more obvious Trump didn't write that? Fuck you, fat motherfucker. I'll celebrate hard when you croak. POS

lemonlime · August 27, 2018

JFC. The first words of the statement are "despite our differences on policy and politics." And he still can't say anything nice about McCain other than a generic I respect his service to our country. A third grader could do a better job being complimentary after being shamed into basic decency.

Hugo Stiglitz · August 27, 2018

54 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

This is a major doxxing.

Article is very long.

Revealed: Notorious Pro-Trump Misinformation Site True Pundit Is Run By An Ex-Journalist With A Grudge Against The FBI

How former-award-winning journalist Michael D Moore came to run a site filled with false reports and conspiracies.

By Craig Silverman

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/revealed-notorious-pro-trump-misinformation-site-true

Posted on August 27, 2018, at 2:57 p.m. ET

Days after former FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified in a closed-door meeting with the House Oversight and Government Reform and House Judiciary committees, pro-Trump website True Pundit published an explosive — and false — report about what she said.

The article cited anonymous “well-placed FBI sources” to claim Page revealed that Chinese hackers had accessed Hillary Clinton’s private server, stolen her emails, intercepted hundreds of top-secret documents including even the president's daily schedule — and that the FBI knew about it and did nothing.

In response, Page’s lawyer spoke publiclyto say the story was unequivocally false. Even Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert — who has pushed the as-yet unproven claim that a foreign power “other than Russia” gained access to Clinton’s server — disputed the story about Page. He told Fox News she “apparently didn’t know” about anything related to China, directly contradicting True Pundit.

Regardless, the false story generated more than 22,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook, and was a hit on Twitter, where famed Trump supporter Bill Mitchell shared it. (The story was also copied by notorious fake news peddler YourNewsWire, which generated another 77,000 Facebook engagements.)

The most Twitter engagements for the article were generated by the owner of True Pundit, who uses the handle @Thomas1774Paine and goes by the historical pseudonym Thomas Paine. He shared the link more than 25 times to his close to 200,000 followers, generating thousands of retweets and likes.

“MSM Quiet on This One -- Wonder Why?” Paine tweeted, suggesting big media outlets were covering up his false scoop.

It was classic Paine: publish a false story that paints the FBI and Hillary Clinton in a bad light, credit the information to anonymous sources, and claim the mainstream media is covering it all up.

Since launching the site in June 2016, Paine and True Pundit have carved out a unique niche among the news grifters capitalizing on our conspiracy-laden, deeply polarized information environment. As New York Magazine noted in a piece debunking two True Pundit stories, Paine is “fluent in the paranoid language of 2016 social media.”

Paine combines the use of a pseudonym with almost exclusive use of anonymous sources to establish the persona of a deeply connected reporter with a vast network of FBI, law enforcement, and government sources. As with the Page story, he adds false or conspiracy-filled claims to real events or documents in order to create the impression of being rooted in fact. And the retweets, traffic, and supporters have rolled in.

True Pundit is frequently cited by other hyperpartisan and conspiracy websites, and its stories are shared by prominent pro-Trump figures such as former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, actor James Woods, and others.

One of Paine’s 2016 stories even led to an email exchange between then–FBI director James Comey and his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, about whether True Pundit really had sources inside the FBI. Paine, of course, seized upon that as evidence that he’s as well-sourced as he claims. (He loves to criticize the bureau: The site has used the phrase “Federal Bureau of Incompetence” in the headline of five different stories.)

The question of who’s behind True Pundit has itself become the source of wild theories. Viral #resistance tweeter Seth Abramson dedicated an 84-tweet threadto True Pundit and Paine. Abramson argued that True Pundit is run by “a cadre of pro-Trump FBI agents and intel officers — some active, some retired — [who] conspired to swing the election to Trump.” (Another Twitter user investigated the account and concluded it’s a fake persona concocted by the Trump campaign’s social media team.)

More credibly, Zachary Elwood, an authorof poker books who also investigates social media accounts, published a detailed investigation of True Pundit at whoistruepundit.com that revealed a litany of details about Paine’s identity.

Among the many clues: Paine and his lawyer say he is based in the Philadelphia area; he has talked publicly about covering the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 as a newspaper reporter; he used to run a Twitter account called @HockeyIntel before changing his handle to @Thomas1774Paine; and he once tweeted a photo of what he said is his Gerald Loeb Award, a prestigious business journalism prize.

Could Paine really be perhaps the best-sourced reporter in America when it comes to big cases being investigated by the FBI, NYPD, and other agencies? Is he someone federal agents would leak incredibly sensitive information to, at the risk of being fired and/or prosecuted? Or is he using his pseudonym to conceal relevant details about his background that further undermine his many dubious claims?

To get answers, BuzzFeed News investigated Paine and True Pundit’s social media accounts, business and court records, and other publicly available information. They reveal that Thomas Paine is in fact Michael D. Moore, 51, a Pennsylvania man with a background in journalism, a criminal record as a result of an FBI investigation, and a long history of shady and illegal business practices.

Reveal hidden contents

After being contacted for comment, Moore did not respond and instead published a story on his website confirming BuzzFeed News' reporting.

Just as Paine has publicly stated, Moore won a Loeb Award in 1996 while working for the Record, a New Jersey newspaper. He also authored at least some coverage of TWA Flight 800: A copy of the front pageof a New Jersey newspaper from Sept. 12, 1996, features a story with his byline that examined airport security in light of the crash. (To read how BuzzFeed News found Moore, see the section, “Connecting Michael D. Moore to True Pundit and Thomas Paine” at the bottom of this story.)

Paine has also talked publicly about leaving journalism in the late ’90s to work in “intelligence.” During that same time period, Moore created a company called Dig Dirt that he described as an investigations service. He left his newspaper job to work on it full-time. The company’s site is now offline, but as recently as the fall of 2016 it contained language that directly echoes the messaging of True Pundit.

“We subordinate our desire for public recognition and publicity to the ever-growing need for confiendiality [sic] and LOYALTY. Old School,” said the Dig Dirt site.

True Pundit’s Patreon says it’s “creating old school journalism,” and the Paine Twitter account constantly refers to things as “old school.”

The Patreon’s description also says True Pundit offers “investigative intelligence unmatched elsewhere.”

Dig Dirt’s tagline? “Investigative intelligence.”

Moore also has a connection to the FBI that could explain True Pundit's fixation with the agency: he was arrested by federal agents in November 2011 for running two websites that sold pirated hockey DVDs and downloads. Months earlier, FBI agents executed a search warrant on his home and carted off the equipment he used to pirate hockey games and other content.

Moore pleaded guilty to one count of copyright infringement in June 2013. He was sentenced to time served of one day in prison, a year of house arrest, and three years of supervised release. During his release he had to provide monthly income statements and facilitate the “investigation of his financial dealings,” according to a sentencing document filed on June 17, 2013.

And so, almost exactly three years later, with probation and its financial disclosure requirements behind him, Moore launched True Pundit.

He didn’t waste any time pumping up its credentials. “True Pundit has folks who worked for the FBI and other agencies on staff,” claimed one of the site’s earliest articles.

Moore's hastily-published admission that he is in fact Thomas Paine made it clear that his case later fed his motivation to start a site that would hit back at the FBI.

"These bastards — and their bosses — were going to pay for violating my family. My kids. My home. One way or the other, I would have the last word," he wrote. "As I have throughout my life and career. And I was going to have to go back into journalism to even the score.

Many would have found it hard to believe that a man who’d been recently been arrested by the bureau, and pleaded guilty, now had former FBI employees on staff at his just-launched website.

But no one knew that True Pundit was the work of Michael D. Moore. Instead, it was Thomas Paine, his Loeb award, and all of his impressive-seeming anonymous sources pumping out frequently false stories to fire up the pro-Trump base.

When he launched True Pundit, Moore was careful to cover his tracks. He registered the domain privately, and later created a Delaware limited liability corporation, True Pundit Media LLC, through a third-party administrator. (Delaware LLCs do not require that the beneficiaries be publicly disclosed.)

Moore appears to have avoided using existing personal emails or social media accounts as contacts or administrators for his new project, or even to promote the site. This level of operational security makes sense in light of the fact that one of Dig Dirt’s main services was finding people. Moore knew how to hide.

It's very hard for a legitimate individual to become invisible," he told the Columbus Dispatch in a 2000 article about his company.

Like True Pundit, Dig Dirt boasted of having strong connections to the intelligence and law enforcement communities.

“To enhance DigDirt.com's investigative arsenal, the company also uses a number of former federal agents who spent their respected careers in agencies including the Secret Service, Central Intelligence Agency and Internal Revenue Service among others,” read the company’s About page in October 2000.

It’s unclear to what extent, if at all, Moore was in contact with former federal agents while running Dig Dirt. His website also made the eye-popping claim that in just a few years of operation the company had solved “more than 20,000 cases in over 100 countries.”

Rather than describing the company as a global investigative or intelligence agency, media articles about Dig Dirt that quoted Moore typically described it as an “online research firm,” “information broker,” or “public-records search firm.”

Dig Dirt was also the source of negative online comments from private investigators who used the service. One thread of messages on alt.private.investigator included complaints about being overcharged for services that didn’t work, having prices raised without notice, and receiving incorrect data. Moore’s subsequent businesses, including his illegal DVD and downloads operation, also left a trail of irate customers who said they’d been ripped off.

Moore started and ran Dig Dirt while he was still working full time as a reporter for the Record, a newspaper in New Jersey. In 1996, the year he shared a prestigious Loeb award with two colleagues, the paper found out about Moore’s side hustle and opened an internal investigation.

Editors were concerned he might have used his press access to public records to benefit his business. Moore was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, though the paper’s editor said the business “very clearly created the appearance and potential for a conflict of interest,” according to an article in Editor & Publisher.

Moore resigned and spoke out about what he felt was mistreatment at the hands of the paper’s leadership. "I think it's a problem when colleagues are actually investigating you with the permission of the newspaper," Moore said. "It's like a bad movie, and that's the main factor why I couldn't go back to work there."

Criticism of mainstream media now permeates the work of True Pundit. “One of the reasons you launch your own media site is to say what the main-stream media and other pundits simply won’t say. It’s called the truth,” he wrote in one story. (Moore’s also not a fan of BuzzFeed, or of the author of this story.)

But in spite of his disdain for traditional media, Paine’s Twitter bio claims some very mainstream accolades. It identifies him as a winner of a Loeb, which is true. It also claims Paine/Moore is a "2-Time Pulitzer Prize” investigative reporting nominee, and that he received a“George Polk Political Reporting” nomination. Neither is true. The Polk Awards does not announce nominees, only winners. The Pulitzers began announcing “finalists” in 1980, and Moore has never been one.

The Polk Awards told Elwood, the independent researcher, that True Pundit submitted a story for consideration for the 2017 awards. Anyone can make a submission; it is not a “nomination.” But True Pundit published a false articleclaiming it had received a "coveted" nomination anyway. (The Paine Twitter account has also falsely claimed to have won a Polk Award.)

Once out of journalism in the late ’90s, Moore became embroiled in lawsuits. In 1999, he sued the Washington law firm Steptoe & Johnson for $10 million. Moore’s suit alleged that people working for the firm had hacked into Dig Dirt’s websites hundreds of times, posted defamatory messages about him online, “and tried to cover it all up by doing their evil deeds under an e-identity swiped from an Alexandria, Virginia, furniture store owner,” according to a report in Wired at the time.

One key element of the case involved Moore’s ownership of a domain name that was similar to the URL of a competing investigation service used by the law firm. Moore in part alleged that the firm’s people had attempted to penetrate his systems via that URL. The firm, however, said the visits to the website were a mistake and the result of Moore cybersquatting on the domain.

The suit was dismissed with prejudice in August 2000 by agreement of all parties.

Also that year, Moore’s cybersquatting came back to haunt him. He was ordered to pay $25,000 in damages for squatting on six domains that contained names of law firms. When representatives of the firms contacted him to object to his ownership of the URLs, Moore asked for money, according to a news brief from the International Trademark Association.

The complaint also claimed that Mr. Moore diluted and detracted from the distinctiveness of the firms' trademarks by using the domain names to advertise his investigative services business,” it said.

Delaware corporate records indicate that Dig Dirt still owes $525 in back taxes dating from 2003, and that the company has not filed an annual report since 2000. It’s unclear how active Dig Dirt was from 2000 onwards. A scaled-down version of the website remained online until late 2016 before being taken fully offline after True Pundit launched. Moore, however, had long been working on other businesses by then.

As early as 2007, according to website archives and domain ownership records, Moore was selling Irish peat logs. That company soon became the focus of angry customer reviews online.

“I too could not get a response from either irishpeat.com or moore and assosciates [sic] … It's been over 5 weeks and I have not received my item,” read one reviewfrom 2009.

Others also complained of paying for but not receiving their orders. The same kind of complaints can be found online about hdhockey.com and broadstreetbullies.com, the sites Moore used for his illegal hockey DVD and downloads business. It was in operation as early as 2006, according to a federal indictment. Domain records from DomainTools suggest both sites may have changed ownership as early as 2004. (Moore also owns a company called Moore & Associates that was registered in Pennsylvania in 1999, according to state records. It’s unclear what this company does, but it remains active.)

I've been after this douche for years after he ripped a ton of people on here years ago. Kharma [sic] is a bitch!” wrote one person on the hockeyfights.com message board after learning of Moore’s arrest. The thread was soon filled with others who said they had paid for DVDs that never arrived. (One person, however, said he’d received his order.)

Even today, Moore is still engaged in his old habit of copyright infringement. Patrick Brown, CEO of Liftable Media, which publishes Conservative Tribune and the Western Journal, told BuzzFeed News he would be contacting True Pundit to demand it stop “stealing the first 10 paragraphs or so of our content” in articles on the site. (True Pundit has many articles that consist entirely of several paragraphs of a story published elsewhere, with a link to “read more.”)

“We will be reaching out to True Pundit to ask them to cease and desist regarding the text,” Brown said in an email.

The True Pundit YouTube channel was also terminated at some point since early June due to “multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, deceptive practices and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations.”

Given that he was busy selling Irish peat logs and pirated hockey content, it’s difficult to know how much, if any, investigative work Moore did in the decade or more before launching True Pundit. And when the site launched he had been out of journalism for roughly 20 years.

Did Moore maintain whatever contacts he might have had in the heyday of Dig Dirt and his newspaper career? Would these contacts have reengaged with a convicted criminal fresh off probation and now writing under a pseudonym? And what useful current information could longtime former agents have about current investigations and cases?

What’s clear is that Moore’s background in journalism, at Dig Dirt, and in online marketing gave him the skills needed to create incredibly suspect and outright false stories that spread widely among pro-Trump networks on Facebook and Twitter. True Pundit’s bread and butter — what drives viral traffic to the site and inspires Paine’s supporters on Patreon — are the stories often credited to its “investigative bureau.”

A review of True Pundit’s top-performing content on Facebook and Twitter reveals many false stories and those built on big unverified claims that veer into the realm of conspiracy. Its biggest hit on Facebook is a November 2016 story that helped contribute to the creation and spread of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. It has generated more than 174,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook, been shared on Twitter more than 15,000 times, and received more than 19,000 upvotes and comments on Reddit.

“BREAKING BOMBSHELL: NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes with Children, Child Exploitation, Pay to Play, Perjury,” read the headline.

The story was built on the recent news that the FBI had reopened an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails after discovering messages on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

In the end, the FBI found that the emails in question were largely duplicates, and soon closed the investigation. But before that happened, True Pundit quoted “NYPD sources” to claim that there was enough information on the laptop “to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life.”

It quoted one “NYPD Chief” saying, “What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach.”

The story also claimed that this senior NYPD officer was ready to go public with the contents of the laptop if they were not released by the FBI. But in reality, no incriminating information was found on the laptop about perjury, money laundering, or child exploitation related to Clinton or any of her advisers. And in spite of the anonymous “NYPD Chief” declaring the emails had “turned [his] stomach,” no such emails ever surfaced. (Weiner pleaded guilty to federal obscenity charges related to text messages and Skype chats with a minor.)

Clinton is a frequent target of the site. True Pundit was the source of the made-up claim that Clinton once asked “Can’t we just drone this guy?” about Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Paine’s report cited “State Department sources” and relied on a total misrepresentation of standard State Department language. The story was soon amplified by WikiLeaks itself, as well as by Infowars, Russia Today, and others. It generated more than 83,000 engagements on Facebook and was shared on Twitter more than 80,000 times. (It's also the story True Pundit submitted for a Polk Award.)

The false claim that Hillary Clinton used a tiny earpiece during one of the presidential debates also originated with True Pundit. It cited “NYPD sources involved with the NBC forum’s security detail.” Fox News, Infowars, and otherspicked it up. (Donald Trump Jr. also tweeted the resulting Infowars story.)

The site has also falsely claimed that Clinton used hand signals with one of the debate moderators during a 2016 presidential debate, and that she was drunk one morning before a campaign rally.

The FBI is another favorite target. The site published a series of conspiracy-laden stories alleging that the bureau’s leadership covered up evidence suggesting that Las Vegas mass shooter Stephen Paddock was not alone. One story also falsely claimed Paddock was a member of Antifa and that “FBI & Vegas police worked hard to conceal Paddock’s politics.”

The site also speculated that Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooter Omar Mateen was an FBI informant, and that the agency was trying to cover that up. Moore later updated his theory to say “definitively” that Mateen was either an FBI informant or he was somehow radicalized by FBI informants during a botched operation. (Neither are true, though Mateen’s father was an informant.)

More recently, True Pundit has been focused on stories that paint the picture of a broad conspiracy involving every US intelligence agency, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, former attorney general Loretta Lynch, British intelligence, Sen. John McCain, former US attorney Preet Bharara, former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, and others in an illegal plot to prevent Trump from winning the election.

The site has also claimed that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Michael Flynn were allwiretapped as part of this plot as early as 2015. (It’s no surprise, then, that in one of his YouTube appearances as Paine, Moore voiced praise for Infowars conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, a major proponent of the Qanon conspiracy theory.)

David Gomez is a former FBI national security executive who reviewed several True Pundit stories at the request of BuzzFeed News. He said some displayed a lack of understanding about basic FBI procedures.

"The key thing that I took away from those stories is that a lot of the quotes and a lot of the factual situations that he relates do not ring true based on my 28 years of experience in the FBI," Gomez said in an interview.

Gomez said it's possible True Pundit is in touch with a former agent or two, but said the articles do not reflect the work of someone with high-level bureau sources and insight into ongoing investigations.

I think he may have one or two people that’s he talking to on a regular basis. I think it would be the same person providing a similar type of information," Gomez said. "But I also think, and it’s clear from his writing, that he’ll also take a bit of what someone says and spin it. And I don't for a second believe his quotes."

In some cases, Moore (as Paine) later claimed his “exclusives” were correct when news broke that was tangentially related. His story that helped feed the Pizzagate conspiracy now carries five bullet points at the top that reference subsequent events as if they support his initial report.

The fact that Weiner later pleaded guiltyto federal obscenity charges is cited as proof of True Pundit’s claim that his laptop would show evidence of “Child exploitation” and “Sex crimes with minors (children).” In reality, the laptop was originally obtained by law enforcement as part of its investigation into Weiner for exactly those reasons. But none of True Pundit’s claims about the laptop having evidence of crimes by Clinton or others proved true.

None of that stopped the site from boasting in June of this year that its story was correct. As evidence, it cited the FBI inspector general’s report about bureau activity leading up to the 2016 election. In a section about Weiner’s laptop, the report contained a reference to “crime against children” and the “sexual exploitation of children.” As noted above, the investigation into him sexting with a minor was why law enforcement obtained his laptop in the first place. Neither reference to child exploitation in the report was connected to Clinton or anyone other than Weiner.

True Pundit claimed vindication anyway. “So who in the media or some of the other half-witted critics out there in social media land are going to be the first to apologize for hammering True Pundit’s reporting in 2016?” its story asked.

Any of the above stories alone should do deep damage to a site’s credibility, and its ability earn revenue and attract an audience. But the opposite has happened for True Pundit, according to traffic measurement services Alexa and SimilarWeb.

Over the past period of nearly a year, as other conservative sites struggled with low or inconsistent traffic, True Pundit has enjoyed a climb in audience.

Moore also sells True Pundit merchandise, has close to 250 people supporting a Patreon, and earns advertising revenue thanks to an arrangement with Revcontent. (A 2017 analysis by BuzzFeed News found that Revcontent was monetizing more fake news sites than any other ad network. The company respondedby labeling the story fake news.)

For a period this summer, True Pundit was also working with Intermarkets, a Washington ad firm that handles advertising for the Drudge Report, among other prominent conservative sites.

“We no longer work with Truepundit.com,” said Kary Jones, the manager of publisher development for Intermarkets, in an email to BuzzFeed News. “You can reach out to them directly.”

Jones did not answer follow-up questions about how long they worked together or why the relationship ended.

Unmasking Moore and revealing his criminal history, potential grudge against the FBI, lack of recent work in journalism or investigations, and string of false stories attributed to anonymous sources should cause many to discount True Pundit as a source.

But the reality is his audience is already invested in his fake scoops about the deep state, out-of-control federal agencies, and child exploitation. They will almost certainly stay with him. Moore can simply portray himself as yet another victim of the FBI, mainstream media, and deep-state complex, all while promoting his Patreon and True Pundit merchandise.

Before he became Thomas Paine, Moore was @HockeyIntel on Twitter. With that account, he showed a particular interest in smaller leagues such as the United States Premier Hockey League. He also displayed the same combativeness and ego that would come to the forefront when he later switched to @Thomas1774Paine. (Twitter allows people to swap one username for another and keep their followers and old timeline.)

But prior to taking on his Paine account and persona, Moore unwittingly left enough clues on his old hockey account to connect the dots.

As part of his research into True Pundit, Zachary Elwood collected old tweets that referenced @HockeyIntel. BuzzFeed News noted that another Twitter account, @Dig_Dirt, often replied to threads to support @HockeyIntel’s comments.

In one 2014 tweet, @Dig_Dirt jumped in on a thread between @HockeyIntel and another account. The phrasing of the tweet (“As a parent … we know the scoop.”) suggested the same person might be running both @Dig_Dirt and @HockeyIntel:

That account had earlier shared a YouTube video of a young defenseman with the last name Moore. The person running @Dig_Dirt also spoke about the player in another tweet as if they were his parent. From there, BuzzFeed News was able to determine that the player’s father is Michael D. Moore. Research on Moore quickly revealed he fit all of the disclosed characteristics of Thomas Paine’s real identity.

Another link between Moore and True Pundit is that the @Thomas1774Paine Twitter account has twice praised tweets sent from the Twitter account of the sports apparel company run by Moore’s son, the former hockey player.

In the end, Moore’s careful work to conceal his true identity was undone by a sockpuppet account and a father’s pride.

Abramson getting chippy with the author of this piece, looks like Abramson was correct.

Edited August 27, 2018 by Hugo Stiglitz

AbeFroman · August 27, 2018

22 minutes ago, Hank Kingsley said:

He was reportedly pressured into that by members of the Senate, yet he can throw out compliments and well wishes at the drop of a hat to Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin.

Hugo Stiglitz · August 27, 2018

SameSame · August 27, 2018

3 minutes ago, AbeFroman said:

He was reportedly pressured into that by members of the Senate, yet he can throw out compliments and well wishes at the drop of a hat to Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin.

Well he didn't write that statement on McCain, not a single fucking word.

DDD Dad · August 27, 2018

4 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

No big deal. Michael, we need you to write another check.

Longhorn_Fan68 · August 27, 2018

Michael? Oh, right...

Hugo Stiglitz · August 27, 2018

Oh, Bruce Ohr has a history of fighting Russian organized crime?

What a surprise!

"Those who know Mr. Ohr seem perplexed that the president has singled him out. Co-workers and former associates describe him as a scrupulous government official who cares deeply about the Justice Department."

"As oligarchs and gangs flourished in Eurasia after the fall of the Soviet Union, Mr. Ohr, his deputies, the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors tackled Russian crime syndicates"

" He sent top deputies to Hungary to root out the nascent Russian mob in the early 2000s. F.B.I. agents viewed the commitment as a sign of his seriousness about combating Russian organized crime."

"In 2006, Mr. Ohr was part of a group of government officials who revoked the visa of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire and aluminum magnate."

Surprise, surprise, surprise . . .

"Mr. Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, has been tied to the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted last week of tax and bank fraud."

This article is full of great background on Orh, his connections to Christopher Steele, and how that factors into the Russia probe. But boy does it also highlight why Mr. Ohr might be on Trump's enemies list. Or Putin's. Or same difference.

ChiTownDoc · August 27, 2018

1 hour ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Abramson getting chippy with the author of this piece, looks like Abramson was correct.

Good. More shady fucks need to be doxxed.

Message Board User · August 27, 2018

Trumpism corrupts. Never forget that.

Biff Tannen · August 27, 2018

3 minutes ago, Message Board User said:

Trumpism corrupts. Never forget that.

torbush

staboner · August 27, 2018

3 minutes ago, Message Board User said:

Trumpism corrupts. Never forget that.

Chuckie Finster · August 27, 2018

8 minutes ago, Message Board User said:

Trumpism corrupts. Never forget that.

This is fucking disgraceful.

Hugo Stiglitz · August 27, 2018

Really tells you all you need to know about those celebrating McCain’s death.

Tuco · August 27, 2018

Trumpism corrupts. Never forget that.

Well, Inhofe has been an idiot for a very long time.

ChiTownDoc · August 27, 2018

2 hours ago, AbeFroman said:

His body is like an over sized sack of mud, he's all fucked up.

More like 400lbs of shit stuffed in a 200lb sack.

JimmyJames · August 27, 2018

Was out walking the trail around the lake today and happened to walk past three older white gentleman. As I was passing I briefly overheard their conversation and it went like this.

Old white guy #1 says to old white guy #2 “so your boy likes to talk a lot about NFL players kneeling and disrespecting the flag, and yet I wake up this morning after McCain dies over the weekend and the flags at the White House are at full staff.”

Old white guy #2 (who I’m assuming is a trumpkin based on the statement by #1) is somewhat incredulous and says “they’re not at half staff?” To which #1 says they are not.

Old white guy #3 looking none too happy simply declares that “McCain is a war hero” and says no more. He was wearing a navy baseball cap.

Bottom line is it doesn’t surprise me that president shitstain changed his pea brain mind later on today about flying the flags at half staff. If he loses the old white guy support he’s beyond fucked.

Edited August 27, 2018 by JimmyJames

Radical Larry · August 27, 2018

This was perfect

Anastasis · August 27, 2018

1 hour ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

"As oligarchs and gangs flourished in Eurasia after the fall of the Soviet Union, Mr. Ohr, his deputies, the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors tackled Russian crime syndicates"

...

"Mr. Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, has been tied to the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted last week of tax and bank fraud."

This article is full of great background on Orh, his connections to Christopher Steele, and how that factors into the Russia probe. But boy does it also highlight why Mr. Ohr might be on Trump's enemies list. Or Putin's. Or same difference.

Same Deripaska who threw a birthday part for John McCain on his yacht? Same Deripaska that Christopher Steele was lobbying Ohr on behalf of? A strange web indeed.

Hugo Stiglitz · August 27, 2018

Sigh

Anastasis · August 27, 2018

Why was Steele lobbying Ohr on behalf of Deripaska?

Hugo Stiglitz · August 27, 2018

Why don’t you provide some facts? Can you directly link Steele to Deripaska?

Steele working for an outfit that did work for a law firm that Deripaska did business with is a popular right wing talking point for obvious reasons.

Edited August 27, 2018 by Hugo Stiglitz

Bama Chick · August 27, 2018

All that’s missing is her eyes blinking “SOS” in Morse Code.

SuingToGetAMessageBoard? · August 27, 2018

There has to be some sort of relationship between Dotus and her. You hear too many whispers of him choosing some particular course with respect to Stormy or whoever was because of wanting to hide it from Melania.

Bama Chick · August 27, 2018

I’m guessing there’s a clause in their pre-nup that gives her an assload more money if he is proven to have cheated on her.

It’s not because he cares about her or her feelings. He doesn’t have the capacity for such.

Hugo Stiglitz · August 27, 2018

Nothing to see here...

Researcher Reports Soviets Created Child-Trafficking Rings in the West for Blackmail

The rings are believed to be still operating

BY JOSHUA PHILIPP, THE EPOCH TIMES

https://www.theepochtimes.com/researcher-reports-soviets-created-child-trafficking-rings-in-the-west-for-blackmail_2420059.html

February 19, 2018 Updated: August 20, 2018

A scholar on Soviet Russia has uncovered claims that former General Secretary Yuri Andropov wanted to subvert the West by creating child trafficking and pedophile networks to blackmail business leaders and politicians.

Details on the program were uncovered by Jeffrey Nyquist in his research on communist regimes and their influence on the West. His main source is the grandson of a former member of the Soviet Central Committee who opposed the program and was possibly killed because of his opposition. Two other sources of his were defectors from the Soviet Union who revealed information on Soviet experiments on pedophilia and sexual perversion.

All three requested to have their identities withheld, as they believe that this abuse continues, and speaking on record would endanger their lives.

The Soviet leaders had begun planning the program in the late 1970s, when Andropov was chairman of the KGB—the Soviet intelligence agency that was set to run the operations. Nyquist noted, however, that the program was controversial even by the standards of the Soviet leaders.

His contact, who is currently living in the West, said his grandfather was part of a faction within the Central Committee that opposed the program; yet the dissenters, including his grandfather, were believed to have been killed for their opposition, and the program was able to move forward.

“This grandfather told his family, ‘Andropov is building networks for child trafficking and pedophilia, and this is a project the KGB has begun internationally, around the world,’” Nyquist said. The purpose of the program was to seduce politicians and business leaders, then control them as agents through blackmail.

The grandfather understood what it meant to oppose Andropov. According to Nyquist, he told his family that Andropov would kill him if the program prevailed, and that if he died, his wife would need to flee with their children to another city; and that if the KGB ever knocked on their door, they would again need to flee, and to “never look back.”

“And, of course, that is what happened. The grandfather died under mysterious circumstances,” Nyquist said. “Whatever the struggle was within the central committee, he lost.” His family fled, as he requested.

Around the same time, two other eyewitness sources of Nyquist’s say the Soviet Union began conducting experiments in its Komsomol camps on how to grow sexual perversions. The camps were for members of the communist Young Pioneers and included children aged 10 to 15. Nyquist interprets these Kosmosol events as connected to the Andropov plan his source told him about.

According to Nyquist, the Soviets were organizing orgies in some of the camps, and “they were trying to locate perverts to recruit them.”

“The idea was that in these Komsomol camps they were looking for people who had psychological problems that caused them to become sexually perverse in different ways,” Nyquist said. “It was like they were studying different perversions and the causes, and how to cultivate that, how to extend it, what kind of things draw people toward blacker perversions.”

The program the grandfather described was a classic honeytrap—a method of espionage to lure people into compromising sexual encounters for blackmail. This program took it a step further, however, by using children as the bait.

It was a form of “false flag recruitment,” according to Nyquist, where the KGB agents likely did not reveal themselves as agents to their targets. He noted that “if the KGB honeytraps somebody, they don’t know who they’re working for, because the KGB officer may be somebody who speaks English without an accent who merely references themselves as part of an organized crime group.”

The tactic is still widely used, including by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP was accused in 2015 of using attractive women to seduce spies from the British MI6 intelligence agency and lure them into honeytraps to obtain state secrets. A top-secret MI6 memo obtained by the UK’s Mirrornews outlet said Chinese spies were “aggressively” targeting spies and their families.

Honeytraps were also very common under the Soviet Union. Former KGB General Oleg Kalugin explained it once, stating according to Foreign Policy that, “In America, in the West, occasionally you ask your men to stand up for their country. There’s very little difference. In Russia, we just ask our young women to lay down.”

In conventional honeytraps, the target may be controlled either by a lover who is secretly a special agent, or with evidence of an extramarital affair—something that in politics can ruin a career.

With pedophilia, however, the scandal and consequences are much more severe, and the effects of the honeytrap are much more binding.

Nyquist referred to it as “the ultimate blackmail.”

The timing of the Soviet child trafficking program corresponds with a sudden uptick of pedophile rings uncovered in the West. While it’s likely similar forms of abuse had existed previously, the new scandals aligned closely with what Nyquist’s source warned of.

In the 1980s and into the ‘90s, shocking cases of pedophilia and extreme abuse began to emerge in the United States, Australia, and Europe. Many of the cases involved high-level officials. Some were prosecuted, but many were thrown out due to lack of physical evidence and child testimony not being recognized.

Among the most prominent cases was that of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile accused of holding underage girls as sex slaves on his private Caribbean island. He flew numerous top politicians and business leaders to the island on his private plane, dubbed by news outlets as “The Lolita Express.” According to press reports, the plane has a bed that was used for sex with young girls. According to the same reports, flight logs from Epstein’s plane show that former President Bill Clinton flew on The Lolita Express 26 times.

Numerous girls alleged they were sexually abused by Epstein, and Epstein was charged by the Palm Beach police department. Yet after a plea deal, he was sentenced in 2008 and served only 13 months in prison for one charge of soliciting prostitution from a 14-year-old girl.

A 2006 court filing, cited by the New York Post, says that a police search of Epstein’s mansion found he wired it with hidden cameras to record his guests engaging in orgies with underage girls, which he could use for blackmail.

Epstein was very well connected. It has been reported that Epstein kept contact numbers of figures including Tony Blair, Naomi Campbell, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Bloomberg, and Richard Branson, but no flight logs have ever surfaced showing any of them ever flew to Epstein’s island. Many of his A-list contacts dropped him after his 2008 conviction.

Often overlooked in Epstein’s case is that the father of his ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell was deceased media tycoon Robert Maxwell, whom Ghislaine accused of sexually abusing her.

Robert Maxwell may have also been a Soviet spy. According to FBI files released in 2013, Maxwell, who was born in Czechoslovakia and was living in the United Kingdom, was believed to be using his Pergamon Press media empire in the 1950s to provide intelligence to the Soviet Union.

The heavily redacted reports noted that when Maxwell and his business partner Kurt Wallersteiner were running their Anglo-Continental Exchange firm in London in 1953, both had “allegedly been recruited by the Soviet intelligence service for espionage purposes.”

Former FBI agent Marc Ruskin said in a previous interview that two agents from the Belgian national police told him of a child abuse ring in Belgium in the mid-1990s that also allegedly involved government officials.

“They had been working on a case that involved political corruption, and also there was a child pornography aspect to it as well,” he said. “And as their investigation proceeded, they began to develop subjects—targets of the investigation—who were high-level public officials.”

As their investigations grew deeper, however, the agents were called into their supervisor’s office and told to drop the case. Ruskin said, referring to political corruption of law enforcement, that “this was Western Europe—not some undeveloped country with a dictator. If it can happen in Western Europe, it can happen anywhere.”

What Ruskin reported happened in Belgium, shocking claims of a pedophile ring servicing high-level officials whose investigation was hushed up, has happened elsewhere in the West. Unfortunately, there is no single source tracking reports of pedophile rings, and there is a pattern of mysterious events obstructing their investigation when they are reported.

Starting in 1980, victims of pedophile networks that fit the picture outlined by the Soviets began to step forward in the West, but a new element began to be commonly reported: Satanic practices. Accounts by child victims and police reports reveal shocking claims of sexual abuse, dark occult practices, and the involvement of high-level officials.

This began the so-called Satanic panic, which lasted into the mid-90s. It resulted in prison sentences for only a handful of perpetrators, and also led to multiple claims of government-level conspiracies behind the rings.

Among the most famous cases was the Franklin child prostitution ring case from 1988 to 1990. The case in Omaha, Nebraska, alleged that high-level politicians were involved in a child prostitution ring, where children were flown to private parties of politicians where they were abused. Victims alleged other crimes including cannibalism, human sacrifice, and drug trafficking.

According to Nyquist, when rumors of high-level Satanic-themed pedophile rings again emerged in 2016, his contact whose grandfather detailed the Soviet plot became nervous and afraid.

“I have to tell you he became very frightened, last year,” he said. “I went to breach the subject with him again, and he said ‘absolutely I do not want to talk about this; this scares me too much.’ Because he believed this is such a significant part of the Russian power, these pedophile networks, that if you talk about it you might be dead.”

Nyquist said his sources did not mention the element of Satanic abuse in the alleged Soviet-backed pedophile rings, but he noted that, as someone who has studied communist methods of infiltration and subversion, it doesn’t seem unusual.

“When the communists design an attack, they use such horrible methods; one of the advantages of a horrible method is that nobody believes that anyone would do such a thing,” he said. The elements of forcing victims to commit ritual murder—and killing any who refused to participate—would also work as a control mechanism over anyone involved, since they would all be guilty, he said.

He said the overall system, if true, would have given the Soviets and later post-Soviet participants significant power in establishing networks of influence and control. He noted that even just among business leaders, since they often fund politicians and political causes, by blackmailing them “you’re suddenly getting into the fringes of the political system. You’re able to penetrate the political system.”

“Pedophilia, if you look at it, is an important tool for corrupting, controlling, and manipulating a foreign government, and sabotaging its economy, sabotaging its political process, even sowing confusion,” he said. “This whole thing can be used in all kinds of creative ways to hurt the target country.”

Bozo_Casanova · August 27, 2018

Why don’t you provide some facts?

Both sides! /Anastasis

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