Despite a sycophantic and ass-kissing press, he still couldn't do it without a cheat sheet. I'm sure the questions were required to be submitted in advance so the staff could prepare this:
Since at least the beginning of August, the web domain Antifa.com has redirected Internet users to the campaign website for Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden.
What remains unknown is whether the redirect was established as a prank or because the left-wing extremists affiliated with Antifa genuinely support Biden, and whether not the Democrat presidential nominee is aware of the redirect.
What’s known is that the domain Antifa.com has existed since 2002, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers:
More importantly, as recently as as July 24th, the Antifa.com homepage had contained actual pro-Antifa propaganda, according to records by the Wayback Machine.
Look:
AUGUST 30, 2020
Rich Manhattanites are fleeing the city so fast because of the pandemic and deteriorating quality of life in the Big Apple that moving companies can barely keep up with them.
“It’s nuts!’’ said Perry Chance of “Show Up” movers to The Post on Sunday. “We have four of our own trucks — but we have so many books that we had to start using U-Haul trucks!”
“The volume has increased by at least 70 percent” in the past few months, he said.
“[Clients] are mostly moving out of luxury buildings. [People] say the rich are leaving New York. Well, they are!”
Chance said 25 percent of the company’s customers are heading from the city to states such as Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Another 5 percent are moving somewhere else in the Apple.
The rest, 70 percent, are moving elsewhere in New York — mainly Long Island, he said.
And it’s not only the wealthy who are trading big-city life for the suburbs.
“When you have an office on Park Ave, and you don’t see anyone but the less fortunate, the homeless, no more day-to-day workers, the high rent makes no sense,” explained a small-business owner at the U-Haul truck-rental center on West 23rd Street in Chelsea, as he prepared for a move to Long Island.
“I have 10 people who just moved out [of the city],” the Manhattan businessman said. “Two of my business partners and eight employees.”
Stephen Bisogno, a 41-year-old insurance underwriter, said he is moving with his wife and 2-year-old daughter from Murray Hill in Manhattan to upstate Poughkeepsie.
“In the ’burbs, it feels more normal — put a mask on, and do what you have to do,” Bisogno told The Post. “Here, all the stress and posturing by the de Blasio administration, it just adds to the stress on us.”
John Romero, 28, a furloughed house trombone player for the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan, said he is moving from the Upper West Side to Texas.
“There is not much work here for musicians,” he said. “I’m from Texas, and I have friends and family there.”
“Plus, teaching is part of my business, and people there will be more willing, less scared, to go out, go for lessons now.”
Guardian Angels founder and current mayoral hopeful Curtis Sliwa told The Post on Saturday that he has seen a huge wave of people moving from his neighborhood around West 87th Street.
“The mass evacuation of Upper West Siders from New York City is in full effect,” Sliwa said.
“The moment I walked out on my block near Central Park West, there was a moving truck,” he said. “I asked, ‘Where you going?’ and they said, ‘Virginia.’”
“They told me, ‘Curtis, first the pandemic hit us and now the quality of life is so bad.’ The woman was almost crying.”
Lats month, there was a 44 percent jump in home sales in New York City’s suburbs — including a 112 percent hike in Westchester County — compared to same month last year, according to the New York Times.
Meanwhile, Manhattan property sales dropped 56 percent.
A top Democratic operative says voter fraud, especially with mail-in ballots, is no myth. And he knows this because he’s been doing it, on a grand scale, for decades.
Mail-in ballots have become the latest flashpoint in the 2020 elections. While President Trump and the GOP warn of widespread manipulation of the absentee vote that will swell with COVID polling restrictions, many Democrats and their media allies have dismissed such concerns as unfounded.
But the political insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears prosecution, said fraud is more the rule than the exception. His dirty work has taken him through the weeds of municipal and federal elections in Paterson, Atlantic City, Camden, Newark, Hoboken and Hudson County and his fingerprints can be found in local legislative, mayoral and congressional races across the Garden State. Some of the biggest names and highest office holders in New Jersey have benefited from his tricks, according to campaign records The Post reviewed.
“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes — it can make a difference,” the tipster said. “It could be enough to flip states.”
The whisteblower — whose identity, rap sheet and long history working as a consultant to various campaigns were confirmed by The Post — says he not only changed ballots himself over the years, but led teams of fraudsters and mentored at least 20 operatives in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania — a critical 2020 swing state.
“There is no race in New Jersey — form City Council to United States Senate — that we haven’t worked on,” the tipster said. “I worked on a fire commissioner’s race in Burlington County. The smaller the race the easier it is to do.”
A Bernie Sanders die-hard with no horse in the presidential race, he said he felt compelled to come forward in the hope that states would act now to fix the glaring security problems present in mail-in ballots.
“This is a real thing,” he said. “And there is going to be a f–king war coming November 3rd over this stuff … If they knew how the sausage was made, they could fix it.”
Mail-in voting can be complicated — tough enough that 84,000 New Yorkers had their mailed votes thrown out in the June 23 Democratic presidential primary for incorrectly filling them out.
But for political pros, they’re a piece of cake. In New Jersey, for example, it begins with a blank mail-in ballot delivered to a registered voter in a large envelope. Inside the packet is a return envelope, a “certificate of mail in voter” which the voter must sign, and the ballot itself.
That’s when the election-rigger springs into action.
Phony Ballots
The ballot has no specific security features — like a stamp or a watermark — so the insider said he would just make his own ballots.
“I just put [the ballot] through the copy machine and it comes out the same way,” the insider said.
But the return envelopes are “more secure than the ballot. You could never recreate the envelope,” he said. So they had to be collected from real voters.
He would have his operatives fan out, going house-to-house, convincing voters to let them mail completed ballots on their behalf as a public service. The fraudster and his minions would then take the sealed envelopes home and hold them over boiling water.
“You have to steam it to loosen the glue,” said the insider.
He then would remove the real ballot, place the counterfeit ballot inside the signed certificate, and reseal the envelope.
“Five minutes per ballot tops,” said the insider.
The insider said he took care not to stuff the fake ballots into just a few public mailboxes, but sprinkle them around town. That way he avoided the attention that foiled a sloppy voter-fraud operation in a Paterson, NJ city council race this year, where 900 ballots were found in just three mailboxes.
“If they had spread them in all different mailboxes, nothing would have happened,” the insider said.
Inside Jobs
The tipster said sometimes postal employees are in on the scam.
“You have a postman who is a rabid anti-Trump guy and he’s working in Bedminster or some Republican stronghold … He can take those [filled-out] ballots, and knowing 95% are going to a Republican, he can just throw those in the garbage.”
In some cases, mail carriers were members of his “work crew,” and would sift ballots from the mail and hand them over to the operative.
In 2017 more than 500 mail-in ballots in New York City never arrived to the Board of Elections for races that November — leaving hundreds disenfranchised. They eventually were discovered in April 2018. “For some undetermined reason, some baskets of mail that were bound to the New York City Board of Elections were put off to the side at the Brooklyn processing facility,” city elections boss Michael Ryan said at the time of discovery.
Nursing Homes
Hitting up assisted-living facilities and “helping” the elderly fill out their absentee ballots was a gold mine of votes, the insider said.
“There are nursing homes where the nurse is actually a paid operative. And they go room by room by room to these old people who still want to feel like they’re relevant,” said the whistleblower. “[They] literally fill it out for them.”
The insider pointed to former Jersey City Mayor Gerald McCann, who was sued in 2007after a razor-thin victory for a local school board seat for allegedly tricking “incompetent … and ill” residents of nursing homes into casting ballots for him. McCann denied it, though did admit to assisting some nursing home residents with absentee ballot applications.
Voter Impersonation
When all else failed, the insider would send operatives to vote live in polling stations, particularly in states like New Jersey and New York which do not require voter ID. Pennsylvania, also for the most part, does not.
The best targets were registered voters who routinely skip presidential or municipal elections — information which is publicly available.
“You fill out these index cards with that person’s name and district and you go around the city and say, ‘You’re going to be him, you’re going to be him,” the insider said of how he dispatched his teams of dirty-tricksters.
At the polling place, the fake voter would sign in, “get on line and … vote,” the insider said. The imposters would simply recreate the signature that already appears in the voter roll as best they could. In the rare instance that a real voter had already signed in and cast a ballot, the impersonator would just chalk it up to an innocent mistake and bolt.
Bribing voters
The tipster said New Jersey homeless shelters offered a nearly inexhaustible pool of reliable — buyable — voters.
“They get to register where they live in and they go to the polls and vote,” he said, laughing at the roughly $174 per vote Mike Bloomberg spent to win his third mayoral term. He said he could have delivered the same result at a 70-percent discount — like when Frank “Pupie” Raia, a real estate developer and Hoboken nabob, was convicted last year on federal charges for paying low-income residents 50 bucks a pop to vote how he wanted during a 2013 municipal election.
Organizationally, the tipster said his voter-fraud schemes in the Garden State and elsewhere resembled Mafia organizations, with a boss (usually the campaign manager) handing off the day-to-day managing of the mob soldiers to the underboss (him). The actual candidate was usually kept in the dark deliberately so they could maintain “plausible deniability.”
With mail-in ballots, partisans from both parties hash out and count ballots at the local board of elections — debating which ballots make the cut and which need to be thrown out because of irregularities.
The insider said any ballots offered up by him or his operation would come with a bent corner along the voter certificate — which contains the voter signature — so Democratic Board of Election counters would know the fix was in and not to object.
“It doesn’t stay bent, but you can tell it’s been bent,” the tipster said. “Until the [certificate] is approved, the ballot doesn’t matter. They don’t get to see the ballot unless they approve the [certificate.]”
“I invented bending corners,” the insider boasted, saying once the fixed ballots were mixed in with the normal ones, the bed was made. “Once a ballot is opened, it’s an anonymous ballot.”
While federal law warns of prison sentences of up to five years, busted voter frauds have seen far less punishment. While in 2018 a Texas woman was sentenced to five years, an Arizona man busted for voting twice in the mail was given just three years probation. A study by the conservative Heritage Foundation found more than 1,000 instances of documented voter fraud in the United States, almost off of which occurred over the last 20 years.
“There is nothing new about these techniques,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at Heritage who manages their election law reform initiative. “Everything he’s talking about is perfectly possible.“
The city Board of Elections declined to answer Post questions on ballot security.
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) was the target of opposition research hits that a local newspaper, owned by a broader national chain, dutifully reprinted on behalf of Fusion GPS without disclosing to its readers the questionable source of the information.
The Fresno Bee published a story in the leadup to the 2018 midterm elections, in late May 2018, that claimed in its salacious headline that Nunes was associated with cocaine and prostitutes at a yacht party. “A yacht, cocaine, prostitutes: Winery partly owned by Nunes sued after fundraiser event,” read the headline from Fresno Bee reporter MacKenzie Mays on the May 23, 2018, article.
The article itself, however, does not back up the headline. What happened was that a winery that Nunes has a minority ownership stake in—meaning he has no management decision-making authority, just a minority stake in the firm—held a charity auction for a yacht ride. On the yacht ride, the winners allegedly, per a lawsuit from a winery staffer at the event, had been doing lots of cocaine and had prostitutes on board who engaged in nefarious acts. While that sounds like an awful experience for the staffer who endured it—the lawsuit was settled out of court—the idea this had anything at all to do with Nunes is simply untrue.
Kelly Carter, the spokesperson for the winery named Alpha Omega, made that clear in a statement to the newspaper. Rep. Devin Nunes is one of a few friends [Alpha Omega owner Robin Baggett] invited to invest in the winery in 2005. None of the investors has ever been involved with the management of the company. Robin is the sole managing partner and ultimate decision maker at Alpha Omega,” Carter said.
While Nunes did not comment for the original story, he did later run a series of advertisements against the newspaper over the salacious article for conduct to which he had no connection—pretty aggressive for a sitting member of Congress to challenge his local newspaper in broadcast advertisements.
Nunes says in one of the 2018 ads:
Like you, I live in the San Joaquin Valley. My family lives here, my daughters go to public schools here, and I spend most of my time here when I’m not in Washington or visiting United States military and intelligence personnel abroad. Sadly, since the last election, the Fresno Bee has worked closely with radical left wing groups to promote fake news stories about me. Now, I signed up for this job and I find the attacks amusing. I haven’t said much about the Bee’s strange crusade against me even when reporters went creeping around my neighbors’ and relatives’ homes. But the Bee has run multiple articles slandering a California Agri-Business simply because I’m one of its investors. It’s time to set the record straight. For many years, the owner of Alpha Omega, a small, family-owned winery and vineyard, has donated the use of its boat to charities for underprivileged kids. In 2015, one of the purchasers of this auction item abused the use of the boat. The Bee has run numerous false stories about this incident.
Nunes then says in the 2018 ad that listeners can “hear the real story” in a statement provided by the winery for broadcast. In that statement, a spokesperson for Alpha Omega says that the Fresno Bee “cited false information stating the people aboard the boat were Alpha Omega investors.”
The winery spokesperson statement continues:
In fact, as we informed the Bee, those aboard the boat had no personal or business connection to the winery or its owners. Furthermore, a Bee editorial claimed it’s unclear if Mr. Nunes was affiliated with the fundraiser for the boat when in fact we repeatedly told the Bee he had no affiliation with it whatsoever. The Fresno Bee also falsely reported that Alpha Omega sold wine to Russia while Mr. Nunes led an investigation of that country. We would appreciate it if the Fresno Bee would stop regurgitating false stories when it has the facts.
Nunes concluded in the ad that he does not mind the criticism of him, but the paper’s attacks on local businesses are a bridge too far:
The Bee’s band of creeping correspondents can go after me but for them to drag a family company through the mud and hurt innocent people’s livelihoods to advance their political agenda is wrong. The Fresno Bee and its parent company — McClatchy — should apologize to Alpha Omega, retract their false news stories and stop embarrassing the San Joaquin Valley.
The ads prompted the Fresno Bee’s editorial board to write a lengthy piece claiming Nunes’s claims in them were “fake news.”
In the editorial, the Bee’s first claim from Nunes that it took issue with was him saying in the ad that the newspaper “has worked closely with radical left wing groups to promote fake news stories about me.”
In response, the Bee claimed this was untrue. The newspaper’s editorial board wrote:
The Bee has never done any such thing. Does Nunes identify those groups he refers to? No. And he can’t, because such a thing never happened. The Bee’s newsroom follows time-honored ethical standards of journalism, and did for this story. One of the tenets is to let all subjects in a story have their say. But since Nunes refused to be interviewed for this story, his side could not be reported. He made it one-sided by his own choosing. By not talking to The Bee, then claiming the story to be “fake news,” Nunes reveals his strategy for dealing with Bee journalists. He also loves to combine the words ‘radical’ and ‘left wing’ to make a point to his conservative base.
The newspaper published this editorial in mid-June 2018, before evidence later emerged in November 2019 that proved Nunes correct—and the Bee incorrect.
Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm behind the now-debunked hoax of Russia collusion—which Nunes played a critical role in unraveling—was apparently behind the hit against Nunes, its leaders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch wrote in their book Crime in Progress. Simpson and Fritsch wrote:
In the end, Fusion found an obscure bit of litigation that lit up the race. In May, weeks after that discovery, Nunes’s ownership stake in the Napa winery Alpha Omega became national news when The Fresno Bee reported on a lawsuit filed in California state court by a young woman who had worked serving wine at a 2015 tasting event aboard the winery’s sixty-two-foot yacht.
In other words, the Fusion GPS leaders Simpson and Fritsch admit—or perhaps, more accurately, brag—in their book about being the ones who dug this up and got the newspaper to run the story.
Simpson and Fusion GPS were of course the ones behind the now discredited anti-Trump Christopher Steele dossier that led to the Russia hoax investigation. But when that was unraveling, according to Simpson’s and Fritsch’s book, they were engaged in a smear campaign against the leading Republican in Congress who was unpacking the entire scandal—and getting his local newspaper and the newspaper chain that owns it, McClatchy, to smear him in any way they could.
Nunes’s role in unraveling Simpson’s work to spark the now-debunked Russia scandal against Trump is featured in an upcoming film by Amanda Milius, the daughter of legendary screenwriter and director John Milius, titled The Plot Against the President.The documentary is a film version of Lee Smith’s bestselling book with the same title.
But the fact that Fusion GPS went to such lengths to try to politically destroy Nunes—and the fact that McClatchy newspapers and the Fresno Bee went along with it—are particularly interesting. Fresno Bee editor Joe Kieta did not reply to Breitbart News’s request for comment about Fusion GPS’s leadership bragging about planting the anti-Nunes hit in his newspaper—something that proves Nunes’s 2018 ad against the paper correct, and the newspaper’s 2018 editorial supposedly rebutting the ad incorrect.
What’s even more interesting about this is that the yacht, winery, cocaine, and prostitutes fake news hit is not the only hit piece that McClatchy’s newspapers published on Nunes that Fusion GPS is taking credit for. From McClatchy’s D.C. bureau, reporter Kate Irby bylined two pieces—both in July 2018—that claimed respectively Nunes misusedcampaign funds for Boston Celtics tickets and a Vegas trip, and for private jet charters. It turns out, according to Simpson’s and Fritsch’s book, both came from Fusion GPS.
They wrote in the book regarding the Vegas and Boston trips that “Fusion discovered” the information that would find its way into the McClatchy report, and regarding the private plane report that “Fusion found” the information that would find its way into that followup story. Unsurprisingly, like much of Fusion GPS’s work, neither of these stories has progressed beyond the original McClatchy article–suggesting that the supposed allegations of impropriety against Nunes from 2018 did not rise to the level of something serious enough for any actual action against him. In other words, they were nothing more than another political smear.
This hyper-targeted political campaign was so unusual for Fusion GPS, which had its case against Trump crumbling thanks to Nunes’s work unraveling the dossier, that Simpson and Fritsch even admit it in the book. They wrote:
Fusion ordinarily didn’t work on congressional races, but as the [2018] election drew closer, the firm began to mull a few ways it could have an impact. Later, it would decide to design and launch a more systematic cyber-monitoring campaign, but first it went small, focusing on a single congressional district in California’s heavily agricultural Central Valley. That solidly red seat happened to have been occupied since 2003 by one Devin Nunes.
McClatchy actually had a very close working relationship with Fusion GPS, far beyond its hits on Nunes. The newspaper chain admitted in a July 2017 article that it had obtained the now-infamous and demonstrably false dossier before it was publicly released by BuzzFeed. As far back as January 2017, McClatchy was pushing content from the dossier in the immediate aftermath of its release. Fusion GPS also pushed a false story—that McClatchy published—alleging that conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell was aware of a secret Russian plot to launder money to the Trump campaign through the NRA. McClatchy even falsely reported that ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was in Prague, according to cell phone records, and claimed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had proof of that, even though Mueller’s final report debunked it.
Nunes is currently waging a number of different lawsuits against various establishment media outlets, including McClatchy, as well as against Fusion GPS.
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