Maria Butina, the alleged Russian spy who posed as a gun rights activist to court influence among Republicans, will plead guilty today for conspiring to violate Section 951 - the federal statute referred to by the DOJ as "espionage-lite" - during the 2016 election. She has also ...read more
Over the past few weeks, Paris and France at large have been rocked by the gillet jaunes ('yellow vests'), who have taken to the streets. The protestors were ostensibly motivated by French President Emmanuel Macron's fuel tax, that puts disproportionate stress on rural French ...read more
Last week, the US House Intelligence Committee released approximately 3,517 Facebook ads purchased by the Russians between 2015-17, meant to influence the 2016 election, all of which are available to download. USA Today conducted a study of the ads and concluded that more than ...read more
Yesterday, the Associated Press published former FBI director James Comey’s memos from his meetings with President Trump. The memos reveal things we either know or have assumed about Trump: he’s petty, vindictive, obsessed with loyalty, and has an attention span that makes fleas ...read more
Having satirized British politics (The Thick of It/In the Loop) and American politics (the multiple Emmy-award-winning Veep), Armando Iannucci has now brought his hammer - and sickle - down on Mother Russia in The Death of Stalin, a farce that not only lives up to his previous ...read more
If Donald Trump did not collude with the Russian government to throw the 2016 election in his favor, he would no doubt be extremely alarmed about the definitive intelligence reports stating that the Kremlin is planning on disrupting the midterm elections this year. And yet ...read more
Yesterday, Robert Paul Preston and Tom Reed launched “New California,” a movement that would make the rural, inland part of California into the nation’s fifty-first state while leaving the coastal cities to their own devices (but keeping San Diego for themselves.) This is the ...read more
The Senate race in Alabama to fill the seat once occupied by Jeff Sessions is a microcosm of last year's presidential race. On one side we have Doug Jones, a sane, good-natured liberal; on the other we have Roy Moore, a rightier-than-right-wing Republican who believes, among ...read more
Over the weekend, Alabama Senate Candidate Roy Moore received a Twitter bounty many can only dream of - he nearly doubled his number of followers. 20,000 more people than before hit the "follow" button to read the thoughts of a man who lost his first judgeship in 2003 when he ...read more
California Representative Dana Rohrabacher, who never took a position the Kremlin didn't like, showed his true colors again when he brought Holocaust denier Charles C. Johnson to a meeting with Senator Rand Paul this week. Rohrabacher, who previously called the Charlottesville ...read more
Where there's liberal democracy, Julian Assange will be there to undermine it. Last year he supported Brexit, and he has taken meetings with one of its strongest advocates, Nigel Farage. Then he took stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee and weaponized them ...read more
As we piece together what Russian media did to manipulate our presidential election, utilizing social media to spread fake news and hacking state voter rolls, it is of the gravest importance that we not let them get away with this again. This past week, Russian media and ...read more
The Banter Long Read: A few months ago, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy was caught on tape joking, "There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump." Although McCarthy apologized for the remarks later on, he wasn't entirely wrong.... (Word Count: 1592) To ...read more
Vladimir Putin took the oath as Russia's president today with a ringing appeal for unity at the start of a six-year term in which he faces growing dissent, economic problems and bitter political rivalries. Putin, 59, was sworn in with his right hand resting on the Russian ...read more