Candace Marie Claiborne, a former employee of the U.S. Department of State, pleaded guilty today to a charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States, by lying to law enforcement and background investigators, and hiding her extensive contacts with, and gifts from, agents of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in exchange for providing them with internal documents from the U.S. State Department.
“Candace Marie Claiborne traded her integrity and non-public information of the United States government in exchange for cash and other gifts from foreign agents she knew worked for the Chinese intelligence service,” said Assistant Attorney General Demers. “She withheld information and lied repeatedly about these contacts. Violations of the public’s trust are an affront to our citizens and to all those who honor their oaths. With this guilty plea we are one step closer to imposing justice for these dishonorable criminal acts.”
According to the plea documents, Claiborne, 63, began working as an Office Management Specialist for the Department of State in 1999. She served overseas at a number of posts, including embassies and consulates in Baghdad, Iraq, Khartoum, Sudan, and Beijing and Shanghai, China. As a condition of her employment, Claiborne maintained a TOP SECRET security clearance. Claiborne also was required to report any contacts with persons suspected of affiliation with a foreign intelligence agency as well as any gifts she received from foreign sources over a certain amount.
Despite such a requirement, Claiborne failed to report repeated contacts with two agents of the People’s Republic of China Intelligence Service, even though these agents provided tens of thousands of dollars in gifts and benefits to Claiborne and her family over five years. The gifts and benefits included cash wired to Claiborne’s USAA account, Chinese New Year’s gifts, international travel and vacations, tuition at a Chinese fashion school, a fully furnished apartment, a monthly stipend and numerous cash payments. Some of these gifts and benefits were provided directly to Claiborne, while others were provided to a close family member of Claiborne’s.
In exchange for these gifts and benefits, as stated in the plea documents, Claiborne provided copies of internal documents from the State Department on topics ranging from U.S. economic strategies to visits by dignitaries between the two countries.
I’ve been way behind on posting the past week, and didn’t get a chance to post several fake news stories. It’s been a busy 10 days or so for fake news too. Here’s a list of fake news from the past week:
The president doesn’t, and Spicer never said he did.
Admitted satire outlet Newslo spread a rumor that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said “Trump has the legal right to cancel SCOTUS (The US Supreme Court) because they serve at his pleasure.” First off, no United States president has the legal authority to dissolve the Supreme Court. Secondly, Sean Spicer never made this statement to reporters. By its very nature, the U.S. Constitution prevents the president from disbanding the nation’s highest court.
The Chicago Cubs outfielder and his teammates visited the Oval Office during a visit to the White House last month. One picture shows Almora with his hand in his pocket and what at first glance could appear to be his middle finger sticking out. Several websites claimed Almora was making an offensive gesture toward the president. However, closer examination of the photo revealed Almora had two fingers displayed. Almora denied making a gesture and called the episode “unfortunate.”
False: 17 Intelligence Agencies Say Russia Behind Hacking
I’ve been telling you for months that there was never any evidence 17 agencies concluded Russia was behind the DNC hacking. The story was officially retracted at the end of June. That’s nearly two weeks ago. A California Democrat introduced legislation to require students to learn about this fake news as if it were real. Yet Democrats and members of the media continue to make this false claim this last week.
Perhaps he should have not taken 9 months to publicly denounce the 17 agency lie. As for the story’s origin … Hillary Clinton started the rumor, and no one bothered to vet it.
Acosta asked: “Trump said it was only 3 or 4. Where did he get this number?”
He got it from the Director of National Intelligence under Obama, James Clapper. Click the link above to Clapper saying he made this clear to Trump in early January.
WOW… The former controller of the BBC Lord Grade launches a very strong rebuke of the BBC over its bias and misleading reporting of Israel pic.twitter.com/tkeFEsaudp
— SussexFriendsIsrael (@SussexFriends) July 5, 2017
Polish First Lady Didn’t Stub President Trump
CNN’s Chris Cillizza got the ball rolling on the supposed snub by Polish First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda. The story then went viral with multiple major media outlets and personalities repeating the false claim. Newsweek, Time, Huffington Post, and the Washington Post (video title) all got in on the lie. It got so bad the President of Poland felt he had to address it publicly.
Contrary to some surprising reports my wife did shake hands with Mrs. and Mr. Trump @POTUS after a great visit. Let's FIGHT FAKE NEWS.
Cillizaa would later admit he new the original edited video was misleading. This appears to be an attempt to soften the backlash he was getting, but all it did was serve as proof he intentionally misled people with a fake story.
Members of the press widely circulated The Daily Beast’s claim on social media as evidence the Trump administration cannot come up with a better strategy than former President Barack Obama’s to defeat the terrorist group.
CNN Lies About States Cooperating With Trump’s Voter Fraud Panel
In reality, most states have not refused the data request. Kansas Secretary of State Kobach declared Wednesday that 14 states had refused and called news reporting by outlets like CNN “patently false, more ‘fake news.’”
Marks told police on June 19 he vandalized the property “out of ‘anger towards liberals and they are breaking major laws everyday and being disrespectful towards our government,'” according to the warrant for his arrest. He told police it was his hope that the vandalism would appear to have been done by the “Left.”
Global Warming Temperature Tampering Confirmed, Once Again
In fact, almost all the surface temperature warming adjustments cool past temperatures and warm more current records, increasing the warming trend, according to the study’s authors.
“Nearly all of the warming they are now showing are in the adjustments,” Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, a study co-author, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “Each dataset pushed down the 1940s warming and pushed up the current warming.”
“You would think that when you make adjustments you’d sometimes get warming and sometimes get cooling. That’s almost never happened,” said D’Aleo, who co-authored the study with statistician James Wallace and Cato Institute climate scientist Craig Idso.
Attacks On President Trump’s Election Integrity Commission Without Merit
In fact, the only connection between Blackwell and the 80-lb. paper is that when asked if he would accept registrations on other types of paper, he initially responded that the state should continue to apply one uniform standard. The heavier paper had served well for several election cycles, and Blackwell saw no need to abandon that standard.
But the state then received large numbers of registrations collected by activists and hand-delivered to election officials. Blackwell concluded that the heavier paper was intended to protect ballots in the mail, but that given the large numbers of registrations being hand-delivered on lighter paper, he issued a new administrative policy that election officials should accept all such registrations so long as the forms were properly filled out.
The New York Times was forced to issue a correction Wednesday to a story it published that initially claimed Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) was one of a number of Republicans lying low during the Fourth of July — except that Portman was anything but.
The Times story on a joint military exercise between the United States and South Korea noted that “the North Korean government belittled the joint exercise as ‘demonstrating near total ignorance of ballistic science.'”
But that statement came from the parody @DPRK_News account, in what was evidently a satirical tweet.
ABC News and Beef Products Inc (BPI) reached a confidential settlement which concluded a 5-year-old lawsuit as of June 27. BPI filed a $1.9 billion lawsuit against ABC News in 2012 for reports that the company’s lean finely textured beef (LFTB) as dangerous “pink slime.” ABC may have been liable for up to $5.7 billion if it lost the case because of South Dakota’s Agricultural Food products Disparagement Act.
Trump NATO Lies By CNN Debunked By CNN’s Own Reporting
On the morning of the Fourth of July, CNN political analyst Julian Zelizer, also a historian at Princeton University, inaccurately claimed that President Trump never made an Article 5 commitment to America’s NATO allies.
This one is unbelievably easy to debunk. All one has to do is go look at CNN’s own reporting, from a June 9 report on its website from CNN politics reporter Jeremy Herb, to see that CNN analyst Zelizer is lying on national television.
The headline of Herb’s early June report speaks for itself: “Trump commits to NATO’s Article 5.”
“I am committing the United States to Article 5,” the CNN report quotes Trump as saying at a news conference with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in the Rose Garden at the White House.
In fact, in the live broadcast on CNN, CNN contributor and Politico White House correspondent Tara Palmeri correctly noted that the president and administration do not feel the need to continue reaffirming Article 5 commitments to NATO allies because “they feel like they’ve already done that in the Rose Garden speech and prior talks.”
Media And Politicians Lie About Dana Loesch’s NRA Ad
James O’Keefe pointed out one of the most overlooked aspects of his new ‘American Pravda’ series on CNN is how they selectively edited a Trump supporter’s comments.
Ok, I’m not sure this technically belongs. If a news organization has a ton of fake followers, is that considered fake news? Did they pay for the followers? Are they just fake accounts? Is the audit even accurate? Nevertheless, I will include CNN’s large number of fake followers.
The two stories were taken down after the site realized they were full of “factual errors” and faulty sources, reports Variety.
“After a thorough investigation into the sourcing of two stories, ‘Here’s the Secret Backstage Trump Drama at Walt Disney World’s Hall of Presidents’ and ‘Behind the Scenes of Disney’s Donald Trump ‘Hall of Presidents’ Installation,’ and the identification of several factual errors, we have decided to retract both pieces,” Vice Media’s Motherboard editorial board said in a note.
“Data: Only 3% Of Planned Parenthood Services Go To Abortion Services,” the chyron incorrectly stated.
The true statistic, some estimate, is that abortion services provided are somewhere between 15 percent and 37 percent of Planned Parenthood’s overall services.
Maajid Nawaz runs Quilliam, a London-based organization that aims to counter jihadism and extremism around the world. Nawaz, who considers himself a former Muslim radical (and still identifies as Muslim), is now fighting back against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has labeled his organization a “hate group” for its strong stance against radicalism. For the record, the SPLC also put Ayaan Hirsi Ali on their list. Nawaz has filed a lawsuit against SPLC and many are left wondering how Quilliam could have received such a label in the first place. He has admitted he feels like there already is a target on his head from certain people in the Muslim community.
Will The Fake Russia Stories Ever Stop?
Obviously, this was the biggest fake news story recently, but I hadn’t had the time to publish it on the site yet in its own post. Though it is discussed several times in the Daily Show Prep.
On Thursday evening, CNN investigative reporter Thomas Frank published a potentially explosive report involving an investigation of a Russian investment fund with potential ties to several associates of President Donald Trump.
Trump’s tweets about Putin not going over well with Republicans
But by Friday night, the story was removed from CNN’s website and all links were scrubbed from the network’s social media accounts.
“That story did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted,” CNN said in an editors note posted in place of the story. “Links to the story have been disabled.”
What was really astonishing is that the story was quickly retracted and the three journalists who have had a fair amount of success and prestige in their past were let go, were forced to quit, apparently. It was astonishing in that regard. Plus, the story was so poorly vetted internally before it was released, is another reason why it was, as I keep saying, jaw-dropping. It’s not the first time a major news organization has screwed up, but this is a recent example and it really does have the effect of feeding Donald Trump’s campaign about fake news. It’s a gift from heaven for him.
New York Times Sued
Sarah Palin rightfully sued the New York Times for defamation after publishing a debunked and retracted fake news editorial linking her to Gabby Giffords being shot.
That’s just 27 recent stories (past two weeks) that are fake news. I could have added more, and some breaking this week are already being vetted. Anyone who thinks fake news isn’t an issue, and that major media isn’t responsible is utterly clueless.
