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Investigating and calling out a magazine and editor for which I felt empathy, and had historic connections to, hearing from its critics and dissidents, and finding whistleblowers and confidential inside sources was a challenge. But hearing responses from all sides was a duty.

I worked on it for six months, settling a first draft of my story to the CJR‘s line editor in the summer 2019. From then on my experience of the CJR was devastating and damaging.

After delivering the story and working through a year-long series of edits and re-edits required by Pope, the story was slow-walked to dismissal. In 2022, after Russian tanks had rolled towards Kyiv, I urged Pope to restore and publish the report, given the new and compelling public interest. He refused.

he trigger for my CJR investigation was a hoax concerning Democratic Party emails hacked and dumped in 2016 by teams from Russia’s GRU intelligence agency.  The GRU officers responsible were identified and their methods described in detail in the 2019 Mueller Report.  

The Russians used the dumped emails decisively – first to leverage an attack on that year’s Democratic National Convention; and then to divert attention from Donald Trump’s gross indiscretions at critical times before his election

In 2017, with Trump in the White House, Russian and Republican denial operations began, challenging the Russian role and further widening divisions in America. A pinnacle of these operations was the publication in The Nation on 9 August 2017 of an article – still online under a new editor – claiming that the stolen emails were leaked from inside the DNC.  

Immediately after the article appeared, Trump-supporting media and his MAGA base were enthralled. They celebrated that a left-liberal magazine had refuted the alleged Russian operations in supporting Trump, and challenged the accuracy of mainstream press reporting on ‘Russiagate’

Nation staff and advisors were aghast to find their magazine praised lavishly by normally rabid outlets – Fox News, Breitbart, the Washington Times. Even the President’s son.

When I was shown the Nation article later that year by one of the experts it cited, I concluded that it was technical nonsense, based on nothing.  The White House felt differently and directed the CIA to follow up with the expert, former senior National Security Agency official and whistleblower, William Binney (although nothing happened)

Running the ‘leak’ article positioned the left-wing magazine strongly into serving streams of manufactured distractions pointing away from Russian support for Trump.

I traced the source of the leak claim to a group of mainly American young right-wing activists delivering heavy pro-Russian and pro-Syrian messaging, working with a British collaborator. Their leader, William Craddick, had boasted of creating the ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy story – a fantasy that Hillary Clinton and her election staff ran a child sex and torture ring in the non-existent basement of a pleasant Washington neighbourhood pizzeria. Their enterprise had clear information channels from Moscow. 

We spoke for 31 minutes at 1.29 ET on 12 April 2019. During the conversation, concerning conflicts of interest, Pope asked only about my own issues – such as that former editor Victor Navasky, who would figure in the piece, had moved from running and owning The Nation to being Chair of the CJR board; and that the independent wealth foundation of The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel – the Kat Foundation – periodically donated to Columbia University.

She and her late husband, Professor Stephen Cohen, were at the heart of my reporting on the support The Nation gave to Putin’s Russia. Sixteen months later, as Pope killed my report, he revealed that he had throughout been involved in an ambitious and lucratively funded partnership between the CJR and The Nation, and between himself and vanden Heuvel. 

On the day we spoke, I now know, Pope was working with vanden Heuvel and The Nation to launch – 18 days later – a major new international joint journalism project ‘Covering Climate Now!‘

Soon after we spoke, the CJR tweeted that “CJR and @thenation are gathering some of the world’s top journalists, scientists, and climate experts” for the event. I did not see the tweet. Pope and the CJR staff said nothing of this to me. 

Any editor must know without doubt in such a situation, that every journalist has a duty of candour and a clear duty to recuse themselves from editorial authority if any hint of conflict of interest arises. Pope did not take these steps. From then until August 2020, through his deputy, he sent me a stream of directions that had the effect of removing adverse material about vanden Heuvel and its replacement with lists of her ‘achievements’. Then he killed the story

Working on my own story for the CJR, I did not look behind or around – or think I needed to. I was working for the self-proclaimed ‘watchdog of journalism’. I forgot the ancient saw: who watches the watchdog?

This week, Kyle Pope failed to reply to questions from Byline Times about conflicts of interest in linking up with the subjects of the report he had commissioned.

During the period I was preparing the report about The Nation and its editor, he wrote for The Nation on nine occasions. He has admitted being remunerated by the publication. While I was working for the CJR, he said nothing. He did not recuse himself, and actively intervened to change content for a further 18 months.

On April 16 2019, I was informed that Katrina vanden Heuvel had written to Pope to ask about my report. “We’re going to say thanks for her thoughts and that we’ll make sure the piece is properly vetted and fact-checked,” I was told

A month later, I interviewed her for the CJR. Over the course of our 100 minutes discussion, it must have slipped her mind to mention that she and Kyle Pope had just jointly celebrated being given more than $1 million from the Rockefeller Family and other foundations to support their climate project.

Pope then asked me to identify my confidential sources from inside The Nation, describing this as a matter of “policy”

Pope asked several times that the article be amended to state that there were general tie-ups between the US left and Putin. I responded that I could find no evidence to suggest that was true, save that the Daily Beast had uncovered RT attempting cultivation of the US left. 

Pope then wanted the 6,000-word and fully edited report cut by 1,000 words, mainly to remove material about the errors in The Nation article. Among sections cut down were passages showing how, from 2014 onwards, vanden Heuvel had hired a series of pro-Russian correspondents after they had praised her husband. Among the new intake was a Russian and Syrian Government supporting broadcaster, Aaron Maté, taken on in 2017 after he had platformed Cohen on his show The Real News. 

On 30 January 2023, the CJR published an immense four-part 23,000-word series on Trump, Russia and the US media. The CJR‘s writers found their magazine praised lavishly by normally rabid outlets. Fox News rejoiced that The New York Times had been “skewered by the liberal media watchdog the Columbia Journalism Review” over Russiagate”. WorldNetDaily called it a “win for Trump”.

Pope agreed. Trump had “hailed our report as proof of the media assault on Trump that they’ve been hyping all along,” he wrote. “Trump cheered that view on Truth Social, his own, struggling social-media platform

In the series, writer Jeff Gerth condemns multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning reports on Russian interference operations by US mainstream newspapers. Echoing words used in 2020 by vanden Heuvel, he cited as more important “RealClearInvestigations, a non-profit online news site that has featured articles critical of the Russia coverage by writers of varying political orientation, including Aaron Maté”.

As with The Nation in 2017, the CJR is seeing a storm of derisive and critical evaluations of the series by senior American journalists. More assessments are said to be in the pipeline. “We’re taking the critiques seriously,” Pope said this week. The Columbia Journalism Review may now have a Russia Problem.  

Mr. Trump “lost his grip” after the election, he writes.

“He stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unreasonable, and was off the rails,” Mr. Barr writes. “He surrounded himself with sycophants, including many whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories.”

Mr. Barr also denounces the inquiry by the F.B.I. and then the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into links between Russia and Trump campaign aides in 2016. He writes that “the matter that really required investigation” was “how did the phony Russiagate scandal get going, and why did the F.B.I. leadership handle the matter in such an inexplicable and heavy-handed way?”

On the scandal that led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, in which Mr. Trump withheld aid to Ukraine as leverage to try to get Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation into Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Barr was scathing.

He calls it “another mess — this one self-inflicted and the result of abject stupidity,” a “harebrained gambit” and “idiotic beyond belief.” But while Mr. Barr describes the conversation Mr. Trump had with Ukraine’s president on the topic as “unseemly and injudicious,” he maintains that it did not rise to a “criminal offense.”

His book expands on that theme, going through specific “fact-free claims of fraud” that Mr. Trump has put forward and explaining why the Justice Department found them baseless. He lists several reasons, for example, that claims about purportedly hacked Dominion voting machines were “absolute nonsense” and “meaningless twaddle.”“The election was not ‘stolen,’” Mr. Barr writes. “Trump lost it.”

Trump and Leo, a prominent conservative lawyer influential in his first term, have not spoken since 2020, according to people familiar with the matter. Their relationship ended over a heated fight in 2020 at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump accused Leo of picking Rod J. Rosenstein to be deputy attorney general, a person familiar with the matter said. Trump’s anger around Rosenstein centered on his decision to appoint special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to oversee the Justice Department’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election

Trump has signaled that he wants the Justice Department to go after his political opponents, and his associates have drafted plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to send the military against civil demonstrations. Near the end of his time in the White House, he repeatedly complained that his White House Counsel’s Office wasn’t doing enough to help him overturn the election results. His attorney general resigned after he would not back up his claims.

“He’s the leading candidate, so I don’t know that it matters what I think,” said Brent O. Hatch, a lawyer who is on the board of the Federalist Society.

Although Trump reshaped the Supreme Court while in office, leading to the overturning of Roe, he has sometimes told others that the decision is a political albatross for Republicans. And he has complained recently at rallies about the Supreme Court and the decisions the judges make, saying without evidence they rule too often against Republicans to show “independence.”

Trump is running on a campaign focused, at least in part, on vengeance and retribution. The former president has made it clear that loyalty would be a key criteria in how he makes decisions if returned to office.

Most members of the Federalist Society board of directors declined to comment on the record or did not respond to a request for comment. Interviews with a dozen other prominent lawyers suggested most had serious misgivings about Trump returning to power but were resigned to the high likelihood he will be the nominee, and many expressed openness to working for another Trump administration.

There is a heated debate underway in conservative legal circles about how GOP lawyers should interact with what increasingly appears to be the likely nominee, according to conservative lawyers who described the private talks on the condition of anonymity. The discussions include whether they would return to work for Trump.

One prominent lawyer described a November dinner he attended where almost all the attorneys in the room said they would prefer another nominee — but were split on whether to back Trump if he wins

Leo, McConnell and McGahn have expressed reservations about what another Trump term would look like, though they have largely stayed away from a public fight.

Some of the informal conversations and debates underway in conservative legal circles about a second Trump term include Project 2025, a coalition of right-wing groups that has outlined plans for the next Republican administration. Clark, who is working on the Insurrection Act for Project 2025, has been charged with violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering law, in the case alleging Trump and co-conspirators of interfering in the 2020 election. Clark pleaded guilty.

The involvement of Clark with that effort has alarmed some other conservative lawyers who view him as a potentially disastrous choice to take a senior leadership role at the department because of his past activities around the 2020 election.

Rob Kelner, a prominent conservative lawyer, said more conservative lawyers should have spoken up against Trump, but that it would cost them business and relationships.

“There were so many positions he took and so many statements that he made that flatly contradicted the foundational principles of the conservative movement and the Federalist Society, and yet it was so rare to hear conservative lawyers speak out against Trump,” Kelner said.

Brown University professor Claire Wardle said the Observatory had created innovative methodology and trained the next generation of experts.

“Closing down a lab like this would always be a huge loss, but doing so now, during a year of global elections, makes absolutely no sense,” said Wardle, who previously led research at anti-misinformation nonprofit First Draft. “We need universities to use their resources and standing in the community to stand up to criticism and headlines.”

The study of misinformation has become increasingly controversial, and Stamos, DiResta and Starbird have been besieged by lawsuits, document requests and threats of physical harm. Leading the charge has been Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whose House subcommittee alleges the Observatory improperly worked with federal officials and social media companies to violate the free-speech rights of conservatives.

In a joint statement, Stamos and DiResta said their work involved much more than elections, and that they had been unfairly maligned.

“The politically motivated attacks against our research on elections and vaccines have no merit, and the attempts by partisan House committee chairs to suppress First Amendment-protected research are a quintessential example of the weaponization of government,” they said.

Stamos founded the Observatory after publicizing that Russia has attempted to influence the 2016 election by sowing division on Facebook, causing a clash with the company’s top executives. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III later cited the Facebook operation in indicting a Kremlin contractor. At Stanford, Stamos and his team deepened his study of influence operations from around the world, including one it traced to the Pentagon.

Stamos told associates he stepped back from leading the Observatory last year in part because the political pressure had taken a toll. Stamos had raised most of the money for the project, and the remaining faculty have not been able to replicate his success, as many philanthropic groups shift their focus on artificial intelligence and other, fresher topics.

In supporting the project further, the university would have risked alienating conservative donors, Silicon Valley figures, and members of Congress, who have threatened to stop all federal funding for disinformation research or cut back general support.

The Observatory’s non-election work has included developing curriculum for teaching college students about how to handle trust and safety issues on social media platforms and launching the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to that field. It has also investigated rings publishing child sexual exploitation material online and flaws in the U.S. system for reporting it, helping to prepare platforms to handle an influx of computer-generated material.