Cheryl Mills and her Lawyer, Walked Out

Posted on May 10, 2016May 10, 2016 by Denise Simon

Off limits….

Isn’t it interesting that Cheryl Mills and her attorney Beth Wilkinson set the ground rules of what questions could be posed to them during the interrogatories? It seems too that the plan set forth was to declare attorney/client privilege on certain questions. So there is the game…legal warfare.

from National Law Journal

Clinton aide leaves interview briefly when the FBI broaches an off-limits topic

WaPo: Near the beginning of a recent interview, an FBI investigator broached a topic with longtime Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills that her lawyer and the Justice Department had agreed would be off limits, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Mills and her lawyer left the room — though both returned a short time later — and prosecutors were somewhat taken aback that their FBI colleague had ventured beyond what was anticipated, the people said.

Investigators consider Mills — who served as chief of staff while Clinton was secretary of state — to be a cooperative witness. But the episode demonstrates some of the tension surrounding the criminal probe into possible mishandling of classified information involving the leading Democratic presidential candidate. In the coming weeks, prosecutors and FBI agents hope to be able to interview Clinton herself as they work to bring the case to a close.

The incident was described to The Washington Post by several people, including U.S. law enforcement officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing and those involved could face professional consequences for discussing it publicly.

It is not completely uncommon for FBI agents and prosecutors to diverge on interview tactics and approach, and the people familiar with the matter said Mills answered investigators’ questions. Mills and her lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, also asked for breaks more than once to confer, the people said.

The questions that were considered off limits had to do with the procedure used to produce emails to the State Department so they could possibly be released publicly, the people said. Mills, an attorney herself, was not supposed to be asked questions about that — and ultimately never was in the recent interview — because it was considered confidential as an example of attorney-client privilege, the people said.

So far, investigators have found scant evidence tying Clinton to criminal wrongdoing, though they are still probing the case aggressively. Charges have not been ruled out. In recent weeks, they have been interviewing Mills and other aides. One former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private email server, Bryan Pagliano, was granted immunity so he would cooperate as part of the probe.

There is no indication a grand jury has been convened in the case.

In response to this story, Wilkinson said, “Ms. Mills has cooperated with the government.” The Clinton campaign also did not provide a response, but spokesman Brian Fallon has said repeatedly that Clinton is willing to answer investigators questions, and he added in a recent statement that “we hope and expect that anyone else who is asked would do the same.”

Clinton herself said on CBS’s “Face The Nation” Sunday that she has “made it clear I’m more than ready to talk to anybody, anytime” and that she looked forward to the inquiry being “wrapped up.”

In an interview with The Washington Post last year, Mills agreed of Clinton’s email “if you could do it again, you’d just do it again differently,” but Mills said she did not recall the topic “being a major area of conversation or engagement.”

“I wish there had been a lot more thought and deliberation around it, but I can’t tell you that I can offer you that insight that there was,” she said. “I think it was just a continuation of a process that she had been engaged in, in terms of using her own account, and it was consistent with what the Department had seen in the past.”

Mills said in the interview that she did not recall having conversations about security vulnerabilities. She would not say then whether she had spoken to the FBI but offered the general assurance that “we’ve obviously sought to be, to cooperate with the FBI and to provide them whatever information they’ve needed to be able to conduct the inquiry that they’re doing.”

Her attorney, Wilkinson, is a seasoned lawyer who handled many high-profile cases when she worked at the Justice Department as an assistant U.S. Attorney. She received the department’s highest award for the prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombers.

Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to comment.

**** More on Cheryl Mills from Politico:

Here are some words often associated with Cheryl Mills: Clintons, gatekeeper, loyal, Benghazi.

Here are words you most likely haven’t heard as frequently: military brat, mother of twins, unmarried in solidarity with the gay community, point person at the State Department on rebuilding Haiti.

Her middle name? No one knows what the “D” in Cheryl D. Mills stands for. Her partner, David, is the son of former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.).

Having worked for the Clintons in some capacity for more than two decades, including her recent stint as chief of staff to the former secretary of state, Mills is a member of the family’s small inner circle. She has remained a key part of Hillary Clinton’s transition team and is likely to factor strongly in a presidential campaign, should there be one, in 2016.

Her dedication and reputation for providing unvarnished advice have earned praise from Obama administration top brass who worked with her.

“I have known Cheryl for nearly two decades. There is no one who cares more about the people she works with and who is more dedicated to public service,” said Treasury Secretary and former Obama White House chief of staff Jack Lew.

Bill Burns, deputy secretary of state, was effusive about the role she played at Foggy Bottom during the Clinton era.

“Cheryl was one of the smartest, most dedicated, and most decent colleagues I’ve had in over 30 years in government service,” Burns said in a statement to POLITICO. “She was just as effective and caring an advocate for the people she served with — the men and women of the Department of State — as she was for the foreign policy goals we pursued. That’s a really admirable combination.”

Mills, 48, spent her childhood living on bases throughout Europe because of her father’s career in the Army. She developed an appreciation for government service work.

The Stanford Law School graduate first came into the Clinton orbit as part of Bill Clinton’s transition team after his 1992 campaign. Seven years later, she was a deputy White House counsel during the House impeachment trial against Clinton.

Mills’s pushback against the House managers’ case gained her trust within Clintonworld — particularly Hillary Clinton, who was impressed with her loyalty. It was around this time, according to a 1999 profile in The Washington Post, that Mills befriended Domenici, while both were involved in a mentoring and tutoring project called D.C. Works, which helped underprivileged kids.

Hillary Clinton made Mills general counsel of her 2008 presidential campaign and then her chief of staff at State.

In between various roles for the Clintons, she has worked at Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Media and at New York University as a senior vice president.

At State, she had a major role in expanding benefits for the agency’s LGBT personnel, officials said, and was actively involved in helping Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng. And she ran the agency’s policy on Haiti, work that current Secretary of State John Kerry has asked Mills to continue to play a part in.

Mills, who has twin 8-year-olds (a boy and a girl), was known for working grueling hours — from a 3:50 a.m. wake-up until her departure from Foggy Bottom at 6:15 p.m., then back at work at 8:30 p.m. after the kids were in bed.

In a thank-you note from Barack Obama to Mills, which Lew read aloud before a gathering of State Department officials at the end of Clinton’s tenure, the president wrote: “Hillary and I have enjoyed watching you and Denis [McDonough] grow from a team of rivals to an unrivaled team.”

Missile Shield in Europe Against Russia

Posted on May 10, 2016May 10, 2016 by Denise Simon

European missile shield marks milestone as new threats emerge

Stripes: NAPLES, Italy— The United States on Thursday will move a step closer to establishing a missile shield over Europe at a time when new threats are emerging that could curb its utility.

U.S. military officials will gather in Romania to inaugurate a first-of-its-kind ground-based missile interceptor site, part of a larger shield that American officials say is necessary to stop Iranian ballistic missiles from targeting Europe.

Moscow has criticized the shield as upsetting the regional strategic balance and could respond to Thursday’s ceremony with deployments or exercises along Russia’s western border.

Russia and China are both equipping their forces with modern cruise missiles, while the U.S. is developing an advanced supersonic model, developments that challenge the idea of missile defense as relating to ballistic missiles alone.

“Missile defense is moving from infancy to adolescence,” said Tom Karako, a missile defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There’s still a long way to go in terms of capability and capacity.”

The Romania interceptor site is located in the southern town of Deveselu, a farming community once home to a communist-era air base. A U.S. Navy base now hosts 24 SM-3 missiles and the same Aegis radar and tracking technology employed by modern Navy ships.

The site is part of the European Phased Adaptive Approach, a shield system that includes a radar facility in Turkey, four U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyers in Spain, a command node at the Air Force base in Ramstein, Germany, and a second ground-based interceptor site to be built in Poland and operational by 2018.

Thursday’s ceremony will certify the Romania site as operational, making it ready to be handed over to NATO for use.

President George W. Bush announced the original plans for a shield in 2002 as a guard against intercontinental ballistic missiles targeting European cities and American bases in Europe. The Obama administration changed it to the EPAA in 2009 to focus on short- and intermediate-range missiles, a shift made partly to ease Russian concerns and improve relations with Moscow.

Although the 2009 announcement ruffled governments in Poland and the Czech Republic, the two countries originally slated to host the long-range sites, the mere presence of American bases has been welcomed more recently in a region anxious about Russia, Following its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninusla two years ago.

“There weren’t a whole lot of people in Romania or Poland staying up at night worrying about an Iranian missile,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who is now with the Brookings Institute in Washington. “What this means to them is having American people and hardware on their ground. And I think especially with recent Russian actions.”

The missile defense plan has been a major irritant in relations with Russia ever since it was first considered at the Prague summit in 2002. Moscow has continued to criticize the system despite the Obama administration changes, arguing it lays the foundation for more sophisticated interceptors that can be used against its own missiles. A Russian proposal to run the missile sites jointly was a nonstarter for NATO members.

As it has in recent years, Russia may respond to Thursday’s ceremony with exercises or deployments, experts say. Another possibility, they say, is pulling out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, which prohibits ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,000 kilometers. The U.S. has already accused Russia of violating the treaty by testing a ground-launched cruise missile.

“There is a developing action-reaction cycle,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association. “The deployment of ballistic missile interceptors in Romania, Poland, it may become a sort of excuse for Russia to take some kind of counter-measure.”

Kimball questioned the rationale behind the missile site deployments, arguing that the recent U.S. deal with Iran removed the nuclear threat “for a generation.” Although the agreement doesn’t stop Iran from advancing its ballistic missile program, Kimball argues that it makes little sense for Iran to strike with conventional weapons against European targets.

Others, like Karako, say the threat remains so long as Iran continues to develop missiles and show interest in a future nuclear program.

Cruise missile proliferation poses a new threat, experts say. Russia demonstrated the capabilities of its Kalibr cruise missiles by striking targets in Syria last year from a submarine in the eastern Mediterranean and a surface ship in the Caspian Sea. China has deployed the missiles across its coast and even into disputed waters of the South China Sea.

The U.S. takes the threat of Russian anti-ship cruise missiles seriously enough that it is equipping its warships in Spain with a new missile-defense weapon. Congress has offered funding for the Navy to install air defenses on the Romania missile site, money the Navy has instead asked NATO to provide.

Yet neither is a guarantee against missiles that are becoming stealthier, faster and more advanced in defeating existing defenses.

“The air defense problem is becoming more complex and difficult to defend in some ways,” Karako said.

The U.S. may be fueling the development drive by working on an advanced cruise missile with a supersonic capability, a technology that competitors like Russia and China would look to offset.

“If you have an airtight defense against ballistic missiles but can’t stop cruise missiles, you have a problem,” said Pifer. “And we don’t even have an airtight ballistic missile defense.”

***** In English, the translation is essentially the ‘son of satan’.

Russia testing unstoppable new nuclear missile which can breach Nato’s shield system and blow up an area the size of FRANCE

The RS-28 Sarmat missile, dubbed Satan 2, will replace the SS-18
It is capable of flying at a speed of seven kilometres (4.3 miles) per second
Sarmat has a range of 10,000 kilometres (6,213 miles)
The weapons are perceived as part of an increasingly aggressive Russia

DefenseTalk: Testing of Russia’s new Sarmat strategic intercontinental missile will begin within two years, the secretary to the commander of the Russian Strategic Missiles Forces said Tuesday, July 21, 2015. The RS-28 Sarmat, or Sarmatian is a future Russian liquid-fueled, MIRV-equipped, super-heavy thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missile in development by the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau from 2009, intended to replace the previous SS-18 Satan.

The third phase of experimental construction work is being completed today and just as the Missile Forces’ commander said not long ago, within the next one and a half or two years, we will move on to the definitive stage of testing this class of missile,” Igor Denisov told journalists.

The experimental constructive work on the new liquid-fueled Sarmat ICBM, which is to replace the Satan, began in 2011.

Earlier, a source in the defense industry told RIA Novosti that the Sarmat should enter into service between 2018 and 2020.

Sarmat’s characteristics are unknown, it is only known that the missile is to replace the world’s largest strategic missile Voyevoda (NATO reporting name – Satan). According to Borisov, the new rocker’s destructive payload will reach 10 tons.

In February 2014, a Russian military official announced the Sarmat was expected to be ready for deployment around 2020. In May that year another official source suggested that the program was being accelerated and that it would, in his opinion, constitute up to 100 percent of Russia’s land-based nuclear arsenal by 2021.

DoJ and North Carolina Trading Lawsuits Over Bathrooms

Posted on May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 by Denise Simon

Really? How did we get here after all these years? Loretta Lynch, U.S. Attorney General made her official statement today and one key word she used was ‘privacy’….exactly whose privacy is protected? This is so twisted.

The Justice Department had alleged the North Carolina law violated Title IX, the federal law that bars sex discrimination in education. But the lawsuit is silent about Title IX, likely because of a recent decision by the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. This could place North Carolina in jeopardy of billions of dollars of federal aid…..nothing about violating the 10th Amendment…..

North Carolina Turns to Prominent Conservative Lawyer to Defend ‘Bathroom’ Law

Provided by the National Law Journal:

Judge assigned to the case is a Reagan appointee whose nomination to the Fourth Circuit stalled amid Democratic opposition.

The 10 page lawsuit is found here.

A go-to lawyer for Republican governors facing scandal and controversy will represent North Carolina Gov. Patrick McCrory as he defends a state law that requires transgender state employees to use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender on their birth certificates.

Karl “Butch” Bowers Jr. of Bowers Law Office in Columbia, South Carolina, is part of the legal team that sued the U.S. Department of Justice on McCrory’s behalf on Monday. Last week, the Justice Department threatened legal action over the law, known as HB2.

Bowers is a lead attorney in one of three lawsuits filed on Monday related to the contested North Carolina law, known as HB2. Several hours after McCrory filed suit, two state legislators sued the Justice Department in defense of the law. Then the Justice Department sued McCrory, several days after threatening legal action.

A former special counsel for voting matters in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, Bowers is also representing McCrory in separate litigation over the state’s voter identification law in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Gupta last week called HB2 discriminatory and in violation of the federal Civil Rights Act. She asked McCrory to respond by Monday with a pledge not to enforce the law. McCrory struck back with Monday’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. The complaint seeks a ruling that HB2 is lawful.

Bowers did not immediately return a request for comment, nor did his co-counsel, Robert Stevens, general counsel in the governor’s office, and William Stewart Jr. of Millberg Gordon Stewart in Raleigh.

The case is before U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle, appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. A former legislative aide to former North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, Boyle repeatedly faced Democratic opposition when two presidents—the elder Bush and the younger Bush—unsuccessfully tried to nominate him to the Fourth Circuit.

Boyle was nominated to the Fourth Circuit in 1991, and then six more times between 2001 and 2006, according to judiciary records. The Senate never voted on his nomination. Legal Times reported in 2007 that Democratic opposition to Boyle was in part political payback for Helms’ blocking of judicial nominees during the Clinton administration.

Governors’ go-to lawyer

McCrory is the latest in a line of Republican governors to seek Bowers’ help.

Bowers represented South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in ethics proceedings in the state Legislature about whether she illegally lobbied for private companies while she was a member of the House. The ethics committee cleared her of wrongdoing in 2012.

Bowers counseled former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who faced impeachment after he disappeared for several days in 2009 on what was later revealed to be a trip to Argentina to visit his mistress. Sanford also faced an ethics investigation into his use of state resources for personal travel. South Carolina Republicans ultimately censured Sanford but did not vote to impeach him.

In 2007, Bowers took a one-year leave from private practice to serve as special counsel for voting matters in the Justice Department. The following year, he served as a lawyer to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, in Florida.

In 2012, Bowers joined a team of lawyers representing South Carolina in litigation over the state’s voter identification law. A special three-judge panel in Washington found that the law was not discriminatory, although the judges blocked it from taking effect for the November 2012 election.

Less than a year later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key section of the federal Voting Rights Act that in effect eliminated the requirement that states such as South Carolina seek court approval before making changes to election processes.

There are now four lawsuits pending over HB2.

Updated at 4:05 p.m.

In March, the American Civil Liberties Union, joined by Jenner & Block and Lambda Legal, filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina arguing that the law is unconstitutional.

The two North Carolina legislators who filed suit on Monday in the Eastern District of North Carolina—Phil Berger, president pro tempore of the state Senate, and Tim Moore, speaker of the House of Representatives—are represented by Gene Schaerr and S. Kyle Duncan of Schaerr | Duncan in Washington.

Schaerr in 2014 left a partnership at Winston & Strawn to defend Utah’s same-sex marriage ban. Kyle is the former general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

In remarks on Monday announcing the Justice Department’s lawsuit, Lynch said that discriminatory measures against transgender individuals that followed the Supreme Court’s ruling last year legalizing same-sex marriage was akin to the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation and the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Addressing the transgender community, Lynch said that the Justice Department and the Obama administration “want you to know that we see you, we stand with you, and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”

Updated with information on additional lawsuits filed on Monday. North Carolina’s lawsuit is posted below.

Russia is Getting Away with it All

Posted on May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 by Denise Simon

Russia Establishes New Military Base in Palmyra: Activists

Local activists claim Moscow has founded a second base in the desert city after taking over the Hmeimim military base in Lattakia last year

The Palmyra Coordination Committee released a statement on Sunday stating that Russia has established a second military base in Syria located in the area of Palmyra, Idleb province.

The statement added that the Islamic State group and Syrian regime forces facilitated handing the ancient city over to the Russians.

“Locals were forcibly displaced by regime and Russians bombings as well as [ISIS] while Assad today with international sponsorship gives Russians the right to violate the property of the people of Palmyra in reward [for] their efforts [by] occupying the city and violating locals’ property.”

The Committee also released footage with the statement showing a Russian military base surrounded by barbed wire.

****

UN accuses Syrian government of blocking aid to Aleppo

The UN has accused the Syrian government of refusing UN appeals to deliver aid to 905,000 people, including in war-torn Aleppo, as the city suffered another day of attacks despite efforts to secure a ceasefire. “We seem to be having new possible besieged areas on our watch, we are having hundreds of relief workers unable to move in Aleppo,” UN humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland said after a weekly humanitarian meeting of nations backing the Syria peace process.”It is a disgrace to see while the population of Aleppo is bleeding their options to flee have never been more difficult than now.”

Russia has said a new ceasefire to halt fighting in Aleppo could be imminent, with Syria’s divided northern city hit by a wave of violence that has killed more than 270 people since 22 April.

Reports on Wednesday said at least three people had died in new attacks in the city, as rebel forces pressed an offensive against government troops on the city’s western outskirts.

With the UN Security Council to hold urgent talks on the crisis later on Wednesday, diplomatic efforts to stem the violence shifted to Germany where Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was to meet UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura, Syria’s main opposition leader Riad Hijab and France’s top diplomat Jean-Marc Ayrault.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said late on Tuesday he hoped to agree on a freeze of fighting in Aleppo “in the near future, maybe even in the next few hours”, after meeting de Mistura in Moscow. Full story here.

****

Close Encounters With Jets Show Russia’s Anger at NATO Buildup, U.S.

NYT’s/ WASHINGTON — When the Pentagon complained about a Russian fighter plane performing a barrel roll near an Air Force reconnaissance plane in international airspace over the Baltic Sea on April 29, a quick response came from Moscow, which claimed that the American plane did not have its transponder turned on.

“The U.S. Air Force has two solutions,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a sharp statement. “Either not to fly near our borders or to turn the transponder on for identification.” (American officials said the transponder had, indeed, been turned on.)

With that, American officials and foreign policy experts said, Russia delivered its response to President Obama’s decision this year to substantially increase the deployment of heavy weapons, armored vehicles and other equipment to NATO countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The move is meant to deter Russia from further aggression in the region.

By sharply ramping up so-called intercepts of American ships and planes in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia is demonstrating its anger over the increased American military presence in a region it considers part of its backyard, White House officials said. They called the Russian actions harassment.

Obama administration officials said they interpreted Russia’s statement as a demand that the United States stay out of the Baltics — and that is not going to happen, these officials said.

“We’re going to continue to fly, and we’re going to continue to operate in the Baltic Sea,” Mr. Carpenter said. “This is not going to change our activities one iota.”

But the game of chance underway in the skies and on the seas of Central and Eastern Europe could lead to miscalculations, American officials warn. More from the NYT’s here.

Facebook Suppression of Conservatives Revealed

Posted on May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 by Denise Simon

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

Gizmodo: Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

Related reading: I Asked a Privacy Lawyer What Facebook’s New Terms and Conditions Will Mean for You

These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site. As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook’s algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section. The curators write headlines and summaries of each topic, and include links to news sites. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment.

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.

Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.

Managers on the trending news team did, however, explicitly instruct curators to artificially manipulate the trending module in a different way: When users weren’t reading stories that management viewed as important, several former workers said, curators were told to put them in the trending news feed anyway. Several former curators described using something called an “injection tool” to push topics into the trending module that weren’t organically being shared or discussed enough to warrant inclusion—putting the headlines in front of thousands of readers rather than allowing stories to surface on their own. In some cases, after a topic was injected, it actually became the number one trending news topic on Facebook.

“We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said one former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.” Sometimes, breaking news would be injected because it wasn’t attaining critical mass on Facebook quickly enough to be deemed “trending” by the algorithm. Former curators cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as two instances in which non-trending stories were forced into the module. Facebook has struggled to compete with Twitter when it comes to delivering real-time news to users; the injection tool may have been designed to artificially correct for that deficiency in the network. “We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook,” one former curator said.

In other instances, curators would inject a story—even if it wasn’t being widely discussed on Facebook—because it was deemed important for making the network look like a place where people talked about hard news. “People stopped caring about Syria,” one former curator said. “[And] if it wasn’t trending on Facebook, it would make Facebook look bad.” That same curator said the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module. “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the individual said. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one’.” This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.

(In February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed his support for the movement in an internal memo chastising Facebook employees for defacing Black Lives Matter slogans on the company’s internal “signature wall.”)

When stories about Facebook itself would trend organically on the network, news curators used less discretion—they were told not to include these stories at all. “When it was a story about the company, we were told not to touch it,” said one former curator. “It had to be cleared through several channels, even if it was being shared quite a bit. We were told that we should not be putting it on the trending tool.”

(The curators interviewed for this story worked for Facebook across a timespan ranging from mid-2014 to December 2015.)

“We were always cautious about covering Facebook,” said another former curator. “We would always wait to get second level approval before trending something to Facebook. Usually we had the authority to trend anything on our own [but] if it was something involving Facebook, the copy editor would call their manager, and that manager might even call their manager before approving a topic involving Facebook.”

Gizmodo reached out to Facebook for comment about each of these specific claims via email and phone, but did not receive a response.

Several former curators said that as the trending news algorithm improved, there were fewer instances of stories being injected. They also said that the trending news process was constantly being changed, so there’s no way to know exactly how the module is run now. But the revelations undermine any presumption of Facebook as a neutral pipeline for news, or the trending news module as an algorithmically-driven list of what people are actually talking about.

Rather, Facebook’s efforts to play the news game reveal the company to be much like the news outlets it is rapidly driving toward irrelevancy: a select group of professionals with vaguely center-left sensibilities. It just happens to be one that poses as a neutral reflection of the vox populi, has the power to influence what billions of users see, and openly discusses whether it should use that power to influence presidential elections.

“It wasn’t trending news at all,” said the former curator who logged conservative news omissions. “It was an opinion.”

[Disclosure: Facebook has launched a program that pays publishers, including the New York Times and Buzzfeed, to produce videos for its Facebook Live tool. Gawker Media, Gizmodo’s parent company, recently joined that program.]