https://www.courthousenews.com/cia-can-shield-records-on-syrian-rebel-funding/

The CIA can reject a public records request seeking information on U.S. payments to Syrian rebel forces because a tweet from former President Trump didn’t officially acknowledge such records exist.

WASHINGTON (CN) — Twitter may have banned former President Donald Trump, but his disruptive use of the platform is still being argued in court.

On Tuesday morning, the D.C. Circuit sided with the CIA in a dispute involving a Freedom of Information Act request from BuzzFeed stemming from a Trump tweet.

“The Amazon Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad,” Trump tweeted out in July 2017.

Just days earlier, the Washington Post published a story reporting that Trump had ended an Obama-era policy of sending money to train moderate rebels in Syria with the hopes of overthrowing Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Following the tweet, BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold sent a FOIA request to the CIA for any records relating to “payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad.”

The agency denied the request and that denial was upheld by a federal judge. BuzzFeed and Leopold then filed a second complaint in April 2019 seeking “agency records relating to payments to Syrian rebels.”

https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/buzzfeed-cia-2019.pdf

https://www.aljazeera.com/podcasts/2021/2/10/how-did-the-qanon-conspiracy-go-global

For people outside the US, QAnon seemed like a uniquely American threat – until it wasn’t. The digital cult was born on the internet in 2017, but its adherents have taken offline action in several countries. So how does a baseless conspiracy theory that says Donald Trump is battling a cabal of child-trafficking elites find its way around the world?

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