NOW WHERE WILL THE rIGHT GET ITS "NEWS":

FBI agents are at the home of Russian energy tycoon Oleg Deripaska, the agency confirmed Tuesday.

The agents are conducting "court-authorized law enforcement activity" at Deripaska's home in Washington, D.C., an FBI spokeswoman told CNBC.

Back in 2018, I was the opinion editor for The Daily Caller. I had worked for the website for about five years as a journalist and editor. I really believed in what we were doing. I believed in what founders Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel said they were building. (More on that later.)

In early March 2018, Deripaska submitted an opinion piece to The Daily Caller. He didn't submit it directly to me or through the Caller's conventional submissions process. Presumably, villainous Russian billionaires are above such hoi polloi procedures. Instead, Daily Caller publisher Patel contacted me directly one day saying he had received Deripaska's op-ed. He wanted to know how I felt about it.

I hated it. Anyone with a passing knowledge of European politics would know who Deripaska is and what he represents. I had been in the U.S. foreign service for a bit, so, of course, I knew.

More importantly, Deripaska's op-ed itself was--and remains--an extraordinary exercise in audacious Russian propaganda.

"The ever-changing 'Russia narrative' in American politics is today's Wag the Dog scenario," Deripaska wrote (or, more likely, had ghostwritten), citing the 1997 movie about a fake war starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro.

Deripaska went on to weave a fantastic conspiracy theory which is fundamentally at odds with the findings of the United States Senate. He describes American foreign policy experts as "the 'Deep State,'" which, he claimed, is "shadow power exercised by a small number of individuals from media, business, government and the intelligence community, foisting provocative and cynically false manipulations on the public."

The Russian billionaire complained that American foreign-policy professionals have "scurrilously attacked" him "for two decades."

After several paragraphs suggesting a host of strange conspiracies fit for a late Stalin purge, Deripaska attempted to quote Abraham Lincoln and then suggested that the U.S. foreign policy establishment has "invented narratives" that "impede internationally shared efforts on the world's most pressing, real issues."

At the time, I told Patel I had deep reservations about publishing Deripaska's op-ed. I would reject it, I said. But Patel wanted to publish the piece and so, of course, that's what I did.

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