Soviet-Islamic front MintPress News, Whitney Webb, and the CIA
On the eve of war, with breaking news advancing like an electrical storm across the horizon, I was outmaneuvered by an internet troll into promising to explain what I know about a bizarre little Minneapolis news site called Mint Press News.
This is that story.
Try telling anyone in the more than a dozen countries where Russia has been strenuously undermining local election processes that Russiagate is a hoax, then stand back, because you’ll likely get an earful of abuse from citizens outraged at foreign meddling in their domestic affairs. It’s not secret, let alone a subject of controversy.
All of Russia’s near neighbors in eastern Europe have experienced Russian interference, countries powerless to counteract Russian incursions, like Estonia, Ukraine, or Montenegro. In Italy, audio surfaced of far-right leader Matteo Salvini, caught discussing a plot to divert millions of dollars of Russian money to fund his party.
In Austria, a far-right leader was caught promising government contracts to a woman he believed was the niece of a Russian oligarch.
The list goes on.
But there is one group— in the U.S.—who will have nothing to do with the idea. They mostly fall under the rubric of “Faux Lefty” site. Labeling RussiaGate a hoax is one of the ‘big ideas’ driven home by one of the newest of them, Mint Press News, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Whitney Webb is Mint Press News best-known journalist. Lately she’s become almost ubiquitous, with stories appearing under her byline at a dozen sites.
“While Russia often serves as a useful “boogeyman” in service to this agenda of promoting militaristic policies, the odd moments when those same policies actually benefit Russia and do not run into hysterical opposition from the political and media establishment provide a rare glimpse into the real motivations behind Cold War 2.0 and the dubious validity of the media-driven narratives upon which current anti-Russian hysteria is based,” reported Webb.
She’s amassed more than 50,000 followers on Twitter, people impressed with her critique of “the dubious validity of the media-driven narratives.”
But its really only a statement of the obvious. Who might be trying to take advantage of that? Maybe by piggybacking on an emotional issue like child abuse? Even the CIA wouldn’t stoop to that level of hypocrisy, would it?
How I got the assignment
A friend and follower on Twitter, sensing my suspicions about Webb and Mint Press News, tweeted a criticism of a recent story of hers, to which she responded. All the way from Chile. Where she lives, supposedly, in a place she has vaguely and variously described as lying somewhere between Chile’s capital of Santiago and the southern tip of the country, a distance of some 1600 miles.
Buried waist-deep in skinny old Chile.
My Twitter friend forwarded the exchange. Maybe he meant it as proof of life.
I tweeted back congratulations for “coaxing her out of the bunker.”
Which, it had soon transpired, had not been a particularly felicitous turn of phrase. Soon I heard from MS Webb herself, demanding to know if I was accusing her of being a NAZI.
Well, not exactly... But I did have a few questions. So I wrote her back.
“I have no idea WHO you are. What I DO know: You work for an outfit run by a former student of that noted humanitarian, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
(That would be Odeh Muhawesh. We’re slightly ahead of ourselves, but his role will soon become clear.)
“While ordinary Americans have yet to see anything except a heavily redacted version of the Mueller Report. you continue to insist the “US media is fixated on Russiagate.”
“You’re a pretty decent researcher. (I read your 4 pieces on Epstein.) But you’re not a reporter. There’s no evidence in your Epstein stories that wasn’t first reported by someone REAL.”
“So, what ARE you? Looks to me like you’re… Disinformation writ large. And I was kind enough not to mention how ludicrous your statements are that everyone from Epstein to Khashoggi worked for Mossad.”
“My boss’ father in law lived in Iran for a couple years in the 1980’s and apparently that somehow means mint press is “sponsored” by Iran,” wrote Webb. “Sad to see Hopsicker promoting this Islamophobic attack.”
“My boss’s father lived in Iran for a couple of years” is completely disingenuous. Spent five years studying under an ayatollah who worked for Khomeini is closer to the truth.
And, I’m not allergic to Islam. I’m allergic to fraud.
But before I heard anything back, I was contacted again from one of her followers, impatient for a response. I should have realized who he was when I noticed his profile pic looks just like the school shooter in Newton, Connecticut.
I was dealing with an actual in-the-flesh troll. How thrilling!
A word from local journalists
While I can barely restrain myself from blurting out what I’ve discovered, the work done by prior journalists deserves mention first, as they tried to answer the question:
Who stands behind Mint Press, a small Minneapolis-based site with a progressive bent that hides its funding even from employees, and has mysterious connections to the Middle East?
Their poking around also establishes the nature of the mystery. The background to the case.
In stories filed with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, MinnPost, and the Colombia Journalism Review, journalists on the ground in Minnesota provided most of the following details.
Interviews with former employees and people familiar with the inner workings of Mint Press, they wrote, paint a portrait of a dysfunctional outlet where employees are left in the dark about the site’s sources of funding and are alienated from the Muhawesh family that runs it:
Mnar, the editor-in-chief, her brother-in-law and managing editor Muhammad Muhawesh, and her father-in-law Odeh Muhawesh, 54, a Minneapolis businessman born in Jordan.
They also revealed an agenda that lines up, from its sympathy with the Syrian regime to its hostility to Sunni Saudi Arabia, with that of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where Odeh Muhawesh studied under an ayatollah for five years after the Islamic Revolution, and where he visited as recently as last summer.
Journalism jobs where they were no journalism jobs
In September 2011, Mnar Muhawesh posted her first call for reporters on journalismjobs.com. She had registered Mint Press News as a limited liability company three months earlier, filing with the state of Minnesota under her name.
The email address and phone number on the filing form, however, were those of her father-in-law, Odeh Muhawesh — the first inkling that the man whose name appears nowhere on Mint Press’ masthead may play a greater role than he claims.
“Be a part of something groundbreaking and meaningful,” one job ad read. “[Join] Mint Press in our journey to bring back the true meaning of news as we break political stories and ask the real tough questions which are often overlooked.”
Joey LeMay, a copy editor at a Gannet-owned paper at the time, said he eagerly replied and, aged 25 at the time, was hired to cover national politics, education, and social justice for the website. “It was almost a too-good-to-be-true venture,” he said, calling Mint Press a “dream job.”
It helped that his annual salary at Mint Press was $14,000 higher than it was at Gannet. LeMay’s new boss was a former classmate in college, where she had gained recognition around campus for becoming the first reporter to wear a hijab on the school’s TV news program.
“We weren’t out gathering the stories,” he said. “We were at a desk. If we did a story about private prisons, we would call the ACLU for comment. This was not objective, straight, traditional journalism. They were passion topics.”
With Jeffrey Epstein, Mint Press News became an instant hit. Epstein was the ultimate passion subject.
“Retired business people” and journalism
Flooding journalismjobs.com with listings caught the attention of young, progressive-leaning journalists like LeMay. But it also piqued the interest of David Brauer, a media reporter with MinnPost, who profiled Muhawesh in January 2012, after seeing Mint Press News pop up repeatedly on local job boards.
“I had never heard of them, and no one I knew had ever heard of them,” Brauer told BuzzFeed. “People in my circle, the chattering-class media circle, were absolutely not aware of them,” Brauer said.
When Brauer asked Muhawesh where the money for the venture was coming from, she would only identify her investors as “retired business people.”
Brauer was curious. “There were some natural questions about how she’s able to finance it at her age.”
Muhawesh wasn’t just ambiguous about her funding with Brauer. She wouldn’t disclose any details to her first hire, LeMay, who said he started “second-guessing things” a few months into the job.
“It was incredibly secretive,” LeMay said. There were barely any ads on the website, and whenever LeMay asked about where they got their money, “it was brushed off as a nonissue.”
“I would go home feeling not squeaky clean,” he said.
Buzzfeed weighs in
In an email to BuzzFeed, Muhawesh claimed that she is financing Mint Press alone.
One former employee who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of legal repercussions said she remained skeptical. Employees speculated funding came from “retired businesspeople” with political agendas in the Middle East.
Muhawesh’s editorial direction didn’t do much to ease staff suspicions. She was progressive, but shied away from some important stories, including LGBT issues.
“For the longest time we really didn’t write about same-sex marriage legalization,” the former employee said.
Stories about Saudi Arabia and Israel would always be edited to include a line about Saudi financing of terrorist groups. One writer was forced to refer to the Palestinian territories as an “open-air prison” in a news piece.
“They’re super anti-Israel,” the source said.
Of course, it’s not as if the Jews don’t deserve a little close scrutiny. Still, most would feel more comfortable if that scrutiny didn’t emanate from a hostile nation’s petty cash drawer.
And that would turn out to be a problem.
LeMay recalled a rare all-hands meeting, led by Odeh Muhawesh devoted to events in Syria.
“It was an hour of him just filling us in on his predictions for what was gonna happen overseas in Syria — all this convoluted political strategy,” LeMay said. “I don’t know if it was right or wrong, but looking back at it, it seems awfully manipulative the way he did it.”
Employees wondered if there wasn’t someone else running the show.
“We know the right people.”
As with its funding, questions about how Mint Press operates always seem to circle back to one person: Odeh Muhawesh, Mnar Muhawesh’s father-in-law.
Odeh Muhawesh is from Jordan, born in Amman in 1959, according to his personal website, where he describes himself as a “well-known theologian and successful business leader.”
He moved to the United States after finishing high school. In 2003, the Minneapolis Middle East Trading Company, of which he was president, opened an office in Amman, Jordan, as “Minnesota’s Gateway to Iraq,” according to a press release from June of that year.
“Our contribution,” Muhawesh says in the release, “is that we know the right people and we know how to get business done in this part of the world.”
If the Jordanian-born owner of the site wants to portray himself as a successful entrepreneur who has created thousands of jobs in his adopted home state of Minnesota, so what? I mean, who can say, right?
However, any business reporter worth his or her salt could have told you—at a glance— what I immediately saw that facts issued to date about Mint Press’ financial backer Odeh Muhawesh don’t add up.
Did no one bother to check? Apparently not.
Where’s the cash coming from?
We were looking for evidence that Muhawesh was wealthy enough to attract journalists by paying thousands more than national competitors like Gannet.
Secrets of Highly Successful Men
- Don’t go bankrupt so often.
The first thing I noticed is how difficult it would be to pick out the “several successful businesses” Odeh had been associated with. Most had disappeared or gone bankrupt within several years of being founded.
The home page of Scorant, for example, these days appears to be serving up Korean porn.
3B Software was another of Muhawesh’s highly-touted ventures. Today, ten years after its founding, 3B Software’s home page displays the wan greeting:COMING SOON.
Texas Netlink International, Stratika, Crescent City Computer Services, have all disappeared with little trace that they were ever here at all.
What was I missing? I turned back to Odeh Muhawesh’s bio:
Odeh, founder and CEO of Scorant, is a scholar and business leader from Minnesota. He founded several successful businesses over the course of 28 years, establishing a strong record of growing revenue and developing competitive products for software and service companies. As chief executive officer, he created thousands of jobs in the state of Tech Titan Minnesota and elsewhere. He received many awards throughout his career including being named one of Minnesota’s 50 Most Powerful leaders and a Tech Titan of 2017.
Tech Titan, 50 Most Powerful, and…what’s this?
Odeh Muhawesh’s bio also proudly listed the 2004 “National Leadership Award” he got for his work as “Honorary Co-Chairman “of the “Business Advisory Council.”
It’s signed by the Republican House Majority leader, Texas Congressman Tom Delay, who was quite the wheeler-dealer back in his day, before he went to prison.
This was quite a coincidence. I knew of a business leader who had been given the exact same award!
His name is Brent Kovar. Kovar headed a pump and dump stock fraud called Skyway Communications, which had no product to sell, but did possess two DC-9’s used in drug trafficking. We know this because one of them N900SA, was busted in Mexico’s Yucatan in 2006 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine.
There are about 150 stories about this company, and this bust, here. I made quite a project of it.
“Another thing about Mint Press that raised suspicions—not to mention red flags–was that it seemed to advertise for a new position every day: staff reporters, California and D.C. correspondents, associate editors, writing interns; an editor-in-training; “contributors”; and a New York correspondent, Lisa Barron, a veteran journalist who spent fourteen months covering the Iraq war for CBS.
Where did the money come from? They were hiring reporters from Gannet, no small-time operation, one reporter stated, by paying considerably more than Gannet would.
Editor-in-chief Muhawesh’s father-in-law, Odeh Muhawesh, advises the site on business matters, said his daughter-in-law. He has managed and sold several multi million-dollar businesses, she said, and was currently serving as CEO for an education company called Scorant.
And indeed, that statement is also in his bio:
“Dr. Muhawesh is currently the CEO of the Minneapolis-based Scorant LLC. He earned his doctorate at Qum Seminary-Global Institute for Islamic Studies in Iran where he focused on comparative theology and Islamic jurisprudence.”
But Muar Muhawesh, who studied journalism at St. Cloud State and worked briefly as an intern at a local news station before launching Mint Press, declined to go further, and name the “retired businesspeople” who provide her financial backing.
In an interview with local news site MinnPost, Muhawesh would say only that her Jordanian-born father-in-law, Odeh Muhawesh, was an important adviser.
In other words, he’s the money behind the operation.
“Muar Muhawesh said her father-in-law’s Minnesota business connections allowed her to raise startup capital but declined to name investors.”
In the meantime, Mint press was in the middle of a hiring spree. Muhawesh hoped to hire a California correspondent, a D.C. correspondent, more staff writers, paid interns, and an associate editor, she confided.
“We are all having so much fun,” she said. “We’re all living the dream.”
Whose dream were they living?
Let’s take a look at his bio:
“Odeh, founder and CEO is a scholar and business leader from Minnesota. He founded several successful businesses over the course of 28 years, establishing a strong record of growing revenue and developing competitive products for software and service companies. As chief executive officer, he created thousands of jobs in the state of Minnesota and elsewhere.”
Has anyone attempted to verify any of the claims in Odeh’s bio? Are any of them true?
The answer is “No,” and “Probably not many.”
I found a list of Odeh Muhawesh companies and started looking them up. I think I stopped after four. None were still in business.
The claim that “Dr. Muhawesh is currently the CEO of the Minneapolis-based Scorant LLC.”
You can check that one out for yourself and you should—especially if you feel an affinity with Korean strippers—at http://www.scorant.com/.
All that separates Casey Key in Sarasota from Venice, Florida—shark tooth capital of the world and home to three of the four terrorist pilots in the 9/11 attack—is the IntraCoastal Canal.
Despite appearances, Sarasota is a pretty soulless place, an otherwise innocuous-looking city on Florida’s Gulf Coast that just happened to find itself up to its neck in 9/11 intrigue.
Sarasota has a decades-long reputation as a center of intrigue. John Ringling North lived here. E. Howard Hunt; the Pinkerton of Pinkerton Detectives; and the Saudi family that disappeared leaving half-eaten food on the table a few days before 9/11.
Remember them? The Saudi family in Sarasota in the gated community of Prestancia, who had Atta and other hijackers over for drinks, and then left dinner on the table to flee the U.S. two days before the 9/11 attack?
Venice and Sarasota share a lot in common.
But Sarasota is richer and flashier. A few rock stars. Some big pharmaceutical magnates. A sprinkling of “international entertainment executives,” a couple of casino owners, a retired chairman of Goldman Sachs.
Mohamed Atta lived in Venice with Marwan Al-Shehhi, bought a cell phone in Sarasota from a local Lebanese “businessman” named Wissam Hammoud, who will later be sent to prison for soliciting an undercover FBI agent to behead an uncooperative law enforcement official.
At the north end of Casey Key, Mafia Don John Gotti owned a three-lot property with state-of-the-art security cameras all over the compound. His daughter lived there, well before she got her own reality show. There were tales tell of strange guys and even stranger real estate closings.
Gotti liked Sarasota.
If you were trying to keep your name out of the papers, Sarasota offered a certain amount of cover. For decade’s the local Sarasota Herald-Tribune was the only newspaper in the country whose publisher had a side gig as an arms dealer.
David Lindsay JR pursued a lucrative sideline as a weapons merchant, selling mostly to tinpot dictators in Central and South America.
He modified surplus WWII P-51 fighters with updated machine guns and peddled them to some of the most repressive regimes in the world.
They sold like hotcakes. Why? Because–given the number of peasants who need killin’ every day—a slow-moving P-51 was the smart choice.
The US only sold jets anymore to its military clients. And jets flew too fast to hover over a battlefield long enough, with both machine guns blazing, to mow down every peasant irresponsible enough to show up for a demonstration that wasn’t officially sanctioned.
David Lindsay Jr. was an old China hand. He had flown with the Flying Tigers out of Kuomintang, amidst rumors of involvement in heroin trafficking.
David Lindsay Jr., of necessity, was a live-and-let-live kind of guy.
The land tells its own story
Down in Venice, even the parcels of land surrounding the Venice Airport told a story of covert association, of America’s secret history.
Here was Jackson Stephens law firm, Boone, Boone & Boone, which still exerts control over the civic destiny of this tiny town.
Down the street there’s the Venice Airport where Mohamed Atta learned to fly, sitting next to the long-time winter home of Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus.
Sarasota also boasts the original MILF, citrus heir Katherine Harris, who as Florida’s Secretary of State after the 2000 Presidential election was instrumental in deciding the election for George W Bush.
Was Katherine Harris’ dubious reputation out of bounds? Apparently so, because hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly in George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.
Was Katherine Harris a vixen from hell? Or just a citrus heiress who applies lipstick with a trowel? Her adventures in makeup were widely-commented on at the time. What didn’t become widely known was that this public picture exactly matched her local reputation in Sarasota. “She was known as the town “pump,” a local doctor told me bluntly.
“She came on to me at a party,” recalled the local internist. “Walked over and sat on my lap. My wife, who was standing right next to me, was not amused.”
John Ringling North…and Son Henry
The circus was brought to Florida by its long-time owner John Ringling North, whose son, Henry was an agent of the precursor of the CIA, the OSS, in World War II. And not just any agent…
Henry North is credited with securing the release from Italian prisons of key mafia figures in 1942, who repaid his kindness by assisting in the Allied invasion of Italy in 1944.
More than 50 years later, sitting right beside the Ringling Circus grounds in Venice is the Venice Airport. Across the street is Jackson Stephens law firm, looking like it came right out of the movie The Firm.
And there, just one block from the Venice Airport, is a parcel of land housing the Italian American Social Club. Friday night is pasta night.
If they put this in a movie, no one would believe it.
Jackson Stephens was the Arkansas Kingmaker. He had been Jimmy Carter’s roommate at the Naval Academy. He became George Bush Sr.’s biggest campaign contributor in 1988. When in 1992, when he flipped and became Bill Clinton’s biggest backer, you could feel the tectonic plates shift.
Jackson Stephens was even rumored to have a lot of influence at the NSA. He was instrumental in the sale of PROMIS software.
But his name must not sound Jewish enough. Because while Whitney Webb devoted considerable time to a discussion of PROMIS software, Jackson Stephens, who was at the hear of the scandal, isn’t mentioned.
Sentenced to Klown College
The circus was often touring behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, providing excellent cover for intelligence activity.
Ringling’s winter home beside the Venice Airport also housed the famous clown college, where for many years the CIA sent recruits as part of their training.
Why does a CIA agent go to clown college? To learn sleight of hand.
Now we’ve come almost full circle. The roommate of the founder of Jackson Stephens’ law firm became a Governor of Florida. His name was Lawton Chiles. Oddly enough it was Chiles who have Katherine Harris her start in politics, when he named her to the board of the Ringling Circus Foundation in nearby Sarasota.
Finally, when the principals of Huffman Aviation, Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard, created a start-up airline, their little airline had only only one celebrity endorser: Katherine Harris.
If they put this in a movie, no one would believe it.
Much earlier, Sarasota was home to CIA spook E Howard Hunt of Watergate fame, whose wife was probably murdered—along with several hundred innocent passengers—in the crash of a United flight on its way to Chicago.
Sarasota was home to the Pinkerton who started the Pinkerton Detective Agency. And to some of John Gotti’s friends and relations.
Not to mention Sarasota’s connections with transnational organized crime. A felon from Sarasota named Jonathan Curshen even tried to bail out the Russian Mob’s biggest boss, Semion Mogilevich His Ownself, back in 1994, using a phony insurance company he owned.
He had a partner, a fellow stock promoter, who claimed to be an ordained minister. “Anyone who held this magical crystal was healed emotionally,” stated Rev. Timothy Miles.
A Town Without Pity
Sarasota has been called “heartless” in the St Petersburg Times. and been called “The Meanest City in America” by USA TODAY.
Another field in which Sarasota has led the way is in those patented Florida “vote snafus.” The 2000 Florida vote snafu had “Made in Sarasota” written all over it. Cooked up by luminary, former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who still lives in town and is always on the lookout for a few good men.
But Sarasota’s one true specialty is massive financial fraud, committed by players from the city’s deep roster of grifters and flim-flam men, including world class pros like Adnan Khashoggi, or Steve Bannon, who have been in bed at the same time with both Russian hackers and mob proxies.
Rounding out the bill are some big-time Ponzi fraudsters, operating in another growth market where Sarasota stands alone.
The most blatant example was Sarasota resident Art Nadel, whose $200 million dollar fraud helped him purchase the flight school in Venice, Huffman Aviation, that trained Mohamed Atta to fly.
Huffman’s previous owner, Wally Hilliard, had used his Lear jets to fly 39 weekly drug flights down and back to Venezuela, ferrying heroin into the U.S. on a weekly basis.
Each flight terminated at Teterboro just outside New York City, where Hillard’s Lear jet would be met by a Russian mobster from Tashkent living in Brighton Beach.
Nadel was also implicated, through a mysterious investment bank in Texas, in the Adnan-Khashoggi-led drug trafficking ring that brought tons of cocaine into the U.S. in two DC-9 airliners.
Of course, that’s not how the city of Sarasota likes to see itself, which is as a “balmy, palm-studded resort town on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.”
A more apt description might be: “A playground of the parasitic rich.”
Not much good comes out of Sarasota, Florida, at least in recent times, which may be why Whitney Webb has gone to some lengths to conceal it as her home. Chile sounds so much more…ex-pat!
“Donald Trump’s campaign chief has moved his voter registration to the home of one his website’s writers, in Sarasota, after it was disclosed that he was previously registered at an empty house in Florida where he did not live,”reported The Guardian.
Steve Bannon turned to Andy Badolato because he would surely get help from Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent, in getting fixed up voter registration-wise.
Odeh Muhawesh, Peter Strzok, Sr., and the CIA
Why Sarasota is important—is even key—is because of all of the above. And because evidence now indicates that Mint Press in Minnesota is being funded by the CIA.
A fellow researcher recently discovered information indicating Odeh Muhawesh was part of a government operation with the father of Peter Strzok, the recently-famous and controversial FBI Agent.
Before to the invasion of Iraq by the George W. Bush regime, Muhawesh opened an office as president of Middle East Trading Company, Inc.in Jordan to provide agricultural and developmental projects within Iraq with funding from federal agencies like U.S. AID and the United Nations World Food Progress.
Peter Strzok, Sr. was the former director of humanitarian and development programs throughout the Middle East. Strzok organized a program to send used tractors and other farm equipment to Iraq.
Both Muhawesh and Strzok’s Dad, himself a former FBI Agent, are affiliated with the Minnesota-based American Refugee Committee, part of a USAID program to distribute relief supplies in Iraq.
What this means, of course, is that an operating hypothesis positing that Odeh Muhawesh was some sort of Iranian asset who they sneakily slipped into the U.S. is totally false.
Odeh is working for the CIA
Which probably means the high levels of CIA-connected activity in Sarasota Florida are not merely coincident with the fact that Whitney Webb went to great lengths to ensure nobody knew that’s where she was from.
For years I have known that the CIA has a station in Naples, one hundred miles south. located right inside the Naples Airport. I should have suspected Sarasota was the same way. The Agency must had a Sarasota office, maybe even a Sarasota station.
I believe I know where its located though, so there’s that.
This building was first pointed out to me by a wealthy investor in Sarasota named Joey Barlow, who had been defrauded by Andy Badolato and Jonathan Curshen, the team of serial fraudsters profiled in numerous stories here.
Curshen and Badolato operated on the fourth floor of this building. Their lawyers were on the fifth floor. And the offices on the top floor, the sixth floor, belong to the law firm of Whitney Webb’s Father, Richard S. Webb IV.
Richard S. Webb IV is a prominent lawyer in Sarasota, and a pretty weighty moniker. Let’s call him “Quad” instead of Four.
The evidence has fingered Sarasota as being second home base to Mint Press’ popular-but-mysterious journalist Whitney Webb, and therefore also to Mint Press.
That Whitney Webb wanted to hide her connection to Sarasota maybe only means her Sarasota connection doesn’t fit with her reputation as a crusading journalist.
But that exactly why her hometown Sarasota Florida is germane to the story of the dubious CIA-connected funding of Mint Press.
By now it should be self-evident, that there aren’t many debutantes who get flattering coverage from Project Censored.
Whitney Webb may be the only one.
THE REAL JOURNALISTIC HEROES OF THE EPSTEIN CASE
The biggest journalistic hero in the Epstein case is Julie K. Brow, who spent each week on the same emotionally brutal endeavor she pursued for more than two years: interviewing women who say that, as girls, they were part of a sex ring run by the wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein.
She singlehandedly kept the story alive.
Also deserving special mention is Vicky Ward. She wrote a famous Vanity Fair profile of Epstein in 2003.
Then in 2015 she came forward and revealed that she had been prepared to report on accusations of sexual misconduct against the financier years ago, but that the magazine had declined to print them.
Charlie Hebdo shooting
Minneapolis-based Mint Press is perhaps best known for a story based on an unknown reporter’s claim that Syrian rebels were behind the August 2013 chemical attack that killed 1,300.
Also the fact that the Syrian regime’s attacks on hospitals went almost unmentioned by Mint Press. But both episodes are well-known. I want to call attention to something else, which was uglier.
In Paris, on January 7, 2015, two French-Algerian brothers who identified themselves as belonging to an Islamic terrorist group forced their way into the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and opening fire with Kalashnikovs.
The two brothers murdered 12 people, including a Muslim policeman on the street outside, and injured 11 others. Related attacks followed, including a siege in a kosher supermarket siege where a terrorist first shot a policewoman, then held 19 hostages before murdering 4 Jews.
It was the deadliest terrorist attack on France in 50 years. After a three-day reign of terror, they were shot dead by police.
The Mint Press take on the terrorist incident was startling, even horrifying.
If, as it is reported by British and other media, that 88,000 police and security personnel had participated in the pursuit of the supposed French-Algerian culprits of the Charlie Hebdo shootings, Said and Cherif Kouachi, then this would be a remarkable figure.
“In terms of ratio, each Kouachi brother warranted a manhunt consisting of 44,000 personnel, backed by one of the most technologically advanced states in the world.”
I don’t know. I don’t have any problem sending 44,000 cops after a killer who’s just murdered almost twenty people.
Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20200117164230/https://www.madcowprod.com/2020/01/09/paint-it-mint/