Authored by Paul Thacker via The DisInformation Chronicle,
A few years back, I kept tripping across one of the many “disinformation experts” who popped up during the COVID pandemic like mushrooms on a rotten log after a hard night’s rain. I had no clue who Imran Ahmed was, nor his Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), but the Biden White House plucked him from obscurity to anoint him an expert on COVID vaccines and to censor their critics.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki quoted from a CCDH report, at a July 2021 press briefing, and accused Facebook of undermining Biden’s federal vaccine policies. “There’s about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms,” Psaki claimed, warning social media companies to shut down these “misinformation” accounts. One of the people targeted by that report, just happened to be a direct threat to President Biden—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was planning to run against Biden as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.
“They’re killing people,” President Biden told a reporter, leveling the charge of murder against Facebook for providing a platform for people such as Kennedy.
Intrigued, I began digging into the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In a 3,300-word investigation for Tablet, I exposed CCDH—not for being a trusted source on vaccines—but as a fraudulent political operation formed by two staffers working for the British Labour Party: Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed. These two characters created CCDH and several other dark money nonprofits to install Keir Starmer as the head of Labour. Starmer is now the Prime Minister of England and Morgan McSweeney is his chief of staff. After its success in the UK, CCDH then began operating in DC and coordinating with Democrats to attack critics of the Biden administration.
Right before the U.S. elections, I released internal documents given to me by a whistleblower working at CCDH that showed the group’s goal was to “Kill Musk’s Twitter.” Co-written with Matt Taibbi, the “Kill Musk’s Twitter” article rocketed across the internet with follow stories appearing in The Spectator, Guardian, The Express Tribune, The Telegraph, UnHerd, and the Washington Post.
London-based investigative reporter Paul Holden also started looking into the Center for Countering Digital Hate beginning in 2021 when got his hands on a tranche of leaked internal Labour Party documents that were making their way around British media circles. Delving into the emails, he ran across the names Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed and began piecing together their secret campaign to to push out Labour’s leftist leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and install Keir Starmer as his replacement.
Fleshing out these documents with three years of reporting, Holden has published his findings in a new book released today titled “The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy.” News of Holden’s book has leaked to the British press, leading for calls that Morgan McSweeney be investigated for criminal activity for the scandal now called “McSweeneygate.” To run his campaign for Starmer, McSweeney lied to the British Election Commission about political donations that funded his work with Ahmed. McSweeney and Ahmed also appear to have hired private investigators to dig into Holden’s background and shut down his reporting.
Holden hails from South Africa where three of his six books were investigative bestsellers, and his last was long-listed for the Sunday Times literary prize for non-fiction. Since 2019, Holden has led Shadow World Investigation’s work on state corruption, investigating how the Gupta family looted South Africa with the help of corporations in the US, Germany, Switzerland, the UK and China.
“It’s a pretty Shakespearean story,” Holden told me, sitting on a leather sofa in his North London living room. The story begins in 2017, with Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed plotting to take over the British government. McSweeney is now at the heart of that government and Ahmed has made CCDH a huge player in the States. Their overall goal: censor anyone who doesn’t share their beliefs.
“I am not for an organization trying to get the government to censor my legal speech,” Holden added.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
THACKER: I got into looking at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, when they released that “Disinformation Dozen” report that the Biden White House amplified to attack anyone critical of vaccine mandates. I looked into their background and found out that they are a British group run by a guy named Imran Ahmed who was a staffer for Labour Party members of the UK Parliament.
I just started thinking, “How does a guy from London land in DC, and pop up being quoted from the White House? That’s so unnatural.” How did you start looking into this? Who is Imran Ahmed and who is Morgan McSweeney?
HOLDEN: I was in much the same position as you. I had never heard of these people before, I would say, late 2021. I’d been given access to this phenomenal leak of documents out of the Labour Party. Initially, there wasn’t much here, but then I came across these emails about Morgan McSweeney and this organization called Labour Together.
At the time I thought Labour Together was this very anodyne, boring think tank, because that’s how they presented themselves in public
THACKER: Just so readers know, the Labour Party is like the political left, sort of similar to the Democrats. On the other side, is the Conservatives or the “Tories,” which would be like the Republicans.
HOLDEN: Yeah, so Labour is the more liberal party. But the important thing is that Morgan McSweeney and Iman Ahmad are the most centrist part of that liberal party.
THACKER: This would be the Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden wing of the Democrats. The Wall Street friendly types, who now line up behind Big Pharma and the defense contractors.
HOLDEN: Yes. They are part of a centrist establishment really, and they are at constant, non-stop war with the more left-wing parts of the Labour Party.
Imran Ahmed, has got a bit of an odd backstory. He comes from Manchester. He was a banker for a while and then, according to his own sort of personal biographies, 9-11 changes his thinking, makes him realize that bullying is bad. He then goes back to university and studies politics at Cambridge, and then disappears, for like six or seven years. We don’t really know what he does in this period of time. He’s only ever said in one interview that he was doing management consulting in the Middle East.
He re-emerges in 2011, and goes to work for a Member of Parliament for free. That begins a five, six, seven-year career in the Labour Party. He also works a little bit, as far as I can make out, on Sadiq Khan’s mayoral campaign for London in around 2015.
He then goes to work for or this MP called Hilary Benn. And this is where it becomes important, because in 2015 Jeremy Corbyn is elected leader of the Labour Party.
THACKER: Imran does have a weird backstory. I reported for Tablet that Imran told a close friend that he had applied to work for British intelligence. But Imran won’t address his ties to British intelligence.
So Jeremy Corbyn becoming head of the Labour Party would be like Bernie Sanders becomes head of the Democratic Party.
HOLDEN: Right. Corbyn became the Labour Party’s candidate to be the Prime Minister. When Bernie Sanders was close to becoming their candidate for President, the establishment Democrats made sure he couldn’t win.
That pretty much happens to Jeremy Corbyn, as well.
THACKER: There was one crazy point in which Bernie Sanders was actually being accused of being anti-Semitic, and he’s Jewish. It was crazy.
HOLDEN: For somebody like Iman Ahmad, the Corbyn victory is anathema to him. He is not from that faction of Labour, and he doesn’t like Jeremy Corbyn. Also, Jeremy Corbyn will be a threat to his own political and career ambitions in the Labour Party.
I’ve spoken to loads of people in the Labour Party, and people suspect that Imran Ahmed is a key source of leaks against Jeremy Corbyn. In the leaked Labour Party documents, I start to see emails of Ahmed working with journalists. He’s clearly got a taste for briefing stories.
Around the time Corbyn wins, he goes and works for another Labour MP called Angela Eagle who is anti-Corbyn. For a brief period of time, there is a sense that Angela Eagle may even challenge Jeremy Corbyn to be leader of the Labour Party.
The Labour Party documents that I’ve seen show Imran Ahmed is trying to protect Angela Eagle from the possibility that her own constituents might vote her out. He is working to make the left wing seem like they’re a bunch of thugs. He’s also railing against small… independent journalists and small independent media outlets who are fact-checking these claims he stirring up in the press.
THACKER: So Imran doesn’t like people like me.
HOLDEN: He doesn’t like people like you and me. He worked with the big media outlets, seeding stories into the mainstream, that are then being fact-checked by these smaller outlets.
Everyone believes Jeremy Corbyn is going to crash and burn, but in 2017 there’s a general election and Jeremy Corbyn gets the Labour Party’s best vote since Tony Blair. Suddenly it’s like, “Oh shit, Corbyn is actually electable!”
For people like Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed, this is the moment where they’re at the weakest in the party. And they’ve got to do something about that.
THACKER: When Corbyn was potentially going to become Prime Minister, one of his supporters is actor, Mark Ruffalo. Now Ruffalo is on social media supporting Imran Ahmed, who helped kill Corbyn, because Ruffalo is too stupid to realize who Imran Ahmed really is.
HOLDEN: I feel genuine sorrow for Mark Ruffalo. He doesn’t strike me as a bad-faith individual, but I do think that if he knew what Iman Ahmad was doing then and what he’s been doing behind the scenes now, he would be deeply upset by it.
THACKER: Many people just don’t know who Imran Ahmed really is.
HOLDEN: Right. So in 2017, Morgan McSweeney comes in. He’s originally from Ireland and starts working for the Labour Party in 2003, 2004. His first job is working under Peter Mandelson, on rapid rebuttal press. But he then becomes very close friends with Steve Reed, who’s now in a very senior position in the Labour government.
Back then, McSweeney’s primary focus is local politics, like South London stuff. But in 2015, he is the campaign manager for an MP called Liz Kendall who was standing against Jeremy Corbyn. Well, she gets trounced.
So McSweeney is part of a Labour Party faction that is pretty marginal in voter numbers but is quite powerful with media access. In 2017, McSweeney left local government issues behind and joins Labour Together. Labour Together was formed to unite the conservative and liberal factions, so the party could focus on beating the Conservatives.
THACKER: So Labour Together’s original concept was to stop the left and the right factions, to stop the squabbling. But then McSweeney changes this?
HOLDEN: Exactly. McSweeney sets about doing the exact opposite of bringing Labour together. Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party got around 40% of the vote in 2017. A huge number.
McSweeney is like, “Okay, we need to go about undermining this, undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s chance of success.” McSweeney writes this briefing document for Labour Together, which plots a path to, first of all, destroy Corbynism from within the Labour Party. Second, identify somebody to replace Jeremy Corbyn, who is eventually Keir Starmer, who’s now the Prime Minister.
Now, we only learned this year about the document McSweeney wrote in 2017. McSweeney is essentially the reason we have Keir Starmer as Prime Minister.
One of things McSweeney identifies back in 2017 is that the Corbyn movement has produced this really vibrant, pretty powerful, economically successful left-wing media ecosystem. It’s independent of the mainstream media, and outside of McSweeney and Ahmed’s ability to control. They can’t control the narrative.
From 2018 onwards, McSweeney and Ahmed start working together full-time. According to one recent retelling, there’s only four people who are allowed in Labour Together’s office: two young staffers, Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed.
A main objective was destroying media aligned with Jeremy Corbyn.
THACKER: You’ve got Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed feeding stories to the Jewish Chronicle, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and the other big outlets. I know they helped to tank the Canary. Who else threatened them?
HOLDEN: Their main threat was the Canary and the other one, it’s slightly smaller, is Evolve Politics. The most important thing is that there’s a huge social media network that supports Corbyn, and a lot of that content was driven by the Canary’s reporting. By 2019 the Canary had published thousands of articles and had around 25 full-time staff.
The Canary has an editorial line, which is basically left wing, and their tone is a bit tabloidy, but they’re a legit media organization with good investigative journalists. And they were fact-checking other papers who basically running stuff likely planted by Ahmed and McSweeney.
People have now written about how, back in 2018 or 2019, Morgan McSweeney was just obsessed with the Canary. Wouldn’t shut up about it. There’s a quote that’s been published in a book by a former Guardian editor where McSweeney says, “It’s like, unless we destroy the canaries, they’re gonna destroy us.
And that’s the thing I think is so interesting about the story. That 2017 McSweeney document I told you about, about how he wanted to destroy the Labour from within, they couldn’t do that openly. They had to do it in secret. They made Labour Together look in public like this friendly cross-faction of kumbaya, “Let’s all meet and discuss our differences….” It’s actually this viciously factional organizations They basically run a misinformation campaign.
THACKER: From the beginning, McSweeney and Ahmed are operating Labour Together with all these hidden groups to attack anything that threatened their idea of what is true. And yet their whole tactic was to say, “You’re misinformation! You’re wrong!”
Their whole game is to pretend they’re stopping misinformation; what they’re actually doing is spreading misinformation to attack anyone who has an independent thought that differs from their own.
HOLDEN: It’s so messed up. It takes a long time for even me to realize, pull back and start understanding. From 2017 they establish a campaign of misinforming the public about who they are and what they’re doing. There’s also the issue of the money.
They’re taking in loads of money and they’re not reporting it to the Electoral Commission. They’re actually funded by close to a million pounds in donations from very political figures. That’s not known to the public at the time either.
They launch the “Stop Funding Fake News” SFFN campaign in March 2019 pretending they’re just a bunch of grassroots activists. It’s all about “We don’t want to reveal our identity, we’re just people who are committed to the truth and fighting hate.” But nobody knows at the time it’s actually Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed—a Labour Party spin doctor. Nor that this campaign is supported by Steve Reed, who at the time was an MP and is now in Starmer’s cabinet.
They present themselves as grassroots. They’re actually this collection of very well-connected political figures who are funded with huge amounts of money from undeclared donors.
THACKER: They were also going after Breitbart in the UK. Breitbart is an American conservative media outlet affiliated with Steve Bannon at one time. Meanwhile, Stop Funding Fake News is telling the media, “We’re scared to tell you who we are, because then we’ll be attacked.”
Yet they attacked and condemned at will, anonymously—without disclosing who was funding them—anyone who dared express opinions they didn’t like. You don’t need to like a conservative Breitbart or a liberal Canary to know that people have a right to have those particular point of views without being attacked relentlessly by some dark money outfit like Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney.
HOLDEN: The fundamental issue is transparency. They were pressuring outlets reporting their opinions and ideas and then destroying them without any way of answering back. McSweeney and Ahmed were really successful against the Canary, cutting their advertising revenue. They still struggle at the Canary as a result.
But as it was happening the Canary they can’t do anything about it because they don’t know who’s attacking them. If the editors could have pointed out, “Look, this is just Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed, they don’t like us.” That would have been it.
But there’s also a legal dimension. If you don’t know it’s McSweeneyy Ahmed defaming you with anonymous accounts, you can’t sue them. On social media, there were times when Evolve Politics would ask, “Who are you? Stop this. I wanna send you a cease and desist letter, because you’re lying about us and affecting our ability to earn our income.”
There was no way of taking that legal action.
Stop Funding Fake News was not this heroic campaign to end disinformation and hate, because if you actually check their factual claims, they really don’t stand up. It was basically a misinformation campaign that’s no different from what Russia does. Hidden money for undisclosed political purposes, attacking people to create chaos.
Morgan McSweeney destroyed the Canary as a way of also destroying Corbynism, so that he can then select the next person to lead the Labour Party—so that person can be the next Prime Minister. It’s a misinformation campaign that succeeds in ways probably no other misinformation campaign has ever succeeded.
THACKER: Why is the media ecosystem in the UK is so weird. Why were they so incurious when they’re being contacted by McSweeney and Ahmed? Why would they go and quote the crap McSweeney and Ahmed were throwing around, without disclosing who they are being contacted by? The British media was complicit in this misinformation campaign.
HOLDEN: That is an incredibly good question to be asking of the British media ecosystem. It’s really genuinely crazy that, in certain instances, we’ve only found out this year about articles Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed were placing back in 2018. That’s a mad situation to be in.
I’m generalizing very broadly, because there’s caveats here, but generally speaking the mainstream British newspapers set the news agenda and are pretty hostile to the politics of Jeremy Corbyn. They were pretty happy to be taking stuff from a campaign that was undermining him.
There was also a conflict of interest. The Canary was successful and taking readers from other platforms. And the Canary often had this very aggressive, confrontational approach to mainstream media outlets. If the BBC published something and they thought there were errors in it, they would call that out, “Hey BBC, you’ve made a mistake. BBC is biased.”
THACKER: The British media was complicit in this misinformation campaign. And they did it for politics and for financial reasons to kill off critical competitors.
HOLDEN: Also, 2019 was this insane period of reporting in the UK. There was hysteria around the possibility that Jeremy Corbyn can be prime minister. Imagine if Bernie Sanders had a real chance to be the Democratic candidate for president. There would be loads of stuff happening in the same way that when Trump became the Republican candidate.
THACKER: This hysteria around Trump is still happening. Half the time you read stuff about Trump … I don’t know if it’s true or not. Like that’s the whole problem. I don’t mind reading things that are negative about Trump, if they’re true, but so many times . . . .
We had years of some bullshit story that there was possibly a pee-tape that was secretly recorded with Trump and prostitutes in Russia. Nonsense crazy stuff, with Trump and Putin plotting to take over America. The reporters at the New York Times who did much of this nonsense reporting then won a Pulitzer.
We have Trump Derangement Syndrome. You have Corbyn Derangement Syndrome (CBS) in the UK?
HOLDEN: That’s a pretty good way of putting it. What it’s taught me, and should teach everyone if you want to learn lessons from it: you have to read all your media against the grain. You’ve got to be checking constantly. You’ve gotta have a wide range of sources because everybody makes mistakes.
Reporting that’s presented as established fact by the mainstream media is often, years later, found to be problematic.
THACKER: Read wisely. Read widely.
HOLDEN: Right. The proper approach is to be skeptical about everything you read. You should be skeptical of me; you should be skeptical of you. People should be skeptical of the Times and the New York Times. They should also be skeptical of the Canary. Read things carefully.
You have moments where it’s accepted that a fact has been established by the mainstream media. And if you challenge that fact, or you question that fact in any meaningful way, you’re immediately seen as falling outside of the acceptable commons for discussion.
Yet independent media are often the ones who push at a topic and then reveal the truth.
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