EXCLUSIVE: Brits Spied on Racket, Other Journalists
The Keir Starmer-aligned group Labour Together had former Racket editor Matt Taibbi and contributor Paul Holden investigated, then passed details to an office in the GCHQ, their NSA analog
If you think reporting on this site doesn’t matter, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer — who may not have the title for long — begs to differ. Beginning in 2023, after publication of a series of “UK Files” exposés on this site, the Starmer-aligned group Labour Together contracted a private firm called APCO to investigate me, author Paul Holden, Sunday Times writers Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, Guardian writer Henry Dyer, Kit Klarenberg of The Grayzone, and John McEvoy of Declassified UK.
British reporters were shown a statement Wednesday in which a cabinet official claimed to be “distressed” and “furious” that Poglund was targeted, and claimed “no other journalists” were investigated or featured. (Apparently Holden and the rest of us don’t count.) The Labour Together work was commissioned by future MP and current Parliamentary Secretary Josh Simons, who told the Sunday Times last weekend: “Those who know me know I think the work of journalists is vital to our democracy.” Simons added it was “nonsense” that APCO was charged with investigating journalists, and that Labour Together was merely interested in investigating a “suspected illegal hack.”
This story was first broken by Khadija Sharife and Peter Geoghegan at the Substack site Democracy for Sale a week ago, but there have been developments. Not only did Labour Together hire APCO to investigate Holden, me, and others after we published internal emails and financial information, but Labour Together told journalists the APCO reports were passed to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is part of GCHQ, the British analog to the NSA. This trick has apparently come into increasing use in recent years, with Britain’s passage of the draconian National Security Act, in addition to more aggressive use of old laws like the Official Secrets Act, which shares “Basically, Everyone is Guilty” qualities with America’s Espionage Act.
How the “leverage” scam works:
A politician calls a friendly mainstream reporter with news that dissident journalist X has been reported to the NCSC for use of hacked materials, association with Russia, or other offenses. The reporter then calls the journalist to convey the news and seek a reaction. In many cases, reporters fear official trouble and drop their stories. The big tell comes when the reporter doesn’t crack, and the mainstream outlet doesn’t do a story. That happened in this case with Holden.
“So [Labour Together] apparently took this dodgy dossier that APCO had written on me, and gave it to the National Cybersecurity Reporting Centre, and basically said, ‘We think that Paul Holden has received illegal hacks from Russia or China of the Electoral Commission, and we demand that it be investigated.’ And then they briefed that to the Guardian, and the Guardian tried to run a story on me. I said, ‘What on earth are you talking about? This is absolutely insane…’ They eventually backed off.”
The Guardian’s Pippa Crerar did not respond to requests for comment.
“This was the same trick that quite a few of the people that I’ve reported on have used. They’ve falsely claimed that I work for Russia or I’m in receipt of Russian hacks. And with some outlets, it scares them off,” said Kit Klarenberg of The Grayzone, who’s had the same stunt pulled on him by another publication. “It’s a complete fraud used to silence critical reporting.”
The fact that fellow Racket writer Ryan Lovelace also learned of an FBI program targeting journalists in the States simultaneous to these developments is a coincidence. The American and British probes of reporters came up as ancillary revelations to other stories. In the case of the Labour Together/APCO shenanigans, it’s painful confirmation of the original reports and of a long-developing scandal, one of many reasons it may hit the wobbling Starmer government hard:
