Snopes exposed as CIA front after attempting to take on real investigators
WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
By Wayne Madsen
12/24/2016
The "debunking" site Snopes.com, which was recently named by Facebook as a partner in tagging "fake news" and whose co-founder David Mikkelson wrote that WMR is "adisreputable web site," appears to have some reputation problems of its own.
According to Britain's Daily Mail, Mikkelson embezzled $98,000 to spend on prostitutes. After Mikkelson divorced his co-founder wife, Barbara Mikkelson, he married Snopes staffer Elyssa Young, aka porn actress Eryn O'Bryn, who also worked as a part-time sex escort. Young also ran for the U.S. Congress in 2004 as a candidate for the Libertarian Party.
Barbara Mikkelson, a native of Canada, is alleging that David looted their joint corporate accounts of "millions of dollars" and bought property in Las Vegas.
WMR has reported on Snopes being an intelligence partner of the Central Intelligence Agency that serves to debunk bona fide news stories that are embarrassing to the CIA. The Mikkelsons always maintained that they were merely a "mom-and-pop" website that voluntarily debunked "fake news" stories. They claimed that Snopes morphed from their first group, the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society. The Mikkelsons used the letterhead of the society even though it never actually existed.
Barbara Mikkelson contends that her ex-husband spent $10,000 during a nearly month-long vacation in India this year and paid for his girlfriend's plane ticket to Buenos Aires. David Mikkelson responded in court filings by stating that he was considering setting up a fact-checking website in India and was attending a fact-checking conference in Buenos Aires. Such international forays appear very ambitious for a San Fernando Valley "mom-and-pop" operation.
The Daily Mail also reported that Snopes's primary fact checker, Kim LaCapria, also blogs as "Vice Vixen" and specializes in dominatrix-oriented "naughtiness, sin, carnal pursuits, and general hedonism and bonne vivante-ery," with a special focus on reviewing the performance of sex toys. She describes, for example, a "vibrating wand" that "drives boys mad."
In an April 2016 email, David Mikkelson demanded from his ex-wife a $720,000 annual salary but decided to settle for $360,000. His 2015 salary was $240,000.
In response to questions posed by The Daily Mail, David Mikkelson responded thatSnopes's editorial staff "is drawn from diverse backgrounds." That is probably the only true statement anyone from Snopes has ever made.
WMR had no idea how close we came to Snopes's actual "business" when we reported on April 19, 2016: "Snopes.com is run by a California couple named Barbara and David Mikkelson, who founded the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society.
The San Fernando Valley is best known as the porn capital of the world and many of its residences serve as porn studios for even the most aberrant type of sexual behavior. It also serves as the headquarters of Snopes.com, which specialized in its own form of "smut" aimed at legitimate news stories.
The recent disclosures by The Daily Mail, based on the Mikkelsons' bitter divorce court case in 2015, lend support to the contention that Snopes was and is a CIA front operation. No small-time web operation would have millions of dollars at its disposal. WMR is the past called for Snopes to provide for the public the sources of its income. Snopes felt it necessary to keep its funding sources secret. We now know why.
Wayne Madsen
 |
Wayne Madsen |
Investigative journalist,
author and syndicated columnist, Madsen has over twenty years experience in
security issues.
As a U.S. Naval Officer,
he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy.
Madsen has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox
News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC and MS-NBC. He has been
invited to testify as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the
French government. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ)
and the National Press Club, Madsen is based and reports from Washington, D.C.