For years, the story of Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and Ukraine was dismissed by much of American officialdom as a far-right fairy tale, a collection of half-truths peddled by desperate Trump loyalists. But newly declassified intelligence documents released by the Trump White House’s Government Transparency Task Force paint a different and far more unsettling picture. According to an operational summary from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ran a secret counterintelligence operation, code-named “Round River,” whose purpose was not to investigate corruption allegations surrounding the Biden family, but to discredit them as…

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, known by its German initials BfV, has stepped out of the shadows to issue a rare and striking public warning. With several state and local elections scheduled for September, the agency says Russia is running a coordinated disinformation campaign designed to manipulate German voters, and it has pointed a finger directly at a sophisticated Russian bot network called “Matryoshka,” named after the famous Russian nesting dolls because of the way it hides layers of deception inside seemingly harmless online activity. In plain and human terms, what this…