“The King is dead! Long live the New King!” The rats are scurrying.
With President Trump’s new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard now confirmed, Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) tried to explain away its years-long scurrilous targeting of Gabbard as a “Russian propagandist.” Lt. Andriy Kovalenko, head of the CCD, issued a statement today announcing that the CCD stories libeling Gabbard in 2022-2023 were “unfounded…. [and] did not meet the Center’s standards, as they were published without appropriate verification of information.”
The CCD first smeared Gabbard on April 6, 2022, with a Telegram posting asserting that “former U.S. Army Reserve officer Tulsi Gabbard has been working for a foreign audience for the Kremlin’s money for several years … on its payroll.” Gabbard was subsequently included in several CCD hit lists against alleged “Russian propagandists,” starting in July 2022.
With Gabbard now in a position to order an investigation into and shut down U.S. government funding and ties to the CCD, Kovalenko now claims that “the individuals responsible for their publication [vs. Gabbard] were fired in 2023-January 2024,” and therefore “the Center is deprived of the opportunity to hold the individuals accountable.”
Kovalenko lies. The CCD did not retract its slander, or delete its April 6, 2022 Telegram lie until today. The announcement of that CCD slander is still available on the X account of Zelenskyy’s NSDC.
Furthermore, as of this writing, Gabbard has not been removed from the Myrotvorets kill list. Myrotvorets added her name to its list on April 6, 2022, explicitly on the basis of the CCD’s libel, citing its text as the primary reason she should be “liquidated.”
Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche has been at the top of the CCD lists which included Gabbard, and dozens of others falsely charged with being “information terrorists” for the Kremlin. No retractions have been issued of the CCD’s similarly “unfounded” lies against those public figures.
With Gabbard now at her post, the new U.S. administration and Congress are in a position to act swiftly to shut this Ukrainian agency down. EIR has provided in its September 2022 dossier, all the documentation needed to prove that it is the U.S. State Department, USAID and other U.S. government agencies (along with NATO and the EU) have directed and funded the CCD’s campaign, coordinated with Myrotvorets, to eliminate public figures who advocate for peace.
