Financial Flim-Flam Backs Imran Ahmed's Center For Countering Digital Hate
Authored by Paul Thacker via The Disinformation Chronicle (subscribe here)
The dark money that apparently birthed the censorship industry’s most critical “anti-disinformation” group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), recently came to light in an investigation by The Telegraph, which uncovered £700,000 in undeclared donations to British Labour Party politico Morgan McSweeney. And who’s McSweeney? He helped found CCDH in the UK in 2018—the same timespan when millionaire venture capitalists and businessmen were sending McSweeney secret money, triggering an investigation by Britain’s Electoral Commission.
As I first reported last October, Imran Ahmed is a Labour Party political operative who maintains close ties to intelligence agencies and began running CCDH from D.C. in 2021, when he started working closely with the Biden administration. That first year in D.C., Ahmed took in 75% of his donations from a dark money pass through, although new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents show Ahmed provided false information to the U.S. federal government to receive tax-exempt, nonprofit status.
“A finding that there is a materially incorrect statement on an application for tax exempt status should hopefully encourage the IRS to take a hard look,” said Dean Zerbe, a tax attorney with consulting firm Alliant, and a former Senate staffer who investigated corruption in the nonprofit industry.
While he was based in the U.K., Imran Ahmed ran both the CCDH and another Labour Party front group, Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN), to attack British leftists, to defund the Canary news site, and to remove Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party’s leftist leader. Both CCDH and SFFN wielded wide influence in British politics and posed as grassroots movements, until reporters at the Canary exposed the groups’ ties to Labour Party conservatives Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney.
Both CCDH and SFFN websites operated from the same server, and CCDH shared its address with Labour Together, an organization McSweeney organized as a campaign slush fund for Labour Party internecine warfare. After runnning Labour Party leftist Jeremy Corbyn out of leadership, Labour Together then helped elect Keir Starmer as Labour’s conservative leader.
Once Starmer defeated Corbyn to become Labour Party leader, McSweeney joined his staff as Starmer’s election guru.
While neither CCDH nor SFFN reported any donors—either to support their organizations or Imran Ahmed’s salary— Matt Taibbi’s Racket News reported that the money appears to have come from hidden donations to Labour Together.
The Telegraph reported further financial details of Labour Together, which appears to have served as McSweeney’s political slush fund.
Labour Together was fined £14,250 for its failure to register donations totalling £739,000.
However, there is now the prospect of a new investigation by the Electoral Commission after The Telegraph discovered Mr McSweeney contacted the regulator in 2017 and was told that funds needed to be registered, according to documents obtained under FOI.
As journalist and author Paul Holden documents, McSweeney’s Labour Together operated as a cut out for conservatives to raise hidden campaign funds from wealthy donors and drive Jeremy Corbyn from leadership.
Dark money, darker history
After Ahmed arrived in the United States, he continued to operate in the financial shadows. According to tax records, he started running CCDH from D.C. in 2021, where the Schwab Charitable Fund reported a $1.1 million private donation to CCDH. Schwab Charitable Fund is a “donor-advised fund” which allows people to set up private accounts that obscures their donations. The $1.1 million donation happened in Ahmed’s first year operating in the U.S., when IRS tax records report he raised $1.47 million for CCDH—meaning almost 75% of CCDH’s first-year donations came from one private, dark money donor.
Ahmed did not respond to questions about the money behind CCDH, nor who has paid his salary in the past.
Attorneys with the law firm Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath filed CCDH’s 2021 submission to the IRS for tax-exempt status and falsely claimed CCDH was operating as a registered charity in the U.K. The IRS documents were obtained by Paul Holden, an investigative journalist whose book, “The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Labour Together, and the Crisis of British Democracy”, will be published later this year.
Attorney Joe Miller with Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath did not respond to an email asking him to explain why the firm filed false paperwork with the IRS.
Since coming to DC, Ahmed has tried to position himself as a leftist, even though he and others on the Labour Party conservative wing helped to push out leftist Jeremy Corbyn from Labour leadership. One of Ahmed’s biggest supporters on social media is the actor Mark Ruffalo, who regularly tweets in Ahmed’s support.
Ironically, Ruffalo was one of many Hollywood celebrities who voiced support for Jeremy Corbyn, before Ahmed and CCDH helped drive him from power. Ahmed's current board for CCDH includes Aileen Keshishian, who is Ruffalo’s agent.
“US progressives may have come to know Imran Ahmed as an ally in their battle against Trump and his politics,” says James Schneider, who was spokesperson for Corbyn when he led the Labour Party. “But Ahmed's political origins in the UK are far from progressive. He worked against the leadership of the Labour Party when it was led by the progressive Jeremy Corbyn. Especially in the murky world of ‘disinfo’, the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.”
Many of CCDH’s employees are not listed on the group’s website, except for one: Callum Hood, who is CCDH head of research. Neither Hood nor any other CCDH employee is acknowledged in CCDH’s reports, and on his LinkedIn page, Hood lists the Center for Countering Digital Hate as the only job he has ever held.
Digging into Hood’s background, I found that, like Imran Ahmed, he staffed a member of Labour Party’s conservative wing. According to British Parliament records, Hood worked for Labour Party MP, Ian Austin.
Austin helped lead the charge against Corbyn’s leadership of the British government, urging voters to back Conservative Boris Johnson for Prime Minster. Johnson then recommended Austin to the House of Lords, where he now goes by the title “Lord Austin of Dudley.”
Intelligence ties
Ahmed seems loathe to discuss his ties to the intelligence community, links which became more obvious in emails made public last week. As I reported in October for Tablet:
One rumor that came up often in the dozen or so conversations I’ve had, with people who have observed Ahmed for years, is that he works for British intelligence. Along with other questions emailed to Ahmed a couple weeks back, Tablet asked him to address the allegation he is connected to British intelligence, but he did not respond to repeated requests for comment. One of Ahmed’s long-standing friends told me that Ahmed once mentioned that he had applied to either MI5 or MI6. Because the conversation took place so long ago, the friend couldn’t remember which of the two British intelligence agencies it was, and they never later discussed if he had gotten in.
New emails from the Biden administration find CCDH partnered with American intelligence agencies to support social media censorship.
In early 2022, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Under Secretary Robert Silvers connected with CCDH’s then-Head of Policy, Eva Hartshorn-Sanders, to discuss research and strategies for social media censoring.
“I’ll organize for the invitations to our Global Summit and Changemakers Dinner event to be sent through to you separately,” Hartshorn-Sanders emailed Silvers. “We’d love to see you there.”
The following day, DHS members began organizing a meeting with CCDH, which sent further invites to CCDH’s upcoming dinner event. By September 2022, CCDH had begun briefing the White House, the National Security Council, and the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism to act against social media companies.
“We are happy to meet with you to discuss the other findings in this report, answer any questions, and work with the White House team on providing further evidence, recommendations, or ways to place pressure on platforms to act on this disturbing content,” CCDH’s Hartshorn-Sanders emailed.
After the Biden White House released a 2023 blueprint to address “online harassment” that included National Institutes of Health (NIH) academic funding for “disinformation research,” CCDH claimed victory. “Great to see the publication of the White House’s initial Blueprint and to have been able to feed in research and policy recommendations for its development.” CCDH’s Hartshorn-Sanders posted on LinkedIn.
When CCDH’s emails with the White House and intelligence agencies became public last week, Hartshorn-Sanders then shut down her LinkedIn account.
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