The Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 US election created a fake leftwing news publication, staffed it with fake editors with AI-generated photos and hired real freelance reporters as part of a fresh influence operation detected and removed by Facebook, the company said on Tuesday.

The latest operation by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) was still in its early stages when it was detected thanks to a tip from the FBI, according to Facebook’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher. The network had 13 accounts and two pages, with about 14,000 total followers.

President Trump’s oldest son defended on Sunday his father’s reelection chances amid flagging poll numbers and criticized presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s economic plan as “asinine.”

Speaking on “Sunday Morning Futures,” Donald Trump Jr. blamed the president’s drop in the polls on the media coverage Trump has received recently – saying news outlets have been critical of the president while ignoring going after Biden.

(CNN) -- One need not listen hard these days to hear the sound of Democratic pollsters and pundits gleefully cheering that the end of President Donald Trump's term in power is finally in sight -- Joe Biden's Inauguration Day on January 20th, 2021.

Such Democratic groupthink goes as follows: the Covid-19 pandemic has killed more than 130,000 Americans and shows no signs of letting up; the economy has been plunged into the deepest recession in decades; and amid ongoing protests in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, Democrats are fired up and ready to vote as never before.

WASHINGTON – Joe Biden can look at the polls and smile.

Cautiously.

A double-digit advantage in numerous national surveys, solid leads in a number of battlegrounds and competitive showings in states Donald Trump carried handily in 2016 suggest the presumptive Democratic nominee is the favorite to win in November.

The overwhelming majority of polls four years ago indicated Trump would lose as well. So why put much faith in the 2020 polls that show the former vice president consistently on top?

Fox’s Brooke Singman, who has been perspicacious in her coverage of the probe of the Russia probe, has a disturbing “exclusive” on July 9, with the headline: “Durham, under pressure to wrap up investigation, could ‘punt’ to after Election Day: source”

Wouldn’t we love to know who her “source” or “sources” were? But never mind for the moment. The story begins:

As much as Donald Trump was hailed by Republicans for winning the White House in 2016, Democrats blamed their loss squarely on Hillary Clinton and her campaign. A closer look confirms that she underperformed a typical Democrat in key states in the race for president, even as she overperformed elsewhere.

In the weeks after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the American press realized it had failed. Nearly every major media outlet had spectacularly guessed wrong on the outcome, had failed to see the rise of the electorate that would elect Trump, and had not covered Trump as a serious candidate. Those sins, along with an obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails and a wrongful dismissal of Russian involvement in the American election, pumped oxygen into the toxic political environment that helped produce the Trump presidency.

Hillary Clinton has endorsed the idea of obtaining political dirt from overseas, saying her campaign’s Kremlin-sourced dossier was “part of what happens in a campaign.”

President Trump is taking heat from Democrats for telling ABC News on Wednesday that he would listen to negative information from a foreign country about a political opponent in 2020.

That is basically the same position Mrs. Clinton took when interviewed on Nov. 1, 2017 on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

Donald Trump began his campaign for the presidency by branding Mexicans as “rapists.” He initially declined to denounce David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. One week after his 2017 inauguration, the president temporarily banned people from seven mostly Muslim countries from entering the United States. That summer, he said there were “very fine people” among torch-wielding white supremacists who descended on Charlottesville.

Defying the popular leftist notion that racism has heightened under President Donald Trump, a pair of University of Pennsylvania researchers just published a study concluding that racism among white Americans actually declined following Trump's 2016 election.