That New Knowledge had such an outsize role in creating the public record about Russia — through the Senate report and Hamilton 68 — is more jarring given that it was exposed in late 2018 as a central player in “Project Birmingham,” an audacious dirty trick election operation.

Just days after New Knowledge’s high-profile report was being lauded by Senator Warner, the New York Times exposed the scandal, which had targeted a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama. In what the firm itself referred to as a “false flag” operation, it had created thousands of fake Russian bots to follow candidate Roy Moore in a hard-fought special election. News stories said it appeared the Kremlin favored Moore.

New Knowledge also ran a phony Facebook page boosting a write-in Republican candidate to draw votes from Moore, and another in which Moore purportedly favored banning alcohol in Alabama. Democrat Doug Jones ended up defeating Moore by a narrow margin.

The “Birmingham Project” was engineered by former Obama White House cyber guru Mikey Dickerson. New Knowledge was paid $100,000 by Linked-In billionaire Reid Hoffman. They both later claimed not to have had a full understanding of the operation.

[I’ll bet. Be sure to read it all, as it demonstrates — again — how easy it is to turn a dirty political trick into a national witch hunt. To this day, the scope of this dirty trick has not been made widely known, which Taibbi wants to ameliorate now. Taibbi has more on that in this story, too. — Ed]