Amid the recent crackdown on Russian influence in American media, a group of former Trump advisers and operatives have quietly helped build a pro-Russian website that frequently spreads debunked conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine, election fraud and vaccines.

Working alongside contributors for Kremlin state media, the former Donald Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos, his wife, Simona Mangiante, and others have become editorial board members of the website Intelligencer, which is increasingly becoming a source of news for those in the rightwing ecosystem.

The growth of the website, which has not been reported on before, comes at a time when the US is seeking to crack down on Russian influence ahead of the 2024 election. Recently, the justice department charged two members of RT (formerly known as Russia Today) with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and money laundering for payments they allegedly made to “recruit unwitting American influencers”. It also placed sanctions on RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, and nine other employees.

Intelligencer appears to be gaining in popularity. It recently had its best month for internet traffic, with an increase of nearly 300% during August, according to data from Similarweb, and its articles have been shared on social media by the conspiracist Alex Jones, former Trump White House staffer Garrett Ziegler and former Trump aide Roger Stone.

According to Emma Briant, an associate professor of news and political communication at Monash University in Australia, the use of well-known figures to spread pro-Russian political messages represents a shift in disinformation tactics.

“Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has increasingly been forced to rely on networks of proxies and influencers whose conspiracist ‘brand’ generates income and audiences through social media monetization and some of whom Russia has now been caught covertly subsidizing,” Briant said.

The website’s opaque ownership structure makes it difficult to understand its financial backing, and there is no direct evidence of Kremlin funding. There is no corporate entity listed anywhere on the website, just a business address in Los Angeles.

Although much of the website’s content focuses on issues relating to American politics, the site actually began in Australia, with a little-known media outlet called TNT Radio, which launched in 2022. Show hosts and guests frequently deny climate change, discuss culture war issues in the US, espouse pro-Russian viewpoints on the war in Ukraine, and spread conspiracy theories about Covid-19.

Jennifer Squires, one of the station’s owners, explained in an interview that Intelligencer began as a way for TNT Radio to have a written publication to complement its radio station. To develop the new site, Squires said she turned to George Eliason, an American journalist who has lived in eastern Ukraine for more than 10 years. Eliason, who already had a show on TNT Radio at the time, has formerly appeared on RT and blames Kyiv for the war in Ukraine.

But Squires said she and co-owner Mike Ryan quickly grew disillusioned with the website’s planned appearance, and sought to disassociate themselves from it. However, Eliason continued to develop it, involving several others who had previously appeared on his radio show. The site appears to have launched at the end of 2023 – and nearly half of Intelligencer’s board members are either former aides, surrogates or fake electors for Trump’s previous two campaigns.

“The editorial board is filled with very accomplished people. All are, or were, experts at the top of their field and extremely qualified to write articles inside their fields of knowledge,” Eliason said.

Perhaps the most well-known ex-Trump official is Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy aide on Trump’s 2016 campaign. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Kremlin-linked professor who told him Russia had dirt on Hilary Clinton.

Mangiante, his wife, has written several posts for the site about debunked conspiracy theories involving the Bidens and Ukraine. In January, she posted an interview with a former Ukrainian lawmaker, Andrii Derkach, who repeated false claims of bribery about the Biden family in Ukraine. In 2020, the US placed sanctions on Derkach, calling him an active Russian agent; Derkach, who now is running for political office in Russia, previously met with Rudy Giuliani and purported to offer evidence of corruption against the Bidens.

“Intelligencer appears to be one of several [Russia-friendly] operations targeting the upcoming US elections, leveraging a network of far-right figures and disinformation tactics,” Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said.

Mangiante, along with fellow board member Igor Lopatonok, appears to have parlayed this work into a new documentary about the Hunter Biden laptop saga called Hunter’s Laptop: Requiem for Ukraine. According to social media posts, the documentary premiered on 5 September at the Trump International hotel in Chicago. Eliason wrote the script, which was filmed by Lopatonok, who has frequently collaborated with Oliver Stone on prior anti-Ukrainian documentaries and fawning films of dictators.

“Mr Lopatonok wanted fresh eyes from an investigative journalist and a different perspective for the story,” Eliason said. “Through the combined interviews, we were able to plumb deeper and raise questions that had not been asked before.”

Eliason also said that the address listed on Intelligencer’s website was provided by Lopatonok.

Lopatonok did not respond to requests for comment. However, he now appears to have implemented part of his business in Moscow. According to Russian corporate records, Lopatonok and his wife, Vera Tomilova, also an Intelligencer board member, registered a Global 3 Pictures LLC in Moscow in February.

According to invitations for the Hunter Biden documentary premiere, the event was hosted by the Christian Orthodox Coalition, an organization which claims to educate Orthodox Christians on social and cultural issues. Four of the organization’s board members are also board members of Intelligencer, including Papadopoulos, Mangiante and Lopatonok.

The fourth board member is Olga Ravasi, who was formerly the chairwoman of Serbs for Trump in 2020 and currently runs the Serbian American Voters Alliance political action committee. In March, Intelligencer posted about a Serbs for Trump kick-off event in Wisconsin with the state’s Republican senator Ron Johnson and former Trump acting director of national intelligence Ric Grenell.

Three other editorial board members also have close connections to the Trump campaigns. Leah Hoopes and Greg Stenstrom, both from Pennsylvania, have written a book falsely alleging the 2020 election was stolen. Both of them have been litigants in court cases challenging the results of the election in Pennsylvania, and Hoopes was one of Pennsylvania’s fake electors, who falsely signed paperwork saying that Trump had won the election.

Tyler Nixon, Roger Stone’s personal attorney, also serves on the board and hosts his own show on TNT Radio. The former Radio Sputnik journalist Lee Stranahan is also involved.

Nixon, Hoopes, Stenstrom and Stranahan did not respond to requests for comment.

Most of the site’s content appears to be created by Eliason, and Trevor Fitzgibbon, who was the spokesperson for American Values 2024, a Super Pac that supported Robert F Kennedy Jr’s presidential campaign. The website has several posts promoting Kennedy’s campaign.

Eliason said that the website is funded out of pocket and the contributors contribute pieces because it “because it makes sense to them”.

Many of the articles promote debunked conspiracy theories about vaccines and fraud in the 2020 presidential election, as well as stories that are aggressively anti-Ukrainian. In a May article, Eliason referred to those who voted for a $61bn aid package for Ukraine as “reprehensible”.

However, the site has even more direct ties to Russia beyond its content. One of its board members is Anna Soroka, an adviser to Leonid Pasechnik, the head of the self-styled Luhansk People’s Republic. In February 2023, the US sanctioned Pasechnik, calling him the “Putin-appointed interim head of the former so-called Luhansk People’s Republic”.

In 2020, Bellingcat found that Soroka had emailed back and forth with Maj Gen Andrey Ilchenko, who has been linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency known as the GRU.

Intelligencer’s content has also attracted the eyes of European propaganda outlets. The website Pravda-en has linked to and promoted Intelligencer articles, including one that attacked the OCCRP report on Lopatonok. According to a February report by France’s Viginum agency, which was set up in 2021 to combat foreign disinformation, a group of websites that operate under the Pravda name are working in coordination to spread pro-Russian content across the European Union.

“With an editorial board that reads like a who’s who of Putinist propaganda, Intelligencer is not your usual Russian ‘fake news’ site,” Briant said. “We may see more efforts like Intelligencer, which brings together cohorts of recognizable pro-Russian writers and consolidates their effort into a respectable-looking ‘news’ platform aiming to promote Russia’s influence in the US election and beyond.”

A well-known Georgian transgender model has been murdered, local officials said, a day after the government passed legislation that will impose sweeping curbs on LGBTQ+ rights in the country.

Georgia’s interior ministry said Kesaria Abramidze, 37, was believed to have been stabbed to death in her apartment in suburban Tbilisi on Wednesday.

Georgian media later reported that a man had been arrested in connection with the crime.

Abramidze was one of the country’s first openly trans public figures. Her death follows controversial legislation on “family values and the protection of minors” that will allow officials to outlaw Pride events and censor films and books.

The law, which was approved by the Georgian parliament on Tuesday in its third and final reading, includes bans on same-sex marriages and gender-affirming treatments. It is expected to be another point of contention between Georgia and the EU as the country seeks to join the bloc.

Critics argue that the bill, initially introduced by the ruling Georgian Dream party in the summer, mirrors laws enacted in neighbouring Russia, where authorities have implemented a series of repressive anti-LGBTQ+ measures over the past decade.

Although the motive behind Abramidze’s murder remains unclear, her death was swiftly cast by Georgian civil society as part of a state campaign against minorities in the country.

Under the Georgian Dream party, which has taken an increasingly anti-liberal stance, the country has seen a rise in violence against LGBTQ+ people.

Last year, hundreds of opponents of gay rights stormed an LGBTQ+ festival in Tbilisi, forcing the event to be cancelled. This year, tens of thousands of people marched in the capital to promote “traditional family values” at an event attended by the ruling party amd the deeply conservative and influential Orthodox church.

“There is a direct correlation between the use of hate speech in politics and hate crimes,” the Social Justice Center, a Tbilisi-based human rights group, said in its statement reacting to the murder.

“It has been almost a year that the Georgian Dream government has been aggressively using homo/bi/transphobic language and cultivating it with mass propaganda means,” it added.

On Wednesday, Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, called on the Georgian government to withdraw the “family values” law, warning it would harm Georgia’s chances of joining the bloc. The legislation would “increase discrimination & stigmatisation”, he said on X.

After Abramidze’s death, Michael Roth, the Social Democratic party chair of the Bundestag foreign affairs committee in Germany, echoed that call. “Those who sow hatred will reap violence. Kesaria Abramidze was killed just one day after the Georgian parliament passed the anti-LGBTI law,” Roth wrote on X.

The introduction of the law comes just five weeks before parliamentary elections that many see as a litmus test of whether Georgia, once one of the most pro-western former Soviet states, will now drift towards Russia.

The country’s pro-western president, Salome Zourabichvili, whose functions are mostly ceremonial, is expected to veto the law before it comes into effect. However, Georgian Dream and its allies have enough seats in parliament to override her veto.

Earlier this year, the Georgian Dream also pushed through the divisive “foreign influence” law, which western critics argue is authoritarian and Russian-inspired, and has derailed the country’s EU aspirations.

Meanwhile, tributes have started to pour in for Abramidze, who represented Georgia at Miss Trans Star International in 2018 and had more than 500,000 followers on Instagram.

“Kesaria was iconic! Provocative, wise, incredibly brave! A trailblazer for Georgia’s trans rights,” Maia Otarashvili, a Georgian political scientist, wrote on X.

Zourabichvili said the murder should be a “wake-up call” for Georgian society.

“A terrible murder! The death of this beautiful young woman … should not be in vain!” the president wrote on Facebook.

Two people are missing and about 1,000 people have been evacuated from their homes after devastating floods and landslides hit the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, prompting accusations that Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government lacks the will to confront the climate crisis.

The flooding was brought on by Storm Boris, which had earlier wreaked havoc in central and eastern Europe, killing at least 24 people. Several major cities in central Europe were bracing for swollen rivers to peak on Thursday.

The torrential rain engulfed the same areas of Emilia-Romagna hit by flooding in May 2023 that killed 17 people and caused €8.5bn (£7.14bn) of damage.

Two people were reported missing in Traversara, a hamlet in Ravenna province, after the Lamone River burst its banks.

Schools have closed, railway lines been disrupted and some roads blocked by landslides.

Firefighters have carried out more than 500 rescue operations in the region, including using helicopters to lift people from flooded homes.

“We are in a full emergency … the event is very similar to what we had last May,” Michele De Pascale, the mayor of Ravenna, told Radio 24.

There are no deaths reported in the latest flooding, which has also affected parts of the neighbouring Marche region. However, anger is mounting among residents at the sluggish progress of works intended to help protect the region from flooding.

“My home has once again been destroyed,” a resident in Faenza, a town in Ravenna province, said in a video collated by Local Team, an Italian photo and video agency. “It’s shameful; the politicians do nothing.”

Extreme rainfall is becoming more common because of human-caused climate breakdown across most of the world. Warmer air can hold more water vapour, while human factors, such as flood defence planning and land use, are also important factors in flooding.

Italy is among Europe’s climate risk spots. This summer alone it has endured unprecedented heatwaves, drought, wildfires, storms and severe flooding.

Angelo Bonelli, who leads the leftwing Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra party, on Thursday urged Meloni to explain her government’s strategy in addressing the climate crisis.

“There is no will to face the climate crisis,” he said. “The truth is that the climate crisis causes damage, and economic damage. The climate issue must not have a political characterisation. Unfortunately, it is an objective fact that we have to deal with. The premier, Meloni, must tell parliament which initiatives she intends to adopt.”

Meanwhile, Alice Buonguerrieri, a deputy in Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, said she would file a complaint with prosecutors “to determine responsibility” for the latest flooding. She claimed the region’s centre-left authorities had spent only €49m of the €130m allocated by the government last year to build flood defences.

In eastern and central Europe, the flooding was the worst in two decades. At least 24 people have died – five in the Czech Republic, seven in Romania, seven in Poland and five in Austria. The damage is estimated at billions of euros, with roads, bridges and railway lines destroyed and whole neighbourhoods submerged.

In Poland’s third-largest city, Wrocław, the defences appeared to be holding firm after two frantic days of work to reinforce them by the military and civil protection forces and volunteers among the city’s 600,000 residents. Poland has deployed 14,000 troops to its hardest-hit region, near the Czech border.

“It is too early to say the flood in Wrocław has been overcome,” the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, told a crisis meeting. “I would prefer that we hold on nervously and try to guess … the state of rivers as accurately as possible.”

Tusk was later due to meet the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria to discuss aid for the region, which has been hit by five times the average rainfall for September in five days.

In Hungary, which has reinforced defences along more than 300 miles of riverbank, the Danube was not due to peak in the capital, Budapest, until Saturday. The prime minister, Viktor Orbàn, said the water should be below record 2013 levels and Hungary would “mount a successful defence against this flood as well”.

In the latest round of the dispute between Elon Musk and Brazil’s top court, a senior judge has accused X of a “willful, illegal and persistent” effort to circumvent a court-ordered block – and imposed a fine of R$5m ($921,676) for each day the social network remains online.

The social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which has been banned by court order since 30 August, on Wednesday became accessible to many users in Brazil after an update that used cloud services offered by third parties, such as Cloudflare, Fastly and Edgeuno.

This allowed some Brazilian users to access X without the need for a VPN – which is also prohibited in the country.

Late on Wednesday, X described its reappearance in Brazil as an “inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users”.

But the influential supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes – who ordered the original ban as part of an attempt to crack down on anti-democratic, far-right voices – on Thursday described the move as a deliberate attempt “to circumvent the court’s blocking order”.

Moraes said that the tactic was “confessed directly by its largest shareholder, Elon Musk, in a post on X addressed to the entire country”.

This was a reference to a message by Musk who on Wednesday posted: “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”

According to Moraes, this left “no doubt that the X platform – under the direct command of Elon Musk – intends, once again, to disrespect Brazil’s judiciary”.

Moraes also ruled that if X does not pay the fines – which occurred with the previous R$18.3m ($3,376,509) penalties applied to the platform – the obligation will fall on Musk’s satellite internet provider, Starlink.

The justice argued that, as the companies share the same owner and X no longer has a legal representative in Brazil – something required by Brazilian law and one of the reasons for the ban – the satellite internet provider becomes “jointly liable” for the fines owed by X.

After a day of unrestricted use, the national telecommunications agency, Anatel, announced on Thursday that, “with the active support of Cloudflare”, it was able to identify the mechanism enabling access to X.

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former far-right president, seized on the platform’s temporary return to post a lengthy message defending Musk and criticising Moraes, who is handling most of the cases related to an attempted coup to keep the former army captain in power.

After “congratulating everyone for the pressure they are applying in defence of democracy in Brazil”, Bolsonaro wrote that “X was banned for questioning judicial rulings that demanded not only the removal of specific posts but the permanent exclusion of accounts. This is prior censorship.”

The supreme court, which has supported Moraes’s decision to ban X, has found that the social network refused to remove accounts that were disseminating false information, hate speech and incitement to crime.

Among them were threats against federal police officers “involved in investigations into digital militias and the attempted coup”, the court said.

In the latest round of the dispute between Elon Musk and Brazil’s top court, a senior judge has accused X of a “willful, illegal and persistent” effort to circumvent a court-ordered block – and imposed a fine of R$5m ($921,676) for each day the social network remains online.

The social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which has been banned by court order since 30 August, on Wednesday became accessible to many users in Brazil after an update that used cloud services offered by third parties, such as Cloudflare, Fastly and Edgeuno.

This allowed some Brazilian users to access X without the need for a VPN – which is also prohibited in the country.

Late on Wednesday, X described its reappearance in Brazil as an “inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users”.

But the influential supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes – who ordered the original ban as part of an attempt to crack down on anti-democratic, far-right voices – on Thursday described the move as a deliberate attempt “to circumvent the court’s blocking order”.

Moraes said that the tactic was “confessed directly by its largest shareholder, Elon Musk, in a post on X addressed to the entire country”.

This was a reference to a message by Musk who on Wednesday posted: “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”

According to Moraes, this left “no doubt that the X platform – under the direct command of Elon Musk – intends, once again, to disrespect Brazil’s judiciary”.

Moraes also ruled that if X does not pay the fines – which occurred with the previous R$18.3m ($3,376,509) penalties applied to the platform – the obligation will fall on Musk’s satellite internet provider, Starlink.

The justice argued that, as the companies share the same owner and X no longer has a legal representative in Brazil – something required by Brazilian law and one of the reasons for the ban – the satellite internet provider becomes “jointly liable” for the fines owed by X.

After a day of unrestricted use, the national telecommunications agency, Anatel, announced on Thursday that, “with the active support of Cloudflare”, it was able to identify the mechanism enabling access to X.

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former far-right president, seized on the platform’s temporary return to post a lengthy message defending Musk and criticising Moraes, who is handling most of the cases related to an attempted coup to keep the former army captain in power.

After “congratulating everyone for the pressure they are applying in defence of democracy in Brazil”, Bolsonaro wrote that “X was banned for questioning judicial rulings that demanded not only the removal of specific posts but the permanent exclusion of accounts. This is prior censorship.”

The supreme court, which has supported Moraes’s decision to ban X, has found that the social network refused to remove accounts that were disseminating false information, hate speech and incitement to crime.

Among them were threats against federal police officers “involved in investigations into digital militias and the attempted coup”, the court said.

A previously unknown piece of music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart when he was probably in his early teens has been uncovered at a library in Germany.

The piece dates to the mid- to late-1760s and consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio lasting about 12 minutes, the Leipzig municipal libraries said in a statement on Thursday.

Born in 1756, Mozart was a child prodigy and began composing at a very early age under his father’s guidance.

Researchers discovered the work at the city’s music library while compiling the latest edition of the Köchel catalogue, the definitive archive of Mozart’s musical works.

The newly discovered manuscript was not written by Mozart himself but is believed to be a copy made in about 1780, the researchers said.

The piece was performed by a string trio at the unveiling of the new Köchel catalogue in the Austrian city of Salzburg on Thursday.

It will receive its German premiere at the Leipzig Opera on Saturday.

The piece is referred to as Ganz kleine Nachtmusik in the catalogue, according to the Leipzig libraries.

The manuscript consists of dark brown ink on medium-white handmade paper and the parts are individually bound, they said.

The Köchel catalogue describes the piece as “preserved in a single source, in which the attribution of the author suggests that the work was written before Mozart’s first trip to Italy”, according to the municipal libraries.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating a Delta Air Lines flight after pressurization issues caused some passengers to say they suffered ruptured eardrums and nosebleeds and forced the plane to turn around.

On Sunday, the flight, a Boeing 737-900, was traveling from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Portland, Oregon, when it was forced to make an emergency landing back in Salt Lake City due to pressurization issues.

Speaking to KSLTV, one passenger, Caryn Allen, said she looked over and noticed her husband was leaning forward in his seat and had both of his hands over his ears. Allen then noticed other passengers in pain too, saying: “I looked about a row behind me over on the other side of the aisle and there was a gentleman that clearly had a very bad bloody nose and people were trying to help him.”

Similarly, another passenger, Jaci Purser, told the TV station that she felt like somebody was stabbing her ear and that she felt her ear pop. “I grabbed my ear and I pulled my hand back and there was blood on it,” Purser said.

Following the emergency landing, paramedics identified at least 10 out of the 140 passengers on board who needed medical attention and Delta offered to pay for the transportation to the hospital.

In a statement following the incident, Delta said: “We sincerely apologize to our customers for their experience on flight 1203 on September 15. The flight crew followed procedures to return to SLC where our teams on the ground supported our customers with their immediate needs,” KSLTV reported.

“Delta technicians worked the pressurization issue on the aircraft successfully. It was taken out of service on the morning of September 15 and went back into service on September 16,” the airline added.

The FAA said it was investigating the incident.

The former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed has been accused of raping five women and sexually abusing at least 15 others when they worked at the luxury department store, according to a BBC investigation.

More than 20 women, all of whom were Fayed’s former employees, told a BBC documentary they were sexually assaulted by him and that Harrods covered up the abuse.

The store’s current owners said they were “utterly appalled” by the allegations and apologised to the victims.

Fayed, who sold Harrods in 2010, died last year aged 94. His obituary in the Guardian noted there were repeated allegations of sexual harassment of female staff during his lifetime.

In 2009 the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge Fayed over the claim he had sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl at the store. In 2013 he was interviewed by police after a woman alleged he had sexually attacked her at his Park Lane apartment after a job interview. The police reopened the case in 2015 but took no further action. Fayed always denied the allegations.

The alleged victims give detailed accounts of the abuse, including some on camera, in the new documentary, Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods. It alleges the abuse took place in London, Paris, Saint-Tropez and Abu Dhabi.

One woman told the BBC she was raped as a teenager in Fayed’s Park Lane apartment. “Mohamed Al Fayed was a monster, a sexual predator with no moral compass,” she told the BBC.

Three other women told the BBC they were also raped by him in the apartment. A fifth woman, named only as Gemma, said on camera that Fayed raped her at his Villa Windsor apartment in Paris and then made her wash herself with disinfectant.

She told the programme: “Obviously he wanted me to erase any trace of him being anywhere near me.”

The documentary-makers say the women came forward after seeing Fayed sympathetically portrayed in the Netflix series The Crown. The episodes in question covered Diana, Princess of Wales’s relationship with Fayed’s son Dodi, and their deaths in a car crash in 1997.

One woman, whom the BBC names only as Sophia, says Fayed tried to rape her more than once when she was a personal assistant to him from 1988 to 1991. Speaking of Fayed’s portrayal in The Crown, she told the BBC: “People shouldn’t remember him like that.”

Bruce Drummond, a barrister representing several of the women, told the BBC: “The spider’s web of corruption and abuse at this company was unbelievable and very dark.”

In a statement, Harrods said: “We are utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed Al Fayed. These were the actions of an individual who was intent on abusing his power wherever he operated and we condemn them in the strongest terms. We also acknowledge that during this time as a business we failed our employees who were his victims and for this we sincerely apologise.

“The Harrods of today is a very different organisation to the one owned and controlled by Al Fayed between 1985 and 2010; it is one that seeks to put the welfare of our employees at the heart of everything we do.

“This is why, since new information came to light in 2023 about historic allegations of sexual abuse by Al Fayed, it has been our priority to settle claims in the quickest way possible, avoiding lengthy legal proceedings for the women involved. This process is still available for any current or former Harrods employees.

“While we cannot undo the past, we have been determined to do the right thing as an organisation, driven by the values we hold today, while ensuring that such behaviour can never be repeated in the future.”

A former CIA officer who drugged and sexually assaulted dozens of women was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Wednesday, the Department of Justice announced.

Brian Jeffrey Raymond, 48, of La Mesa, California, drugged more than two dozen women and performed nonconsensual sexual acts or made sexual contact with at least 10 women, the justice department said in a press release.

Raymond also photographed and recorded videos of victims without their consent while they were drugged or otherwise incapacitated.

Raymond had previously worked for the CIA for more than 20 years, the Washington Post reported.

Prosecutors said that Raymond, as a CIA employee, would lure women he met on dating apps back to his government-leased apartment, later drugging and assaulting them.

The assaults date back to 2006 and took place in multiple countries, including Mexico and Peru.

An investigation of Raymond began in May 2020 when police in Mexico City responded to a naked woman screaming for help on the balcony of Raymond’s residence, according to court documents. The apartment had been leased by the US government for embassy employees.

The woman told police that she and Raymond had met online. She said that Raymond had raped her and accused him of drugging her when the two had drinks at his apartment.

Police then searched Raymond’s devices as apart of the investigation. They discovered several explicit videos and images showing Raymond sexually assaulting numerous women.

Raymond accepted a plea deal in November 2023, pleading guilty to four counts of sexual abuse, abusive sexual contact, coercion and enticement, and the transportation of obscene material, according to the Department of Justice.

Several of the women spoke in court about the trauma caused by Raymond’s actions. Many did not realize they had been assaulted until they were approached by police and shown images or videos taken by Raymond.

“My body looks like a corpse on his bed,” said one woman of the photos. “Now I have these nightmares of seeing myself dead.”

Another woman testified in court: “Was I raped? Was I sexually assaulted. I will never know, and that haunts me too.”

Raymond’s sentencing comes as the CIA faces intense scrutiny over its handling of sexual misconduct cases. A 648-page internal watchdog report revealed that the agency routinely failed to address such incidents.

The document came after an Associated Press investigation found that more than two dozen women reported that they had experienced sexually assault or unwanted contact, later facing retaliation after they reported it to the agency.

Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, was denied the sale of alcohol this week after he forgot his identification while promoting a new state law allowing customers to buy canned alcoholic cocktails from convenience stores.

The governor’s office told the Hill that Shapiro put the alcoholic drink back after being carded, and no one bought alcohol for him.

Shapiro, 51, was making an appearance at Rutter’s convenience store in central Pennsylvania on Tuesday, along with other legislative leaders and members of the Pennsylvania liquor control board, to celebrate the new law and pick up some canned cocktails.

In video clips and photos, Shapiro was seen laughing inside the store when he realized that he forgot his ID, and then was seen leaving the store empty-handed.

“Everybody’s been there,” Shapiro’s spokesperson, Manuel Bonder, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Follow the law and get your canned cocktails.”

The Hill reported that Shapiro intended to buy some Philadelphia-based Surfside tea and vodka beverages.

The state law, Act 86, authorizes places like grocery stores and gas stations in the Keystone state to sell ready-to-drink cocktails with up to 12.5% alcohol by volume in containers of up to 16 ounces, starting 16 September.

Shapiro signed the bipartisan legislation into law this summer.

“This is what real freedom looks like, and we did it in a way that protects taxpayers and supports our state workers,” Shapiro said in August.

Before this, convenience stores and grocery stores in Pennsylvania could sell beer and wine but could not sell ready-to-drink beverages, and only state-run stores could sell hard liquor.