An investigation into Facebook’s political donations to Republican and anti-LGBT politicians and its investments from Putin-linked Russian oligarchs. We found a pattern of political activity at odds with the company’s public image.

At 33, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the world’s most recognizable names. Zuckerberg is also one of its richest, estimated to be worth $73.7 billion. The Facebook founder publicly espouses liberal notions on everything from gay rights to immigration but a closer look under the hood of Facebook’s finances and political operations reveals a record of support for conservative causes, opposition to LGBT rights and connections to Russian money.

Zuckerberg is now under enormous pressure to reveal more about Facebook’s role in a Russian propaganda campaign in support of Donald Trump in the 2016 election cycle. Despite a coy statement revealing $150,000 in advertising spend by a Russian social media firm with ties to Vladimir Putin and the FSB and new revelations the social network allowed Russian operatives posing as Americans to create and sell tickets to anti-immigration, secessionist, anti-LGBT and confederate events, Facebook is refusing to release the ads, groups and who was targeted.

“It appeared to me that the very social media sites that we rely on for virtually everything — our Facebooks, Googles and Twitters — it was my belief the Russians were using those sites to intervene in our elections,” Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) told CNN “And the first reaction from Facebook was: ‘Well you’re crazy, there’s nothing going on’ — well, we find yesterday there actually was something going on.”

Amid all this pressure, a renewed spotlight should be shone on why Facebook donated $120,000 to the Conservative Political Action Committee. Facebook made the donation to CPAC partly to allow conference attendees could easily produce Facebook Live videos, according to the Daily Beast. Facebook had previously contributed to production at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions but the decision to support a partisan action committee conference raises questions about the motives of the donation amid conflicting statements from Facebook and CPAC.

The social network acknowledged the payment but said “our involvement is not an endorsement of any particular position or platform.” CPAC’s Matt Schlapp indicated however there was some ideological participation: “We are glad Facebook agreed to be at CPAC and to acknowledge the importance of conservatives to their company, and we continue to work with them on issues important to conservatives,” he said.

The CPAC convention took place at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Md in February this year and featured President Donald Trump, VP Mike Pence, Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus, Kellyanne Conway. The NRA which is also linked to Russian influence is a big funder of CPAC.

Since 2011, Facebook’s PAC has contributed more to GOP candidates including those with anti-LGBT positions.

Facebook started its own Political Action Committee in 2011. The PAC supports politicians on both sides of the aisle which tends to favor Republican causes, giving $477,000 to Republican candidates like John Boehner and Paul Ryan. The PAC gave Democrats $425,000 in donations including to John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi. The PAC only supported one presidential candidate in 2016, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who received $4,000.

Since 2012, Facebook has also favored politicians with anti-LGBT voting records. More than 40 percent of Facebook’s PAC contributions, totaling roughly $156,000, have gone to politicians voting against LGBT rights. In 2014, Northstar Asset Management which owns more than 55,000 shares in Facebook filed a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission demanding the company’s PAC fall in line with Facebook’s values of being pro-gay and intellectual property rights.

Facebook rejected the claim, saying: “We have practices in place to ensure the appropriate disclosure and oversight of our lobbying and political activities. The proposal seeks to impose requirements that would be cumbersome to apply, are not required by law and are not standard amongst other companies, including competitors”.

A look inside Facebook also reveals a culture devoid of diversity. There are literally no people of color on Facebook’s board which is mostly men. As a whole, 90% of Facebook is white or asian. In 2015, only 2% black overall and 3% black in senior leadership.

One of those white men who has a seat on the board is Peter Thiel, an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump (he personally donated $1.25 million to the Trump campaign and spoke at the RNC). Zuckerberg has resisted pressure to oust Thiel from the board but as investigators turn up evidence of Facebook’s role in targeting and delivering Facebook ads on behalf of the Trump campaign, Thiel’s role is likely to receive new scrutiny.

Zuckerberg touts Thiel as an example of ideological diversity. “I think the folks who are saying we shouldn’t have someone on our board because they’re a Republican, I think that’s crazy,” Zuckerberg told a forum at North Carolina A&T State University. “I think you need to have all kinds of diversity if you want to make progress together as a society.”

Thiel is also tied to mercenary Erik Prince, brother of Betsy DeVos who favors a private army take over the war in Afghanistan and is vocally opposed to rights for transgender people.

One of Facebook’s biggest shareholders is a Russian company partly-owned by an oligarch known as the “hard man” of Russia and is very close to Vladimir Putin.

In 2009, Facebook was struggling financially. The company sought outside investment and it came from Russian internet holding company Digital Sky Technologies, which invested $200 million for 2% in the company in 2009 (the stake has since climbed to between 5.4% to 10% depending on who you ask). Digital Sky’s CEO is Russian oligarch Yuri Milner but its largest shareholder and initial funder is Alisher Usmanov who is known “as the hard man” of Russia.

Usmanov is criticised for being a “racketeer and gangster”. He is a convicted criminal and was in jail in the former Soviet Union though he claims he was a political prisoner. He owns Britain’s Arsenal Football Club and investments in mines, metals factories, media properties, and mobile phones in Russia. He is the Chairman of ‘Gazpromholdings’, a subsidiary of state-run Gazprom, which has been sanctioned by the U.S.

“Usmanov became a billionaire oligarch in the gangster takeover of Russia’s “privatised” mineral assets. He is close to Putin, and has been used by him to buy up and neutralise much of the little remaining independent media in Russia. Usmanov does this in his own name or as Chairman of ‘GazpromInvestHolding’. Independent journalists have died in mysterious accidents following Usmanov takeovers,” says former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray who has taken on a personal crusade against the oligarch and was sued for his effort.

Usmanov owns 35 per cent of DST which makes him the indirect owner of a significant amount of Facebook through Digital Sky. “For a blackmailer who is a key tool in Putin’s increasingly authoritarian regime, to have a share in Facebook is totally unacceptable,” says Murray.

Digital Sky’s CEO Milner presents a cleaner image to the world but is also very close to Putin, regularly attending meetings with Usmanov and the Russian president. DST is heavily invested in Silicon Valley including investments in Twitter, Groupon and many young startups.

Facebook’s reliance on DST was not just about getting Russian money. It gave the social network access to the Kremlin and the Russian digital market. “If Facebook wants to be successful in Russia, DST can bring a lot to the table besides knowledge. DST is close to the government there, the source said, and while outright involvement (or obstruction) from the Russian government is highly unlikely, if Facebook wants its business to go more smoothly, DST can help,” a source close to DST told CNET.

Facebook has many business reasons to supports conservative voices but it remains an open question how much they knew about Russia’s interference in 2016.

Silicon Valley is increasingly concerned about aggressive Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice antitrust investigations over “unfair or deceptive”, monopolies and online data collection and use, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and spam. According to Forbes, the FTC is known in Silicon Valley as the “Federal Technology Commission”. From a business perspective Facebook’s support for conservative allies makes some sense but that they fly in the social network’s public values could harm the company.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents is “zeroing in on how Russia spread fake and damaging information through social media and is seeking additional evidence from companies like Facebook and Twitter about what happened on their networks,” according to Bloomberg.

Mueller’s focus on social media is said to be “red hot” and Facebook, Twitter and Google executives may be called to testify in front of congressional committees as well. More troubling is a notion first floated by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Facebook, Twitter and Google may indeed be the scene of the biggest political crime in history. This would expose the tech giants to extraordinary examination by prosecutors and ironically the very regulation they may have sought to dissuade with their political efforts.

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President Trump’s plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan would enrich three of Trump’s key financial donors and plays into Russia’s military objectives.

With reporting by Tracie McElroy.

In September 2007, Blackwater armed military personnel, guarding State Department officials, drove into Baghdad’s Nisour Square and opened fire, killing 17 people and injuring 20 others. Blackwater worked for the US as a “contracted” private army (there were as many as 160,000 contracted personnel operating during the Iraq war). Blackwater guards worked outside the normal military command of the military and the House Oversight Committee would later reveal the firm was engaged in over 195 unprovoked attacks in a 9 month period in 2014.

As a result of the Nisour Square massacre, Iraq terminated Blackwater’s license to operate within its borders. Four Blackwater employees were tried and convicted in U.S. federal court; one for murder, and the other three of manslaughter and firearms charges.

Peter Singer, a former Brookings Analyst would later write, “When we evaluate the facts, the use of private military contractors appears to have harmed, rather than helped, the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq, going against our best doctrine and undermining critical efforts of our troops.”

Mercenary Erik Prince wants to command a private army to fight the war in Afghanistan.

10 years after the Nisour Square Massacre, Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, the same man who helmed the company in 2007, is proposing that a private army should fight another U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Prince, brother of Education Secretary Betsy Devos, is a staunch supporter of the Trump administration with close ties to Vice President Mike Pence, Trump backers Robert and Rebekah Mercer and former White House strategist Stephen Bannon. Prince, as you may recall, was the Trump adviser who held secret talks with Russia in the Seychelles in December 2016. Now, he wants to privatize the 16- year-old war in Afghanistan.

“We aren’t winning,” President Trump recently chastised his Generals at a meeting on Afghanistan. “We are losing.” The Generals reminded the President that the U.S. isn’t winning the war because he’d delayed signing off on a strategy for months. It’s in that vacuum that Prince and the White House have floated an idea to pay Blackwater $10 billion to hire 5,500 private contractors to run the war in Afghanistan.

Prince is not the only private citizen to set to benefit from this deployment. Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel, who helped found PayPal and Facebook donated $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign and was even given an important prime-time speaking role at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. He is close to Erik Prince. Thiel showed New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, “a picture on his phone of him posing with Erik Prince, who founded the private military company Blackwater, and Mr. Trump but joke[d] that it was ’N.S.F.I.’ (Not Safe for the Internet).”

Thiel is the co-founder of Palantir, a controversial yet effective data mining software company which provides clients, including many branches of the U.S. military, a real-time view of what is going on in an operational theatre (weather conditions, cell-phone and social media tracking, and other real-time data). Palantir’s software is believed to have been used in the raid that killed Osama Bin-Laden and has been effectively deployed elsewhere.

Critics say Palantir doesn’t have the right security and privacy mechanisms and as a private company, the vast data set that it owns, often classified, is in the hands of a private company and can easily pass into the wrong hands. The system has has also been vulnerable to significant malware attacks.

Former National Security Adviser, Lt-Gen Michael Flynn, exposed as “compromised” by Russia, has ties to mercenary Erik Prince and Peter Thiel’s company Palantir.

Palantir has many supporters in the military ranks, including three of General Jim Mattis’ deputies who have lobbied on behalf of Thiel’s company. Condoleezza Rice and former CIA director George Tenet advise the company. Perhaps Palantir’s most ardent supporter is Lt-General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security adviser, who was working for Turkey and who Justice officials say was compromised by the Russians. Back in 2010, when he was the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Flynn pushed the military to adopt Palantir software. “Intelligence analysts in theater currently do not have the tools required to fully analyze the tremendous amounts of information currently available,” Flynn wrote.

Flynn also played a behind the scenes role connecting Palantir to partners. Steven Brill speculates in Fortune magazine that with Trump in office, Thiel can get Palantir approval across U.S. agencies, something his key lobbyist (and compromised Russian operative) Michael Flynn would wholeheartedly endorse.

Flynn served under Mike Pence as the vice chairman of Trump’s transition team. In December, he met with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. The same month Flynn, Erik Prince, Jared Kushner and Stephen Bannon met Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan in a secret meeting in New York. Zayed had met with Putin twice in 2016. A few weeks after the New York meeting, Zayed arranged for Erik Prince to meet a representative of Vladimir Putin in the Seychelles in order to explore Russia’s willingness to isolate Iran in exchange for closer U.S. relations and dropping of sanctions.

Another top Trump supporter Stephen A. Feinberg is working with Prince to support the privatization of the war in Afghanistan. Feinberg is the billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International. Bannon and Kushner tapped Prince and Feinberg to come up with the plan to privatize the conflict in Afghanistan. Feinberg is also close to Thiel.

Russia supplies weapons to the Taliban while working with the Trump administration to co-operate in the fight against it.

Afghanistan has been a quagmire for the United States for 16 years, and part of the reason it is bogged down there is Russia. The head of U.S. forces there, Gen. John Nicholson confirmed Moscow is supplying weapons to the Taliban. “We continue to get reports of this assistance,” Nicholson said, speaking to reporters alongside Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. “We support anyone who wants to help us advance the reconciliation process, but anyone who arms belligerents who perpetuate attacks like the one we saw two days ago in Mazar-e Sharif is not the best way forward to a peaceful reconciliation.”

It’s easy to see why Russia has a strategic goal in Afghanistan. Russia’s foreign policy is guided by a drive to access warm water ports. This is true in Syria, North Korea, Turkey, Iran and the “stan” countries – particularly Afghanistan and Pakistan. In addition to the efforts to prop up the Taliban, Russia has supported ISIS, Hezbollah through Iran and despots like Bashar al-Assad.

Putin likes to wage war between two forces he controls so any move by the Trump administration to “privatize” the war in Afghanistan should be viewed in this light. Without real U.S. military involvement, a private army run by Erik Prince and cooperation from Russia in taming the Taliban it supports, joint Russian and U.S. control over Afghanistan would bring a cold peace to the region, but it also gives Russia a strategic foothold at the expense of the U.S. It would certainly enrich three of Trump’s biggest supporters: Erik Prince, Peter Thiel and Stephen Feinberg.

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