An American working in Moscow is playing a key role in an effort to support President Donald Trump by “fact-checking” claims about Trump’s alleged connections to Russia.

Clint Ehrlich is a visiting researcher at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). He gained attention during the US election campaign for repeating Kremlin talking points in an opinion piece published in Foreign Policy that outlined the view that Hillary Clinton genuinely wanted to start a war with Russia.

Now, Ehrlich is back. Domain registration records and document metadata show that he played a key role in creating both an anonymous website, FactCheck.net, and a recent report it published claiming to reveal “exclusive evidence that casts doubt on the recent, highly publicized allegation that Donald Trump was compromised by Russia’s foreign-intelligence services.”



When reached by BuzzFeed News, Ehrlich confirmed that he was the person behind the site, saying the project was "exactly what it purported to be."

After the publication of this story, the site posted a response "officially announcing" that Erlich is its editor-in-chief.

The FactCheck.net report aimed to refute information contained in the dossier compiled by a former MI6 agent that US intelligence used to brief Trump and then-President Barack Obama. Ehrlich was critical of the decision to publish the dossier, which contains explosive but unverified claims about Trump, and has been sending tweets that question some of the allegations in the document. Similar refutations are present in the FactCheck.net report.

When it launched earlier this month, FactCheck.net claimed to be run by a “group of experts” working to expose the “bogus claims about Mr. Trump and Russia’s government.” Nine days after announcing its presence on a bare-bones website with no identifying information, FactCheck.net published a PDF called “Shower of Falsehoods” that claimed to expose key inaccuracies in the Steele dossier. (The title is likely a play on both a RAND Corporation report about Russian propaganda, “Firehose of Falsehood,” and the the most eyebrow-raising of the allegations contained in the dossier.)

The resulting PDF cited no sources and said its authors are “a coalition of national-security professionals from the United States and Russia who have joined forces to expose ‘fake news.’ Our work is a public service, which is not financed or directed by either state.”

"I was the primary person involved in writing the content of the report, but the project was a collective effort that drew on the expertise of likeminded professionals, both for sourcing and analysis," Ehrlich said in an email to BuzzFeed News. "Some of those people work inside Russia's foreign-ministry and/or intelligence community, but the site was not created with the approval of anyone in Russia's government."



Asked for the names of some of those who worked on the report with him, he said, without elaborating, that many of them worked with him inside the MGIMO. Ehrlich said he would ask if any were willing to speak to BuzzFeed News directly, but added, "your site does not have the best reputation in Russia."

Upon its release, someone with the username FactCheckDotNet began submitting a link to the report in different Reddit subgroups to try and get attention for the work. One redditor was immediately skeptical of a site that mimicked US fact-checking site FactCheck.org, and said that it was making big claims with no evidence or authors to back it up.



The redditor, DrJackMegaman, subsequently opened the PDF report and saw the author was identified as Clint Ehrlich. “Next time, clear the author section of the PDF,” the redditor said in his post.

The PDF was subsequently removed from the thread by the FactCheckDotNet account. Soon after, the PDF and two associated blog posts were also removed from FactCheck.net. (The posts are still viewable in Google Cache.)

