Funding

The Institute was established and publishing before that funding existed. An earlier version of this page said the Institute operated without external funding, and that was true when it was written. When the funding relationship began it stopped being true, so the registration was filed and the disclosures this site now carries were added, as the Act requires. The earlier wording remains findable in search results and archives, and the sequence is the answer to it.

The funder does not select topics, does not see drafts, does not review findings, and approves nothing before publication. Apart from the funding itself the Institute operates independently, and any change to that arrangement will be disclosed on this page.

That is a claim about the arrangement, and the reports are where it can be tested. The findings do not run one way: the published research includes reports whose conclusions are unfavourable to the interests of the funder alongside reports whose conclusions are not, and the full index is open to be read in either direction.

The registration and every filing made under it are public at the Department of Justice FARA unit, which publishes the registrant, the foreign principal and the material distributed. Each report published here is filed there, so the register can be read against this site rather than taken on trust.

The registration is why this site does not call itself independent, nonpartisan or neutral. What it offers instead is a method that can be checked: every figure carries the body that produced it, the year and the number, inside the sentence that makes the claim; a source that is a party to the events it describes is labelled as one and its counts are never presented as independently verified; and where the evidence is contested the competing findings are given by name and date rather than settled. No report recommends a policy or tells a reader what to conclude.

Critique is invited, and it belongs to the reporting and the sources rather than to whoever assembled them.