# Jerome Corsi American author who has spent twenty years turning conspiracy theories into bestsellers and then into political weapons: the **Swift Boat** attack on John Kerry (2004), **birtherism** against Barack Obama (2008–2011), and in 2016 a role as [[Roger Stone]]'s go-between on [[WikiLeaks]]' plans for the Clinton campaign emails. He holds a Harvard PhD in political science (1972), which he uses as a credential in almost every book jacket and interview. He is the connective tissue between three eras of right-wing media: the book-publishing era (Regnery-style bestsellers), the web era ([[InfoWars]], WorldNetDaily), and the Trump era (the WikiLeaks backchannel and election denial). ## The book machine | Year | Book | Target | |---|---|---| | 2004 | *Unfit for Command* (with John O'Neill) | [[John Kerry]]'s Vietnam record — the basis of the Swift Boat ad campaign; sold more than a million copies | | 2005 | *Atomic Iran* | Claimed Democrats helped Iran's nuclear program | | 2006–07 | "North American Union" books | A supposed secret plan to merge the U.S., Canada and Mexico | | 2008 | *The Obama Nation* | [[Barack Obama]]; hit No. 1; the Obama campaign answered with a 40-page rebuttal and FactCheck.org called it "a mishmash of unsupported conjecture, half-truths, logical fallacies and outright falsehoods" | | 2011 | *Where's the Birth Certificate?* | The core text of [[Birtherism]] | | 2013–14 | *Who Really Killed Kennedy?*, *Hunting Hitler* | [[JFK Assassination Conspiracy]]; Hitler's supposed escape | | 2020–24 | *Coup d'État*, *The Anti-Globalist Manifesto* and others | The [[Deep State]], globalism, climate and "neo-Marxism" | "Swift boating" entered the language as the name for this kind of attack: take a candidate's strength and reframe it, with enough surrogates, as his weakness. ## The WikiLeaks backchannel (2016) In August 2016 Corsi emailed Stone that "word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps," describing the coming releases as very damaging to the Clinton campaign. Court documents released in November 2018 showed he had passed on Stone's instruction to reach [[Julian Assange]] to [[Ted Malloch]], a London-based associate. Later that month (August 21) Stone tweeted that it would soon be [[John Podesta]]'s "time in the barrel" — before WikiLeaks began publishing Podesta's emails in October. Corsi then became Washington bureau chief for [[InfoWars]] (2017, gone by mid-2018). ## Mueller | Date | Event | |---|---| | Sept 2018 | Subpoenaed by the [[Mueller Investigation]] | | Nov 26, 2018 | Rejects a plea deal on a single false-statements count, saying he "did not willfully mislead anyone"; publishes the draft statement of offense | | Dec 2018 | Sues Mueller for $350 million | | Jan 2019 | Confirms he is "Person 1" in Stone's indictment | | Feb 2019 | Sues Stone for defamation | He was never charged. Stone was convicted in November 2019 and had his sentence commuted by Trump in July 2020. ## QAnon and election denial Corsi was an early promoter of [[QAnon]], declared it "completely compromised" in May 2018, and then said in August 2018 he would still "follow QAnon when QAnon is bringing forth news." In 2019 he sued Alex Jones and InfoWars for defamation. He is still active in 2026, mostly on the conspiracy-interview circuit. In interviews about the 2026 midterms he has argued that the president's Article II powers let him use the military to stop "cheating" in the election and that this "cannot be challenged in the court" — the [[Election Denialism]] argument carried forward into the next election. ## Why he matters here Corsi is the clearest case in the vault of the conspiracy entrepreneur as political operative: the same person, and the same method, served a presidential campaign's opposition research (Kerry), launched a racial smear that the future president adopted (Obama), and worked a foreign-hacked-email operation for that president's campaign (WikiLeaks). The through-line is not any one theory — it is the business of producing them. ## See Also - [[Roger Stone]] · [[WikiLeaks]] · [[Julian Assange]] · [[John Podesta]] - [[Birtherism]] · [[QAnon]] · [[Deep State]] · [[Election Denialism]] - [[Alex Jones]] · [[InfoWars]] - [[Mueller Investigation]] · [[Trump-Russia Arc Timeline]]