Methodology
Nearly a decade of research. Triangulated, sourced, reviewed.
The dossiers and investigations on this site are the visualization of nearly ten years of direct experience engaging with, researching, and documenting Idaho’s extreme-politics network. Every claim is pulled from primary-source records, cross-referenced across more than twenty-five authoritative data sources, and subjected to a proprietary multi-stage review before it appears on any public page.
We built this system because the existing tooling wasn’t good enough. Most political research is one of two things: opinion commentary with a handful of links, or expensive closed-database subscriptions that limit what can be published. Neither actually documents a coordinated political network the way a prosecutor, a financial investigator, or an investigative-journalism desk would.
Snake River Strategies’s in-house research system does. It’s how we ingest, structure, corroborate, and publish.
The 5-tier citation standard.
Every source we cite on this site is graded into one of five evidentiary tiers. The tier determines how we phrase claims derived from that source, whether it’s publishable as fact, and how it interacts with other sources in our corroboration logic.
Government filings, court records, sworn testimony
State and federal campaign-finance filings, court PACER dockets, sworn affidavits, legislative voting records, official business-entity records. Citable directly as fact.
Major-market news organizations with fact-check practices
Idaho Statesman, Idaho Capital Sun, InvestigateWest, ProPublica, AP, Reuters, local radio. Cited with byline and publication date; treated as corroborating fact for the claim reported.
Specialized or local outlets with transparent sourcing
Smaller publications, trade press, policy outlets with disclosed editorial processes. Used when a Tier 1 or Tier 2 source also supports the claim.
Public statements by the subject themselves
A subject’s own X posts, Facebook posts, Substack articles, public-meeting video, speeches, and campaign literature. Archived before citing. Quoted in full context.
Propaganda-network content, anonymous blogs, unsourced claims
We research content from Honor Idaho, Idaho Dispatch, Stop Idaho RINOs, and similar amplifier sites to understand what narratives the network is pushing — but we never cite them as fact. They’re signal about the machine, never evidence for reality.
Triangulated across 25+ data sources.
Every subject and every claim passes through a pipeline that pulls and cross-references data from more than twenty-five distinct authoritative sources — government filings, judicial records, business-entity systems, legislative databases, OSINT intelligence networks, and curated news-source coverage. We do not publish this list in detail; doing so would compromise the research tradecraft that took us years to develop. What matters for you as a reader is that every factual claim on this site has been checked against multiple independent sources before it shows up on any page.
The validation pipeline.
Nothing on this site is published without passing our internal Snake River Strategies validation pipeline. This is a proprietary multi-stage review process that every dossier, every organization profile, and every tactical report must clear before it goes live. The validation layer handles:
- Record integrity. Every factual claim is tied back to a specific primary-source record in our research substrate, with verifiable identifiers. If a claim can’t resolve to a real record, it doesn’t ship.
- Cross-source corroboration. Claims are checked against independent sources in different tiers. Single-source claims are either held for corroboration or labeled explicitly.
- Citation-level auditing. Every direct quote, every statistic, every attributed action is verified for verbatim match against its source. Paraphrase drift is flagged and corrected.
- Source-link verification. Every external URL is validated for reachability and for content still matching the cited claim. Broken or altered references are quarantined.
- Editorial tone review. Every piece is checked against our house voice standard — claim first, evidence second, measured delivery. No hedging filler; no partisan framing that isn’t grounded in documented conduct.
- Legal + defamation review. Every named-subject claim is audited for the specific categories of legal risk most common in political research: criminal imputation without conviction citation, mental-state claims without attribution, opinion stated as fact, and per-se defamatory constructions. Anything flagged either gets attributed, reframed as opinion, or deleted.
- Structural review. Each piece is checked for the structural elements that support careful reading: clear headline, summary, question-shaped subheadings, answered FAQs, and properly-attributed evidence blocks.
- Final gate. A consolidated pre-publish review with a go / no-go verdict plus a specific punch list for any issue that must be resolved before publication.
The exact mechanics of each stage are proprietary. We’ve spent years refining this process, and publishing the internals would let the propaganda network we document actively work to evade it. But we’ll tell you the outcome: nothing ships unless all eight checks return clear. That’s the whole point.
Corrections.
If we publish something wrong, we correct it in public. Corrections are date-stamped, shown on the relevant page with the original language preserved in strikethrough, and logged in a corrections register linked from this page. We will never silently edit a published claim.
Why we built it this way.
Most political sites publish first and defend later. That’s how you end up with corrections nobody reads and reputational damage that never quite gets undone. We inverted the order: we publish only what we can defend on a record-by-record basis, which is why this site takes longer to produce than a partisan blog — and why it holds up when it’s challenged.
The dossiers and reports on this site represent real work, done by a real team with a real decade of subject-matter experience. Everything you read here is traceable to sources we trust and would defend under oath.