Thanks for your interest in the liberation of Reorte. Here's the detail as I remember it plus a few other tidbits to show the Alliance playerbase style.
On reddit Elementical/Omma Dawn has already pointed you at the Galnet article I wrote at the point we flipped it back to Alliance, but here's that link again: - https://community.elitedangerous.com/galnet/26-APR-3301
I'm sure you remember the time in question. The Code announced their renaming of The Old Words to "The New Carribean" in March/April 3301 with the intent of turning it in to a pirate play ground. They managed to flip Leesti from Independent Leesti for Equality (Alliance) to Reynhardt Intellisys (Indie) with a Civil War on April 1st 3301 (I've only just realised the significance of that date). A few days later (Apr 4th) Reorte also flipped from Reorte Democrats (Alliance) to Reorte Purple Dynamic Comms (Indie). Whether that was intentional by them, or just a coincidence, we never did uncover.
The Code's reasoning being that bounties on their CMDRs were less of a nuisance if the ruling factions in the area were all Independents. I think bounties in those days were Super Power only bounties, rather than faction bounties. Meaning that Independents didn't share bounties across Independent systems like the other super powers did. That allowed their pirates to travel largely unimpeded by bounties.
You can see that AEDC began watching the Old Worlds on 27 March on our tracker, once we heard about their plans: - http://aedc.org.uk/aedc/Reorte - http://aedc.org.uk/aedc/Leesti
We didn't immediately get involved in stopping their actions. In hindsight we probably should have. We'd always said that AEDC is NOT the Alliance police force, nor the Alliance Navy. We have our own projects, and before Powerplay came along we largely ignored everything else happening in Alliance space. Plus the Old Worlds were considered impossible for controlled Background Simulation (BGS) work due to the enormous traffic in the region. Our projects were 100Ly away, so initially we just watched as things unfolded.
Leesti flipping was a shock. Reorte flipping 3 days later was unacceptable. It's a time we named internally: Pirate Week.
We slowly came to the conclusion that there were no other organised Alliance groups in the game with the strength or BGS expertise to counter The Code. We put our own projects on hold and moved en masse to the Old Worlds.
In those days the BGS was not as "complete" as it is today. AEDC understood the inner workings of it as well as anyone (our selection for the Dangerous Games is testament to that). We quickly realised that after Leesti had flipped it became thoroughly state blocked and would remain blocked for over a month. We simply couldn't do anything with that system (good luck on The Code's part); today's mechanics would have allowed us to flip it back within days. Reorte however was a different story.
On April 16th we triggered an invisible Civl War there (see influence history link above). We knew from previous work that equalising two factions while one was in boom, would start a conflict without it showing in game. This allowed us to gain a winning lead without The Code even knowing it was happening. Once the Boom ended, the Civil War would show for one day and then end. But we also knew that the station would flip the moment the war became visible. The last day of conflict (the only day it was visible) was utterly pointless (and still is today) the station had already changed hands. Essentially, the civil war was won by our BGS work during Boom before the conflict became visible.
We had a few fun battles with Code CMDRs on that day of CW though, safe in the knowledge that we'd already won :-)
Within AEDC, April 24th, the day Reorte was liberated, is known as: Kill-a-Pirate Day. It was the first time, and one of the rare occasions, that we went public with an achievement. Usually we keep everything to ourselves - another common Alliance trait.
Unfortunately, the situation in Leesti continued to block us for months. It was eventually returned to Alliance rule, but such was the state of the BGS back then that we had a frustrating wait.
We were working a few other systems in the region during that time too, but The Code's aggressive posturing seemed to come to an end with Reorte, so we returned to our own projects before completing anything else around Lave.