Elon Musk’s Machine for Political Violence

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Last October, I wrote a post called “Elon Musk’s Machine for Fascism,” describing how Twitter had twice served Donald Trump’s electoral ambitions.

In 2016, trolls — including Don Jr — workshopped memes on a DM list and then used their reach to pressure MSM to adopt their narratives. In 2020, trolls — including Trump himself, his two sons, and other key advisors — used the platform to sow intentional disinformation about the election. Only by shutting down Trump’s account after January 6 was he prevented from further sowing violence in advance of Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Since then, Elon Musk has bought the platform and right wingers have successfully pushed to defund any effective civil society checks on the social media platform.

As I reflected last year, Musk’s purchase of Xitter seemed to be an effort to perfect on the 2016 and 2020 models.

By welcoming outright Nazis to the platform, though, he has undermined its ability to reach traditional journalists and normies, which made me hope that some of Xitter’s past utility to fascists might be weakened.

But in the last year, Musk and his far right allies have tested another model. First in Ireland and more recently and systematically in the UK, far right thugs like Tommy Robinson have used Xitter to enflame far right violence masquerading as organic anti-immigrant unrest.

Even before Musk got involved, high profile accounts on Xitter magnified disinformation from other platforms.

Much of the false information about the attack seemed to come from a website called Channel 3 Now, which generates video reports that look like mainstream news channels. But its video and its false claims about the name of the attacker might have stayed relatively obscure if they were not highlighted by larger accounts.

On X, users with considerable followings quickly shared that video and spread it across the site. And on other platforms such as TikTok – where videos can go viral quickly even if the accounts posting them do not have large followings, because of the app’s algorithm – they racked up hundreds of thousands of views. At some point, the false name of the attacker was a trending search on both TikTok and X, meaning that it showed to users who might otherwise have shown no interest in it at all.

But Musk did get involved personally, repeatedly stoking more violence.

Elon Musk just can’t help himself.

The billionaire X owner sparked fury in the British government this weekend after he responded to incendiary footage of the far-right disorder that’s sweeping the country by saying “civil war is inevitable.”

The post on X was roundly condemned by U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office, which said there was “no justification” for Musk’s comments.

But Musk doubled, tripled, then quadrupled down after that dig. Responding to a statement from Starmer vowing his government would “not tolerate attacks on mosques or on Muslim communities,” the X boss effectively accused the British prime minister of wearing blinkers. “Shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on all communities?” Policing of the unrest “does seem one-sided,” he offered in a third post.

He then branded Starmer “#twotierkeir” — riffing on a popular far-right talking point that British police treat disorder by white people differently to that by perpetrated by minorities. Justice Minister Heidi Alexander called Musk “deplorable.”

Musk has complained about British efforts to police content that, in the UK, is illegal.

And things would be worse in the US, because the laws against incitement are far more limited.

Plus, Xitter has twice fought back against legal process, one time on behalf of Donald Trump.

Xitter has also throttled pro-Kamala Harris accounts, even as Musk repeatedly boosts Trump.

Today, in advance of an “interview” with Musk and the roll-out by Trump’s sons of a new crypto currency scam and on the 7th anniversary of the Charlottesville riot, Donald Trump returned to Xitter.

The Trump Hack Could Extend Far Beyond a Hack-and-Leak

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When news first broke that Donald Trump’s campaign says it has been hacked, I started drafting a post on applying the lessons of past ratfucks.

The alleged hack was first reported by Politico, which says some person using an AOL account reached out and shared documents, including the vetting materials pertaining to JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

On July 22, POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account. Over the course of the past few weeks, the person — who used an AOL email account and identified themselves only as “Robert” — relayed what appeared to be internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official. A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.

The research dossier was a 271-page document based on publicly available information about Vance’s past record and statements, with some — such as his past criticisms of Trump — identified in the document as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” The person also sent part of a research document about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also a finalist for the vice presidential nomination.

Trump’s bouncer-spox, Steven Cheung, claims the hack was done by Iran, citing a Microsoft report released Friday describing the compromise by Iran of the email account of a “former senior advisor,” which the IRGC then used to attempt to compromise a current high-level official.

Yet another Iranian group, this one connected with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor. The email contained a link that would direct traffic through a domain controlled by the group before routing to the website of the provided link. Within days of this activity, the same group unsuccessfully attempted to log into an account belonging to a former presidential candidate. We’ve since notified those targeted.

A pity for the Trump campaign that Cheung is a habitual liar, so we can’t trust anything he says, and Politico’s authentication appears to rely exclusively on word of mouth from those who have the documents, not digital authentication.

Still, it’s distinctly possible. The FBI certainly seems to believe the IRGC is trying to assassinate Trump.

The lessons I was going to propose in my draft post were the following:

  • Vice President Harris should eschew assigning her senior-most staff to exploiting these emails like Trump did in 2016.
  • But only after Trump, Don Jr, and Mike Pompeo apologize for their enthusiastic use of hacked emails in 2016.
  • The same 51 former spooks who warned that the Hunter Biden laptop had the earmarks of a foreign influence operation should write a similar letter here, emphasizing (as they did in their Hunter Biden letter) the import of resisting foreign efforts to influence a presidential election. Maybe Peter Strzok and Andy McCabe could join in. Chris Krebs, who already has weighed in validating the seriousness of the threat, but who was fired for telling the truth about the 2020 election, can join too. They should send it to Politico, which first reported this story, but CC Jim Jordan, who says even writing such a letter is an abuse of First Amendment protected free speech.
  • Donald Trump must provide all the affected servers to the FBI, stat.

It’s the last one that was going to be my punch line. Partly because of misleading (arguably inaccurate) Jim Comey testimony, and partly because a wide swath of people had an incentive to do Russia’s bidding, for eight years people, including many in Congress, have been suggesting that a hacking victim must give all the servers that were hacked to law enforcement — the actual servers, not forensic images — otherwise the FBI’s investigation would be suspect.

They were wrong on several counts. But they were loud and insistent.

Fine. Based on that precedent, Trump must hand over his campaign servers to the same FBI that has criminally investigated him, including his campaign finance shenanigans, immediately.

That’s what I was going to write when Politico’s Alex Isenstadt, who is not a journalist competent to report a hack-and-leak story, was the only one who had written this up.

But then WaPo wrote it up, with Trump-whisperer Josh Dawsey and horserace journo Isaac Arnsdorf bylined, but also Ellen Nakashima and Shane Harris, the latter two of whom are exceptional reporters for a story about hacking.

That story had two additional details that made me rethink the potential impact of this. First, it revealed that Trump didn’t tell the FBI about the hack.

People familiar with the matter said the campaign separately concluded earlier this summer its email system had been breached but did not disclose it publicly or to law enforcement. The people said some officials were told to take more protective measures on their email accounts. At the time, campaign officials communicated to others that they weren’t sure who hacked the emails.

It’s not even clear whether Trump got an outside contractor — and if so, if it was someone more competent than Rudy Giuliani, whom Trump once pitched as a cybersecurity expert — to help clean up this mess. It took Crowdstrike and the DNC over a month to attribute the Russian hack, but they never fully cleaned it up. And persistent attacks continued through the election. That is, even with a respected outside contractor, the Democrats were wasting energy on whack-a-mole defense efforts for the remainder of the election.

Against that background, WaPo’s description of what the persona shared becomes more alarming.

On Thursday, The Washington Post was also sent a 271-page document about Vance from a sender who called himself Robert and used an AOL email account. Dated Feb. 23 and labeled “privileged & confidential,” the document highlighted potential political vulnerabilities for the first-term senator. Two people familiar with the document confirmed it was authentic and was commissioned by the campaign from Brand Woodward, a law firm that represents a number of prominent Trump advisers in investigations by state and federal authorities.

The document drew from publicly available information, including past news reports and interviews with the senator. The campaign commissioned several reports of other candidates, too, the advisers said.

The sender would not speak on the telephone with a Post reporter but indicated they had access to additional information, including internal campaign emails and documents related to Trump’s court cases. [my emphasis]

First, Brand Woodward did the campaign’s vetting.

Stan Woodward represents, along with others, Walt Nauta, Kash Patel, and Peter Navarro in various Trump-related criminal investigations, as well as some seditionists. He’s a great fit for Trump insofar as he’s good at generating outrage over manufactured slights — though in front of regular judges, those complaints usually collapse. Multiple filings in the documents case suggest that Woodward has a tenuous relationship with digital technology.

The role of Stan Brand, Woodward’s partner, has been assiduously hidden, except insofar as he has made claims about cases to the press on-the-record without disclosing the tie to Woodward.

Now, WaPo has confirmed that the Microsoft description — of a former advisor pwned and using that person’s email account, an attempt to hack “a high-official” still on the campaign — pertained to the Trump campaign. Given that description, there’s no reason to believe that Woodward or Brand were affected.

But there’s nevertheless a problem with hiring Brand Woodward to do your candidate vetting. To be clear: Brand is absolutely qualified to do that kind of thing. He’s got a long record of doing so in congress. But even Trump appears to have concerns about major issues the vetting process missed, to say nothing of his donors.

Over the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has fielded complaints from donors about his running mate, JD Vance, as news coverage exploring Mr. Vance’s past statements unearthed — and then exhaustively critiqued — remarks including a lament that America was run by “childless cat ladies.”

Mr. Trump dismissed out of hand donors’ suggestions that he replace Mr. Vance on the ticket. But Mr. Trump privately asked his advisers whether they had known about Mr. Vance’s comments about childless women before Mr. Trump chose him.

There were better choices to vet candidates, but if Trump wants to let a thin team vet the surly troll he picked to be his running mate, that’s his own business.

My alarm about the news that Brand Woodward starts, however, by the way that the Trump campaign has muddled various functions, criminal and civil defense with campaign finance and, now, candidate vetting. It creates a legal morass, one that — if Trump loses this election — could lead to more legal trouble down the road.

Maybe that’s why Trump didn’t call the FBI.

But it also means that some people — most notably, Susie Wiles and Boris Epshteyn, along with Woodward and Brand — are playing multiple functions. Wiles is the one who decides who gets their criminal defense bills paid, she’s also the one who decides how to spend campaign cash, and she was a big backer of the JD pick.

When people play overlapping functions like that, it means that a hack targeted at them for one function — say, candidate vetting — may strike a gold mine of documents pertaining to another function — say, criminal defense.

WaPo’s reference to “documents related to Trump’s court cases” — Politico quoted the persona offering a “variety of documents from [Trump’s] legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions” — may ultimately pertain exclusively to Trump’s electoral court cases. If it does, those could be some of the most newsworthy out there, since Trump’s electoral court cases pose a direct threat to democracy.

But what if they don’t? What if these documents pertain to what those overlap people — people like Wiles or Epshteyn, and they’re only two of the most obvious –know about Trump’s criminal cases? What if they pertain to claims that witnesses have made to the FBI about where documents got moved or what was included in them? What if they pertain to the actual documents Trump stole, starting with the US strategic plan against Iran that Trump shared with Mark Meadows’ ghost writers?

Trump has not firewalled his campaign from a criminal case involving the most sensitive documents of the US government, meaning a well-executed hack targeted at his campaign may turn into an intelligence bonanza.

If Iran plans to make things difficult for Trump, the problems may extend well beyond what documents get leaked. As they did in 2016, this could mean that Trump wastes resources having to serially defend against hacking attempts via a range of different platforms. It could mean that Iran does what Russia did, hack key strategic models to optimize other kinds of fuckery later in the election. Because — unlike Russia — Iran is actively trying to kill Trump, not just defeat him, hacked documents may also facilitate efforts like those charged against Asif Merchant, manufacturing fake protests to create distractions to facilitate an assassination attempt.

The question of how to approach this news, if it is further confirmed, goes well beyond the question of whether to publish the documents allegedly stolen by Iran. In significant part because Trump refuses to maintain boundaries between his political life and his criminal life, hacks from Iran could create real damage to the United States beyond what they do to Trump’s campaign.

So by all means, let’s pause for a moment of schadenfreude. Let’s review all the things Trump said and did in 2016 and 2020 (including with the Hunter Biden laptop) that invite his opponents to fully exploit stolen documents this time.

But as you do that, consider that this ratfuck may be far more dangerous to the US than those targeting Hillary and Hunter.

After CNN and NYT Get Punked by Trump, They Prioritize Free Dick Stories Over Bribery

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I spent the weekend with family, so was a bit distracted as the US media had an epically stupid weekend (and today is a bank holiday, so). Twice, multiple outlets, including CNN and the NYT displayed the least competence to serve as a guardian for democracy.

It started when Trump, just hours after telling Fox’s Maria Bartiromo that he didn’t need to debate Kamala Harris because the Vice President was already known, tweeted on his social media site that he had “agreed” to a debate on Fox News.

There were lots of Irish outlets who might not know better. CNN should, but their first instinct was to publish a claim that the debate had been switched; by the end of the day they figured out the ploy.

NYT kept trying — as Margaret Sullivan and others noted, at first and second, they were struggling more than Drudge to understand what happened.

Headlines in the New York Times — probably the most influential mainstream news organization in the nation — matter even more. They make their way into the news ecosystem and can pollute the waters.

That’s why it’s so confounding when such headlines are either wrong or misleading. Consider this one in this past week’s New York Times:

Trump Agrees to a Fox News Debate with Harris on Sept. 4

Donald Trump speaks with Rachel Scott of ABC News at the National Association of Black Journalists conference on July 31 in Chicago. Trump’s comments during the event spawned poor headline choices / Getty

Reading this, a headline-grazer might think that the former president’s agreement was all that was necessary to make a Fox debate a reality. That Kamala Harris was on board. And that Donald Trump is ready for a fine, public-spirited exchange of views.

But that, of course, is not the case. In fact, Trump had backed out of a planned debate on Sept. 10th on ABC. He then came up with a new date, unilaterally changed the venue to Fox and decided it would be in an arena with a big audience, not in a studio with no audience.

Consider the Drudge Report’s headline, which — though not expressed in restrained journalistic language — does manage to get the truth across.

RATTLED TRUMP ONLY WANTS FOX DEBATE

[snip]

The Times, probably responding to the criticism, changed the headline online — twice!

Round 2: Trump Proposes a Fox News Debate

Round 3: Trump Backs Out of ABC Debate and Proposes One on Fox.

Then they faceplanted again, decided that Daily Mail was their assignment editor. They decided to chase the story of an affair Doug Emhoff had years before he even met Kamala Harris that — unlike some of Trump’s, did not involve sexual assault or dozens of felonies to cover up the affair. Then the NYT decided to join in the toddler chase, assigning two journalists to the story that still did not remotely involve any actions that could impact Harris’ fitness to be President (and adopted a double standard with Melania and any dalliances she has had).

Neither of these outlets have yet matched WaPo’s report on the suspect $10M payment via Egypt that kept Trump in his first race (even though CNN had led on the story prior to the WaPo’s recent story).

Indeed, when CNN did a story purporting to describe how Trump’s campaign has stumbled in the last two weeks, they didn’t mention the damning new evidence that Trump has been working for foreign countries all along.

American democracy has almost entirely spun free of any substance. And Trump is exploiting that situation to avoid any accountability.

Tanya Chutkan Finally Gets the Trump Case Back

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SCOTUS finally remanded its immunity decision to the DC Circuit and the DC Circuit has, in turn, remanded it back to Judge Tanya Chutkan.

So Trump will finally have to deal with his actions on January 6.

As Brandi Buchman noted, Trump will have to file his appeal of the E Jean Carroll verdict by August 14.

In other scheduling news, Judge Noreika has scheduled the Hunter Biden sentencing for November 13 — much later than it had to be, delaying any of the appeals until such time that the President will have to be considering pardoning his son, if he plans to do that. She has yet to rule on Hunter’s Rule 29 motions, but I guess we know how she’ll rule.

Hunter’s tax case is still scheduled for September, and prosecutors continue to insist they can introduce allegations of influence peddling that have nothing to do with his alleged tax evasion and non-payment.

 

Michael Sherwin Failed to Brief Merrick Garland on Trump’s Suspected Egyptian Payment

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WaPo significantly advances the story of the suspected $10 million Egyptian payment to Trump — including the role of China in it.

The investigation started when the CIA got a tip from a reliable informant that Egypt had paid Trump the money.

In early 2017, Justice Department officials were briefed on initial reports from the Central Intelligence Agency that Sisi had sought to send money to Trump.

The intelligence had come partly from a confidential informant who had previously provided useful information, according to people familiar with the matter.

That led to Mueller’s focus on Trump’s decision to inject the same amount into his campaign after meeting with Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in September 2016.

Trump repeatedly declined — until Oct. 28, roughly five weeks after the meeting with Sisi, when he announced the $10 million infusion.

As described, Mueller focused on Trump’s finances in 2016, but prohibited investigators from looking at his finances after he became President. Instead, they subpoenaed the Egyptian National Bank, which led to the extended legal fight. Materials finally provided by the bank showed a transfer from Shanghai…

The Research and Studies Center opened an account at the bank’s Heliopolis branch in November 2015, the bank’s records showed. In August 2016, the center opened a second account, this time in the bank’s Shanghai branch. Five days after that, a company that investigators believed was tied to an Egyptian oligarch initiated a transfer of $10 million into the center’s Shanghai account, records showed.

The transfer was held up, then cleared for deposit in Shanghai in December, the records showed. The same amount was transferred from that account to the center’s account at the Heliopolis branch shortly before the cash withdrawal there on Jan. 15, 2017.

Three days later, the center closed its account in Shanghai. Within 90 days, its account in Heliopolis was closed, too.

… And following that, a request from a likely Egyptian intelligence front to withdraw the same sum in cash.

A short handwritten letter dated Jan. 15, 2017, in which an organization called the Research and Studies Center asked that the bank “kindly withdraw a sum of US $9,998,000” from its Heliopolis branch, located about seven miles from Cairo International Airport. According to the bank records, employees assembled the money that same day, entirely in U.S. $100 bills, put it in two large bags and kept it in the bank manager’s office until two men associated with the account and two others came and took away the cash.

In summer 2019, after being spun under DC USAO, the FBI was asking for permission to subpoena records from Trump’s 2017 finances. But then Jessie Liu met with Bill Barr, reviewed the underlying CIA intelligence herself, and grew hesitant about further investigative steps.

Sometime after her June meetings with the FBI, Liu met with Barr to discuss the Egypt case. He urged her to personally review the underlying information from the CIA that had prompted the opening of the criminal investigation two years earlier, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

[snip]

Sometime around September 2019, FBI agents and a supervisor from the field office presented what they considered an ultimatum to Liu: authorize getting Trump’s 2017 bank records or it wasn’t worth continuing to investigate, according to people later briefed on the exchange. Liu listened but turned them down; she said she wasn’t closing the case and was open to subpoenaing Trump’s records later on if agents turned up more compelling evidence to justify doing so, these people said.

After Barr replaced Liu with first Tim Shea and then Michael Sherwin, Sherwin shut down the investigation on June 7, 2020.

Sherwin, the only person quoted in the piece, taunted that Merrick Garland could have reopened the case.

In an interview with The Post, Sherwin said Biden administration appointees, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, who took over the department months later, could have relaunched the probe if they disagreed. “The case was closed without prejudice,” he said. “Anyone could have reopened the case the second I left that office.”

The case was not reopened.

Except, as the last paragraph of the story describes, partly amid the rush of cases in the wake of January 6, Garland and his top aides were never briefed on the case in their first year in office — which for Garland, who wasn’t sworn in until March 11, 2021, would be March 2022.

Garland, senior members of his team, and Biden’s new U.S. attorney in D.C. were never briefed on the Egypt investigation in their first year in office, one former and one current government official told The Post.

The Statute of Limitations expired on January 15, 2022.

There’s still at least one hole in this story.

The money was deposited in Shanghai in August 2016. That’s before the September meeting between al-Sisi and Trump. Though at a time when Trump’s people — including both George Papadophoulos, who played a key role in setting up the meeting with al-Sisi, and Walid Phares, who was investigated for ties to Middle Eastern intelligence — were negotiating a meeting with Russia, in London, in September 2016.

Papadopoulos communicated with Clovis and Walid Phares, another member of the foreign policy advisory team, about an offthe-record meeting between the Campaign and Russian government officials or with Papadopoulos’s other Russia connections, Mifsud and Timofeev.480 Papadopoulos also interacted directly with Clovis and Phares in connection with the summit of the Transatlantic Parliamentary Group on Counterterrorism (TAG), a group for which Phares was co-secretary general.481 On July 16, 2016, Papadopoulos attended the TAG summit in Washington, D.C., where he sat next to Clovis (as reflected in the photograph below).482

Although Clovis claimed to have no recollection of attending the TAG summit,483 Papadopoulos remembered discussing Russia and a foreign policy trip with Clovis and Phares during the event.484 Papadopoulos’s recollection is consistent with emails sent before and after the TAG summit. The pre-summit messages included a July 11, 2016 email in which Phares suggested meeting Papadopoulos the day after the summit to chat, 485 and a July 12 message in the same chain in which Phares advised Papadopoulos that other summit attendees “are very nervous about Russia. So be aware.”486 Ten days after the summit, Papadopoulos sent an email to Mifsud listing Phares and Clovis as other “participants” in a potential meeting at the London Academy of Diplomacy.487

Finally, Papadopoulos’s recollection is also consistent with handwritten notes from a journal at that time.488

[snip]

These are the notes that Papadopoulos professed to be unable to read when meeting with Mueller’s investigators.

This story is also silent about Russia’s role in convincing Egypt to withdraw a UN resolution against Israel after Trump intervened in December 2016.

Finally, recall that Erik Prince and Kyrill Dmitriev met in the Seychelles on January 11 and 12.

America’s Whimpering Democracy Is Trump’s Past, as Well as Future

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There was a bit of a kerfuffle yesterday in response to an Erik Wemple claim that the media has not shirked media coverage of the risk posed by Trump while focusing non-stop on Biden’s (but not Trump’s) age.

Wemple made a list — and given the prevalence of lefty columnists, not a particularly impressive one, once you look closely.

But it also betrays the degree to which journalists have the same blind spots I have noted in NYT’s series on the subject (which makes up 15 entries in Wemple’s list): they ignore or understate how much of this Trump did in his first term and continues to do it via his right wing allies in Congress.

Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan keep teaming up to write the same story over and over: A second Trump term is going to be bad … really bad.

Just some of these stories, in reverse order from Tuesday’s latest installment, are:

There are several aspects to these stories: a bid to eliminate civil service protections, a personalization of power, and the elevation of people who proved willing to abuse power in his first term: Russel Vought (who helped obstruct the Ukraine investigation), Stephen Miller, and Johnny McEntee (who even before January 6 was making a willingness to invoke the Insurrection Act a litmus test for hiring at DOD), and Jeffrey Clark.

The series, thus far, skirts the language of authoritarianism and fascism.

[snip]

These stories admit that Trump did some of this in his first term. But they describe a process of retribution by the guy who got elected — with abundant assistance from Maggie Haberman — on a platform of “Lock her up!,” who breached the norm of judicial independence 24 days into office when he asked Jim Comey to “let this” Mike Flynn “thing go,” as something that took a while to “ramp up.”

[snip]

[T]hese pieces always vastly understate how much politicization Trump pulled off in his first term, and never describe how that politicization continues at the hands of people like Jim Jordan.

Such reporting will be most salient, I believe, if reports show voters the costs of such abuses of the judicial system have already had and are already having.

Even as the kerfuffle was unrolling, Rosa Brooks published a piece in The Bulwark describing the lessons from a series of five nonpartisan simulations on how American democracy might fare if Trump wins in November.

The simulations showed that the risk Trump poses isn’t necessarily the immediate totalitarianism or civil war liberals sometimes raise, but instead targeted persecution against those who speak up.

The exercises produced some “good news”: None of the simulations devolved into mass violence or civil conflict, and Team Trump found it difficult to fully execute its most ambitious plans. For instance, in one of our exercises, Trump’s efforts to detain millions of undocumented migrants floundered; the money and infrastructure for such a massive operation proved too challenging.

[snip]

High-profile nonprofit groups are undergoing IRS audits, forcing their senior staff to spend most of their time huddled with accountants and lawyers. More university presidents have resigned in the face of investigations, audits, and threats to yank federal funding over curricula and the actions of student protests. Meanwhile, a number of high-profile journalists are the targets of leak investigations. The owners of several major media outlets are under investigation for specious criminal tax code violations, and the FCC is considering revoking the broadcast licenses of a dozen television stations. Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, and retired Gen. Mark Milley are under investigation for allegedly mishandling classified materials.

The nation’s streets are largely peaceful. But around the country, numerous civil servants, reporters, teachers, librarians, election officials, and other community leaders are being doxxed and threatened.

You can imagine how this unfolds. Most people will see the writing on the wall: Speak out, and life becomes unpleasant. Your address and children’s names will be posted on social media. You’ll get a nasty letter from the IRS. Perhaps your brother’s undocumented girlfriend will go to work one day and never come home, and you won’t know if she’s been detained or deported. Your pregnant niece might be stopped by police as she drives from Texas to New Mexico, and grilled about whether she’s heading to an abortion clinic. Maybe the FBI and Homeland Security will use undercover agents—or even government surveillance capabilities—to spy on organizations from school boards to church groups, in search of “illegals,” “Christian-hating communists,” the “woke,” and other “vermin.”

The chilling effect on our politics would be intense. Ordinary citizens would self-censor. Many federal, state, and local leaders, rightly worried about the effects on themselves and their families, will quietly step down from their roles.

Definitely read the piece. As you do, though, consider the ways that this, too, is a story of Trump’s past and present, not just his future.

Just yesterday, for example, FBI’s Deputy Direct Paul Abbate said that he “absolutely did not” sign off on the settlement of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s lawsuits and “would never sign off on something like that.”

The allegations in the Privacy Act part of the complaint — the only part included in the settlement — show that before the misconduct allegations against Peter Strzok had been resolved, someone shared his texts with the White House, which in turn got leaked to the press before Sarah Isgur released them en masse, with Rod Rosenstein’s approval.

59. Between late July and December 2017, someone from the Department of Justice alerted the White House to the existence of these texts and, at least, their general content. On information and belief, officials in the White House, in turn, began to contact members of the news media about the texts as a means to try to undermine the Special Counsel’s investigation.

60. No later than December 2, 2017, at least two news organizations printed stories including characterizations of the contents of some of Special Agent Strzok’s texts.

[snip]

62. On December 12, 2017, DOJ willfully and intentionally disclosed to numerous news outlets approximately 375 text messages to, from, and about Special Agent Strzok. In a press release, DOJ called this act a “public release” of the messages.

Years ago, I was told this was a clear violation of the Privacy Act. Having gone through discovery, DOJ appears to agree.

By saying he would never sign a settlement with someone targeted in violation of the law, Abbate was (wittingly or not) stating an unwillingness to make things right after the government violates the rights of a long-valued FBI employee. And Abbate has to know that there are plenty of right wing agents who never got disciplined for sending pro-Trump texts on their phones, including the agents who handled one of the informants targeting the Clinton Foundation.

Republicans threw a similar tizzy fit after DOJ settled Andrew McCabe’s lawsuit for a similar violation of his rights — in that case, of his due process rights. And in McCabe’s case, granting McCabe’s due process would likely have revealed that the allegations he willfully lied about his role in a story that exposed the investigation into the Clinton Foundation were unproven.

The time to stand up to the kind of individualized targeting that Trump has long used is now, was last year, was seven years ago, when the extended campaign to turn Strzok and Page into the face of the Deep State first began.

Waiting to learn the outcome of the election is a cop out.

The time to catalog the damage Trump has already done by the kind of treatment the Bulwark projects in the future is now. All the more so given that its anonymous participants, described to include “former senior officials from President Trump’s first administration, along with former senators and members of Congress,” surely include a number of people who’ve received this treatment. If the way to combat Trump involves solidarity to prevent this isolating doxxing, then such a group is precisely the kind of group that should set an example.

LOLGOP and I are working on a podcast episode that talks about all the people at the FBI that Trump targeted: in addition to Strzok and Page, McCabe and Jim Comey, every person mentioned in the Carter Page IG Report, a number of key witnesses in the Durham investigation, often leveraged to cultivate the testimony Durham needed to sustain his conspiracy theory. That retaliation did real damage to the FBI’s expertise on Russia.

But it has continued even since Trump left office. After first being investigated in the wake of the IG Report, a top Russian analyst, Brian Auten, remains a target because he tracked Russia efforts to influence the 2020 election. Laura Dehmlow — then a unit chief in FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and now the Deputy Director of the National Counterintelligence Center, was bullied because she didn’t come out and say that the FBI had obtained a laptop attributed to Hunter Biden from a computer repairman (which remains inconclusive regarding any Russian influence). Tim Thibault, who in 2016 was one of the people who predicated investigations of the Clinton Foundation, was targeted in part because he made the decision — at the request of FBI agents trying to preserve the integrity of the Hunter Biden investigation — to shut down Peter Schweizer as an informant. Elvis Chan, long one of the most important FBI agents in fighting Russian hacking, was misrepresented as part of the Twitter Files, and ever since, the House GOP has been demanding he sit for a deposition either represented by his personal lawyer or the FBI’s lawyer.

Other members of the “Deep State” that Trump or his flunkies have targeted include:

  • The 51 former spooks who signed a letter stating that the release of the Hunter Biden laptop before the 2020 elections “has the earmarks of a Russian information operation”
  • Witnesses at either of Trump’s impeachments
  • January 6 Committee witnesses and members
  • Capitol Hill Police who testified in January 6 trials
  • Witnesses in the Durham investigation
  • Former Trump officials who’ve spoken out against Trump (again, these likely include some participants in Bulwark’s simulations)
  • Members of the Hunter Biden investigative team, including those who were engaged in the more aggressive targeting of him
  • Every judge, prosecutor, and identified FBI agent who has investigated Trump (note: Aileen Cannon was also targeted)
  • Judges who’ve overseen January 6 trials or those of Trump’s associates
  • Those who didn’t support Jim Jordan as speaker

This has a noticeable effect. Not only does Abbate (along with Chris Wray) cow before Congress rather than explain that Trump’s Administration violated the law, which has repercussions, but it led the FBI to hesitate before going after Trump and his people both before January 6 and during the stolen documents case.

There are those outside of government, too.

A sustained campaign to shut down efforts, both within and outside social media companies, to limit mis- and disinformation has led many programs and experts to quit, largely after sustained doxing and disinformation campaigns.

Perhaps most alarmingly, Trump and his mob have targeted election administrators around the country, both prominent and not. Even if Kamala Harris wins more votes than Trump in November, there are known localities and states where there’s real question whether election denying voting officials will certify the vote. Patrick Byrne has even started issuing death threats against those prosecuting Tina Peters for tampering with election equipment back in 2020.

This is not just about loyalty. This is not just about cowing law enforcement. This is not just retribution — though that serves as cover.

Particularly taking account of the election workers targeted in service of Trump’s Big Lie, this must be understood as systematic: an attack on particular institutions and norms of liberal society: the rule of law, elections, and truth.

We don’t have the luxury of waiting until after November to start defanging the right wing’s stochastic terrorism. That’s true, because they’ll be using it to stoke fear leading up to the election. That’s true because Jim Jordan still has three months wielding a gavel to elicit lynching threats. But it’s also true because the guy managing the FBI is so afraid of Congress that he’s unwilling to say that people selectively targeted for such treatment by Donald Trump are entitled to due process.

Ball of Thread: Devin Nunes’ Collusion

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While we were distracted over the week, LOLGOP released the fourth installment of our Ball of Thread podcast, in which we explain how the House Intelligence Committee helped Trump deflect from his Russian entanglement.

LOLGOP is also doing a Patreon for this effort (which is separate from my own Patreon), where we’re doing bonus releases. The Steve Bannon one associated with this — in which I lay out how Trump scripted Bannon to deny talking about sanction relief, after the inauguration but not before, incorporates Nixon talking about his own limited hangout.

You can also listen to the podcast itself on these outlets:

Listen on Apple

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Audible

Listen on Podcast Addict

 

 

Boiled Frog Journalism: Is Trump an Agent of Saudi Arabia, and Other Pressing Questions Buried under Biden’s Age

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A jury found Robert Menendez guilty on all charges yesterday, including those alleging he accepted payments from Egypt and Qatar (I didn’t follow the trial closely enough to figure out which country ultimately provided the gold). The verdict marks DOJ’s first successful conviction under 18 USC 219, basically, working for a foreign country while serving as a member of Congress.

Henry Cuellar faces the same charge.

While the RNC largely overshadowed the verdict, Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, and Governor Phil Murphy have all called on Menendez to step down.

The reasons why he should resign seem obvious: You can’t continue to serve the people of New Jersey after a jury determined you were actually using your position of power to serve two wealthy foreign countries.

Is Trump a Saudi foreign agent?

And yet we are two days into Trump’s nomination party, and no one has asked — much less answered — whether Donald Trump is a business partner, paid foreign agent, or merely an employee of Saudi Arabia.

This is not a frivolous question. Since Trump left office, his family has received millions in four known deals from the Saudis:

  • A deal to host LIV golf tournaments. Forbes recently reported that Trump Organization made less than $800K for about half the tournaments it has hosted. But Trump’s role in the scheme has given credibility to an influence-peddling scheme that aims to supplant the PGA’s influence. When Vivek Ramaswamy learned that two consultants to his campaign were simultaneously working for LIV, he forced them to resign to avoid the worries of influence-peddling. Yet Trump has continued to host the Saudis at his properties.
  • A $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner’s private equity firm, in spite of the fact that analysts raised many concerns about the investment, including that he was charging too much and had no experience.
  • A deal to brand a property in Oman slated to open in 2028, which has already brought Trump Organization $5 million. The government of Oman is a key partner in the deal, signed with a huge Saudi construction firm.
  • A newly-announced deal with the same construction firm involved in the Oman deal, this time to brand a Trump Tower in Jeddah.

These Saudi deals come on top of Trump’s testimony that Turnberry golf course and his Bedford property couldn’t be overvalued because some Saudi would be willing to overpay for them.

But I believe I could sell that LIV Golf for a fortune, Saudi Arabia. I believe I could sell that to a lot of people for numbers that would be astronomical because it is like — very much like owning a great painting.

[snip]

I just felt when I saw that, I thought it was high. But I could see it — as a whole, I could see it if this were s0ld to one buyer from Saudi Arabia — I believe it’s the best house in the State of New York.

And while Eric Trump, not his dad, is running the company, Eric also has a role in the campaign and his spouse Lara has taken over the entire GOP.

Trump never fulfilled the promises to distance himself from his companies in the first term. A very partial review of Trump Organization financial records show the company received over $600K from the Saudis during his first term. As far as I’m aware, no one has even asked this time around.

Which means as things stand, Trump would be the sole beneficiary of payments from key Saudi investors if he became President again. Trump would be, at the very least, the beneficiary of a business deal with the Saudis, as president.

Admittedly, under the Supreme Court’s latest ruling on gratuities, it might be legal for Trump to get a bunch of swank branding deals as appreciation for launder Saudi Arabia’s reputation (one of the things for which Menendez was just convicted).

But that doesn’t mean it should be ignored, politically. It doesn’t mean American voters shouldn’t know these details. It doesn’t mean journalists (besides NYT’s Eric Lipton, whose most recent story on this was buried on page A7) shouldn’t demand answers.

What deals has Trump made with Putin and/or Orbán?

At some point at the RNC, Don Jr claimed that his Daddy would get poor coverage from real journalists because “they lied about Russia Russia Russia.”

Only, they didn’t.

In guilty pleas, Trump’s people confessed that they were the ones lying. George Papadopoulos lied to hide when he learned of the Russian hack-and-leak operation. Mike Flynn lied to hide his efforts to undermine Barack Obama’s foreign policy with Russia. Micahel Cohen lied to hide his contact with the Kremlin during the campaign in pursuit of the kind of Trump Tower deal Trump has since inked with the Saudis.

Don Jr was spared charges, in part, because he’s too dumb to be expected to know he shouldn’t accept campaign dirt from Russian nationals.

Robert Mueller found that Trump’s campaign manager briefed someone Treasury has since labeled a Russian spy, Konstantin Kilimnik, on his plan to win the Rust Belt, even while discussing a deal to carve up Ukraine and get tens of millions in benefits. Kilimnik passed on polling data and the campaign strategy to Russian spies. Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Paul Manafort lied to hide that.

At the time the FBI obtained Roger Stone’s cell site location in August 2018, they had reason to believe he had gotten advance notice of both the dcleaks and the Guccifer 2.0 releases. Stone had multiple contacts with Trump about the releases and prosecutors hoped to obtain a notebook where Stone documented all of those conversations. A jury found that Stone lied to hide whence he learned all this.

Trump pardoned all but Cohen and Jr for the lies they told to hide what really happened with Russia. And we still don’t know why the clemency for Roger Stone Trump stashed in his desk drawer had a Secret document on Macron associated with it.

And Trump has only gotten more shameless since. In 2019, during his impeachment for extorting Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his kid, Trump was warned that among the Ukrainians from whom Rudy Giuliani was soliciting dirt on the Bidens was at least one Russian agent, Andrii Derkach.

Trump did nothing to stop Rudy from sidling up to a Russian agent. And when Rudy came back, Bill Barr set up a side channel to ingest that dirt — a side channel the resulted in an FBI informant with self-professed ties to Russian spies attempting to frame Joe Biden for bribery, an attempt to frame Biden that likely goes a long way to explain why the plea deal against Hunter Biden collapsed.

Once upon a time, it was a big deal that Trump refused to let an activist make the RNC platform’s defense of Ukraine more hawkish.

Now, however, Trump no longer hides that he’s willing to let Putin dismember Ukraine. He welcomed Viktor Orbán’s pitch of a plan to do just that — but there has been no readout from Trump’s side of what happened. Orbán, however, has told other EU nations that Trump will moved for “peace” immediately after being elected — a replay of what Flynn lied to cover up in 2017 — largely by withdrawing US support for Ukraine.

In the past, Trump has gone even further than this, suggesting he’ll do nothing as Putin invades NATO states.

Meanwhile, JD Vance is, if anything, even more pro-Russian than Trump, as are some of the Silicon Valley oligarchs who now back Trump’s campaign since the Vance pick.

Trump’s plan of capitulation to Russia will go a long way to ending the Western rules-based order, the greatest wish of Putin and Xi Jinpeng.

And thus far we know just one of the things that Russia seems to be doing to help Trump’s campaign: detaining WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich until Trump gets elected, just as Iran held onto hostages to help Reagan get elected. Avril Haines recently made clear Russia is planning on helping in other ways as well.

That’s how “Russia Russia Russia” has worked. It’s a shameless lie that Mueller found nothing, a lie built off years of propaganda. Indeed, Trump’s willing acceptance — or, in Rudy’s case, outright solicitation — of Russia’s help to get elected has only gotten more brazen. Yet rather than call Don Jr on his “Russia Russia Russia” lie, reporters simply let the pressing question of whether Trump will end the alliance of democracies in a second term go unasked.

What happened to the missing classified documents?

Amid the focus on Aileen Cannon’s stall then dismissal of Trump’s stolen documents charges, something has been missed: There appear to be documents missing. Here’s what we know:

  • According to the indictment that Judge Cannon just threw out, after Trump tricked Evan Corcoran into searching only about half the boxes containing stolen documents, he flew to Bedminster with “several” of the boxes he had excluded from the search.
  • In July 2022, Trump and Walt Nauta snuck back to Mar-a-Lago from Bedminster — to check on the boxes, one witness told Jack Smith.
  • When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022, they failed to search a closet in his bedroom to which he had added a new lock.
  • Several searches overseen by Tim Parlatore found no new documents, though he did find a new classified document folder.

Given FBI’s failure to do a complete search adn Parlatore’s failure to find documents at Bedminster, the most likely way to learn what happened to them would be to get Walt Nauta to flip, something that, as I suggested here, his indictment might normally have done. But (correct, as it turned out) expectations that the prosecution would go away kept Nauta from cooperating.

And as a result, we have literally no idea how many documents Trump managed to withhold from the FBI’s search, or what he did with them.

The continued focus on Joe Biden’s three year seniority over Trump

Again, this kind of betrayal of America once mattered in Trump’s campaigns.

No longer.

It’s not happening because journalists are so cowardly they can be cowed with a mere “Russia Russia Russia” chant.

And it’s not happening because journalists have lost all sense of proportion — and for many of them, all sense of public good.

Journalists are making much of a confrontation between Jason Crow and Biden, related by Julia Ioffe, in which Biden insisted he had been great on foreign policy.

The campaign did not, however, dispute this next part, about Crow and his Bronze Star. In a video of the Zoom that I was able to view, you can hear Biden chastising Crow, who asked about the importance of national security to voters. “First of all, I think you’re dead wrong on national security,” the president says, the emotion at times garbling his words. “You saw what happened recently in terms of the meeting we had with NATO. I put NATO together. Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me! Tell me who the hell that is! Tell me who put NATO back together! Tell me who enlarged NATO, tell me who did the Pacific basin! Tell me who did something that you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son—and I’m proud of your leadership, but guess what, what’s happening, we’ve got Korea and Japan working together, I put Aukus together, anyway! … Things are in chaos, and I’m bringing some order to it. And again, find me a world leader who’s an ally of ours who doesn’t think I’m the most respected person they’ve ever—”

“It’s not breaking through, Mr. President,” said Crow, “to our voters.”

“You oughta talk about it!” Biden shot back, listing his accomplishments yet again. “On national security, nobody has been a better president than I’ve been. Name me one. Name me one! So I don’t want to hear that crap!”

It’s another instance where Biden responds stubbornly when Democrats try to push the president to drop out of the race. And that’s why reporters are gleefully dunking on Biden’s comments.

But it’s also an instance where Biden is making a really good point: He has restored America’s alliances to what they were before Trump destroyed them.

And the press is only telling that story — and doesn’t even realize that they are only telling that story — as part of their singular obsession with Biden’s age.

It’s a confession, really, that they have abdicated any concern for the kind of accomplishments of which Biden is justifiably bragging (ignoring Gaza). They have been bullied out of covering any of Trump’s glaring betrayals of the country the leadership of which he wants to monetize.

Trump might literally be an agent of a foreign power — just like Robert Menendez has been adjudged — and this mob calling themselves journalists would exhibit the least interest, much less persistent concern. Journalists don’t even care that both of Trump’s most suspect foreign allegiances involve the exploitation of journalists for political gain, first Jamal Khashoggi and then Gershkovich. Journalists have ignored that recent history, even after he picked Vance, someone who formally asked Merrick Garland to criminally investigate Robert Kagan (a neocon whom Vance called left wing) for inciting insurrection because he discussed liberal states resisting Trump in a second term.

Trump might literally sell out the next journalist who opposes him to be chopped up by some foreign dictator. And yet the press corps seems not to give a rat’s ass.

Because Joe Biden is three years older than Donald Trump.

NYT 2016: “But Her Emails” NYT 2024: “But His Debate”

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Remember back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton’s emails were all The New York Times could write about? Flooding its front page instilled FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt, a well-known and frequently used tactic to undermine opposition.

(source: Vox, Study: Hillary Clinton’s emails got as much front-page coverage in 6 days as policy did in 69)

That. We’re watching a reprise of a FUD flood right now, this time with NYT’s uppermost management in on the effort.

In 2016 it was so bad it became a joke memorialized as a meme.

That was then, this is now. Welcome to NYT’s 2024 election FUD operation: “But His Debate.”

~ ~ ~

LOLGOP pointed out how bad the NYT’s front page was in a Mastodon post:

It’s far worse than LOLGOP shared, because the editorials also hammer on Biden’s debate performance:

Recall how the media bleated on for months about Clinton’s emails and how later after investigation her emails were a nothing burger. All that NYT energy trying to make fetch happen; but fetch wasn’t Clinton being prosecuted but losing her race to Trump

You can expect the same thing from here on forward, the entire NYT once again focused on making fetch happen.

Meanwhile, the one man crime spree goes on. Former Assistant AG for New York State and MSNBC commentator Tristan Snell nailed it:

This is what the NYT’s front page looked like the day after a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on felony charges:

Two stories. That’s it. Nothing the day before about the trial.

NYT’s Editorial Board published an op-ed – Donald Trump, Felon – in which the NYT made no call for Trump to step down as the GOP candidate.

This is the last graf from that op-ed which summarizes the trial and the editorial board’s opinion:

In the end, the jury heard the evidence, deliberated for more than nine hours and came to a decision, which is how the system is designed to work. In the same way, elections allow voters to consider the choices before them with full information, then freely cast their ballots. Mr. Trump tried to sabotage elections and the criminal justice system — both of which are fundamental to American democracy — when he thought they might not produce the outcome he wanted. So far, they have proved resilient enough to withstand his attacks. The jurors have delivered their verdict, as the voters will in November. If the Republic is to survive, all of us — including Mr. Trump — should abide by both, regardless of the outcome.

That’s it. It’s on us, the voters. Don’t expect the NYT to sully itself with informing voters about candidate’s policy positions, they’ll be too busy trying to tank Biden’s candidacy for re-election.

~ ~ ~

It’s nearly impossible at this point to come to any conclusion except that the NYT has been and remains in the tank for Trump based on its history of coverage of Trump and his opponents Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2024.

This POS from October 2016 is still incredibly offensive:

We already lost a far better POTUS in 2016 with NYT’s help, resulting in the loss of many American lives thanks to Trump’s corruption and incompetence.

Now we may lose a candidate for re-election who’s managed to fix many of the fuck-ups Trump generated, who’s ensured the U.S. economy has thrived in spite of pandemic pressures.

It’d be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high.

Trump’s engaged in criminal behavior which included not only trying to overthrow an election but the willful unlawful retention of classified materials including national defense information?

NYT: *yawn*

Trump says he wants to be a dictator on Day One, ordering a concentration camp for undocumented immigrants?

NYT: *bigger yawn*

Biden, suffering from a cold, has a poor showing at the first debate?

NYT: Oh we can’t have that! Biden must step aside!

I really thought it was the Washington Post which was racing to the basement with its hiring of Will Lewis and abortive hiring of Robert Winnett.

Nope. WaPo has nothing on the NYT.

Ashraf Shaaban Listed as Global Legal Head of National Bank of Egypt

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As noted here, according to a newly unsealed passage of Beryl Howell’s September 19, 2018 opinion denying an Egyptian Bank’s motion to quash a subpoena in an investigation into a suspected $10M payment to Donald Trump, Ashraf Shaaban is the Group Legal Counsel for the Egyptian-owned bank in question.

According to the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, Shaaban is the Global Legal Head of the National Bank of Egypt.

The website for Mona Zulficar’s lawfirm also includes this complimentary comment from Shaaban:

“They have a very solid reputation in the Egyptian market and they provide world class quality legal services to their clients and have at the same time very strong business orientation in handling such legal matters.” – Mr. Ashraf Shaaban – Group General Counsel – National Bank of Egypt

That suggests that the bank suspected of funneling $10 million to Trump at a key point in the 2016 election is the National Bank of Egypt.

I think I’ll reup this annotated rant Trump went on when Bob Menendez was indicted for allegedly taking bribes from Egypt.