The Presidency Is a “Black Job”

/157 Comments/in , /by

You should watch the video of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, as they waited backstage in Milwaukee as the call of delegates was livecast in Fiserv Forum, packed to the gills, the same venue where the GOP held their convention a very long month ago. As Gavin Newsom, in Chicago’s United Center, cast the last votes making the Vice President the formal nominee of the party, Harris and Walz stood together.

It’s time for us to do the right thing, and that is to elect Kamala Harris as the next President of the United States of America. California, we proudly cast our 400 and 82 votes for the next President, Kamala Harris.

The range of emotions that registered on Kamala’s face started with, perhaps, anxiety or perhaps a sense of unreality. As Newsom cast the votes, she seemed to focus — Walz, standing next to her backstage, had begun to go nuts. She bent her head back and began to register some kind of joy.

But then there was a moment where her eyes got big. She got an almost childlike expression in them, as if she couldn’t believe what just happened, couldn’t believe the enormity of it all.

Then it began to settle. Perhaps pride came in.

Finally she turned to Walz, gave him a high-five handshake, a hug. It’s only after that hug where she came away with a full joyful smile.

As I watched that video, I couldn’t help but think to the significant number of people who, as they were trying to get Joe Biden to drop off the ticket, were inventing reasons to pass over Kamala Harris.

Many people, white and Black, progressive and not, opined with certainty that the country was not ready to elect a Black woman.

There has been almost no discussion of that since the day, exactly a month ago, when Joe Biden endorsed her.

To be sure: the fact that she would be the first woman president, the first Black woman president, the first Asian-American president — people keep talking about that (though as several stories on the Convention noted, particularly in comparison with Hillary, Kamala is not dwelling on that).

To be equally sure, the challenge it presents is not something anyone is forgetting. Certainly Michelle Obama addressed the challenge before us in her speech, which started with a tribute to the memory of her own mother, Marian Robinson, who passed away in May, and paid tribute to Kamala’s mother, along the way. (In his speech, Obama also paid tribute to Robinson, likening her to his grandmother.)

After declaring there is no monopoly on what it means to be an American, Michelle described what it’s like to grow up without the privilege Trump has enjoyed.

Because no one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American. No one.

Kamala has shown her allegiance to this nation, not by spewing anger and bitterness, but by living a life of service and always pushing the doors of opportunity open to others. She understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt the business or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third, or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. No. We don’t get to change the rules, so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. No. We put our heads down. We get to work. In America, we do something.

That wasn’t necessarily a comment on race. Few Americans enjoy the privilege that Trump has.

But what followed was about race. Michelle turned to the attacks Donald Trump had launched on her and Barack.

It was the first time Michelle named Trump.

we know what comes next. We know folks are going to do everything they can to distort her truth. My husband and I, sadly, know a little something about this. For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black.

Then she flipped it all back on Donald Trump. The office of the Presidency is a “Black job” now.

Wait, I want to know: Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those “Black jobs”?

Michelle moved from there to name Trump’s misogyny and racism as a substitute for his own inadequacy. Later, she returned to those “who don’t want to vote for a woman,” but prescribed “Do something” when it happens.

We cannot be our own worst enemies. The minute something goes wrong, the minute a lie takes hold, folks, we cannot start wringing our hands. We cannot get a Goldilocks complex about whether everything is ‘just right.’ We cannot indulge our anxieties about whether this country will elect someone like Kamala, instead of doing everything we can to get someone like Kamala elected.

You can read the rest here.

The First Black First Lady warned everyone. The shit is going to fly. But when it happens, you just have to Do Something to push back on the lies and racism and misogyny.

I don’t know whether, in the month since Biden endorsed Kamala, people set aside the belief that America is not ready to elect a Black woman, or just recommitted to making this happen regardless of the racism and sexism of America, in spite of it. Or maybe, for some, that was always just an excuse to ask for someone else.

I responded, back when people said the US was not ready for the first Black woman president, that with Dobbs on the ballot, with fascism on the ballot, after several elections in which Black women voters saved the country, a Black woman candidate may be the most logical choice. Indeed, as Trump has struggled, and usually failed, to come up with some attack on the Vice President that didn’t turn his dog whistles into a clarion call of racism, his insecurities about running against Kamala have made it harder for the press to normalize his racism.

Being bested by a smart, beautiful Black woman may be precisely the Kryptonite to Trump’s power the country has been looking for.

The Saudi Payments to Trump Are More Important than the Suspected Egyptian One

/96 Comments/in , , /by

As you know, I was calling on the press to focus on the suspected $10 million payment Egypt made to Trump before it was cool — since even before the WaPo significantly advanced the story over a month later.

In the aftermath of Trump’s shitshow presser last week, a slew of people have started calling on the hand–picked set of journalists who’ll attend today’s presser to focus on the Egyptian payment.

It is important that Trump face questions about it.

But, in my opinion, that’s not the most important financial windfall to question. The ongoing Saudi funding of Trump is.

There are four payments of interest:

  • The $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner’s investment fund after Mohammed bin Salman overrode the recommendations of advisors who pointed out he’s unqualified and was charging too much.
  • The LIV golf tournaments hosted at Trump properties; while Forbes has estimated the tournaments were a minimal part of Trump Organization revenue, they put Trump at the center of a Saudi influence-peddling racket that was too toxic for even Vivek Ramaswamy.
  • The freebie branding deal for a development in Oman, for which Trump has already pocketed $5 million.
  • The more recent deal — with the same government-connected construction firm as the Oman deal — for a Trump Tower in Jeddah.

There are a bunch of reasons why the Saudi payments are more important.

First, while the Egyptian payment does seem to have coincided with increased coziness on Trump’s part for Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the Saudi/Gulf influence-peddling was orchestrated even earlier by Tom Barrack (and assisted by Paul Manafort). There’s good reason to suspect the autocrats of the world are at least chatting openly about efforts to reinstall Trump, because he will undermine democracy and human rights.

The Jared investment, especially, looks like a quid pro quo for America’s help downplaying the Jamal Khashoggi assassination. That is, that payment, at least, looks like a specific payoff, a payoff for letting Mohammed bin Salman chop up a US resident journalist with a bone saw.

As noted, Trump’s involvement in LIV really legitimized a clear Saudi influence-peddling racket.

The branding deals in Oman and Jeddah parallel the free money Moscow Trump Tower deal that was fairly clearly an attempt to purchase Trump (and put Trump back in the business of selling money laundering vehicles to corrupt people again).

The branding deals are especially troubling given the closer involvement of Eric and Don Jr in Trump’s campaign this time. Will Trump do what he did the last time, and install his children in the White House and give them access to classified records they would otherwise never be cleared to access?

And finally, there are the missing stolen documents. According to the indictment, Trump took boxes of documents with him to Bedminster after he hid them from Evan Corcoran (and he had the classified Iran document with him the previous summer in Bedminster). As ABC reported last month, Trump snuck back to Mar-a-Lago, a trip witnesses described was an effort to check on his stolen documents. Then, weeks later, the Saudis arrived for their golf tournament. By all accounts, there must be documents outstanding, and one possible explanation for their disappearance is they left the country.

Finally, and most simply, Trump has not (as far as I’ve seen) even remotely addressed what he will do with his existing Saudi deals if he is elected in November. Even if he agreed to shelter himself from the business (assuming, of course, that he doesn’t give either Don Jr or Eric a job in the White House), we would have to assume he was lying, just like he lied the last time.

We literally do not know whether Trump would enter the White House as a business partner, an employee, or an unregistered foreign agent of the Saudis.

The Saudi financial tie is ongoing and prospective. That makes it a far more urgent issue than a payment that may have been made over seven years ago.

Update: Amicus12 adds another reason to worry about the Saudi deals: Trump’s past efforts to strike a nuclear deal with the Saudis, which could be used to get nukes.

In Attempting To Claim WaPo Doesn’t Chase Rat-Fucks, WaPo Lies about Chasing Rat-Fucks

/73 Comments/in , , , , /by

I’m the rarity among lefties who supports the decision of Politico, WaPo, and NYT (thus far) to not publish the actual files that a persona suspected to have ties to Iranian hackers sent them. That’s true, partly because I think this hack could be even more dangerous than the one of Hillary. But it’s also true because of the opportunity cost that publishing stolen documents incurs.

I prefer Kamala Harris’ message to remain the affirmative message she’s running on, and to the extent that those outlets are doing reporting like the story further developing the suspected $10 million payment via Egypt to Trump, I’d like them to continue to pursue real reporting, as well.

One of the real impacts of the files Russia hacked in 2016 is that they distracted journalists from harder work, work about what a corrupt man Trump is. Campaign reporters are already distracted too easily by nonsense stuff; they don’t need any further distractions from their day job.

That said, reporters don’t have to publish the actual documents to address something that is clearly newsworthy about the files. As Politico explained, the main thing the persona has sent so far was a draft of the vetting document for JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

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.

Note, this mirrors one of the first things Guccifer 2.0 released in 2016: Hillary’s oppo dossier on Trump. So in addition to its use of an AOL account, this persona is adopting another of the Russian persona’s tactics.

Again, I’m cool with outlets sitting on the dossier itself. But the content of it is newsworthy. That’s because after JD Vance’s rocky rollout, both donors and Trump himself are asking whether vetters were surprised by Vance’s misogynist public statements.

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.

I’d also like to know if Trump’s vetting team knew of the pictures of JD wearing drag while at Yale, which have become the subject of memes on social media.

Whether the dossier was comprehensive matters (particularly given that a law firm also involved in Trump’s criminal defense completed it). It matters, most of all, because Trump has swapped the mediocre Ivanka as his primary familial advisor for the incompetent Don Jr, and the failson had a key role in picking JD.

So it would be newsworthy to reveal the scope and the thoroughness (or not) of the vetting document.

That said, I think every outlet that is sitting on these documents, particularly if they’re withholding details about any oversights in JD’s vetting document, owes the public an explanation of why they’re adopting a double standard as compared to their poor choices from 2016.

WaPo, which is trying to hunker through controversy about Will Lewis’ possible role in covering up Murdoch’s phone hacking,  tried to do that yesterday. Matt Murray boasted that outlets were taking a breath, and then went on to claim that the vetting document isn’t newsworthy because the six-month old vetting document isn’t, “fresh or new enough.”

“This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of The Post. Instead, “all of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”

[snip]

“In the end, it didn’t seem fresh or new enough,” Murray said.

WaPo even attempted to address something virtually all discussions about using rat-fucked documents in the context of the suspected Iranian hack do not: the treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop, the most innocent provenance explanation for which is that, after pursuing a laptop from foreigners with ties to Russian intelligence for a year, Rudy Giuliani received just such a laptop out of the blue from a blind computer repairman.

Here’s what WaPo claims about how reserved news organizations were with the hard drives described as the Hunter Biden laptop.

News organizations have been tested since 2016. Wary of (1) hacked materials since then, many proved reluctant to report on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop out of concerns that they were the result of a hack. As the conservative press latched on to (2) allegedly incriminating emails found on the computer in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign, more mainstream outlets did not join in a 2016-style frenzy over the material, and Facebook and Twitter limited distribution of a New York Post story about the laptop.

An analysis by The Post nearly two years later confirmed the authenticity of many of the emails on the laptop and found no evidence of a hack. [my annotation]

Note the two reasons alluded to in this passage, both of which show up in Murray’s claimed explanation for sitting on the JD Vance dossier. There were two concerns, according to the WaPo:

  1. Was the laptop “hacked”?
  2. Did the “allegedly incriminating emails” prove what the NYPost claimed they did?

Then, in the next paragraph, WaPo addresses just one of those two issues, whether the hard drive copied from a copy of a laptop, was hacked. WaPo claims, falsely, that the linked story describing the results of Jake Williams and Matt Green’s analysis “found no evidence of a hack.”

For starters, that’s a category error. This is a copy of a copy of a laptop, not the laptop itself. What their analysis attempted to assess was the authenticity of the emails on the laptop — but two different security researchers were only able to do so for a fraction of the emails. This analysis made no attempt to assess whether the stuff on the laptop was packaged up from authentic files (or from a combination of authentic and doctored files). Far more importantly, given details of Hunter’s cloud accounts, it did not assess whether people besides Hunter Biden had access his cloud data (evidence at his gun case described that not just his mistress, Zoe Kestan, accessed his cloud data, but his drug dealers accessed at least his bank account).

But it did find that the copy of a copy of a laptop lacked marks of reliability and did include files placed there by someone other than Hunter Biden.

Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify content.

[snip]

In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.

[snip]

“From a forensics standpoint, it’s a disaster,” Williams said. (The Post is paying Williams for the professional services he provided. Green declined payment.)

[snip]

Neither expert reported finding evidence that individual emails or other files had been manipulated by hackers, but neither was able to rule out that possibility.

[snip]

Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.

“No evidence of tampering was discovered, but as noted throughout, several key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available,” Williams’ reports concluded.

There are several details, disclosed subsequent to the story, that it lacks: It doesn’t talk about the ways the story John Paul Mac Isaac’s attorney told WaPo conflict with the story JPMI would tell in his book (one very significant conflict pertains to the date when JPMI reached out to the FBI). It doesn’t describe that JPMI himself disavowed some of the content on the Jack Maxey hard drive, the one shared with the WaPo. It doesn’t describe that Hunter has sued Garrett Ziegler and Rudy Giuliani for hacking him (the former survived Ziegler’s motion to dismiss; the latter was dismissed pending the end of Rudy’s bankruptcy; as far as I know, Hunter has not yet renewed the suit against Rudy given the imminent dismissal of Rudy’s bankruptcy). It doesn’t describe that in court filings, Abbe Lowell affirmatively claimed that the data on the laptop itself — not the copy! — had been compromised before being shared with the FBI.

Defense counsel has numerous reasons to believe the data had been altered and compromised before investigators obtained the electronic material from Apple Inc. and The Mac Shop, such that the Special Counsel’s claim that the underlying data is “authentic” (id. at 4) and accurately reflects “defendant’s Apple Macbook Pro and [] hard drive” (id. at 2) is mistaken.

Mr. Biden’s counsel told the Special Counsel on May 10, 2024 it agrees not to challenge the authenticity of the electronic data the Special Counsel intends to use with respect to it being what law enforcement received on December 9, 2019 from John Paul Mac Isaac (owner of The Mac Shop), and from Apple on August 29, 2019 and in a follow-up search on July 10, 2020. (Mot. at n.3.) However, Mr. Biden cannot agree this electronic data is “authentic” as to being his data as he used and stored it prior to Mac Issac obtaining it.

WaPo relies on a two year old story that has been significantly preempted to claim that the copy of the copy of the laptop was not hacked. The story never made such a claim, and the claims it has made have been undermined since.

But there’s an even more telling aspect of WaPo’s self-satisfied claim that reporters gave up their rabid addiction for rat-fuckery after 2016. It doesn’t address whether the laptop subsequently became newsworthy.

There’s good reason for that: Because after the election, WaPo did embrace the laptop, even the doctored one they got from Maxey, as part of a years-long campaign of dick pic sniffing. Their lead dick pic sniffers, Matt Viser and Devlin Barrett, even made shit up when disgruntled IRS agents released details that raised questions about the integrity of the original copy. Since then, prosecutors themselves have described that the extraction of the copy of the laptop they received — the one whence all the data that sloppy reporters call “the laptop” came — is 62% bigger, measured in terms of pages, than the laptop itself. There are potentially innocent explanations for why the hard drive purporting to be a copy of the laptop would not match it, but those explanations would conflict with JPMI’s explanations for how he made the copy. And, scandalously, the FBI never made an index of the laptop, and Judge Maryellen Noreika allowed it to be used in the trial against Hunter without ever even assuring that the forensic reports on the extraction of the two devices matched what got certified to her in a court filing.

And WaPo is not alone in its continuing addiction to relying on a copy of a copy of a laptop with such provenance problems. Just yesterday, NYT’s Ken Vogel did a story that relied on the laptop which basically said, Hunter Biden asked the Commerce Department for help on Burisma but it blew him off (unsurprisingly, Vogel also struggles with the court filings on which he bases his news hook). Four years after Vogel’s chum Rudy Giuliani released the laptop, three weeks after Joe Biden dropped out, NYT is still reporting the absence of news in an 8-year old email as news, precisely the kind of attention suck that rat-fuckers seek when they provide stolen documents to people like Vogel.

Again, in my opinion, WaPo is right not to publish the JD Vance dossier, though that’s different than using it to assess whether there were big gaps in the vetting of Trump’s unpopular running mate.

But WaPo is telling fairy tales about whether mainstream outlets gave up their fondness for rat-fuckery.

They did not. For four years, they have been utterly addicted to the rat-fuckery of the laptop, to the exclusion of reporting on all the details that should raise cautions disclosed since then.

And as such, the decision not to embrace this rat-fuckery, however correct it might be, is a double standard.

Elon Musk’s Machine for Political Violence

/66 Comments/in , , /by

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

/127 Comments/in , , , /by

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

/62 Comments/in , /by

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

/30 Comments/in , /by

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

/47 Comments/in , , /by

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

/61 Comments/in , , , , /by

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

/26 Comments/in , /by

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