The nuts and graphs are here courtesy of the New York Times:

“The judge in the Fox News defamation case said on Tuesday that the case was resolved, abruptly ending a long-running dispute over misinformation in the 2020 election just as a highly anticipated trial was about to begin.

It was a last-minute end to a case that began two years ago and after the disclosure of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that peeled back the curtain on a media company that has long resisted outside scrutiny. The settlement included a $787.5 million payment from Fox, according to Justin Nelson, a lawyer for Dominion.

“The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” he said outside the courthouse. “Over two years ago, a torrent of lies swept Dominion and election officials across America into an alternative universe of conspiracy theories causing grievous harm to Dominion and the country.”

Dominion had originally sought $1.6 billion in damages. Fox Corporation said in a statement that “we acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

It added: “We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

The agreement was reached a few hours after a jury in Wilmington, Del., was selected on Tuesday, just as opening statements were expected to begin. Lawyers for both sides had been preparing to make their cases to the jury, their microphones clipped to their jacket lapels.

The sudden settlement means no high-profile Fox figures — including those who privately expressed concerns about the veracity of claims being made on its shows — will have to testify. The expected witness list had included Fox executives, including Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, and the hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Maria Bartiromo.

It was the latest extraordinary twist in a case that had promised to be one of the most consequential against a media organization in a generation.

The trial had been expected to be a major test of the First Amendment, raising questions about whether defamation law adequately protects victims of misinformation campaigns.

While the settlement avoids a lengthy trial, it still results in a rare instance of accountability for attempts to delegitimize President Biden’s victory. Few people or organizations have faced legal ramifications for claims related to electoral fraud that were brought by former President Donald J. Trump or his supporters.

Dominion sued Fox in early 2021, arguing that its reputation was badly damaged when Fox repeatedly aired falsehoods about its voting machines. Fox denied wrongdoing, saying that it had merely reported on newsworthy allegations that were coming from Mr. Trump and his lawyers and that it was protected in doing so by the First Amendment.

Judge Eric M. Davis had previously ruled that statements Fox had aired about Dominion were false, and functionally limited some of its potential defenses by deciding that its lawyers could not argue that it broadcast false information on the basis that the allegations were newsworthy.

At trial, a jury would have been tasked with answering the question of whether Fox had acted with “actual malice” — a legal standard meaning it had knowingly broadcast lies or had recklessly disregarded obvious evidence that the statements were untrue.”

Personally, I am shocked to find such gambling here in Ricks Cafe. Or not so much. Am feeling pretty good about my post yesterday morning.

I’ll leave it at that for now. Who could have known?

And for the inevitable dopes that will wander in to say “Ohhh, this was not enough!”, or “Ohhh there needed to be more admission and contrition!”, please stop. This was a fine and appropriate settlement. This case was NEVER about you and your politics, it was a jury trial case, which was NEVER going to be about you. Stop now.

Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss have, as Beryl Howell invited them to do, moved to compel Rudy Giuliani to comply with discovery in their defamation lawsuit. The two 2020 Georgia election workers sued for the damage caused by the lynch mob Rudy summoned by falsely claiming they were attempting to steal votes after he saw a video showing Moss passing her mother a ginger mint.

The motion and all its exhibits are here.

What seems to be happening is that Rudy, having had his phones seized in 2021 and successfully avoided — thus far — charges for his Ukraine influence-peddling, is deliberately slow-walking discovery here to avoid identifying any devices or records that prosecutors can use in that investigation, the Georgia investigation, or Jack Smith’s January 6 one, all while sustaining a story that is already starting to fall apart.

As described in the motion to compel, Rudy’s non-compliance has included:

• Refusing to turn over any phone or financial records
• Refusing to explain what accounts and devices he has included in his searches
• Failing to search for texts and messaging apps from the phones seized in 2021
• Providing discovery based on much earlier requests from the January 6 Committee and Dominion’s lawsuit against him, rather than the requests from Freeman’s lawyers
• Providing documents on Hunter Biden along with one Pentagon City Costco receipt
• Others — like Bernie Kerik and Christina Bobb — similarly refusing to comply
• Claiming, then disclaiming, reliance on “unknown GOP operatives” for the false claims made about Freeman
• Refusing to describe how he became aware of the surveillance footage on which he based his false claims about Freeman and Moss

As a reminder, back on April 21, 2021, DOJ obtained a warrant for around 18 of Rudy’s phones in conjunction with the investigation into Rudy’s Ukrainian influence peddling that Bill Barr had successfully obstructed. By September of that year, DOJ had convinced Judge Paul Oetken to have Special Master Barbara Jones to review all the contents on his phones, not just that pertaining to the Ukraine warrants. Since then, I’ve been arguing that DOJ could — and at this point, almost certainly has — obtained that content for use in the January 6 investigation.

Dominion sued Rudy back in 2021. The January 6 Committee subpoenaed Rudy in January 2022 and interviewed him in May 2022. Those are the discovery requests on which Rudy is attempting to rely in this suit, rather than doing searches specific to the requests made by Freeman’s lawyers.

But after May 2022, Rudy’s exposure in Georgia went up. In addition to Freeman’s lawyers filing their amended complaint on May 10, 2022, Fani Willis convened her grand jury on May 2, 2022, subpoenaed Rudy to testify in June 2022, and he testified in August. It is virtually certain that Rudy gave answers to Willis — at the very least, about what he knew of Trump’s call to Brad Raffensperger on January 2 — that subsequent testimony has since disputed and on which topic he has since amended his interrogatory response.

The materials in this motion reveal that Rudy’s lawyer in this matter (Joe Sibley — who represented Christina Bobb in a J6C deposition that conflicts with Rudy’s answers here, though Robert Costello was present for Rudy’s March deposition) at first promised thousands of documents to Freeman’s lawyers, while claiming that most documents would be unavailable because of the Special Master process tied to the Ukraine investigation. Last July 12, Rudy provided 1,269 documents he had also turned over to Dominion’s much earlier request, which Freeman’s lawyers describe as, “his first and only substantial document production to date.”

Then, on August 3, Robert Costello made a showy announcement that SDNY had ended the Special Master process, which is not the same thing as getting a letter that he’s not a subject of that investigation anymore. Shortly thereafter, Freeman’s attorneys pointed out that the excuse Rudy had been using to limit his discovery in this case was no longer operative. He had the phones that — he claimed — included all his communications from the period during which he had started the conspiracy theories about Freeman.

After that showy announcement from Costello on August 3, things changed dramatically. In September, Sibley told Freeman’s lawyers there were 18,000 documents relevant to discovery in the materials seized from his phone. A month later, he said there were 400. In October, Rudy turned over 177 of those documents, 51 of which were blank. Since then, Sibley seems to have provided answer after answer that amounted to throwing up his hands when describing the state of Rudy’s discovery.

Rudy is quite literally attempting to claim he can only shoot blank documents in hopes of getting through this discovery process.

In his March 2023 deposition, Rudy claimed that the physical phones returned by SDNY — which he says only happened in August — were “wiped out.” What actually seems to have happened is that he hasn’t figured out how to access the content saved to the cloud by discovery vendor TrustPoint, and may not have tried to access the phones themselves, which I believe Costello had publicly claimed to have been returned earlier last year.

But far and away the best way to understand his answers are that, first of all, he and Bobb gave materially inconsistent answers while being represented by Sibley, most notably on the topic of whether they participated in the Brad Raffensperger call, which Bobb said they did and Rudy originally claimed — and presumably claimed to Fani Willis’ grand jury — that they had not.

Just as importantly, Rudy may be aware of both messaging apps and phone accounts that he’s not certain prosecutors in SDNY, Georgia, or DC have identified, so he’s refusing to be forthcoming about all the devices and phone accounts he used. There are probably communications from his phones that Costello successfully claimed were privileged during the SDNY Special Master process, which would be obviously crime-fraud excepted in any proceeding before someone who knows the January 6 investigation well. Prosecutors in both SDNY and DC will be able to tell after a quick review of exhibits included with this motion to compel whether Rudy’s claims about the status of the phone content from TrustPoint are accurate.

And therein lies the risk of the game that Rudy is playing.

This would be an obviously bullshit response before any judge, including Carl Nichols (who is presiding over the much more leisurely Dominion suit against Rudy).

But by luck of the draw, he’s attempting this stunt before Beryl Howell, who even on good days does not suffer fools at all, much less gladly, and who until just a month ago was the Chief Judge presiding over all the grand jury proceedings in DC, including the January 6 investigation. She’s one of just two or three judges who knows whether DOJ asked for and obtained a warrant to get the stuff from Rudy’s phones in SDNY. If they did (and I’d bet a very good deal of money they did), she would have seen an affidavit explaining in what form DC USAO understood that phone content to be, and if they did, she has likely overseen discussions about any further attorney-client protections DOJ had to adhere to. If DC USAO obtained warrants for other cloud content, she might also know about any accounts that Rudy is not disclosing to Freeman, including those whose email and phone accounts Rudy consistently used as a proxy. She likely has a sense of how many phone accounts DOJ has identified for Rudy, none of the call records of which would be subject to attorney-client protection. She may know of other aliases that Rudy used in his assault on the election.

Rudy is pulling this contemptuous stunt in front of the one judge who may know the extent to which he’s bullshitting.

Which may be why, at a few points in Freeman’s Motion to Compel, her attorneys note that they’re only asking for modest relief, basically just leverage to get Rudy to actually answer the questions, as well as attorney fees for their time he has wasted.

But Judge Howell? Well, if she wants to use her discretion to provide expanded relief, Freeman’s lawyers say, they’d be open to that too.

The relief Plaintiffs seek in this Motion is narrow, while recognizing that the Court in its discretion may enter additional forms of relief, including sanctions. Plaintiffs reserve all rights relating to seeking expanded forms of relief in the future.

At this point, there are at least two criminal investigations into Rudy and two civil suits — January 6, Georgia, Dominion, and this suit. Even before reviewing his J6C transcript, it’s easy to identify plenty of ways his evolving answers here, amended in part because of inconsistent testimony given before the J6C, conflict with what he must have answered before the Georgia grand jury, which could start issuing indictments any day.

Juggling all that legal exposure would be difficult for a sober, organized man with little real legal exposure.

For Rudy, though, this insane approach may be, at best, a futile attempt to limit the damage this civil case can do to his criminal exposure.

Members of the Emptywheel community are on top of almost everything. So you probably know that late over the weekend, the judge in the Dominion v. Fox defamation trial in Wilmington Delaware continued the trial. For one day, moving the continuation of jury selection from this morning, Monday, to the same time, 9:00 am, tomorrow, Tuesday.

That caused quite a stir on the internet, but, as the judge explained today, is quite common, although he did not say why it had been done in this case.

The speculation is that it was to give one extra day past the weekend for the parties to contemplate settlement. Courts, especially a rapid moving one like the Delaware Court, rarely do that on their own. One or both parties have to request it. Was it Fox, Dominion, or both?

Then late last night, there were reports there had been no settlement reached. That is not surprising in the least, as Sunday would have just been the start, any really settlement would come Monday. So far, so good, but now what?

Short answer is that is unclear. Even today is not a drop dead deadline. Trials can be settled even during jury voir dire or into arguments and evidence. I would very much think the judge here would rather it be sooner rather than later, but doubt given the strain on the court, would probably accept it at any point.

The internet hills are alive with the sound of (almost always) non-trial lawyers yammering that Dominion should “not” settle, because the “public” is entitled to this spectacle.

What a load of bullshit. There are two parties to this civil litigation, and the “public” is not one of them. But the two actual parties in interest, Dominion and Fox have their own interests and needs that obliterate public call for a show trial for their puerile amusement, and “popcorn” moment.

Attorney Brad Moss noted:

“For those asking why Dominion might settle, there are at least three things to remember:

1) non-trivial chance the pre-trial rulings get reversed on appeal and the whole thing is tossed;

2) trials are a wild card; and

3) if they can accomplish their primary goals, why not?”

Attorney Peter Zeidenberg, who this blog knows well if you go far enough back, said:

“Better reason: the damages case for $1.6B is pretty weak. If awarded it could easily get tipped on appeal. $500M would be a tempting offer.”

Frankly, I agree with both on this. Will the case settle? I have no idea, but there are good reasons for both parties to try. And it would certainly thrill the court. There is a lot of sense in making the attempt.

Back in March, ABC reported that Fani Willis wanted to interview Christina Bobb in the probe of Trump’s attempt to overturn Georgia election results.

Smart commentators on that investigation, like Lawfare’s Anna Bower, suggested that Willis’ team likely had discovered, as they worked their way through the January 6 Committee transcripts released after Willis’ grand jury had expired, that whereas Bobb has always publicly claimed to have nothing to do with efforts to overturn Georgia’s election (she focused on Arizona, Nevada, and, in her J6C interview she belatedly admitted, Michigan), she revealed much later in the interview that she had first met Mark Meadows when she sat in on Trump’s call to Brad Raffensperger.

Bobb’s description of the call is pretty nutty.

Q Did you have any interactions with him in the post-election period?

A I — sorry. My phone is ringing. Okay. Yeah, one. One that I remember was the phone call, the Brad Raffensperger phone call. I was in Meadow’s office with Rudy, I think Katherine [Friess] was there. There may have been one other person there, but we listened in on the call from Meadows’ office.

Q Had you met him before that?

A No. I don’t think so.

Q Do you remember — go ahead. I’m sorry.

A No. I don’t think — I think that was the first time I met him.

Q Do you remember talking to him before that, even if not in person?

A No. I never did.

Q When you gathered for that call, what was his expectations for the call? What was the purpose of that call?

A I think to listen and, you know, be available as needed, but I think the whole point was just to listen.

Q Did he say anything about what the President was or was not going to request or seek by this call?

A No.

Q Do you remember if Mr. Meadows expressed any concerns about having this call?

A No. I don’t think he did, but I don’t remember, but I don’t remember him expressing any concerns.

Q Were you able to hear the call that the President had with Secretary Raffensperger?

A Yes.

Q What happened afterwards, when you were sitting there and, you know, the phone is hung up now?

A Nothing. We chit-chatted and left. It was — it was an unremarkable call.

I know the media has sensationalized it, but none of us thought anything of it. It was just a call and that was it.

Q I mean, the President of the United States asked the Secretary of State to find enough folks to ensure his victory in Georgia. I mean, he used those words, I’m just asking you to find votes.

A That is a gross misrepresentation of the phone call. It was a perfectly fine phone call. If you look at the transcript, he was not asking anything improper. He wasn’t asking him to do anything illegal.

There was a lot of indicators of fraud. That’s what he was talking about. He was not — nobody in the room thought there was anything wrong with the phone call. I think it was perfectly fine.

Nuttier still, after she defended it as a “perfectly fine” call, she explained that she and “at least two dozen” others sat in on it because, “we knew somebody was going to record it [and] release it.”

Q So I understand your perspective, but I did want to ask you that, what you just got to is that after the call, did anybody express any concern, reservation, have any thoughts about what had just happened in that call?

A No. But there were a lot of people on the call. Like there were probably at least two dozen, like there was, you know, half a dozen of us in the room, but then there were other — there were a lot of other people on the call.

We knew somebody was going to record it. We knew somebody was going to release it. We knew the media was going to twist it, which was exactly what happened, but nobody was concerned about it. Our concern was, was it a legitimate phone call and did the President say anything improper. And at the end of the call, we all thought no. Like it was totally fine. There was nothing wrong with it. So we didn’t think anything of it, and we chit-chatted and left.

As she describes it, she and twenty people were on the call as a prophylactic against the outcry when one of those twenty people or someone from Raffensperger’s team released the call to the press.

Bobb also admitted in the interview to witnessing Rudy Giuliani’s call to pressure Rusty Bower to overturn the Arizona vote, and described that she may have been Rudy’s representative on a different fake elector call.

Bobb did a whole lot of witnessing during this period for someone who had never left propaganda outlet OAN during the entire post-election period, when she was also claiming to play a role covered by attorney-client privilege.

That’s an interesting dynamic behind the reason I finally slogged through her transcript, to understand certain questions Jack Smith has been asking about the stolen documents investigation, particularly why Boris Epshteyn asked Bobb to be the gal who certified a declaration she hadn’t written.

It turns out there were at least two details in her J6C transcript that raise interesting questions about her role in the stolen documents case. First, in this April 21, 2022 deposition, Bobb revealed that she had had interactions with Alex Cannon after Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Q How about Alex Cannon?

A At that time, no.

Q You said at that time. Have you interacted with him since January 20, 2021?

A Yes.

Q Unrelated to the events we are talking about today, January 6 and the lead up?

A Yes. Correct.

In reporting on Bobb’s role in the June 3 subpoena response, she claimed to have no prior interaction with Evan Corcoran, who wrote the declaration. But interaction with Cannon would reflect ongoing involvement in purportedly legal matters after the coup attempt.

And consider the kind of lawyering her J6C testimony described her to be (and remember that other witnesses said she played no legal role, but was just involved in communication).

When the committee asked about the mid-December 2020 memo recommending that Trump invoke national security as an excuse to seize the voting machines — which, metadata shows, Bobb authored, and which, the interview revealed, she had not provided in response to a subpoena — she explained that she didn’t really author it. She just went to lunch with Phil Waldron and wrote down what he said. And then emailed what he said back to him.

I started the document, took their notes down, whatever. And then Colonel Waldron asked me to email it to him, which I did. What happened with it from there, I don’t know.

So I don’t know. I’m not sure that this — I don’t know. I don’t know if this is — this looks like what I originated on my computer, but I think it went past whatever I had done, because what I had done, I think — when I say I had done, I started the document. They wanted to work on it. They used my computer to work on it, and then when they were done doing whatever they were doing, said, hey, can you email this.

And I think that’s probably it, but I am not — you know what I mean, like, I don’t know what they changed after it left my computer.

Q Yes.

A But I had some role in initiating something like this in the sense that I had a computer that people wanted to use, and that was it.

As investigators probed this remarkable story, Bobb said Waldron was with someone named Mike but not that Mike, Mike Flynn, because she knows him, and maybe Sidney Powell but she doesn’t know.

Q Okay. All right. So let me unpack some of that. You are with Colonel Waldron. Who else is there?

A It was people that he was working with. I don’t know their names. know there was a guy named Mike. I don’t know his last name. And it was folks that — like it was the machine team folks that, you know, I didn’t really know them.

[snip]

Q What about Sidney Powell?

A She may have been. I don’t know. Like because I gave them my computer, they finished doing whatever they were doing. While they were doing that, I was working from my phone and taking calls, so I would step out and come back in.

So to the extent someone came in and out, I don’t know, you know.

As things progressed, Bobb included details that might explain a Google search from her computer of the statutes invoked, but insisted she “literally just like formatted it.” And provided the title.

Q When you started working on this, or what became this document, were you working with something else as an example? Like did you have another executive order that you used as a model?

A Probably. And I wasn’t — like I probably just found one and put it together, but just so you know, I was not putting — I didn’t do the substance and stuff of this. Like the authorities that they used and all that, I didn’t do that. I just literally just like formatted it.

[snip]

Q And were you typing up from scratch or did you have something else that you were modifying?

A I wasn’t typing it. So the — like I probably — I probably did pull up an executive order just to see like the title, but literally past the title, I did not provide that content.

Q Okay. You gave your computer to Mr. Waldron. Is he the one that was typing on your computer when they were working on this document?

A He did some of it, and then this guy Mike, whoever he was, was doing some of it. I don’t know. It was like they were brainstorming collectively and working. I don’t know.

Q One of the things you mentioned there in the authorities, just past those that you referred to, are National Security Presidential Memoranda 13 and 21.

Did you have anything to do with inserting those?

A No. I had nothing to do with the authorities.

[snip]

Q No. Do you remember Colonel Waldron or Mike or anybody else typing —

A Colonel — I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt you.

Q That’s okay. Do you remember them talking about presidential  memoranda?

A I remember vaguely, like I don’t have a good recollection. I’m going to give you what I think I remember. And I remember it sounded like they wanted to do something intelligence related, and EO 12333 is like the standard intelligence authority.

So I remember thinking that that made sense. And then I remember thinking I have no idea what they are doing with the other stuff. That’s the extent of my memory.

Q Okay. As far as the next paragraph it says, I, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, find that the forensic reports of the Antrim County, Michigan, voting machines released on December 13th — and then it goes on.

Did you have any role in writing this either as a scribe or something that you came 20 up with?

In the middle of a deposition where she turned on attorney-client privilege at will, she described herself here as a “scribe.”

A I definitely didn’t come up with it. I could have been a scribe. I mean, I was — I was a scribe for a lot of things. And, like I said, I started this document.

I don’t — like I’ve also said, I don’t have the information on Dominion voting systems.

So if I physically typed this out, I had to have someone dictate it to me because I don’t have this information.

Q Tell us about the conversations you had with Mike and Colonel Waldron about this. Like what was the purpose of it, as you started to draft and pull up an example —

A I didn’t — I honestly didn’t have a whole lot. They had mentioned that they were brainstorming some type of proposal to see if there was some government action to be taken on machines or whatever. I don’t know a lot about the machines. I don’t have a lot of information on the machines. And I was more curious about the authorities because, you know, I didn’t know what authority they would use to do it.

And the two documents, one being DOD, one being DHS makes sense because I remember, you know, there was posse comitatus issue and they were talking about, you know, like DHS needs to be the lead because the military can’t do it, whatever. I don’t know. I don’t even think I weighed — I do not remember weighing in on anything substantive about this.

And the legal advice? In spite of her awareness that the memo distinguished between DOD and DHS, the agency for which she had only recently been an attorney, she didn’t have anything to do with the shitty legal advice, she says.

Q Okay. So that was going to be my next question. Without disclosing any legal advice you may have provided, were you asked to provide legal advice about this and weigh in from your perspective as a lawyer?

A I don’t think so. No.

[snip]

What do you remember about any discussions related to the appointment of a special counsel in connection with this document?

A I have limited — like I have hazy recollection, but based on the fact that it says “her,” I’m guessing they were probably thinking Sidney would get appointed, but I can’t confirm that.

Q Okay. Do you know why Colonel Waldron wanted Sidney to be appointed as a special counsel?

Q I don’t

[snip]

Q Now, working on their — on your computer, how does it get to that? And I’m sorry if you already said this.

A Yeah, that’s okay. When they were done with it, they gave me my computer back and said — I don’t remember who said it, but it was probably Phil said can you email this to Phil, or can you email this to me. And I sent it to Phil from there, and that was it.

This testimony is positively amazeballs.

And whether there’s a scrap of truth to Bobb’s claim that she, on a topic about which she fancied herself playing a legal role, simply gave her computer to non-lawyers (and maybe Sidney Powell) so they could draft a memo providing advice to the President of the United States, about a topic — national security law — on which she claims some expertise, that she would then blindly email to them without first reviewing, whether there’s a shred of truth to any of this or not, it certainly explains why Boris Epshteyn would think Bobb might be a good candidate to participate in an effort to dupe the FBI as they investigated stolen classified documents. It also may explain why she disclaimed playing a legal role when she testified in October, so she could offer the FBI a similar story about playing the same kind of dumb cut-out for legal advice.

Christina Bobb, in an interview in which she was warned that any lies could be prosecuted as False Statements (though in which she was not placed under oath), told an absolutely fantastic story about how her computer came to write a historically shocking document in the run-up to an insurrection, but she had nothing to do with what her computer wrote.

Dan Froomkin says reporters should call Jack Teixeira’s release of highly classified documents “theft,” not a leak, distinguishing “public-spirited” leakers from “self-serving … thieves.” Spencer Ackerman muses that Teixeira, “leaked for that most ineffable thing, something nonmaterial but nevertheless hyper-real in the logic of the poster, and particularly the right-wing-chud poster: clout.” Charlie Savage suggests something distinguishes this case, legally, from those of everyone else (among a limited subset) who took classified information. Glenn Greenwald has been all over the map, in one breath calling this, “a bullshit leak, despite some relevant docs, the impact of which has been severely overblown from the start,” but then applauding Tucker Carlson’s focus on the altered casualty numbers in Ukraine and Tucker’s claims that even Fox has factchecked as an example of, “the significant revelations these leaks provide.”

Now he’s just making shit up about WaPo and NYT hunting down Teixeira, shit that a quick reading of the arrest affidavit readily debunks, shit that ignores that WaPo’s source(s) for hundreds of still-unpublished documents, at least, are one or more of the Discord chat kids, to whom WaPo has given source protection (that will be utterly meaningless in the face of the subpoenas already served).

A bunch of people who made their careers because a young, narcissistic IT guy stole a shit-ton of records about which he had little personal expertise — some incredibly important, a great many useful only to America’s adversaries — seem to be uncertain what to make of Jack Teixeira, who, early reports at least suggest, is an even younger narcissistic IT guy who stole a smaller shit-ton of records about which he had even less personal expertise, some newsworthy, some useful primarily to America’s adversaries.

We will likely have the rest of Teixeira’s young life to get a better understanding of why he allegedly did what he did, which may well be very different than what he told the kids in the Discord chat rooms about why he did what he did, who in any case are entirely unreliable narrators. But then, they may be no more unreliable, as narrators, than Greenwald is about Edward Snowden, and for a similar reason: because their identity is wrapped up in a certain narrative about this dude.

Since this age of the leak dump started, journalists have been sustaining self-serving stories about what leak dumps really are.

That Ackerman treats Josh Schulte’s hack-and-dump in the same breath as the leak dumps of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, calling Teixeira’s leaks, “something different than the Snowden leaks, Manning leaks or, say, the Vault 7 hack,” is a great example of that. At trial, Schulte didn’t so much claim he was a whistleblower as he was a scapegoat, someone the CIA already hated to blame for an embarrassing compromise. But in his second trial, in the course of representing himself, he performed precisely what the government said he was: a narcissistic coder — KingJosh, he called himself — exacting revenge for the escalating personnel problems he caused after his manager moved his desk. “I think you are playing into the government’s theory of the case,” Judge Jesse Furman warned in a sidebar during Schulte’s cross-examination of a former supervisor, “by making clear to the jury that even today you remain aggrieved by you as being mistreated.”

Vault 7 was not a noble leak. It was an epic act of nihilism. A man-boy retaliating because he couldn’t get his way at work.

And except for security researchers in the business of attributing CIA hacks, the Vault 7 files weren’t all that newsworthy, either — though they did give Julian Assange a way to pressure the Trump Administration. Plus, the fate of both the Vault 7 files during the nine months between leak and publication, during a period when Assange was a key part of a Russian influence operation, as well as the Vault 8 source code included in Schulte’s guilty verdict, remains unknown. In a letter attempting to exonerate himself (even while exposing the protected identities of several colleagues), Schulte himself described the value that the source code would have for Russia, particularly during that nine month window before the CIA learned Schulte had hacked them:

So much still unknown, and with potential (yet unconfirmed) link between wikileaks and Russia–Did the Russians have all the tools? How long? It seems very unlikely that an intelligence service would ever leak a nation’s “cyber weapons” as the media calls them. These tools are MUCH more valuable undiscovered by the media or the nation that lost them. Now, you can secretly trace and discover every operation that nation is conducting.

I don’t imagine that these issues were what Ackerman had in mind, when comparing Schulte to Manning and Snowden, but perhaps he should give some thought to why he believes otherwise.

Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene is already creating a heroic myth about Teixeira not all that dissimilar from the myths WikiLeaks spun about Schulte that Ackerman appears to still believe.

Maybe, like Chelsea Manning, a struggle with his own demons made Teixeira more apt to leverage classified records to win the adulation of a bunch of teenagers. Or maybe, like Schulte, he really is the racist shithole he sounds like.

Or both.

We may never learn how much damage these leaks did such that we could adequately balance their value against their cost. We will undoubtedly get inflammatory claims from prosecutors if Teixeira is ever sentenced, which may or may not be backed by some damage assessment that will get declassified in a decade or three.

Because it’ll be some time before we really understand this guy, because journalists seem to be struggling to understand how to treat him, I thought it worthwhile to lay out some lessons I have learned from covering leak-dumps for 15 years, lessons that have resulted in a radically different view than the Manichean belief in good dumps or bad dumps others have.

Leak dumps don’t care about all that.

In what follows, I’m not questioning the value of (some) of Snowden’s and Manning’s leaks. I’m saying that some of the people most closely involved haven’t taken a step back, in the decade since, to see what we’ve learned since, including some things these celebrated leakers have in common with what we know, so far, of Teixeira.

It’s worth distinguishing leaks from people knowledgable about what they’re leaking

Those who’ve worked on past leak dumps like to compare the leakers with Daniel Ellsberg, a comparison Ellsberg has welcomed.

But for most, there’s something that clearly distinguishes this later group of leakers: many don’t have expertise on the specific files they’re leaking.

Indeed, several of these leakers obtained new jobs while they were already contemplating leaking (or, in Snowden’s case, long after he had started collecting documents to leak). Several took files entirely unrelated to their jobs.

By comparison, Ellsberg was a PhD who leaked the Rand study he worked on himself.

To the extent that prior leak dumpers leaked files they didn’t have specific reason to want to expose, they often did so out of a generalized malaise, usually stemming from America’s war on terror policies. While I think Manning and Daniel Hale’s reaction to the war on terror was just and righteous, and while Teixeira thus far seems like a badly misguided conspiracy theorist, the type of motivation, a general malaise about American conduct, may not be that dissimilar.

Similarly, Teixeira clearly doesn’t have the knowledge or maturity to make an ethical decision to leak these documents. But it’s not clear some of his predecessors did either.

False claims about authentic documents are still false claims

Over the years, Greenwald and others — most recently #MattyDickPics Taibbi — have completely collapsed the distinction between “true” and “authentic.” There’s a good deal of Snowden reporting, for example, that remains uncorrected. Ackerman even repeated one such error, from the Guardian’s report on PRISM, in his 2021 book — “the NSA could conduct what internal documents described as ‘legally-compelled collection’ from the servers—the exact form of access remains unknown”—of PRISM participants. [my emphasis] This description of getting data directly from tech companies’ servers came from a guy who was overselling the program, effectively a Deep State hypester snookering civil libertarian journalists to buy into his hype.

As Bart Gellman described in his own book, not only was the direct access misleading, but it distracted from the more important policy points of the Section 702 collection.

Companies that had declined to comment in advance, or had said nothing of substance, now issued categorical denials that any U.S. agency had “direct access” to their servers. I scrambled to reconcile those statements with the NSA program manager’s explicit words—repeated twice—in the authoritative PRISM overview. Later that night I found a clue in another document from the Snowden archive. There, in a description of a precursor to PRISM, I found a variation on Rick’s formula. “For Internet content selectors, collection managers sent content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” it said. That sounded as though the U.S. government black box was on company property but might not touch the servers themselves. I updated my story to disclose the conflicting information and the new evidence.

[snip]

The “direct access” question became a big distraction, rightly essential to the companies but not so much to the core questions of public policy.”

The Snowden reporters were under a real time crunch and unbelievable security pressure to report, so have a good excuse, but others don’t.

#MattyDickPics blithely started reporting on Twitter without first bothering to get the least understanding of what he was looking at and he still has never gotten records showing what requests Trump made of Twitter, the only thing close to real censorship in question. Yet because he has some screen caps to wave around, vast swaths of people believe his false claims.

The same is true of the “laptop.” Virtually the entire Republican Party has refused to distinguish between authentic emails on a hard drive allegedly obtained from a Hunter Biden laptop, and the authenticity of the laptop itself, even after people in Rudy’s orbit started altering that hard drive. To say nothing of whether provably authentic emails say what the GOP breathlessly claims they do, which so far, they have not.

As noted, Tucker has already magnified (with Greenwald applauding) two of the false claims about the documents that Teixeira released: the doctored casualty numbers put out by Russia, and misrepresentations about the role of Special Operations forces in Ukraine, which have been debunked by the same Fox News reporter that Tucker tried to get fired one of the previous times she corrected the network’s false claims.

Notably, I think one thing that is contributing to more accurate reporting based on these files is more hesitation from responsible outlets to publish or magnify the files themselves, while still using them as a basis for stories, though as WaPo races to beat its competitors that may be changing.

Documents can serve to distract

And that’s because authentic documents have, from the start of these leak dumps, often served to distract attention from the actual content.

As I noted the other day, FBI’s cooperating troll witness in the Douglass Mackey trial, Microchip, described unashamedly how the trolls ensuring the John Podesta emails would go viral in the last weeks of the 2016 election knew there was no there, there. But they also knew that so long as they could invent some kind of controversy out of them, they could suck the air out of substantive political coverage.

Q What was it about Podesta’s emails that you were sharing?

A That’s a good question.

So Podesta ‘s emails didn’t, in my opinion, have anything in particularly weird or strange about them, but my talent is to make things weird and strange so that there is a controversy. So I would take those emails and spin off other stories about the emails for the sole purpose of disparaging Hillary Clinton.

T[y]ing John Podesta to those emails, coming up with stories that had nothing to do with the emails but, you know, maybe had something to do with conspiracies of the day, and then his reputation would bleed over to Hillary Clinton, and then, because he was working for a campaign, Hillary Clinton would be disparaged.

Q So you’re essentially creating the appearance of some controversy or conspiracy associated with his emails and sharing that far and wide.

A That’s right.

Q Did you believe that what you were tweeting was true?

A No, and I didn’t care.

Q Did you fact- check any of it?

A No.

Q And so what was the ultimate purpose of that? What was your goal?

A To cause as much chaos as possible so that that would bleed over to Hillary Clinton and diminish her chance of winning.

In this model — the exact model adopted by the Twitter Files (and, frankly, virtually all of Trump’s tweets) — the actual documents themselves are just a hook for viral dissemination of the false claims made about the documents, just like most of the Twitter Files are.

Microchip even admitted that disinformation can increase buzz.

Q As you sit here today, back in that time period, did you like to get a rise out of people?

A Sure, yeah.

Q And that’s one of the reasons you posted things on Twitter; correct?

A Correct.

Q Was it your belief back then that disinformation increases buzz? A Um, disinformation sometimes does increase buzz, yes.

The claims about the documents don’t work like truth claims do; instead, they serve to short-circuit rational thought, making it far easier to believe conspiracy theories or intentional disinformation.

We’re seeing some of that now from the disinformation crowd, starting with Tucker and Greenwald.

You can’t always tell who is in a chat room

The Discord kids told WaPo there were “roughly two dozen” active members of the Discord chat room where Teixeira allegedly first released the documents, about half of whom were overseas, including in Ukraine and elsewhere in post-Soviet countries.

Of the roughly 25 active members who had access to the bear-vs-pig channel, about half were located overseas, the member said. The ones who seemed most interested in the classified material claimed to be from mostly “Eastern Bloc and those post-Soviet countries,” he said. “The Ukrainians had interest as well,” which the member chalked up to interest in the war ravaging their homeland.

But the affidavit to search Teixeira’s house says there were twice that many members, approximately 50. WSJ reports that the group was more pro-Russian than the Discord kids have thus far admitted. So while initial reports suggest this was not espionage, it’s far too early to tell either what Teixeira’s motive was or whether he was cultivated by someone else in his server, encouraged to leak certain kinds of documents just as Chelsea Manning was encouraged to seek out certain things over a decade ago.

That’s why I harped on this earlier: I’ve learned, both stuff that’s public and not, about how easily sophisticated actors can manipulate precisely the kinds of people, usually young men, who inhabit these kinds of chat rooms.

Foreign intelligence services have been searching out these opportunities, eliciting both criminal hacking and leaks, for at least a decade.

For example, the LulzSec hackers knew there were Russians in their chat rooms, but didn’t much care. But it might explain why some documents hacked as part of the Syria Leaks that would be particularly damaging to Russia never got published by WikiLeaks, even though multiple sets of the documents were shared with the outlet.

Even the FBI, with subpoena power, may have troubles identifying everyone who participated in a chat room. And if the FBI can’t do it, the teenagers involved likely can’t either. That’s especially true as operational security increases. Which means they may have no idea who they were really talking to, no matter what they tell the WaPo and FBI.

So while Teixeira paid for with this server with his own credit card, it has been shut down long enough that FBI may never be able to figure out who else was in the chat room, much less their real identity. So we may never know what happened before someone decided to ruin their lives by leaking documents with what inevitably will be inadequate operational security.

Which, in the case of Teixeira’s leaks, means we may not know all the people who got advance access to documents months before their publication on Twitter and Telegram alerted the IC about them, to say nothing of whether those people were nudging Teixeira for certain kinds of leaks.

No one controls what happens with dump leaks

Back in 2021, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon and former DOD Chief of Staff Eric Rosenbach seemingly confirmed that the files released by Shadow Brokers in 2016 and 2017 were obtained after two NSA employees, Nghia Pho and Hal Martin, brought them home from work; there’s no evidence that Pho, at least, ever tried to share them and no proof Martin did either.

In two separate incidents, employees of an NSA unit that was then known as the Office of Tailored Access Operations—an outfit that conducts the agency’s most sensitive cybersurveillance operations—removed extremely powerful tools from top-secret NSA networks and, incredibly, took them home. Eventually, the Shadow Brokers—a mysterious hacking group with ties to Russian intelligence services—got their hands on some of the NSA tools and released them on the Internet. As one former TAO employee told The Washington Post, these were “the keys to the kingdom”—digital tools that would “undermine the security of a lot of major government and corporate networks both here and abroad.”

If that’s right, it means the last most damaging leak to DOD wasn’t intentionally leaked at all, which makes it not dissimilar from the way that Teixeira reportedly intended just to share it with the guys in his Discord server. It was exfiltrated from NSA’s secure servers by employees (in Pho’s case, purportedly for work reasons), then stolen, then released.

In the wake of that discovery, DOJ seems to have started pushing to hold leakers accountable for the unintended consequences of their leaks. In a declaration accompanying Terry Albury’s sentencing, for example, Bill Priestap raised the concern that by loading some of the files onto an Internet-accessible computer, Albury could have made them available to entities he had no intention of sharing them with.

The defendant had placed certain of these materials on a personal computing device that connects to the Internet, which creates additional concerns that the information has been or will be transmitted or acquired by individuals or groups not entitled to receive it.

But it’s a lesson journalists don’t take seriously, except (in most cases) their own operational security. What happened to the source code of CIA hacking tools Schulte took? What happened to the damning files on Russia from the Syria leaks? Did Chelsea Manning envision the State cables she leaked would be shared with someone like Israel Shamir, who reportedly shared them, in turn, with Alexander Lukashenko’s regime in advance — the same kind of advance knowledge that Schulte himself reflected on?

Even the laudable, distinguishing aspect of Snowden’s leaks, that he gave them to journalists to determine what was in the public interest (an approach he abandoned when he described CIA infrastructure in his own book), is a double-edged sword. He made multiple copies of his files — most of which weren’t in the public interest — and handed the files to others, including at least one person, Greenwald, that Snowden knew had started out with epically shitty OpSec. We would never know if someone got some the Snowden files as a result unless, like Shadow Brokers or Teixeira’s leaks, someone started sharing them openly on Telegram.

The damage assessment and the reporting goes on

We are nine days into the public part of this leak and, thanks to WaPo reporters’ success at befriending the Discord kids, WaPo has obtained hundreds of otherwise unpublished documents. In addition to about eight background stories on the leaks and charges against Teixeira, WaPo currently has Discord Leak stories on: Taiwan’s military vulnerability, China’s surveillance balloons, Surveillance on Mexican cartels. There’s nothing that makes WaPo’s reporting more or less credible, more or less honorable, because Teixeira released these to show off to his buddies (if that is why he released them).

The Discord Leaks are a leak dump. They may have more in common with past leak dumps than a lot of past leak dump journalists would like to admit. Importantly, no matter what journalists would like to tell themselves, Teixeira’s motive, if he is the source, will have virtually no impact on the damage he does to US national security or the value those documents offer to the public good, both of which will be driven by the content of the documents and the details of any advance notice adversaries may have gotten.

And legally, Teixeira is going to be treated just like Chelsea Manning and Josh Schulte — which is to say, harshly, unless he decides to flip before prosecutors can build charges on another twenty documents and has information of value to prosecutors. That’s not surprising in the least. But — short of proving he knowingly shared these documents with an agent of a foreign power — nor will it be tied to his motive.

Leak dumps don’t care about motive.

Update: PwnAllTheThings’ analysis of the damage caused by the Discord leaks is worth reading. Along with noting that at least one human source has been put in danger by these leaks (as well as a bunch of SIGINT collection), he describes how these releases could have gotten a bunch of Ukrainians killed.

We don’t know yet if Teixeira wanted lots of Ukrainians to die as a result of his leak. But we definitely know he didn’t care if they did, and they certainly had the potential to cause colossal amounts of death—both military and civilian—in Ukraine, even if that huge potential was never fully realized.

Index to posts in this series

The standard story of the origin of our nation tells us that the Declaration of INdependence asserts that all men are created equal and naturally endowed with certain rights including the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that the Revolutionary War was fought to uphold these principles; and that the principles are instantiated in the Constitution. We didn’t always live up to those principles but we’ve always worked towards them, and we get closer all the time. P. 9 et seq. In the first post in this series, we saw that the Declaration doesn’t fit well with the standard story. What about the Revolutionary War and the Constitution?

The Revolutionary War

Roosevelt doesn’t think there was a single cause for the War.

Different people sought independence for different reasons, and likely they sometimes said what they thought would advance their cause rather than what they truly believed. History requires interpretation, and a claim to possession of the one singular truth is a hallmark of ideology. P. 55.

The Declaration explains the decision of the Colonists to throw off English rule. It claims that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The Declaration complains that the King cut off trade between the Colonies and the rest of the world. It claims that the King ignores the laws and even the courts of the Colonists. The King attacks the Colonies directly, keeps a standing army in the Colonies, and quarters troops on the population. The King imposes taxes on the Colonies even though they are not represented in Parliament. The King stirs up the “merciless savages” to attack and murder the Colonists. The only reference to slavery is oblique: the King “… has excited domestic insurrections amongst us….”

No doubt one or more of these claims were a factor for some of the Colonists. The principle of consent itself may have motivated some of them. The listed claims may have motivated others. Perhaps some were motivated by a desire to bring about equality or at least to end slavery (Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, for example.) Roosevelt points out that protecting slavery may have brought others into the war:

There isn’t much evidence supporting the idea that slavery was an issue. Of course just as people say things they don’t believe to advance their cause, others may keep quiet about their actual reasons if they would hurt the cause. There was little to be gained by saying we’re rebelling because we want to enslave people. Roosevelt suggests that

… for some of the Patriots, a desire to preserve slavery was one reason—and maybe a strong one—to declare independence[.] On its face, this is pretty plausible. Just as it seems unlikely that northern Patriots had slavery at the front of their minds, it is unlikely the southern ones didn’t have it at least at the back of theirs. P. 53.

In any event it’s hard to argue that the War was fought over the principle of equality for anyone except white men and especially white men with property. A telling detail: the British offered slaves freedom if they fought for the King. After the War the Colonists demanded the return to slavery of those people. The British refused.

Nor was the Revolution fought to advance a broad principle of equality. Roosevelt says that the statement that all men are created equal is a reference to the fictional state of nature assumed to exist in the beginning. The broader concept of equality would have to wait for the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789. It asserts that “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” This is a statement about real people living in real societies, not imaginary savages in the wild.

The Constitution

The Constitution was necessary because the Articles of Confederation failed to create a strong enough central government. The states were fighting among themselves, refusing to adhere to treaties, imposing trade restrictions and refusing to pay the debts incurred in the Revolutionary War. The preamble states the reasons for adoption of the Constitution, starting with “to produce a more perfect union”, and ending with “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Roosevelt says that the chief goal of the Constitution was unity, with liberty at the bottom of the list.

If the Constitution were actually about individual human rights, it would include provisions that protected the rights of individuals. It doesn’t. The Founders Constitution restricts the Federal Government’s right to intrude on the specific rights in the Bill of Rights, but the states were free to intrude as much as their own constitutions allowed. It took the 14th Amendment to change that, and to make the Federal Government the guarantor of individual rights against itself and against the states.

As to slavery, there are three provisions that directly or indirectly support its continuation: the Three-Fifths Clause, a provision barring the Federal Government from ending the international slave trade until 1808, and the Fugitive Slave Clause. Each of these cemented the power of the slave states.

The Three-Fifths Clause redressed the population imbalance between the slave states and the rest, allowing slaves to be counted at ⅗ of a person for purposes of calculating the number of Representatives allocated to each state. It worked with the provision giving each state two senators to insure a balance in the legislature between slave and free states. In addition it gave the slave states an edge in the Electoral College with respect to population. Thomas Jefferson would have lost the election of 1800 to John Adams without the Three-Fifths Clause. Ten of the first 12 presidents were slavers. P. 76.

The prohibition on ending the slave trade before 1808 enabled slavers to rebuild their holdings by importation after losses in the Revolutionary War. The British offered freedom to any slave who fought for the King, and thousands of slaves accepted this offer. Others escaped their bonds. The Colonists demanded return of these escapees, but the British refused. The outcome is that slave population rose from 697,497 in the first census of 1790 to 1,191,362 in the 1810 census.

The Fugitive Slave Clause says that slaves who escaped to a free state did not gain their freedom, and that the free state was required to return them to their enslavers. This was a big win for the slavers. Under the Articles, each state determined how it would treat slaves in their territory; in fact that rule remained in effect as to slaves brought to free states by their masters. The Constitution stripped the States of their right to decide the question of slavery as to escapees, which today we would call a violation of States Rights.

As South Carolina delegate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney boasted upon his return from the Constitutional Convention, “We have obtained a right to recover our slaves in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before.” P. 79.

Discussion

1. The standard story has a central place in our understanding of ourselves as Americans, regardless of other political views. Other nations have national stories, but it seems like we put a lot of emphasis on this story and the two documents, more than citizens of other countries do.

2. One consistent element of our self-image as Americans is that we consent to our government. In prior posts I’ve discussed the theoretical idea of the social contract. That’s not what I’m talking about. We believe that government only works if people consent to it.

Apparently that belief is not shared by a substantial of Republicans today. In this they are like the secessionist Confederates, as Heather Cox Richardson shows.

“We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “But we twelve hundred . . . never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”

3. Regardless of what Jefferson meant with the phrase all men are created equal, today we flatly mean that we’re all born equal, we’re all entitled to equal rights, and that one function of government is to guarantee that equality.

Apparently that belief is not shared by a substantial number of Republicans.

DOJ has unsealed the arrest affidavit for Jack Teixeira.

It describes the following investigative steps (and leaves out the one that Bellingcat got to first):

April 9 [Not described]: Based on conversations with the guys involved, Aric Toler lays out how documents traveled from servers we now know were operated by Teixeira onto WowMao.

April 10: FBI interviews the user who cross-posted a document released by Teixeira (this may be Lucca), who provided information about how Teixeira had first leaked text, then leaked documents, as well as providing basic information about Teixeira.

On or about April 10, 2023, the FBI interviewed a user of Social Media Platform 1 (“User 1”). According to User 1, an individual using a particular username (the “Subject Username”) began posting what appeared to be classified information on Social Media Platform 1 in or about December 2022 on a specific server (“Server 1”) within Social Media Platform 1. According to User 1, the individual using the Subject Username was the administrator of Server 1. User 1 indicated that the purpose of Server 1 was to discuss geopolitical affairs and current and historical wars.

According to User 1, the individual using the Subject Username initially posted the Government Information as paragraphs of text. However, in or around January 2023, the Subject Username began posting photographs of documents on Server 1 that contained what appeared to be classification markings on official U.S. Government documents.

[snip]

User 1 also described to the FBI his interactions with the individual posting under the Subject Username. In the course of those interactions, User 1 learned that the individual posting under the Subject Username called himself “Jack,” appeared to reside in Massachusetts, and claimed that he was in the United States Air National Guard (“USANG”). User 1 described the individual posting under the Subject Username as a white male who was clean-cut in appearance and between 20 and 30 years old.

April 12: Subpoena returns from Discord reveal that Teixeira registered the server in question under his own name, from his mom’s address, which is the same address the Air National Guard had for him.

According to these records, the individual using the Subject Username is the administrator of Server 1, the billing name associated with the Subject Username is “Jack Teixeira,” and the billing address associated with the Subject Username is a specific residence in North Dighton, Massachusetts. Teixeira listed the North Dighton, Massachusetts residence as his primary residence on employment paperwork with the USANG. On April 13, 2023 the FBI arrested TEIXEIRA at that residence in North Dighton, Massachusetts.

April 13: User1 gave a positive ID of Teixeira based on his driver’s license

On April 13, 2023, User 1 also identified TEIXEIRA’s Registry of Motor Vehicles photo from a photo lineup as the individual he knew as “Jack” who had posted Government Information under the Subject Username on Social Media Platform 1.

nd: OGA1 provides log files showing Teixeira printing out the single charged document the day before it got cross-posted.

The Government Document posted on Social Media Platform 1 was accessible to TEIXEIRA by virtue of his employment with USANG. According to a U.S. Government Agency, which has access to logs of certain documents TEIXEIRA accessed, TEIXEIRA accessed the Government Document in February 2023, approximately one day before User 1 reposted the information on the Internet. User 1 told the FBI that the information he reposted was originally posted on Server 1 by the individual using the Subject Username.

nd: OGA2 provides log files showing Teixeira searching for this leak investigation the day the leak was first reported.

In addition, according to a second U.S. Government Agency, which can monitor certain searches conducted on its classified networks, on April 6, 2023, TEIXEIRA used his government computer to search classified intelligence reporting for the word “leak.” The first public reporting regarding the Government Information appeared on or around April 6, 2023. Accordingly, there is reason to believe that TEIXEIRA was searching for classified reporting regarding the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of the identity of the individual who transmitted classified national defense information, to include the Government Document.

Update: Spelling error of Teixeira fixed.

 

From emptywheel: Thanks to the generosity of emptywheel readers we have funded Brandi’s coverage for the rest of the trial. If you’d like to show your further appreciation for Brandi’s great work, here’s her PayPal tip jar.

It took more than three months but this week at the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial, the first defendant to step forward and testify was the group’s Philadelphia chapter leader Zachary Rehl. 

Rehl took the stand over two days and emphatically denied that there was a plan to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election on Jan. 6, an argument that shouldn’t surprise any juror that has patiently heard evidence over these last 53 days. 

The violence that consumed the U.S. Capitol was never part of the objective— if there even was an objective Rehl would say, because, after all, there was no plan. He wasn’t in a position to direct what happened, he testified, and at the end of the day, he asked jurors to believe he was just a man who liked to protest and party afterward. 

Rehl has sat at the back of U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly’s courtroom now for months as the evidence in the case against him and his co-defendants Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean, and Dominic Pezzola, has stacked up at a punishingly slow pace. 

When Rehl finally sat in the witness box, with a U.S. Marshal seated behind him barely visible to the jury, his speech was often muddled, his hands rarely still. 

The 37-year-old former U.S. Marine at times seemed overeager to get his side of the story out, occasionally speaking over his attorney, Carmen Hernandez as she conducted her direct examination.

After Donald Trump told them to stand back and stand by at the presidential debates—”let’s be real, the biggest platform in the world mentioned the Proud Boys,” Rehl testified on Tuesday—the influx of new recruits had exploded. This was one of the precursors to Henry Tarrio’s creation of the group’s exclusive Ministry of Self Defense, or MOSD, he said. 

At trial, the defense has worked to throw off the allegation that MOSD was a hub for Proud Boy leaders to coordinate a plot for Jan. 6.

Instead, they argue it was a division for chapter leaders to discuss their “marketing” and “operations” for rallies or other events they would attend, and moreover, to establish protocols for self-defense after the stabbing of North Carolina chapter leader Jeremy Bertino on the night of the “Stop the Steal” rally in December 2020. Bertino has since pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy. 

Tarrio, Biggs, and Nordean, Rehl testified, led the MOSD “marketing team.”’ Rehl ran “operations” with fellow Proud Boy John Stewart, also known as Johnny Blackbeard. Stewart has pleaded guilty, Tarrio’s attorney Sabino Jauregui let slip in court in October 2022. The only other member of the operations team was a third man that Rehl said he could not recall the name of in court. 

The Seattle Times reported that the third member was Proud Boy Robert Fussell aka Rex Fergus from Washington State. Notably, a web archive shows Fussell’s Parler profile photo was once a selfie with Roger Stone, a key player in Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election results. There is no public record that Fussell has been charged with any crimes.

It was “clear as day,” Rehl told the jury this week that the Ministry was only about protecting Proud Boys and nothing further. Yet during proceedings this February, prosecutors showed jurors clips from a Dec. 30, 2020 video conference for the Ministry where Rehl, Tarrio, Nordean, Biggs, and other members discussed the 6th.

Conversation did involve concerns over how they would respond to potential threats from “antifa” or leftists at the looming event. But tucked into the roughly 90-minute meeting (which was one of only two pieces of evidence that Joseph Biggs entered before waiving his right to testify; the other was a mostly biographical stipulation heavy on his military service) were several moments where information about the 6th seemed to be gatekept.

In one segment, Tarrio tells someone who asked for details about Jan. 6 that it would be discussed in a separate chat later and on what would amount to a need-to-know basis for people who would “be on the ground.”

Some of the people who would end up on the ground were the men Rehl brought into MOSD himself including Isaiah Giddings, Brian Healion, and Freedom Vy. Rehl told the jury he agreed to bring a “10-man team” to D.C., and that this was an expectation set by Tarrio for other chapter leaders during the Dec. 30 MOSD meeting.

Prosecutors said this was a “fighting force.” Rehl’s attorney has recoiled at the suggestion during trial. Last month before bringing West Virginia Proud Boy Jeff Finley in for testimony on Rehl’s behalf, she argued unsuccessfully that Finley’s charging decision should be entered into evidence to deflect the government’s claims that Rehl brought a “fighting force” into the Capitol. 

Since Finley pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of entering restricted grounds, and Finley and Rehl had spent time together in and out of the Capitol, this, she argued, should go toward supporting Rehl’s claims of his own peaceful and lawful conduct on Jan. 6. 

On his own time before jurors, Rehl recounted how he drove to D.C. with Healion, Giddings, and Vy. They shared a room at the upscale Darcy hotel on the 5th, “protested” on the 6th, marched and, yes, he admitted, went inside the Capitol. On the stand, Rehl’s attorney didn’t spend much time at all asking Rehl to explain his time inside Senator Jeff Merkley’s office where Proud Boys and rioters congregated and at least one individual smoked marijuana. After he left the Capitol, he said he got drunk with his friends. And when it was all over on Jan. 7, he returned to Pennsylvania, drove his friends home, and spent the afternoon “hungover,” “stressed” and “hungry” he said. 

Rehl’s delivery on this sequence of events sounded confident as he moved through the details rapidly. When they left, the men had purchased beers, a 30-case for each, he said. 

But once off the stand, a source reached out to Empty Wheel to “clarify” that record: the beers were purchased on the way to Washington. So, in effect, it was a pre-game instead of a post-game celebration, a detail that in the grand scheme of the charges he faces wouldn’t seem to matter so much. The “clarification” however, did make Rehl’s testimony seem all the more rehearsed. 

Though Rehl, whose father was a policeman and his grandfather too before him, said he thought the violence of Jan. 6 was a “disgrace” and he testified that he did not and could not have impeded or assaulted officers nor would he condone those who did, a day after the attack on the Capitol, Rehl seemed nonetheless pleased with the role he ultimately played in the greater events of the day. 

“Bad ass pic in DC,” Rehl wrote in a text message sharing this photo on Jan. 7:

His reverential attitude toward law enforcement in court also breaks with what his one-ztime brother in black and yellow, Isaiah Giddings, told authorities about Rehl after Giddings pleaded  guilty to disorderly conduct. Rehl, like Tarrio, Nordean, Biggs, and hundreds of other Proud Boys by mid-December 2020, had turned on police, he said. 

Text messages and videos in evidence have indicated steady animosity from Proud Boys toward police in the run-up to the 6th. And on that morning, video footage shows Nordean, with Rehl and Biggs just nearby, repeatedly stoking fury and zeroing in on law enforcement and their treatment of the group’s head honcho.

“Enrique shows up and gets detained before he gets to D.C. and he’s charged with two felonies, multiple felonies for what?” Nordean shouted through a megaphone to a group gathered around him on Jan. 6. 

Tarrio was arrested in D.C. on Jan. 4 for burning a Black Lives Matter banner that he stole from a historic Black church on Dec. 12. When arrested, he was also charged with possessing two high-capacity firearm magazines. Jurors have seen dozens of text messages where Tarrio’s arrest appeared to throw the defendants and other members, including Rehl, into a tailspin as they worried about whether Tarrio had the wherewithal to delete Proud Boy communications from his phone. 

Later, when Proud Boys in a large marching group passed police on the street who were gearing up, one Proud Boy, Chris Worrell, was heard yelling at officers to “pick a side” and to “honor your oath.” Worrell allegedly attacked police at the Capitol with pepper spray. He’s pleaded not guilty and waived his right to a trial by jury. 

As for Rehl, he wasn’t seen or heard attempting to dissuade Worrell, if he heard him at all, and he wasn’t seen or heard ever attempting to dissuade any Proud Boys from their ugly and often violent rhetoric in their chats. 

When Hernandez asked Rehl about this in court, his tone was particularly pointed and he tapped the desk before him with a single finger to punctuate his words. If he didn’t say anything to someone it didn’t mean anything. He wasn’t there to police the chats, he said. 

“I’m my own person,” the Proud Boy chapter president said. 

Their members were “grown ass men,” he added.

When Hernandez asked him what that meant, he offered testimony that would seem almost too perfect for prosecutors to pass up once they get Rehl under cross-examination next week. 

“It’s someone who takes responsibility for their own actions, conduct, and statements. If a man goes into a chat and says something stupid, that’s on him. Unless a guy is in a chat sitting there and saying he’s going to go attack someone, if he’s got plans—well, it’s just probably bluster anyway.”

Rehl hung a lot of his testimony’s weight on blustering. But prosecutors argue it wasn’t just empty talk but proof of motive and intent. 

That would include a Jan. 7 text stream found in the new MOSD channel that was set up after the old MOSD chat was nuked following Tarrio’s arrest. 

In a stream of those messages shown to jurors this week, one Proud Boy, “E-Geezy” urged members to “have faith… we did our part yesterday.” Another Proud Boy “Joshua Maxstud” responded but his message is missing, something that digital forensic experts have testified indicates they were deleted. 

Rehl replied after the blank text: “I find this hard to believe now. I’m proud as fuck of what we accomplished yesterday. But we need to start planning we are starting planning for a Biden presidency.” 

Rehl told jurors when he said he was proud he was referring to the protest on Jan. 6 generally speaking. 

“What I saw was huge crowds of people waving flags protesting and I was proud to be part of something like that. Like I said, it was a historical moment,” he said. 

And as for his remarks about “planning” for a Biden presidency, Rehl said it was about telling people to “stop with the conspiracies” of a stolen election. 

Just a few weeks before, Rehl seemed more than happy to endorse those conspiracies. And to the point of bloodshed. 

In a Nov. 16 text message, Tarrio voiced his concerns that if Biden “stole” the election, Proud Boys would be “political prisoners.” Nordean, in a text the next day, said the “Spirit of 1776 has resurfaced… good luck to all the traitors…you’re gonna need it.” 

Rehl replied: “Hopefully the firing squads are for the traitors trying to steal this election from the American people.” 

Rehl told the jury he never intended to go inside the Capitol on Jan. 6 but when he finally decided on it, he testified that he had no idea anyone was inside but Capitol Police officers. At one point he said he thought lawmakers had left and Pence had been evacuated. 

At another point, he told the jury: “Well there was a proceeding going inside, I didn’t want to affect anything going on inside. I wanted the legal process to play… this is the process our country was founded on. That’s what was playing out on Jan. 6 and I had no intention to go into that building if members of Congress were going to be in that building and I didn’t go in there until after I knew they weren’t going to be in there,” he said. 

Police officers weren’t barring any door to his entry when he got inside either, he claimed. 

“At the time, they seemed welcoming to people coming in at that time [sic],” Rehl said. 

The scenes were reminiscent of a crowded “baseball game” or a “concert” with so many people crowded into a single area and heading in a single direction. 

He told the jury it was other Trump supporters who were “rowdy” instigators that knocked over barriers and plowed through police lines. It wasn’t him or the Proud Boys.

“I seen some people shaking some gates over there. Honestly, when that was going down, I knew of protests going on at Capitol grounds. I thought people were trying to get there earlier, some of the protests were being advertised to go on at 1 p.m. It was 12:53… when we collided with that crowd of people, that crowd was really rowdy and when they started shaking the gate, I heard it and I went over there to investigate the scene and see what’s going on,” Rehl said.  “The people shaking barriers must have been just trying to get to a stage, he said. 

“You’re giving me this look,” he then remarked to his attorney, “But it’s the honest God’s truth.”

At 2:49 p.m. on Jan. 6, as some of the worst violence exploded inside the Capitol, records show Rehl sent a text to Proud Boys: “They just broke all the doors and windows open. People pouring in.” 

On his first day testifying, Rehl told the jury he didn’t see any violence toward anyone. He told the jury he didn’t see any Proud Boy engaged in any violence.

“I didn’t think anyone had done anything at all,” he said. 

That included his co-defendant Dominic Pezzola, the New York Proud Boy and member of the Ministry of Self Defense who was seen in video footage bashing open a window with a police riot shield he allegedly stole from an officer during an intense scuffle. Prosecutors allege Pezzola’s actions allowed rioters to stream inside the Capitol, ultimately setting off the first major breach of the day. 

On his second day of testimony, Rehl left Pezzola to swing in the wind. 

“He went off on his own,” Rehl said. 

Pezzola, also a former Marine, had discredited MOSD with his actions.

This was what MOSD was “supposed to prevent,” he testified.

“I guess it made us all look bad,” he added. 

This January, when Proud Boy Matthew Greene testified on behalf of the government, he said he and Pezzola were “openly expecting a civil war” and that this was the commonly held belief among the group. 

Rehl wasn’t standing very far from where Pezzola allegedly stole the riot shield from police in a bitter tug-of-war but Rehl testified he couldn’t see anything. Video footage shows Rehl facing in the overall direction of the episode with Pezzola and he can be seen his hands up, gripping a cell phone as he films. Rehl said he couldn’t see anything too far ahead of him in the crowd. 

Rehl denied as well that it was his voice captured by his phone in a video he shot where a man’s voice is heard screaming “fuck them, storm the Capitol!” before an initial breach of police barriers around 10:17 a.m. 

At trial, his wife Amanda testified that she didn’t recognize the voice as Rehl’s. Through a rushed and rambling explanation in court, Rehl said the voice wasn’t his but was from a man just nearby. Prosecutors have tried to draw comparisons for the jury by sharing that footage and another video where Rehl is heard clearly exclaiming that he thinks he can see Trump’s motorcade in the road before he and other Proud Boys finally make it to the Capitol.

Separately, in yet more footage, Rehl can be seen and heard perfectly clearly urging Proud Boys that members of the press or media should be shooed off as they first gather at the Washington Monument on the morning of the 6th. 

He told the jury he didn’t want the press around because he feared being doxxed. Ironically the footage of Rehl saying this is shot by Proud Boy videographer Eddie Block who was live-streaming. 

The defense has argued often that a conspiracy wouldn’t be filmed and conspirators wouldn’t ask media of any kind to follow them or document their activities. 

Jan. 6 was essentially a “photo op,” Tarrio’s attorney Sabino Jauregui has argued.

 Other witnesses for the defense have called it a “meet-and-greet” and that’s what Rehl has chalked it up to as well. 

And yet when Block is filming the Proud Boys on multiple occasions on Jan. 6, trying to capture every moment he can while asking for “likes” and “subscribes” on the live stream, he can be heard remarking at various points that he should give Nordean, Biggs, Rehl and others like Charles Donohoe, space or privacy when they would stop along the route to the Capitol and huddle only with each other. 

Donohoe has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding as well as assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers. 

Further potentially hampering Rehl’s credibility, text messages extracted from the defendants’ phones show Rehl telling members of MOSD they have to delete their messages person by person after Tarrio was arrested just before the insurrection. 

Donohoe, who originally gave the instruction about deleting messages to MOSD members after Tarrio’s arrest, replied to Rehl: “Well at least they won’t get our boots on ground plans because we are one step ahead of them.”

In that same vein, Rehl’s co-defendant Joe Biggs on Jan. 5 told members in the newly stood-up MOSD chat he had just talked to Tarrio and “we just had a meeting woth [sic] a lot of guys. Info should be coming out.”

“We have a plan. I’m with Rufio,” Biggs wrote, using Nordean’s handle in their chat, Rufio Panman. 

“What’s the plan so I can pass it to the MOSD guys?” Donohoe asked. 

“I gave Enrique a plan. The one I told the guys and he said he has one,” Biggs replied. 

Outside of the presence of jurors this week, Rehl’s attorney let her anxiety about the Justice Department’s impending cross air out. 

They would “savage” her client once given the chance, she told Judge Kelly. 

It was expected that Rehl would finish his testimony early this week and that prosecutors would be crossed by Wednesday with defendant Dominic Pezzola in the wings to testify right afterward. A scheduling issue with a juror abbreviated the week precluding the jury from sitting on Thursday and Friday. 

Perhaps milking an opportunity to let jurors sit with her client’s testimony over a long break or perhaps trying to avoid the inevitable cross of her client, Hernandez spent the bulk of her direct examination of Rehl asking questions at a grindingly slow pace on Wednesday afternoon. Oftentimes, she would flip through her notes at the podium as the court sat in silence for a minute or two at a time. For at least a half hour, she went down the list, charge by charge, even breaking the sentences apart to elicit a yes or no answer from Rehl. 

“Did you aid and abet anyone with throwing a watter bottle at a law enforcement officer?” Hernandez asked. 

“No,” Rehl testified. 

“Did you aid anyone with throwing a water bottle at a law enforcement officer?” she asked.

“No,” Rehl testified. 

“Did you abet anyone with throwing a water bottle at a law enforcement officer?” she asked. 

“No,” Rehl testified. 

It went on and on like this. 

Jurors in this trial have already been subjected to long and near-daily delays due usually to internecine fights over evidence sparked by the defense (with a lot of the issues already litigated pre-trial). Adding to this, late last month CNN reported that several jurors had been approached by members of the public outside of the courthouse. One juror said she felt she was being followed. 

On Thursday, while the jury was out, a hearing that was meant to be sealed from the public and press was not, and in the process, reporters who had gathered in the media room briefly heard proceedings. CNN reported it was during this time that they learned Judge Kelly would deny a motion for mistrial from all of the defendants sparked by the episode with the jury. 

The defense suggested since the jurors had talked to each other about the confrontations, they couldn’t be impartial. Kelly disagreed. 

Next week, Pezzola is on course to testify. 

Though things came yet again to a grinding halt this week, the parties and judge generally seem optimistic that they could finally get into closing arguments within the next week to week and a half. And then it will be left to the jury to deliberate.

 

CORRECTION: The initial report stated that Finley cooperated with the government. He did not. He had a plea agreement but he was subpoenaed for his appearance by Rehl’s attorney.

I’m going to share something I’ve been laughing to myself about for months, since before I wrote this post on how the financial aspect of Jack Smith’s investigation would be a way to break through the otherwise formidable wall of lawyer-witnesses between investigators and Trump’s crimes.

There’s a reason why the fundraising aspect of Trump’s Big Lie has been accessible to investigators, even beyond the fact that there’s boatloads of financial evidence available with a subpoena. That’s because reporters, including Josh Dawsey, were able to track Trump’s fundraising in real time back in 2020, and when they saw what he was doing, they asked the Director of Communications for Trump’s campaign, Tim Murtaugh, about it.

Heck, Dawsey even wrote a story on December 1, 2020, over a month before the Big Lie led to an insurrection, reporting on this scam.

President Trump’s political operation has raised more than $170 million since Election Day, using a blizzard of misleading appeals about the election to shatter fundraising records set during the campaign, according to people with knowledge of the contributions.

The influx of political donations is one reason that Trump and some allies are inclined to continue a legal onslaught and public relations blitz focused on baseless claims of election fraud, even as their attempts have repeatedly failed in court and as key states continue to certify wins for President-elect Joe Biden.

Much of the money raised since the election is likely to go into an account for the president to use on political activities after he leaves office, while some of the contributions will go toward what is left of the legal fight.

[snip]

The donations are purportedly being solicited for the Official Election Defense Fund, whose name is featured prominently atop the Trump campaign’s website.

There is no such account, however. The fundraising requests are being made by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising effort of the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. As of Nov. 18, that committee also shares its funds with Save America, a new leadership PAC that Trump set up in early November and that he can use to fund his activities after the presidency.

Dawsey appears to have gotten no response from Murtaugh.

What happened with his inquiry instead — along with one Politico’s Maggie Severns sent on November 11 and a follow-up question CNN’s Jeremy Diamond sent on November 24 — is that Murtaugh, who could have no conceivable attorney client privilege, sent the query to Justin Clark, who otherwise would have attorney-client privilege, along with a bunch of other senior campaign officials, to ask whether they should “still ignore” press inquiries about the fundraising.

In the case of Dawsey’s email, they said things like this to each other:

On Nov 30, 2020, at 7:03 PM, Tim Murtaugh <[email protected]> wrote:

I side with no comment. He’s going to write about the split and if we say stuff about legal expenses it will serve to highlight the argument that the fundraising pitch is misleading.

From: Jason Miller <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, November 30, 2020 7:24 PM

To: Tim Murtaugh <[email protected]> Cc: Sean Dollman <[email protected]>; Justin Clark <[email protected]>; Bill Stepien <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: [EXTERNAL]$$$$$$

Fair points. Sean -what are the reporting deadlines for these respective entities -12/15? It will be tougher to dodge such answers after reporters can find it themselves.

[snip]

Re: [EXTERNAL]$$$$$$

We should talk tomorrow about whether to just announce this by press release like we would any other fundraising announcement. If we have the numbers we can discuss how the breakdown among entities needs to be messaged. Also key, as Jason pointed out, that POTUS is on board with how it will be described. [my emphasis]

In response to Dawsey’s query back on November 30, 2020, Murtaugh, Clark, Jason Miller, CFO Sean Dollman, and Campaign Manager Bill Stepien exchanged emails recognizing that the fundraising pitch they were using was misleading, strategizing how they were going to continue to distract journalists from the misleading aspect of their pitches after they had to disclose their fundraising, and noting that they were going to ask Trump if he was comfortable with them fluffing journalists on how they were misleading small donors.

And Murtaugh, because he had no conceivable privilege in these exchanges, sent this exchange to the January 6 Committee and, I assume, to DOJ when they subpoenaed him.

That’s why I find it hilarious that Dawsey, in a report on a new set of subpoenas sent out in March that follow ones sent in December or November and September, wonders whether prosecutors will find the same kind of damning evidence that Trump’s campaign knew they were engaged in fraud as the Steve Bannon Build the Wall fraud did.

It’s unclear whether prosecutors will find similar kinds of evidence to support an indictment in this case.

I’m pretty sure they’ll find it, because that evidence has your name on it, Josh! One way Jack Smith will prove that Trump’s people knew they were lying to the rubes sending in their spare cash is by showing how panicked the campaign was when people like Dawsey started to ask about it.

WaPo suggests the subpoenas he describes disclose “the breadth of Smith’s investigation” and claims this prong of the investigation follows the release of the January 6 Committee Report.

The special counsel’s increased interest in fundraising follows the December release of the final report of the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack, which concluded that the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee’s joint fundraising operation brought in $250 million between the November election and Jan. 6, sending as many as 25 emails to supporters each day, many claiming that the election had been “rigged” or that Democrats had tried to steal the presidency and urging people to join the “Trump Army.” The Trump campaign sent several emails on Jan. 6 itself, including one declaring, “TODAY. This is our LAST CHANCE … The stakes have NEVER been higher. President Trump needs YOU to make a statement and publicly stand with him and FIGHT BACK.”

But not only have other outlets been reporting on it, CNN reported in December that this financial prong of the probe (which like NYT, they reported in September) had been going on, at that point, for a year, though the PAC prong of it may have post-dated the J6C presentation of this scam last June.

Another top prosecutor, JP Cooney, the former head of public corruption in the DC US Attorney’s Office, is overseeing a significant financial probe that Smith will take on. The probe includes examining the possible misuse of political contributions, according to some of the sources. The DC US Attorney’s Office, before the special counsel’s arrival, had examined potential financial crimes related to the January 6 riot, including possible money laundering and the support of rioters’ hotel stays and bus trips to Washington ahead of January 6.

In recent months, however, the financial investigation has sought information about Trump’s post-election Save America PAC and other funding of people who assisted Trump, according to subpoenas viewed by CNN. The financial investigation picked up steam as DOJ investigators enlisted cooperators months after the 2021 riot, one of the sources said.

That may be why Merrick Garland has been saying the investigation was following the money since October 2021, at which point the similar fraudulent fundraising investigation into Sidney Powell was reported by … the Washington Post.

The investigation into fundraising fraud is important by itself for the (outside) possibility it’ll lead Trump’s supporters to turn on him for cheating them. It could help to prove that Trump’s efforts to obstruct the vote certification on January 6 were “corrupt” by any definition of the term that the DC Circuit will ultimately adopt. But it likely also serves as a useful prosecutorial tool not just because it had a public-facing aspect that resulted in non-privileged conversations like the one above, but also because a goodly number of Trump people who weren’t implicated in the actual election theft were involved and cognizant of the financial fraud.

It’s something like 34 paragraphs deep into this WaPo report on how a bunch of documents got shared on a Discord server named “Thug Shaker” before WaPo reveals there was another name for the specific room in which someone who works on a military base shared classified information: bear-vs-pig, an allusion to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The documents were another lesson for younger members in how OG thought the world really worked. The member said OG wasn’t hostile to the U.S. government, and he insisted that he was not working on behalf of any country’s interests. “He is not a Russian operative. He is not a Ukrainian operative,” the member said. The room on the server where he posted the documents was called “bear-vs-pig,” meant to be a snide jab at Russia and Ukraine, and an indication that OG took no sides in the conflict.

Before you get to that detail, the WaPo offers this apocryphal reference to Reality Winner’s leak.

The photographs of printed secret documents now seen by millions may offer clues to the federal agents searching for OG. Reality Winner, who leaked secret National Security Agency documents to the news website the Intercept in 2017, was compromised by secret markings on printouts that helped narrow the search.

There’s no evidence in the search warrant affidavit or detention motion that the FBI had to use the dots on the document Winner printed out. They didn’t need to. She was one of just two people at her workplace who printed out the document, for which she did not have a need to know. She was easy to find using little more than subpoenas, as this dude is likely to be.

But the reference to Winner, someone who leaked a document that alerted Russia to what collection the NSA had on one of Russia’s most elusive hacking groups even though she had no known reason to want to help Russia, is an important reminder that often the best way to recruit someone to leak is via means other than asking them to help a hostile country.

Indeed, even the teenagers interviewed by the WaPo describe, whether they recognize it or not, that “OG” is a narcissist craving for adulation, even if comes from teenagers or people posing as teenagers in a Discord chat room.

The young member was impressed by OG’s seemingly prophetic ability to forecast major events before they became headline news, things “only someone with this kind of high clearance” would know. He was by his own account enthralled with OG, who he said was in his early to mid-20s.

“He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said.

[snip]

OG was the undisputed leader. The member described him as “strict.” He enforced a “pecking order” and expected the others to read closely the classified information he had shared. When their attention waned, he got angry.

[snip]

The dramatic and yet nonchalant presentation also reminded the group that OG could lay his hands on some of the most closely guarded intelligence in the U.S. government. “If you had classified documents, you’d want to flex at least a little bit, like hey, I’m the big guy,” the member said. “There is a little bit of showing off to friends, but as well as wanting to keep us informed.”

OG is a right wing guy with Top Secret clearance who has been soured by conspiracy theories.

But OG had a dark view of the government. The young member said he spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.”

OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The attack left 10 dead, all of them Black, and wounded three more. OG said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption.

And whether the foreigners in the Discord server had followed OG there or even had elicited these leaks, they surely saw the same thing a bunch of teenagers saw: he would and did leak to feed his own ego and rationalized doing so with claims about the Deep State, the same kind of claims that the former President spreads regularly.

The member estimated that the server hosted people from Europe, Asia and South America. “Just about every walk of life.” Of the roughly 25 active members who had access to the bear-vs-pig channel, about half were located overseas, the member said. The ones who seemed most interested in the classified material claimed to be from mostly “Eastern Bloc and those post-Soviet countries,” he said. “The Ukrainians had interest as well,” which the member chalked up to interest in the war ravaging their homeland.

For years, U.S. counterintelligence officials have eyed gaming platforms as a magnet for spies. Russian intelligence operatives have been suspected of befriending gamers who they believe work for intelligence agencies and encouraging them to divulge classified information, a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

As WaPo notes, spooks have recognized for some time that gaming platforms and other semi-private chat rooms are havens for spy recruitment.

The easy part of this investigation will be figuring out who OG is. Subpoenas on Discord and even these kids’ call records will identify him. The hard part will be figuring out who the other foreigners in the room were, and whether they enticed OG to leak this stuff or treated it as an auspicious benefit of being there.

This was a room focused on Ukraine and OG was an easy mark. One of the main questions at this point is whether he needed the nudge to leak these or really did so just to impress a bunch of teenagers.

Update: NYT reports that a member of MA’s Air National Guard is the person in the chatroom.

The national guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.

Two U.S. officials confirmed that investigators want to talk to Airman Teixeira about the leak of the government documents to the private online group. One official said Airman Teixeira might have information relevant to the investigation.

Update: While I was out to dinner, Teixiera was arrested.