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The Still-Secret Cultivation of Alex Jones by Guccifer 2.0

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One of the more interesting redactions in the SSCI Russia Report hides details of how dcleaks and Guccifer 2.0 reached out to Alex Jones. Citing to five pages of a report the title of which is also redacted, the four paragraphs appear between the discussions of Guccifer 2.0’s outreach to then-InfoWars affiliate Roger Stone and Guccifer 2.0 and dcleaks’ communication with each other.

Thomas Rid provides a bit of background in his book, Active Measures (which is good in some parts, offers details of the 2016 attack that aren’t readily public, but does really uneven and in a few places incorrect interpretation of what that evidence means).

The GRU’s active measures in 2016 were never meant to be stealthy, only to be effective. In early October, the Russian intelligence officers learned from an official press release of their American counterparts that their two U.S. front accounts had been exposed—which meant, in effect, that they knew the accounts were now under surveillance. Nevertheless, they still continued to use these very accounts to reach out privately to journalists, and to escalate their disinformation game.

On October 18, for example, as the election campaign was white hot and during the daily onslaught of Podesta leaks, both GRU fronts attempted to reach out to Alex Jones, a then-prominent conspiracy theorist who ran a far-right media organization called Infowars. The fronts contacted two reporters at Infowars, offered exclusive material, and asked to be put in touch with the boss directly. One of the reporters was Mikael Thalen, who then covered computer security. First it was DCleaks that contacted Thalen. Then, the following day, Guccifer 2.0 contacted him in a similar fashion. Thalen, however, saw through the ruse and was determined not to “become a pawn” of the Russian disinformation operation; after all, he worked at Infowars. So Thalen waited until his boss was live on a show and distracted, then proceeded to impersonate Jones vis-à-vis the Russian intelligence fronts.23

“Hey, Alex here. What can I do for you?” the faux Alex Jones privately messaged to the faux Guccifer 2.0 on Twitter, later on October 18.

“hi,” the Guccifer 2.0 account responded, “how r u?”

“Good. Just in between breaks on the show,” said the Jones account. “did u see my last twit about taxes?”

Thalen, pretending to be Jones, said he didn’t, and kept responses short. The officers manning the Guccifer 2.0 account, meanwhile, displayed how bad they were at media outreach work, and consequently how much value Julian Assange added to their campaign. “do u remember story about manafort?” they asked Jones in butchered English, referring to Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager. But Thalen no longer responded. “dems prepared to attack him earlier. I found out it from the docs. is it interesting for u?”24

Rid describes just one of two outreaches to Jones (through his IC sources, he may know of the report the SSCI relies on). And while Thalen claims to have rebuffed this one, as SSCI notes, he did publish a less pertinent story using stolen documents.

This one, however, uses as entrée some stolen documents from May 2016 showing that the Democrats were doing basic campaign research on Trump’s financials. It then purports to offer “Alex Jones” information on early Democratic attacks on Paul Manafort’s substantial Ukrainian graft, possibly part of the larger GRU effort to claim that Ukraine had planned an election year attack on Trump.

Rid, as he does throughout his analysis of the GRU personas, treats this as a failed attempt to sow disinformation, without considering the performative aspects of DMs sent by entities that know law enforcement can see those DMs.

Still, none of that explains why this passage was redacted, even while — with the unredacted reference to Thalen — making it clear that the redaction pertains to InfoWars and therefore is (as it is in the report) Roger Stone-adjacent. It may be SSCI considered ties between Guccifer 2.0 and another of Trump’s right wing propagandists too sensitive to release, as they did with other information damaging to Trump. It may be that the IC still considers this outreach to Jones sensitive.

Andrew Miller Was [Probably] Questioned about Someone He Knew Under a Different Name

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Among the FBI 302s BuzzFeed just liberated appears to be the 302 from the original FBI interview of Andrew Miller. The date matches, the interview was conducted (as Miller’s was) by agents showing up to serve a subpoena, the location is redacted, the name is six characters, and the interview closely focuses on Roger Stone. In this post, I will generally use “Miller” as the interviewee here, with the understanding that identification of this as him is not 100%.

The interview confirms something I have long suspected: Miller was a witness to details about a person he did not know by proper name. This was the last person the FBI agents asked Miller about (see below for the others). The 302 describes that Miller, “did not immediately recognize the name [redacted] but after discussion, determined he knew the individual in question as [redacted].” After two and a half redacted paragraphs, the 302 records that Miller “had never met [redacted] but had seen a photo of him.” The rest of the discussion of this person is redacted.

Given everything else we know about Miller’s testimony — and how, after extensive discussions with Stone in the wake of this interview — Miller fought his subpoena to the DC Circuit, it is highly likely that Miller knows that Stone met this person at the RNC, where Miller was running Stone’s schedule. Shortly after Stone met with this person, at least according to Michael Cohen, Stone gave Trump advance knowledge that the DNC emails would be dropping days later.

That’s the most interesting detail from this interview, but 302 has other key details.

After two paragraphs laying out whom Miller worked for, his interview included the following:

  • Almost 20 paragraphs describing his relationship with Stone, virtually all of it redacted under [dubious] privacy redactions. The unredacted bits describe:
    • Miller hadn’t seen Stone for three or four weeks and didn’t know whether he was in NY or FL
    • Stone was not a tech guy
    • Stone ran his own Twitter account
    • Stone traveled to NYC for several days every week
    • A claim he had never been to Stone’s current home
    • A (false) claim that he had done “nothing really” for Stone over the previous two years, as well as an explanation that no one continued to work for Stone once they had a family because Stone demanded too much time
  • About ten paragraphs commenting on Stone’s relationship with Trump, including the following claims, most dubious:
    • Miller did not think Stone “was a lawbreaker, nor would he break the law for Trump”
    • Stone mostly talked about Hillary incessantly because he was selling a book
    • Miller did not really remember talking to Stone about the DNC hack
    • Miller spoke to Stone about the media coverage of him since the election
    • Stone was “all about Twitter,” and focused on the retweets he got, but did not pay for them (this conflicts with details in the Facebook takedown of Stone’s accounts and other testimony)
    • Miller had not been in contact with any Russians himself
  • Three paragraphs about Alex Jones (who was raised significantly before Corsi in this interview), including:
    • Miller didn’t like Jones
    • Miller thought Stone worked there for the money and the reach to areas of the country that “the left has forgotten”
    • Miller didn’t know who did InfoWar’s IT and digital strategy, but it was better than Stone’s because they had more money
  • Discussions of two people whose names are redacted (one of these is likely Sam Nunberg):
    • Of the first person, Miller suggested that Stone took credit for things he didn’t do and lied to people to get credibility with them
    • Of the second, Miller described he and Stone having a “love-hate” relationship
  • A paragraph about Michael Caputo, describing their relationship as “complicated”
  • Just one paragraph about Jerome Corsi, though Miller appears to have testified that he wasn’t aware of what the two were up to
  • Miller also claimed not to know if Stone used encrypted apps to communicate (the record actually shows he started using them more later in 2016) and made a false claim that he and Stone primarily communicated via email (Miller turned over texts between him and Stone, and Stone was an avid texter, though all of his texts from 2017 disappeared)

Miller was given the opportunity to correct any lies he told in the interview, but he chose not to.

Right Wing “News” Site Deleted One of the Videos Prosecutors Wanted to Use at Roger Stone’s Trial

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Roger Stone and the government are beginning their fight over what evidence will be included and excluded in his November trial. The motions in limine submitted yesterday include:

  • A government motion to exclude any discussion about 1) Russian involvement in the hack of the DNC and 2) any coordination — or lack thereof — with Russia
  • A Stone motion to admit evidence that WikiLeaks did not receive the DNC, DCCC, or John Podesta emails from the Russian state (note the careful phrasing, which avoids addressing whether Russia did the hack itself); Stone does not explain what evidence he wants to submit, aside from mentioning his earlier motions related to this, which Amy Berman Jackson is sure to ding him for
  • A government motion to exclude claims of misconduct about the investigation
  • A government motion to admit this video from the Godfather II to explain what Stone’s allusions to Frank Pentangeli mean
  • A sealed government motion to submit two newspaper articles as part of 404(b) evidence (if I had to guess, I’d say these articles show that Stone not only had records of communications he denied having to HPSCI, but shared them with journalists when it became convenient)
  • A future government motion to admit the transcript of Stone’s HPSCI testimony (the government had tried to get Stone to stipulate to the accuracy of this transcript, but Stone ultimately refused a few days ago)
  • A government motion to admit the upload dates for various videos mentioned in the Indictment

The last motion is partly an attempt to lay out the timeline in these paragraphs of the indictment:

Starting in early August 2016, after receiving the August 2, 2016 email from Person 1, STONE made repeated statements about information he claimed to have learned from the head of Organization 1.

a. On or about August 8, 2016, STONE attended a public event at which he stated, “I actually have communicated with [the head of Organization 1]. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation, but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”

b. On or about August 12, 2016, STONE stated during an interview that he was “in communication with [the head of Organization 1]” but was “not at liberty to discuss what I have.”

c. On or about August 16, 2016, STONE stated during an interview that “it became known on this program that I have had some back-channel communication with [Organization 1] and [the head of Organization 1].” In a second interview on or about the same day, STONE stated that he “communicated with [the head of Organization 1]” and that they had a “mutual acquaintance who is a fine gentleman.”

d. On or about August 18, 2016, STONE stated during a television interview that he had communicated with the head of Organization 1 through an “intermediary, somebody who is a mutual friend.”

When the government requested the upload times for the videos in paragraphs a through c on June 5 (the August 18 appearance was on CSPAN, from whom the government asked separately and even earlier for that upload time), they asked for the upload times of seven videos, including the ones linked above, this video of Julian Assange talking about WikiLeaks’ upcoming dump on Hillary Clinton, this August 4 interview with Alex Jones alleging Russia didn’t do the hack, and a Media Matters version of Stone’s August 8 Broward appearance (they posted it over 24 hours before Stone did).

But, as noted, one of those videos — described as a August 16 Alex Jones interview of Roger Stone — is not linked. As Google noted,

Regarding your attached legal request, after a diligent search and reasonable inquiry, we have found no records for any YouTube video file(s) identified as HXXwf-9otzU, as specified in your request. Therefore, we do not have documents responsive to your request.

The video was a mirror of the Alex Jones interview hosted by the right wing “news” channel, OpenMind.

There actually is a video of the interview (which actually appears to have taken place on August 15, not August 16), available from another site that mirrors Jones. But it appears that other site deleted the video; I’m fairly sure that happened after the government asked for it (the request was revealed the day it was filed).

The discrepancy of a day is not that great (and the government covered itself in any case with the “on or about” language. But I do find it mildly interesting that a propaganda channel tried to make the video unavailable.

Jerome Corsi’s Gazillion Dollar Lawsuit Against the Same Media Targets that Individual-1 Is Targeting

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Jerome Corsi’s already frivolous lawsuit against Robert Mueller yesterday got still more sanction-worthy. On top of adding new defendants (including Jeff Bezos), he and his crack lawyer Larry Klayman asked for damages of [takes off glasses and peers closely] $1.35 trillion billions, of which $800 million million would come from Bezos, which — these fabulists claim — would be just 5% of his $140 billion net worth and not, instead, more than the richest man in the world is worth.

Admittedly, by the end of the day they had fixed these errors, now asking for an utterly modest $1.35 billion in punitive damages.

But I’m interested in what the amended complaint says about Corsi’s stunt.

Corsi justifies adding Bezos based off what is either an Infowars fabrication or an attempt to pre-empt a WaPo story that Mueller believes InfoWars paid Jerome Corsi $15,000 a month to keep him quiet.

In an email sent yesterday to lawyer Marc Randazza, the Washington Post’s Rosalind Helderman states, “I’ve been able to confirm that Robert Mueller’s investigators have been asking witnesses about the financial relationship between Infowars and Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone’s role in helping Corsi get his Infowars job.”

Asking why Infowars hired Corsi, Helderman states, “Mueller seems to be exploring that the job was hush money in some way.”

Corsi was hired by Infowars in January 2017 to set up a Washington bureau. His contract renewed in January 2018 but then the relationship was ended in June 2018. Corsi was paid routine 6 months severance pay.

Corsi was hired at a time when the Roger Stone-Corsi conspiracy theory nexus tied to Wikileaks was not even being circulated. Corsi was fired because of his failure to adequately establish a Washington bureau, his failure to maintain White House press credentials, and his generally poor work performance.

Recall that Mueller also seems to be investigating whether Stone sent Randy Credico work in a bid to get him to sustain Stone’s claim he was the go-between with WikiLeaks. And Stone has said some of his campaign finance expenses were about throwing people who needed money some work.

In yesterday’s complaint, Corsi names not Helderman, but Manuel Roig-Franzia, along with Bezos.

Defendant Franzia is an individual, a reporter of WaPo working under and at the direction of Defendant Bezos and is on information and belief a citizen of Washington D.C.

Corsi names Franzia (who has done extensive interviews with Stone) because he’s the one who called Corsi about the allegations. Corsi claims that the day after Franzia called, Alex Jones’ daddy stopped paying him $15,000 a month.

Furthermore, on January 17, 2019, Defendant Franzia on behalf of Defendant WaPo telephoned Plaintiff Corsi to question him about information that Defendant WaPo had obtained from unspecified sources in the Office of the Special Counsel that Defendant Mueller was investigating monthly payments, which were characterized falsely and maliciously published as hush payments to Dr. Corsi so he would not provide “incriminating evidence,” about Alex Jones, InfoWars and Roger Stone before Defendant Mueller and the grand jury. These hush money payments to Plaintiff Corsi were maliciously and falsely represented to be made by Dr. David Jones, father of Alex Jones of InfoWars.

Defendant Franzia grilled Plaintiff Corsi about details of his relationship with InfoWars, David Jones, and Alex Jones. He indicated that his sources in the Office of the Special Counsel, and working under Defendant Mueller’s direction, told him Dr. David Jones was paying Dr. Corsi to influence and/or suppress and/or misrepresent and falsify his testimony to Defendant Mueller’s prosecutors and/or the FBI regarding Alex Jones and/or Roger Stone, as well as other government authorities.

Defendant Franzia told Plaintiff Corsi that Defendant WaPo that he had learned from the Special Counsel that Dr. Corsi was still today being paid $15,000/month by Dr. Jones.

As a direct result of Defendant Franzia and Defendant WaPo’s actions, directed by Defendant Bezos and carried out by Defendant Franzia and WaPo, working in concert with Defendant Mueller and the other Defendants, the very next day Plaintiff Corsi learned from Dr. David Jones that he was being terminated and would no longer be receiving $15,000 per month.

So rather than being cut off because Corsi testified against Roger Stone, he was cut off (in this fabulous complaint) because the WaPo is going to write that up.

While Infowars claims the hush money timing doesn’t make sense — because the payments started well before Corsi was subpoenaed — they actually time up to when Corsi may have deleted his pre-October 11, 2016 emails and when SSCI announced an investigation in January 2017. And Corsi seems to agree that his six months of severance got cut off (which he calls “terminatied”) sometime in the last month, in the wake of his revelations about his grand jury testimony.

Even as this is happening, Corsi is both trying to reassure Stone that prosecutors told him they would not be able to use his testimony that his August 2016 memo targeting the Podestas was a cover story.

And trying to back the Infowars/Stone claim that he was getting paid $15,000 a month not to work as part of a severance agreement.

And from this intra-rat-fucking fuckery, Corsi manufactures a $800,000,000,000,000 claim for punitive damages out of Bezos. And he does this, remarkably, even while claiming that Bezos’ company, Amazon, is a victim of the relentless Robert Mueller, because Amazon got a subpoena for a copy of the hard cover copy of Corsi’s book (which must differ from the online version that is already out).

Defendants have also threatened threatened Amazon.com, a distributor of Plaintiff Corsi’s new book, “Silent No More: How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s ‘Witch Hunt,’” published by Post Hill Press, with a subpoena to obtain a pre-publication copy of the hardback in-print version of the book when Defendant Mueller and the FBI federal could very easily obtain an already in print copy of the ebook and/or audiobook version of the same book on the internet. [my emphasis]

So Bezos is both villain and victim in Corsi’s fevered imagination. But being a victim won’t get him off the hook for $800,000,000,000,000 in damages.

I find the targeting of Bezos, coming in the same week that National Enquirer did a hit job on his affair, curious timing.

I also find one other detail of this amended complaint worthy of notice.

A big part of Corsi’s lawsuit is premised on the nonsense claim that Mueller leaks.

One of the paragraphs that got amended (the Ali Dukakis reference was always there) now works in a detail about last week’s BuzzFeed story, using the BuzzFeed story to substantiate Corsi’s claim Mueller leaked about him.

For instance, and as just one example, an article published by ABC News titled “Conspiracy Theorist Becomes Key Figure as Mueller Builds Case” contains confidential information regarding the grand jury proceedings about Plaintiff Corsi that could only possibly have come from Defendant Mueller.3 Consistent with the leaks concerning Plaintiff Corsi, it was recently revealed that a major leak concerning President Donald J. Trump was made by Defendant Mueller to BuzzFeed, namely that the president had ordered his private legal counsel Michael Cohen to lie to congressional committees over the Trump organization’s business dealings with Russia. After calls for a U.S. Justice Department investigation of this leak in particular – notwithstanding that the undersigned counsel had already filed complaints on behalf of Plaintiff Corsi and others concerning the Special Counsel’s continuing and harmful criminal grand jury leaks among other allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and illegality – Defendant Mueller, to try to cover his illegal tracks and head off a Department investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility and Inspector General — falsely repudiated what BuzzFeed had reported were indeed leaks from the Special Counsel.

That is, along with all the other shit in this complaint, Corsi is now suggesting that BuzzFeed’s story (which public evidence suggests likely came from SDNY sources) is proof that Mueller leaks because for the first time ever Peter Carr issued a correction probably in part to make it clear that Mueller wasn’t the source for the story.

And, curiously, Corsi makes that claim based on the representation that everyone was calling for a leak investigation on Friday. As far as I know, such calls really began when Rudy mentioned it on a Sunday show, which Ben Smith then pointed back to in his Reliable Sources appearance later that day.

Don’t get me wrong. I have zero doubt there will be a leak investigation into this story. But Corsi seems to have more knowledge of that than other people. Which I find curious, for a guy complaining about leaks.

Look, I don’t expect anyone to make sense out of this gazillion dollar lawsuit. It was never a serious lawsuit — not even when it made unsupported claims about NSA surveillance and media leaks. But yesterday it became far more of a messaging vehicle, a messaging vehicle targeting the same targets that the President is targeting.

This may be all this pack of rat-fuckers has left. But the specific form of their conspiracies deserves some notice.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Are Mueller and Matt Whitaker Already Battling over Immunity or a Plea Deal for Jerome Corsi?

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From the very first reporting on Jerome Corsi’s testimony to Robert Mueller, his lawyer hinted that he may have been invited — but declined — to engage in criminal activity with Roger Stone.

Gray said he was confident that Corsi has done nothing wrong. “Jerry Corsi made decisions that he would not take actions that would give him criminal liability,” he added, declining to elaborate.

Asked if Corsi had opportunities to take such actions, Gray said, “I wouldn’t say he was offered those opportunities. I would say he had communications with Roger Stone. We’ll supply those communications and be cooperative. My client didn’t act further that would give rise to any criminal liability.”

Yesterday on his broadcast, Corsi seemed a lot less certain that he has avoided legal jeopardy.

He billed the broadcast as a historic one and made it clear it was all about Mueller, even while he feigned that he was not commenting on Mueller. He announced he would not broadcast Friday, because he’d be with his lawyers, and suggested he might not broadcast Monday. He invoked both Stone and Alex Jones in his comments. Chuck Ross laid out some of this here, including that he invoked Jeremiah 20:11, presumably as a veiled attack on Mueller.

But the Lord is with me as a mighty terrible one; therefore my persecutors shall stumble, and they shall not prevail; they shall be greatly ashamed; for they shall not prosper; their everlasting confusion shall never be forgotten,

Corsi also invokes Jesus’ superior access to truth before Pontius Pilate.

What Ross doesn’t lay out — but I have — is that Roger Stone’s excuses for his “Podesta time in a barrel” comments seem to be a retroactive excuse for some attacks he and Corsi made on John Podesta that seem to reflect some pre-knowledge that the Podesta emails Russia leaked in October 2016 would include information on Podesta’s ties to Joule Unlimited. Corsi returned to the attack in October 2016 even before WikiLeaks started releasing the emails and Stone adopted without showing signs of reading the emails he relied on. The awareness that the Podesta dump would include emails on Joule seems to date back to mid-August 2016, precisely the period when Stone (and his associate, Lee Stranahan) were first engaging with Guccifer 2.0, and it happened just two weeks after Stone flipflopped on his claimed beliefs about who did the DNC hack.

So, in his broadcast, Corsi suggests something about his two month cooperation with Mueller coming to a head, and he may have been the means by which Stone knew of what the Podesta emails included ahead of time. But with all that, Corsi’s lawyer suggests Stone is the one with the really serious exposure.

It may be that Mueller is pressuring Corsi to cop a plea deal. That might explain two months of close work with Mueller’s team. But Corsi’s concerns about his immediate future may, instead, suggest that Mueller has immunized Corsi, because if he refused to testify about something having immunity, then he could be jailed right away.

As I’ve laid out, in the hearing on Andrew Miller’s challenge yesterday, Michael Dreeben seemed to be arguing about which actions Mueller could take without getting Matt Whitaker’s approval first.

Prosecutors do this all the time. They seek immunity. They make plea agreements,. They bring indictments.

[snip]

We have to get approval requires just like US Attorneys do. If we want to subpoena a member of the media, or if we want to immunize a witness, we’re encouraged if we’re not sure what the policy or practice is, to consult with the relevant officials in the Department of Justice. If we wanted to appeal an adverse decision, we would have to get approval of the Solicitor General of the United States. So we’re operating within that sort of supervisory framework.

While none of those issues pertain to Miller, all of them might apply to Corsi, including the subpoena for a journalist. To prevent any of these actions — immunizing a witness, making a plea agreement, or even bringing indictments — Whitaker would have to deem them “so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued.”

Perhaps Corsi is praying that Whitaker will rescue him from Mueller-as-Pontius Pilate by deeming that conspiring with Russian assets to attack a political opponent is totally normal?