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Did Pam Bondi Bury the Election Day Bomb Threats?

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The other day, Pete Hegseth capitulated to Vladimir Putin, dealing away Ukraine’s future and leverage, making Neville Chamberlain look not only stronger, but better dressed, by comparison.

He tried to walk back his capitulation the next day.

Everything is on the table in his conversations with Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy. What he decides to allow or not allow is at the purview of the leader of the free world of President Trump. So I’m not going to stand at this podium and declare what President Trump will do or won’t do, what will be in or what will be out, what concessions will be made or what concessions are not made.

Remember, in response to questions from Tammy Duckworth, Hegseth confessed he had never been part of international negotiations. In his first day and second days learning on the job, he failed every rule of negotiation.

I may return to Pete Hegseth’s predictable failures.

For now, though, I want to note all the things put in place before Trump seemingly turned on a dime, effectively demoting his Ukraine negotiator Keith Kellogg in favor of Marco Rubio, John Ratcliffe, Mike Waltz, and Steve Witkoff (who has been liaising with people like Mohammed bin Salman and — reportedly, Kirill Dmitriev from Mueller Report fame) and taking a much more pro-Russian stance in this negotiation.

Between Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, they have protected precisely the kind of interference and corruption with which Russia kicked off Trump’s political career ten years ago. These moves have been covered already (see this post from Casey Michel and this from Cyberscoop). But I want to look at the kinds of DOJ and CISA actions against which Trump’s team may be reacting, not least because this pivot from Trump did not happen until they were all in place.

Non-prosecution of FCPA: Start with the decision to first limit (in Bondi’s adoption) and then pause (in Trump’s adoption, in a later Executive Order) prosecution of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law that prohibits businesses with a presence in the United States from engaging in bribery. Bondi actually put this provision in a memo otherwise eliminating approval requirements for investigations and prosecutions targeting trafficking, and with regards to FCPA, simply made using FCPA against traffickers the priority.

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Criminal Division’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit shall prioritize investigations related to foreign bribery that facilitates the criminal operations of Cartels and TCOs, and shift focus away from investigations and cases that do not involve such a connection. Examples of such cases include bribery of foreign officials to facilitate human smuggling and the trafficking of narcotics and firearms.

Trump, on the other had, halted its use for six months and then maybe another six months.

Most coverage of this move noted its use, under Trump, to penalize Goldman Sachs for bribing Malaysia’s 1MDB sovereign wealth fund, an investigation the aftermath of which sucked in Trump associate Elliott Broidy before Trump pardoned him. But it might be better to consider how such bribery statutes limit transnational investment companies like Trump’s own and Jared Kushner’s. That is, Trump’s intervention in FCPA might be personal to Trump.

Elimination of KleptoCapture Task Force: In the same memo, buried under a shift of focus for Money Laundering cases to traffickers and away from Trump’s buddies, Bondi also included this language about the KleptoCapture program that has been a key prong of Joe Biden and Merrick Garland’s response to the Ukraine invasion.

Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture. The Criminal Division’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section shall prioritize investigations, prosecutions, and asset forfeiture actions that target activities of Cartels and TCOs.

Task Force KleptoCapture, the Department’s Kleptocracy Team, and the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, shall be disbanded. Attorneys assigned to those initiatives shall return to their prior posts, and resources currently devoted to those efforts shall be committed to the total elimination of Cartels and TCOs.

It’s not yet clear whether this means DOJ will start giving yachts back to the sanctioned Russian oligarchs that Biden seized them from.

But what this does imply is that the sanctioned oligarchs who had invested in property and other facilities in the US — people like Oleg Deripaska and Andrii Derkach, both of whom were identified to have ties to Russian influence operations in election years — might be free to invest in the US again.

Shift away from FARA: Buried in Section IV of a different memo innocuously titled “General policy regarding charging, plea negotiations, and sentencing,” are two paragraphs describing changes in the National Security Division’s focus.

Shifting Resources in the National Security Division. To free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion, the Foreign Influence Task Force shall be disbanded. Recourse to criminal charges under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and 18 U.S.C. § 951 shall be limited to instances of alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors. With respect to FARA and § 951, the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, including the FARA Unit, shall focus on civil enforcement, regulatory initiatives, and public guidance.

The National Security Division’s Corporate Enforcement Unit is also disbanded. Personnel assigned to the Unit shall return to their previous posts.

Let’s take them in reverse order. The FARA statement basically says that only people akin to spies will be charged criminally with it; everyone else will be subject to the same civil sanctions DOJ used before the Paul Manafort case. That of course means Manafort’s ongoing work is in the clear (a point that Ken Vogel makes in a column hilariously titled, “Moves by Trump and Bondi Raise Hopes of Those Accused of Foreign Corruption“). It also makes things far easier for Pam Bondi’s former colleagues at Ballard Partners, the most powerful foreign influence peddlers under the first and undoubtedly the second Trump term. This will save Bondi’s friends a whole lot of money in compliance worries.

But here’s the problem with this move: Most of the people DOJ has charged with criminal FARA in recent years were being handled by foreign spies. FARA, as it was used under Mueller and since, was a way to neutralize people for being in the pay of foreign spies without having to prove — or having to declassify evidence to show — that they were themselves spies. It was a way to disable spying, even or especially if people receiving foreign money didn’t know they were being handled by spies.

But Bondi just said she won’t use that tool.

Elimination of FITF: I might have written this post weeks ago, except I keep staring at Bondi’s claim that the Foreign Influence Task Force (the website for which has been taken down) led to “abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” Now, Bondi often parrots the stupidest bullshit that Jim Jordan has floated (which includes a lot of false claims made by Matt Taibbi), and this may be an example — because FITF would not lead to prosecution of a US person, as I tried to lay out in this table (which first appeared in this post).

What the FITF did was to identify attempts by foreigners to clandestinely influence Americans (not just during elections). It played a key role in funneling intelligence to the private sector, especially social media companies. While the government has charged foreigners involved in such operations (such as the Iranians who hacked Trump’s campaign), Americans would almost always be victims.

Based on that assumption, I can only imagine Bondi’s reference to “abuses of prosecutorial discretion” pertains to one of three possible prosecutions:

  • The prosecution of Douglass Mackey for duping Hillary Clinton voters into “texting” their vote rather than voting in person, a prosecution that in later years might have arisen out of election protection efforts (the second row in this table) put in place in the wake of 2016.
  • A warning about the Andrii Derkach influence operation in 2020, which was managed by FITF, and which led the FBI to shut down some informants sharing information on Hunter Biden. Importantly, the entire right wing believes that a FITF staffer, Laura Dehmlow, should have breached the confidentiality of a non-public investigation in 2020 and told Facebook that the hard drive shared with New York Post derived from a Hunter Biden laptop in the FBI’s possession was “real” (notwithstanding that the FBI had not, and still has not, done the most basic things to test if it was packaged up). So it’s possible that Bondi believes, like Jim Jordan does, that the outcome of the Hunter Biden investigation would have been different if they could have relied more on the laptop.
  • The Tenet operation, in which the RT funded right wing propagandists Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Benny Johnson. The operation was exposed with an indictment of foreigners shortly before the pre-election halt to such actions, but not even Canadian Lauren Chen has been charged, much less the right wing bros. That indictment, for money laundering and FARA, might not be viable under Bondi’s new restrictions on other prosecutorial focus.

But there are a whole bunch of things you throw out with that bathwater. If the FITF is disbanded, then social media companies might not have discovered that Iran was adopting the identities of the Proud Boys to suppress turnout among people of color. There’s the ongoing Doppelganger effort to create counterfeit versions of real US and European media outlets to spread disinformation — such as an attack on USAID that Elon Musk spread just days ago.

Or there’s the multiple influence operations that Jack Posobiec has been party to, starting with PizzaGate (the weaponization of the Podesta emails stolen by the GRU), the GRU MacronLeaks operation, as well as a more recent FSB campaign. Posobiec’s centrality to all this — as well as his involvement in other kinds of rat-fucking — is particularly pertinent because Pete Hegseth at least invited Jack Posobiec to travel with him to the Munich Security Conference where he sold Ukraine out.

Trump administration officials at the Pentagon invited a far-right activist, Jack Posobiec, to participate in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first trip overseas, according to a planning document obtained by The Washington Post and people familiar with the decision, triggering alarm among U.S. defense officials worried about the military being dragged into partisan warfare.

Posobiec was in Ukraine yesterday — it’s not yet clear whether he traveled to Europe with the Defense Secretary.

The most charitable explanation for Bondi’s decision to shut down FITF is that she’s suffering from delusions that Jim Jordan passed on. But if she really understands what this program did, then she has deliberately chosen to make it easier for hostile countries, especially Russia, China, and Iran, to affect US elections.

Administrative Leave of CISA Election Security Staff: Which brings me to the most recent effort to help foreign adversaries, something done by Kristi Noem, not Pam Bondi. On Monday, 17 of the people who were involved in keeping the 2024 election secure were put on leave, citing a focus on election disinformation.

In recent days, 17 employees of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who have worked with election officials to provide assessments and trainings dealing with a range of threats — from cyber and ransomware attacks to physical security of election workers — have been placed on leave pending a review, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Ten of those employees are regional election security specialists hired as part of an effort to expand field staff and election security expertise ahead of the 2024 election. The regional staffers were told the internal review would examine efforts to combat attempts by foreign governments to influence U.S. elections, duties that were assigned to other agency staff, according to the person.

All were former state or local election officials who were brought in to build relationships across all 50 states and the nation’s more than 8,000 local election jurisdictions. They spent the past year meeting with election officials, attending conferences and trainings, and ensuring officials were aware of the agency’s various cybersecurity and physical security services.

[snip]

The other staffers placed on leave are current or former members of the agency’s Election Security and Resilience team, who were told the review was looking into agency efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation campaigns, according to the person familiar with the situation. The 10 election security specialists who worked with state and local election officials reported to a different team at CISA, the field operations division.

Now, the rationale offered for this decision is a review of CISA’s involvement in warnings about mis- and disinformation. As noted above, that’s not what CISA does. To the extent it shares information with social media companies, it is to provide correct information to make it easier for people to get quality information on voting.

But consider something that these 17 people might have been involved in: the effort, in real time, to respond to bomb threats called into electoral precincts in Democratic areas, many of which were sourced to Russian email domains. (Remember that Ohio Governor Mike DeWine attributed the bomb threats in Springfield — threats ginned up with the significant involvement of Jack Posobiec — to overseas actors.)

We still don’t know whether the bomb threats targeting Springfield and voting locations actually were Russian operations or whether they were funneled through Russia by American actors to obscure their origin. We still don’t have a report from the FBI explaining what happened.

And with the decision to shut down both the FITF and to pause CISA’s election protection work, we may never get it now. We may never learn whether Democratic precincts had to shut down due to Russian involvement or that of people laundering their work through Russia.

In the wake of Trump’s victory, key Putin advisor Nikolai Patrushev claimed that, to win, Trump “relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations.”

In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.

“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”

“But very often election pledges in the United States can iverge from subsequent actions,” he recalled.

When he gave that ominous warning, I concluded that Trump would soon sell out Ukraine and the rest of Europe. But that didn’t happen right away. Rather, for months, Trump feigned a hardline stance against Russia, all while teasing the number of calls he was having with Putin.

Until this week.

Trump didn’t move to “fulfill” the “corresponding obligations” he made to get help in the election, if indeed he did get help, until Pam Bondi instructed DOJ not to look for such things.

Douglass Mackey’s Criminal Twitter Trolling

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For the entire time since MattyDickPics started complaining about the fact he couldn’t see nonconsensual pictures of Hunter Biden’s dick, he and other apologists for disinformation have claimed there was nothing to the effort to suppress the vote using Twitter.

A jury in Brooklyn just decided otherwise. Douglass Mackey — who was indicted for attempting to suppress the Black and Latino vote in 2016 — was found guilty of conspiring to violate his targets’ right to vote.

As proven at trial, between September 2016 and November 2016, Mackey conspired with other influential Twitter users and with members of private online groups to use social media platforms, including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages that encouraged supporters of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to “vote” via text message or social media which, in reality, was legally invalid. For example, on November 1, 2016, in or around the same time that Mackey was sending tweets suggesting the importance of limiting “black turnout,” the defendant tweeted an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign. The ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.” The fine print at the bottom of the deceptive image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.” The tweet included the typed hashtag “#ImWithHer,” a slogan frequently used by Hillary Clinton. On or about and before Election Day 2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and his co-conspirators.

Several hours after tweeting the first image, Mackey tweeted an image depicting a woman seated at a conference room typing a message on her cell phone. This deceptive image was written in Spanish and mimicked a font used by the Clinton campaign in authentic ads. The image also included a copy of the Clinton campaign’s logo and the “ImWithHer” hashtag.

The people with whom Mackey conspired are a collection of leading figures in the (Russian-backed) alt-Right.

I plan to return to this trial in weeks ahead.

But for the moment, this verdict says that all the disinformation that Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk are working to replatform on Twitter has been found to be potentially criminal.

Judge Unseals Details on Cooperating Witness in Douglass Mackey Case

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The government was just forced to reveal that it has a cooperating witness against Douglass Mackey, the far right troll who tried to help Trump win in 2016 by tricking Hillary voters into texting their vote instead of casting it legally. The cooperating witness will testify against Mackey, whose trial starts on March 16.

The documents were all made available today:

The charge against Mackey accuses him of conspiring with four other people. As Luke O’Brien laid out when Mackey was arrested in 2021, three of Mackey’s co-conspirators were readily identifiable.

HuffPost can report that one co-conspirator is a prominent alt-right botmaster who goes by “Microchip” and was instrumental in making pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton hashtags and content go viral on Twitter during the 2016 election. A fascist accelerationist who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazism, Microchip claims to have been involved in the early spread of the QAnon conspiracy cult and repeatedly told this reporter that his goal was to destroy the United States.

Another of Mackey’s co-conspirators is Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet, a pro-Trump white nationalist who was arrested on Jan. 16 for his involvement in storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. Gionet also participated in the deadly white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. (A New York Times story reported Wednesday afternoon that Gionet was a co-conspirator, citing a source close to the investigation, and HuffPost can confirm that reporting based on the Twitter ID cited in the complaint.)

HuffPost was able to link the Twitter IDs in the complaint to Gionet and Microchip through previously collected Twitter data, interviews and evidence left by both extremists on other websites. In direct messages with this reporter last year, Microchip also confirmed that he was using the Twitter account associated with the user ID listed in the complaint.

The user ID for a third co-conspirator belongs to a pro-Trump far-right activist who goes by “Nia” and has a long history of spreading disinformation on Twitter. HuffPost has not yet been able to identify the fourth co-conspirator.

The fourth was not.

As the government laid out in its motion, at some point, the cooperating witness pled guilty to the same crime charged against Mackey, a violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act. Since then, he has been cooperating with the government on other investigations, presumably targeting the far right.

The CW has pleaded guilty to a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241 and entered into a cooperation agreement with the government. The government expects that the evidence at trial will show that the CW had communications with the defendant and other relevant persons over the internet through the use of Twitter, including communications discussing the creation and dissemination of deceptive images concerning the time, place, and manner by which voters could cast a vote in the 2016 presidential election. In particular, the CW participated in direct-message groups that included the defendant and others. In all instances, the CW used an online moniker for these communications and did not reveal his or her true identity, face, or likeness to the defendant or the other participants in the groups.

The government intends at trial to introduce the CW’s communications as exhibits and to question the CW concerning them and the CW’s understanding of the purpose of the deceptive images discussing the time, place, and manner of voting, among other related online activities. The CW has advised that apart from the CW’s family, a former girlfriend. and possibly one or two former business associates, no one is aware that the CW is in fact the user of the relevant internet monikers. As far as the government is aware, the CW’s true identity has never been publicly associated with any of the online monikers used by the CW on Twitter or other social media, notwithstanding the efforts of investigative journalists who have attempted to learn the CW’s identity.

In addition, since entering into the cooperation agreement, the CW has provided assistance to the FBI in other criminal investigations beyond the scope of this case. The CW is presently involved in multiple, ongoing investigations and other activities in which he or she is using assumed internet names and “handles” that do not reveal his or her true identity. The CW has not interacted with any witness, subject, or target in these investigations and activities on a face-to-face basis, and the government has no reason to think that the CW’s true identity has been compromised as a result of this work.

The government provides no other details about the CW (though Mackey’s reply refers to him as male), but it does go out of the way to note that the person had not flipped by 2016, I guess to avoid any possibility Republicans will claim this was part of Crossfire Hurricane.

For the avoidance of doubt, the CW was not cooperating with the government at any point before or during 2016.

The government noted in its reply, the technical proficiency of those who might suspect they were being investigated is such that revealing his identity might make him the target of harassment and cyber attacks.

The fact of the CW’s cooperation is sure to be seen by many in that community as a profound betrayal, with the result that, at a minimum, online harassment is bound to follow the CW should his or her identity become a matter of public record. That harassment can have negative consequences in and of itself. In addition, to claim that intense online attacks do not endanger a person’s physical safety is to ignore the reality of our current world, as evinced in common newspaper headlines. See, e.g., Sheera Frenkel, The Storming of Capitol Hill Was Organized on Social Media, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 6, 2021, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/protesters-storm-capitol-hillbuilding.html; Eric Lipton, Man Motivated by “Pizzagate” Conspiracy Theory Arrested in Washington Gunfire, N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 5, 2016, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/pizzagate-comet-ping-pong-edgar-maddisonwelch.html. It is simply (and regrettably) a fact of the times that many acts of politically motivated violence in current society arise from campaigns of online harassment.

Beyond the risk to the CW, the potential consequences include the disruption of the CW’s ongoing work with the FBI. It is certainly true that the nature of this work is online and anonymous, but, if the CW’s name and location were to become known, the CW would become a target for all who believe that they might be under investigation (whether they are or not). Given the technical proficiency of those with whom the CW associates, it is not difficult to envision multiple scenarios in which the CW’s online work could be jeopardized by way of a cyberattack (at a minimum).

While it doesn’t say so, those two past incidences in which online trolling led to violence — January 6 and PizzaGate — are both other instances in which Mackey’s other co-conspirators and those in the same network were involved. Indeed, co-conspirator Baked Alaska is currently serving time for his role in the January 6 attack.

Unsurprisingly, the government provides no details about how long this cooperation has been going on — but it presumably started before Mackey was arrested in 2021. Which is likely to make a lot of right wingers awfully nervous.

Douglass Mackey Allegedly Aimed to Depress Black Turnout in Pennsylvania

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The government and the defense team for Douglass Mackey, the Twitter troll accused of conspiring to convince Hillary Clinton voters to throw away their vote in 2016, are fighting over what evidence will come in at trial, which is currently scheduled to start on March 16.

As I have laid out, campaigns like the one Mackey is alleged to have conducted with people including Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet, are the reason why the FBI sends Twitter lists of accounts lying about the place or means of voting: The FBI is trying to stop systematic attempts to dupe people out of exercising their right to vote.

Indeed, several times in 2016, Twitter suspended Mackey for lying about the election. “[I]t was because I posted a meme that told Hillary supporters they could text to vote. Lol,” he said in one of the messages the government is seeking to introduce.

In his own filing, Mackey cited the Twitter Files claiming it proves Twitter sometimes gets it wrong when suspending people.

The Mackey case presents some challenging legal questions, and if he is convicted, he’ll presumably appeal on First Amendment grounds.

At issue in the evidentiary dispute are comments Mackey or his alleged co-conspirators made in 2015 and 2016 about how he understood his trolling.

Even in 2015, Mackey understood the power he wielded with his trolling, because of the loyalty of his troll army.

“I have the personality and the ability to convince people now” (DM, Nov. 23, 2015)

“This identity is very powerful. I have something great going on.” (DM, Jan 7, 2016)

“I am going to start preparing myself mentally, spiritually, and physically, to be a leader. . . . I never asked or wanted to be a leader, but so many people are asking it of me, so I feel a responsibility” (DM Jan 11, 2016)

“I have like the most loyal army on twitter. I can get anything I want photoshopped in one hour. I have people offering to do web design for me. My Twitter account is just exploding” (DM Jan 28, 2016)

“It’s like at any one time there is an army of 100 of my followers ready to swarm.” (DM, Aug. 1, 2016)

The government also wants to introduce descriptions of how to deploy that troll army: repetition is key. (Note, it’s not clear whether all of these are Mackey, or whether they come from his alleged co-conspirators, not all of whom have been identified.)

“We can hijack hashtags with memes” (DM, Jan 26, 2016)

“It should be done as a coordinated effort. With the goal of trending.” (DM, May 9, 2016)

“Please help me trend #InTrumpsAmerica. New hashtag starting now” (DM, May 12, 2016)

“Repetition is key…. Repeat it again and again. I just tweeted it. Memes would also be good.” (DM, June 22, 2016)

“Please contribute a tweet to #KaineAndUnable2016, maybe we can trend it.” (DM, July 23, 2016)

“I would say use fewer hashtags, maybe only use one hashtag, and a simple, short message. Other than that, you’re doing everything right. I will keep retweeting you.” (DM, Oct 5, 2016)

“We’re going to need serious memetics to derail the coming mainstream narrative…get on it, folks” (Tweet, June 6, 2016)

“I am looking for roughly half a dozen photoshop experts who wish to join a team, please respond to this tweet with why you are qualified.” (Tweet, July 1, 2016)

The most interesting detail — particularly given Mackey’s ties to people like Jack Posobiec and, through him, to people like Roger Stone — is how closely Mackey’s understanding of the 2016 presidential race matched the Trump campaign’s.

“Hillary’s team is in a panic because black voter turnout in Ohio and Florida primaries was down 40 percent.” (Tweet, Mar 19, 2016)

“All of these polls assume the electorate will be 52 or 53 percent female, while all data indicates female turnout will be lackluster.” (Tweet, July 25, 2016) 7

“One way to depress turnout is to use meme magic to make not voting for Hillary a cool way for young POCs and progressives to ‘protest.’” (Tweet, July 29, 2016)

“A 25 year old latino progressive will probably never vote for Trump, but we can depress her enough to stay home, or vote for Jill or Gary.” (Tweet, July 29, 2016)

“Very few persuadable voters remain. A lot of what we are doing is just keeping our own team fired up, and trying to demoralize other team.” (Tweet, July 31, 2016)

“Obviously, we can win Pennsylvania. The key is to drive up turnout with non-college whites, and limit black turnout.” (Tweet, Nov 2, 2016)

To be clear: Mackey wouldn’t have needed inside information to understand that one way to suppress turnout for Hillary would be to get them to vote for Jill Stein instead of Hillary. That was all openly discussed. Even the claim that “obviously we can win Pennsylvania,” while not the consensus before the election, was embraced by MAGA trolls in advance of the election.

But in August, the prospect of winning Pennsylvania was, according to Rick Gates, “fools gold” because “Trump was unlikely to win there.” And Mackey was part of a network that could have learned of the campaign’s decision to go for fools gold.

Even as self-described reverse Russian chauvinist Matt Taibbi continues to aggressively disinform people about the point of FBI’s interest in combatting election disinformation, the Mackey trial may make clear how easy it was to match such disinformation efforts to the strategy of the campaign.

Sure, it was just trolling, albeit fairly sophisticated trolling. But its means and manner were perfectly tailored to enhance Trump’s campaign strategy.

A Roger Stone Pardon for MacronLeaks Isn’t As Crazy as It Sounds

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In April 2020, DOJ released the warrants from the Roger Stone investigation. With six of those, DOJ redacted broad swaths of the justifications behind the warrants, none of which were shared with him as part of his obstruction prosecution.

September 26, 2018: Mystery Twitter Account

September 27, 2018: Mystery Facebook and Instagram Accounts

September 27, 2018: Mystery Microsoft include Skype

September 27, 2018: Mystery Google

September 27, 2018: Mystery Twitter Accounts 2

October 5, 2018: Mystery Multiple Googles

All six were obtained by Patrick Myers, an FBI agent located in Pittsburgh, whereas almost all the warrants obtained before that were signed by agents located in DC (in earlier weeks, Myers had also obtained a warrant targeting a second account used by the GRU persona, Guccifer 2.0).

In his order releasing the warrants, Judge Christopher Cooper explained that all the redacted information (and so the information justifying these warrants) was redacted to protect, “the private information of non-parties, financial information, and non-public information concerning other pending criminal investigations.”

One of those warrants explicitly said that the government requested a gag on the provider involved (in that case, Twitter) because Roger Stone seemed not to understand the full extent of the investigation into him.

It does not appear that Stone is currently aware of the full nature and scope of the ongoing FBI investigation. Disclosure of this warrant to Stone could lead him to destroy evidence or notify others who may delete information relevant to the investigation.

In addition to the crimes for which Mueller declined to charge Stone (foreign donations) or of which he was convicted (witness tampering and obstructing an investigation), the warrant sought evidence of conspiracy (18 USC 371), two foreign agent laws (18 USC 951 and 22 USC 611), and computer hacking (18 USC 1030).

These warrants strongly suggest that in April 2020, as Bill Barr was making unprecedented efforts to limit Stone’s punishment for the crimes of which he had been convicted, DOJ continued to investigate whether Stone conspired with foreign entities — and given that a Guccifer 2.0 warrant is among this series, Russia would be that foreign entity — to engage in computer hacking.

That’s important background to the seizure from Trump’s office of document reflecting Executive Clemency for Stone that appears to have a link to a French President, possibly Emmanuel Macron.

If Stone were involved with the MacronLeaks operation on which the GRU teamed up with alt-Right figures in Stone’s orbit, it’s conceivable Trump secretly pardoned him to prevent him from being included in the indictment covering that operation.

Based on the FOIA exemptions in various versions of the Mueller Report released, the Stone investigation that continued after Mueller closed up shop appears to have been closed between September 18, 2020 and November 2, 2020. On the latter date — literally the day before the 2020 election — DOJ provided Jason Leopold a version of the Mueller Report with newly-unsealed passages. It revealed for the first time that, on page 178, a footnote modified the discussion in the body of the Report about whether Stone could be prosecuted for conspiring with Russia on computer hacking by explaining that Mueller had referred the issue to DC US Attorney’s Office for further investigation.

The Office determined that it could not pursue a Section 1030 conspiracy charge against Stone for some of the same legal reasons. The most fundamental hurdles, though, are factual ones.1279

1279 Some of the factual uncertainties are the subject of ongoing investigations that have been referred by this Office to the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office.

A version of the report released to Leopold on June 3, 2019 redacted that footnote because of an ongoing investigation. And a spreadsheet justifying all continued redactions released on September 18, 2020 seems to have redacted it too. The unredacted publication of it on November 2, 2020 suggests whatever investigation in Stone DOJ had been pursuing had been closed.

Stone’s wasn’t the only investigation that got shut down in the months before Donald Trump would lose the presidency. In that period, previously redacted references to investigations into two of Paul Manafort’s businesses, and an investigation into a suspected $10 million cash infusion during the 2016 election from an Egyptian state-owned bank were unsealed — though both were unsealed by the time of that September filing. There was even reference to a warrant for Erik Prince’s phone, suggesting any investigation into him had similarly been shut down.

What made Stone’s case different, however, is that DOJ never told us what the investigation was about (indeed, two referrals that likely pertain to Stone were redacted in that November 2020 release, which they shouldn’t have been if the cases were really closed).

The most important referral from the Mueller investigation, then — the one that Billy Barr was hired to make go away — simply got deep-sixed sometime in the months when it looked like Trump would lose the election, with no explanation as to what the investigation even was. And, again, it appears to have happened between September 18 and November 2, 2020.

As it happens, DOJ rolled out an indictment against GRU on October 19, just 15 days before the election (and just 14 days before DOJ released the language pertaining to Stone). It covered six GRU attacks, though focused especially on the 2018 Olympic Destroyer attack on the Pyeongchang Olympics.

But it included, almost as a throwaway, GRU’s role in the 2017 MacronLeaks campaign. By description, it held just one of the charged individuals accountable for the spearphishing part of the MacronLeaks campaign: Anatoliy Kovalev, the one guy (as noted) also charged in the DNC hack.

Defendant ANATOLIY SERGEYEVICH KOVALEV was a Russian military intelligence officer assigned to Military Unit 74455. KOVALEV sent spearphishing emails targeting a wide variety of entities and individuals, including those associated with French local government entities, political parties, and campaigns; the 2018 Winter Olympics; the DSTL; and a Georgian media entity. KOVALEV also engaged in spearphishing campaigns for apparent personal profit, including campaigns targeting large Russian real estate companies, auto dealers, and cryptocurrency miners, as well as cryptocurrency exchanges located outside of Russia. KOVALEV is a charged defendant in federal indictment number 18-CR-215 in the District of Columbia. [my emphasis]

In the Mueller indictment of the GRU, Kovalev is described as the guy responsible for the hacking that targeted voting infrastructure — the kind of stuff that really could have affected the outcome, especially in North Carolina.

72. In or around July 2016, KOVALEV and his co-conspirators hacked the website of a state board of elections (“SBOE 1”) and stole information related to approximately 500,000 voters, including names, addresses, partial social security numbers, dates of birth, and driver’s license numbers.

[snip]

75. In or around October 2016, KOVALEV and his co-conspirators further targeted state and county offices responsible for administering the 2016 U.S. elections. For example, on or about October 28, 2016, KOVALEV and his co-conspirators visited the websites of certain counties in Georgia, Iowa, and Florida to identify vulnerabilities.

76. In or around November 2016 and prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, KOVALEV and his co-conspirators used an email account designed to look like a Vendor 1 email address to send over 100 spearphishing emails to organizations and personnel involved in administering elections in numerous Florida counties. The spearphishing emails contained malware that the Conspirators embedded into Word documents bearing Vendor 1’s logo.

The Olympic Destroyer indictment obtained weeks before the election held Kovalev (and the GRU) accountable for the spearphish and communications with some French participants.

27. From on or about April 3, 2017, through on or about May 3, 2017 (during the days leading up to the May 7, 201 7, presidential election in France), the Conspirators conducted seven spearphishing campaigns targeting more than 100 individuals who were members of now-President Macron’s “La Republique En Marche!” (“En Marche!”) political party, other French politicians and high-profile individuals, and several email addresses associated with local French governments. The topics of these campaigns included public security announcements regarding terrorist attacks, email account lockouts, software updates for voting machines, journalist scoops on political scandals, En Marche! press relationships, and En Marchel internal cybersecurity recommendations.

28. KOVALEV participated in some of these campaigns. For example, on or about April 21, 2017, KOVALEV developed and tested a technique for sending spearphishing emails themed around file sharing through Google Docs. KOVALEV then crafted a malware-laced document entitled “Qui_peut_parler_ aux journalists.docx” (which translates to “Who can talk to journalists”) that purported to list nine En Marche! staff members who could talk to journalists about the previous day’s terrorist attack on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. Later that day, the Conspirators used an email account that mimicked the name of then-candidate Macron’s press secretary to send a Google Docs-themed spearphishing email to approximately 30 En Marche! staff members or advisors, which purported to share this document.

29. From on or about April 12, 2017, until on or about April 26, 2017, a GRU-controlled social media account communicated with various French individuals offering to provide them with internal documents from En Marche! that the user(s) of the account claimed to possess.

But it professed utter and complete ignorance about how the stolen documents started to get leaked.

30. On or about May 3 and May 5, 2017, unidentified individuals began to leak documents purporting to be from the En Marche! campaign’s email accounts.

But they weren’t unidentified, at least not all of them! As a DFIR report released 15-months before this indictment laid out, while there was a Latvian IP address that hadn’t been publicly identified at that point (one the FBI surely had some ability to unpack), the American alt-right, including Stone associate Jack Posobiec, made the campaign go viral, all in conjunction with WikiLeaks.

First there was a rumor spread from that Latvian IP to 4Chan to William Craddick to Jack Posobiec.

Last but not least came the “#MacronGate” rumor. Two hours before the final televised debate between Macron and Le Pen, on Wednesday, May 3, at 7:00 p.m.,41 a user with a Latvian IP address posted two fake documents on 4chan. The documents suggested that Macron had a company registered in Nevis, a small Caribbean island, and a secret offshore bank account at the First Caribbean Bank, based in the Cayman Islands. Again, the rumor itself was not entirely new. Macron himself had seen it coming. More than two weeks earlier on TV he warned that this type of rumor was likely to appear: “This week, you will hear ‘Mr. Macron has a hidden account in a tax haven, he has money hidden at this or that place.’ This is totally false, I always paid all my taxes in France and I always had my accounts in France.”42 What was new this time, however, was the release of two documents supposedly proving this rumor. The user who posted the two documents on 4chan did it purposefully on the evening on the final televised debate to attract more attention, and even suggested a French hashtag: “If we can get #MacronCacheCash trending in France for the debates tonight, it might discourage French voters from voting Macron”43.

Then the rumor spread on Twitter. The 4chan link was first posted by Nathan Damigo, founder of the American neo-Nazi and white-supremacist group Identity Evropa, and was further circulated by William Craddick, founder of Disobedient Media and notorious for his contribution to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that targeted the US Democratic Party during the 2016 American presidential campaign. The first real amplifier was Jack Posobiec—an American alt-right and pro-Trump activist with 111,000 followers at the time: his tweet was retweeted almost 3,000 times. Only after 10:00 p.m. did the rumor begin to spread in French, mostly through far-right accounts using the #MacronCacheCash hashtag. The first tweets in French seemed to have been automatically translated from English.44

[snip]

The same user with the Latvian IP address who posted the fake documents on Wednesday announced on Friday morning that more were coming, promising, “We will soon have swiftnet logs going back months and will eventually decode Macron’s web of corruption.”49 Those responsible for #MacronGate thereby provided evidence that they were the same people responsible for the #MacronLeaks that were released later that day.

Then there were the leaked files themselves, which followed the same pattern: an anonymous leak to Craddick to Posobiec to WikiLeaks.

The files were initially posted on Archive.org, an online library site, supposedly in the morning63 (the time of first release on the website cannot be determined, as these original threads have since been deleted). At 7:59 p.m., the links to the threads were posted on PasteBin, a file-sharing site, under the name “EMLEAKS.” At 8:35 p.m., they were shared on 4chan. Then came their appearance on Twitter: Craddick was again the first to share the link to the PasteBin dump at 8:47 p.m., quickly followed by Jack Posobiec at 8:49 p.m., who provided a link to the 4chan thread with, for the first time, the hashtag #MacronLeaks.64 Contrary to what would later become a widespread misconception, Posobiec was not the first to tweet, Craddick was. However, Posobiec was the first to use the hashtag that would lend its name to the entire operation, hence the confusion. Posobiec’s tweet and hashtag was retweeted eighty-seven times within five minutes. He later said he had been alerted to the incoming dump by the user with a Latvian IP address who had posted the #MacronGate fake documents two days prior: “The same poster of the financial documents said to stay tuned tomorrow for a bigger story–so I pretty much spent the next 24 hours hitting refresh on the site.”65

So far, this conversation was exclusively Anglophone. This makes it clear that the hashtag #MacronLeaks was launched and spread in the United States, by the American alt-right. It was WikiLeaks that internationalized the spread, at 9:31 p.m., by tweeting: “#MacronLeaks: A significant leak. It is not economically feasible to fabricate the whole. We are now checking parts,” with a link to the files on PasteBin. Only then came the first French amplifiers, who happened to be Le Pen supporters

MacronLeaks was, openly and proudly, a joint venture between the GRU, far right influencers in Stone’s immediate orbit, and WikiLeaks. It was an attempt to repeat the 2016 miracle that elected Donald Trump, by supporting the Russian-supporting Marine Le Pen by damaging Macron.

There’s something unusual about the indictment, too. Alone among the indictments obtained by the Pittsburgh US Attorney’s office that month (October 2020), it was the single one signed in wet blue ink by the US Attorney, Scott Brady. Both the copy released by DOJ and the one docketed in PACER also lacked a jury foreperson’s signature.

Admittedly, most of the indictments WDPA obtained that month were fairly podunk crimes that wouldn’t need heightened security: a fentanyl dealer, a cocaine dealer, two unhoused men charged with theft, an aggravated assault, manufacturing a controlled substance, Social Security fraud, VA benefit fraud, all were signed in black ink, at least some of them electronically. But a child sexual trafficking indictment and a CSAM possession indictment, both originally filed under seal, also bear the foreperson’s signature and that black ink signature. Even a ransomware indictment rolled out nationally on October 15 — which would have the same kind of international sensitivities and national coordination as the GRU indictment — had a normal jury foreperson’s signature.

While Brady was not a surprising choice for US Attorney in Pittsburgh (he had previously been an AUSA), he was perhaps the most politicized of Trump’s US Attorneys. He’s the guy whom Barr put in charge of ingesting the dirt on Hunter Biden that Rudy Giuliani was getting from suspected Russian agents.

To be clear: There’s no public allegation that Stone had anything to do with MacronLeaks, though HateWatch places him at a Milo Yiannopoulos party where MacronLeaks appears to have come up, after the leaks but before the French election. I’m not saying that Stone was involved in the MacronLeaks operation.

But the response to the Stone reference in the subpoena receipt has assumed that the Stone reference cannot be related to the French President reference, all assumptions made by journalists that never covered the ongoing aspects into whether Stone conspired with Russia on a hack. If Trump did issue his rat-fucker a secret pardon for follow-on cooperation with Russian hackers, though, it would explain a number of things about the aftermath of the Mueller investigation, including what happened to the investigation into whether Stone conspired with Russia on hacking campaigns.

For his part, Trump included a bit of a tirade about the Stone reference in his motion for a Special Master last night.

In addition, did the affiant to the warrant fairly disclose any pretextual “dual” purpose at work in obtaining the warrant? For example, the Receipt for Property largely fails to identify seized documents with particularity, but it does refer to the seizure of an item labelled “Executive Grant of Clemency re: Roger Jason Stone, Jr.” Aside from demonstrating that this was an unlawful general search, it also suggests that DOJ simply wanted the camel’s nose under the tent so they could rummage for either politically helpful documents or support other efforts to thwart President Trump from running again, such as the January 6 investigation.

This is legally and politically nonsensical. If the pardon is the known pardon, then it’s not politically damaging at all. If it’s a real pardon of any kind — as a pardon written on a cocktail napkin arguably would be — then it’s a Presidential Record and squarely within the scope of the warrant (which permits seizure of any Presidential record created during Trump’s term). If the information about the French President is part of the document and appears to be sensitive, then it would qualify as a likely classified document. If the pardon were found in Trump’s safe next to his leatherbound box of TS/SCI documents, then it would be covered by the proximal search protocol laid out in the warrant. The pardon was legally seized.

Trump’s claims are nonsensical. But they’re also the the kind of squealing that invites further attention to what the clemency document really is.

Whither the Douglass Mackey Investigation?

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Yesterday, the FBI arrested Douglass Mackey, a far right activist who used the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, for his efforts in 2016 to suppress Clinton voters. The complaint charges Mackey with a conspiracy against others’ Constitutional rights under 18 USC §241. I want to unpack what the complaint says about where this investigation came from and where it might head, if anywhere.

Mackey and others led almost 5,000 people to miscast their 2016 vote

There’s a lot of language in the complaint about Mackey’s social media efforts — which has a number of right wingers, including those who were tangentially involved in this effort, whining about their own First Amendment rights. Ultimately, though, the crime boils down to ads that Mackay made and popularized in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election encouraging Hillary voters to text their vote. If people did so, they would have thought their vote was cast, when in effect they would have texted it to a void.

The complaint notes that the text code Mackey used for the campaign got 4,900 responses.

According to iVisionMobile, the company that owned the Text Code listed in the two Deceptive Images distributed by MACKEY, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “[Candidate’s first name]” or some derivative to the Text Code on or about and before Election Day, including many belonging to individuals in the Eastern District of New York. Of the approximately 4,900 numbers that corresponded with the Text Code, approximately 4,850, or 99%, sent their texts after MACKEY first tweeted a Deceptive Image from MACKEY Account 2. [my emphasis]

Effectively, then, the complaint argues that Mackey tricked almost 5,000 people to miscast a Hillary vote, thereby depriving them of their right to cast a valid vote.

This investigation was started and finalized under a Trump US Attorney

Right wingers are also whining that the timing of this complaint shows that the Deep State is moving against Trump supporters immediately after his departure.

That makes no sense.

First, at least two key steps in this investigation, interviews of Paul Nehlen and filmmaker Loren Feldman, happened last fall.

On or about October 5, 2020, FBI agents conducted a voluntary interview with the Congressional Candidate. The Congressional Candidate confirmed that “Ricky Vaughn’s” true name was MACKEY, and that MACKEY had offered his services to his/her campaign. The Congressional Candidate added that, although s/he had never met MACKEY in person, s/he frequently communicated with MACKEY by telephone and via MACKEY’s personal email accounts.

On or about October 19, 2020, FBI agents conducted a voluntary interview of the Filmmaker who again confirmed that s/he had interviewed MACKEY in 2016 and that s/he knew MACKEY at that time by his Twitter name of “Rickey Vaughn.” The Filmmaker futher confirmed that s/he had subsequently been shown a photograph of MACKEY and confirmed that the individual in the photograph was the individual the Filmmaker had met as “Ricky Vaughn.”

In October 2020, as now, the Brooklyn US Attorney was Seth DuCharme. While DuCharme spent his career in EDNY, he was a key aide to Bill Barr, both as Counselor and then PADAG. In July, Barr effectively swapped DuCharme back into EDNY and moved the then US Attorney, Richard Donoghue, to PADAG.

In other words, the guy whose name will be on this indictment is among Barr’s most trusted aides.

DuCharme even issued a strong statement about this prosecution when it was announced.

“There is no place in public discourse for lies and misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote,” said Seth D. DuCharme, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of Internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes. They will be investigated, caught and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

I argued in this post that early indictments in the Biden Administration would (because he’s not immediately replacing all US Attorneys) be approved by Trump loyalists, and this is a perfect example of that.

Actions completed in 2016 are being charged in 2021

One of the most interesting questions about this complaint is why actions that were completed in 2016 and didn’t appear to take much investigation beyond some warrants to Twitter and two interviews were only charged in 2021.

It’s not entirely clear where this investigation came from, but the most likely is that when HuffPo originally exposed Mackey in 2018, someone at the FBI or DOJ took notice. That seems all the more likely given that the complaint relies on some of the research in that original story, including that Mackey had a reach on Twitter well outside his follower count.

There was no mistaking Ricky Vaughn’s influence. He had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters and a central figure in the “alt-right” white supremacist movement that attached itself to Trump’s coattails. The MIT Media Lab named him to its list of top 150 influencers on the election, based on news appearances and social media impact. He finished ahead of NBC News, Drudge Report and Stephen Colbert. Mainstream conservatives didn’t know they were retweeting an avowed racist and anti-Semite, but they liked what Ricky Vaughn had to say.

So the simplest explanation for the genesis of this investigation is that article.

There are other possibilities, though.

For example, as that original HuffPo story noted, Mackey magnified one of the Internet Research Agency’s most effective Twitter accounts, TEN_GOP, which many right wingers mistakenly believed was the official account of Tennessee’s Republican Party.

In the data set of significant accounts we looked at, Ricky Vaughn retweeted @TEN_GOP the most, by far. Although Twitter shut down his @Ricky_Vaughn99 handle in October 2016, another handle he possibly used, @RapinBill, took over and retweeted @TEN_GOP at least 162 times between early March and late August 2017. (@RapinBill also retweeted @Pamela_Moore13, another Kremlin-controlled account, at least 37 times during this period.)

Some far-right sources suggest that @RapinBill might be an account run by another anonymous bad actor, an assertion for which there is no proof, but the account has nevertheless capitalized on the Ricky Vaughn brand of far-right intolerance and fake news. We will update this story as we learn more.

Curiously, @RapinBill, which is still active and followed by Donald Trump Jr., does not appear to have received a single reciprocal retweet from @TEN_GOP during the time period we looked at, perhaps indicating an attempt to conceal the connection. @RapinBill retweeted @TEN_GOP until the end. When Twitter finally shut down @TEN_GOP last August, after having ignored numerous complaints about the Russian account, Ricky Vaughn did not take it well. He groused that @TEN_GOP had been “banned for supporting our president.” Within hours, he was steering traffic to the Kremlin’s backup account:

Another possibility is that this investigation arose out of Mueller’s investigation of Mike Flynn and Roger Stone’s focus on social media during the 2016 election. As Luke O’Brien (the reporter who first unmasked Mackey) noted in his coverage of the complaint, Mackey had ties to efforts involving Flynn and Stone in 2016.

Mackey and the three co-conspirators that HuffPost was able to identify are closely associated with a group of high-level pro-Trump political saboteurs known as “MAGA3X” that had ties to the Trump campaign and Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Presided over by far-right Twitter influencer Mike Cernovich, white nationalist funder Jeff Giesea, who is a disciple of billionaire Peter Thiel, and neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec, who counts Roger Stone as a mentor, MAGA3X spearheaded the Pizzagate disinformation campaign on social media that targeted Hillary Clinton in the weeks before the 2016 election.

Mueller’s team focused closely on both Flynn and Stone’s involvement in social media in 2016. In August 2016, Stone pitched both Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon on how to win ugly using social media. The overt parts of Stone’s effort involved an Erik Prince-funded effort to suppress the black vote. One of the still-sealed warrants pertains to multiple Twitter accounts that don’t appear to be Stone’s. And Mueller interviewed several people who worked with Stone on social media campaigns (and asked Andrew Miller about Alex Jones’ campaigns, as well).

The biggest reason to doubt that this investigation comes out of Mueller’s is the venue. While Mackey has ties to Brooklyn, at the time of his actions, he was living in Manhattan, SDNY rather than EDNY. The complaint seems to claim venue based on victims who reside in EDNY, bolded in the blockquote above, not Mackey’s location at the time of his actions. If Mueller had referred this, he presumably would have referred it to where the actions took place, SDNY.

It’s also possible it comes out of the Intelligence Committees’ investigations into disinformation. As Quinta Jurecic noted last night, Mackey’s ads were among those Twitter shared with the committees in 2018, though not by name. But again, the logical place to pick that up would have been SDNY or even DC.

There’s one other possibility. Last fall, in an effort to feed Trump’s conspiracy theories, Barr affirmatively mobilized voter fraud investigations. If someone had been sitting on the evidence unveiled in 2018, Barr’s action would have provided the opportunity to wrap it up into an indictment, effectively using GOP claims of voter fraud as the excuse to prosecute GOP voter fraud.

DOJ charged just one member of a conspiracy

Perhaps the most enticing part of this complaint is that it explicitly includes four other people as co-conspirators.

It describes the actions of Mackey’s co-conspirators to include:

  • Discussing how best to optimize social media campaigns
  • Retweeting Mackey’s campaigns
  • Running several DM-based strategy groups called the Madman Group, the War Room, Fed Free Hatechat
  • Fine-tuning some of the ads used
  • Posting some of the actual ads
  • Adding Mackey’s new accounts back into the DM collaborations after Twitter shut down his accounts

It’s not entirely clear how EDNY chose to treat these four as co-conspirators as distinct from other Twitter users and DM collaboration participants.

O’Brien IDs three of the four co-conspirators:

The complaintlists four co-conspirators referred to only by Twitter “user IDs,” a unique string of numbers assigned to each Twitter account. HuffPost can report that one co-conspirator is a prominent alt-right botmaster who goes by “Microchip” and was instrumental in making pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton hashtags and content go viral on Twitter during the 2016 election. A fascist accelerationist who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazism, Microchip claims to have been involved in the early spread of the QAnon conspiracy cult and repeatedly told this reporter that his goal was to destroy the United States.

Another of Mackey’s co-conspirators is Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet, a pro-Trump white nationalist who was arrested on Jan. 16 for his involvement in storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. Gionet also participated in the deadly white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. (A New York Times story reported Wednesday afternoon that Gionet was a co-conspirator, citing a source close to the investigation, and HuffPost can confirm that reporting based on the Twitter ID cited in the complaint.)

HuffPost was able to link the Twitter IDs in the complaint to Gionet and Microchip through previously collected Twitter data, interviews and evidence left by both extremists on other websites. In direct messages with this reporter last year, Microchip also confirmed that he was using the Twitter account associated with the user ID listed in the complaint.

The user ID for a third co-conspirator belongs to a pro-Trump far-right activist who goes by “Nia” and has a long history of spreading disinformation on Twitter. HuffPost has not yet been able to identify the fourth co-conspirator.

It’s unclear whether EDNY plans to add them in an indictment or not. It’s possible they just named them as co-conspirators so as to be able to use their DMs and other Tweets to build the case against Mackey (which would make it a matter of prosecutorial efficacy). It’s also possible they’ll get added when this is indicted.

Particularly given the inclusion of Baked Alaska in here, though, it’s possible that this is an effort to crack down on key far right propagandists as part of a larger crackdown in the wake of the January 6 insurrection.

There’s just one detail that suggests this might go further: the inclusion of a PIN prosecutor in the prosecution team.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Erik Paulsen and Nathan Reilly of the Eastern District of New York, and Trial Attorney James Mann of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section are prosecuting the case.

Among the other cases James Mann is or was prosecuting are the Andy Khawaja case funneling money from the UAE to both 2016 candidates (though only the Hillary side was charged; George Nader is one of the defendants) and the Elliot Broidy case, whose pardon will close out that case.

While his inclusion by no means makes this a certainty, it raises the chances that this social media activity will either be considered in the scope of campaign donations or might even involve foreign partners.

Rudy Giuliani and Jack Posobiec Claim a False Flag

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Yesterday, the FBI arrested John Sullivan, one of the guys who took video showing Ashli Babbitt’s shooting in the January 6 insurrection. As the arrest affidavit describes, in an interview the day after the riot, Sullivan claimed he had been acting as a journalist at the riot.

SULLIVAN claimed to be an activist and journalist that filmed protests and riots, but admitted that he did not have any press credentials.

[snip]

23. At various times in his statements to law enforcement, to others inside the U.S. Capitol that were recorded in his video, and to news outlets, SULLIVAN has claimed he was at the U.S. Capitol only to document and report. In addition, your affiant is aware that, at various times, SULLIVAN has claimed to be a journalist. He has admitted, however, that he has no press credentials and the investigation has not revealed any connection between SULLIVAN and any journalistic organizations.

The affidavit describes that, at some protest in DC, Sullivan made anti-Trump comments.

The United States obtained a video of SULLIVAN, posted on YouTube, in which, while attending a protest in Washington, D.C., SULLIVAN can be seen telling a crowd, over a microphone, “we about to burn this shit down,” “we got to rip Trump out of office . . . fucking pull him out of that shit . . . we ain’t waiting until the next election . . . we about to go get that motherfucker.” SULLIVAN then can be seen leading the crowd in a chant of, “it’s time for a revolution.”1

But it quotes from a video he shared with the FBI repeatedly speaking of “we,” including himself in the mob. On several occasions, Sullivan convinced police to stand down (including in front of the Speaker’s Lobby, just before Babbitt was shot). And it provides evidence that Sullivan broke a window in one of the offices.

h. At one point in the video, SULLIVAN enters an office within the U.S. Capitol, as seen in the screenshot below. Once inside the office, SULLIVAN approaches a window, also seen in the screenshot below, and states, “We did this shit. We took this shit.”

i. While at the window, a knocking noise is heard off-screen. The camera then pans to show more of the window and a broken pane can be seen that was not broken on SULLIVAN’s approach to the window:

SULLIVAN can then be heard saying, “I broke it. My bad, my apologies. Well they already broke a window, so, you know, I didn’t know I hit it that hard. No one got that on camera.” SULLIVAN then exits the office.

Sullivan is charged with violent entry of Congress and impeding police officers during a civil disorder. He is not charged with breaking the window.

Even before his arrest, left wing activists had described concerns in that community, going back some time, that Sullivan was a provocateur working with others, including his brother James, who has ties to the Proud Boys and runs a pro-Trump organization.

But shortly after Sullivan’s arrest was reported, right wing propagandist Jack Posobiec pounced on his arrest, claiming it showed that BLM was behind the attacks and and that Sullivan’s actions led to Babbitt’s death (remember these screen caps have GMT, so subtract 5 for ET).

Then, in the middle of the night Rudy’s time, he posted a text from what appears to be John’s brother James.

Rudy presents this as proof that the riot was conducted by Antifa. But it instead seems to show that John’s brother (the phone number is in Utah, where they’re from) claimed to be, “working with the FBI,” had gotten his “agent” and three others out of trouble (Rudy did not show when he received this text, so it may have predated John’s arrest). It also showed that Sullivan seemed to have ties with someone named Kash, who might be Patel, the Devin Nunes flunky who got installed as DOD’s Chief of Staff. Patel would likely have had a key role in ensuring the National Guard delayed any response to the riot last week.

A Nazi sympathizer and the President’s lawyer seemed prepared to speak from the script that Donald Trump seems to have written the day before the riot, when he moved towards naming Antifa a terrorist organization. The OANN propagandist and chief purveyor of fraudulent claims about the election are attempting to use the arrest of John Sullivan to claim that their own people did not plan out this coup attempt.

In the process, however, Rudy Giuliani may have tied the President and the Proud Boys, and the Pentagon together in the plot. And Rudy’s calls to Tommy Tuberville after people had already died, that ties people n Congress to the attempts to assassinate members of Congress.

Update: I’ve been persuaded that “Kash” is someone else who was detained after the raid, so deleted references to Kash Patel. That person, Kash Kelly, is probably a convicted gang member awaiting his sentencing.

Update: Corrected that the anti-Trump comments may not have been at this protest.

Sidney Powell Has Become No More than a Channel for the Fevered Rantings of Her Twitter Followers

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Sidney Powell has outdone herself in this motion for recusal, submitted 16 months after the appropriate time for such a motion. This thread unpacks it.

I want to look at the crazy-ass echo chamber that Powell is engaged in.

In her filing, she argues that because “a random sample of tweets of citizens in response to the hearing” suggest Judge Emmet Sullivan is biased, it supports a claim that he appears biased.

Because “unbiased, impartial adjudicators are the cornerstone of any system of justice worthy of the label, [a]nd because ‘[d]eference to the judgments and rulings of courts depends upon public confidence in the integrity and independence of judges,’ jurists must avoid even the appearance of partiality.” Al Nashiri, 921 F.3d at 233- 234. The court jettisoned any appearance of neutrality before and throughout the hearing. Judge Sullivan’s words and conduct prior to and during the hearing have had a profound negative affect on “public confidence in the integrity of the judicial process” and require him to recuse himself under §455(a) and §455(b)(1). Liljeberg v. Health Servs. Acquisition Corp., 486 U.S. 847, 860 (1988). See Ex. A (a random sample of tweets of citizens in response to the hearing).

[snip]

The court’s hostile tenor made its abject bias resounding to thousands who listened or who read the transcript. Countless tweets from Americans who were watching what became a circus reflect their view of the federal judiciary. Ex. A. It was apparent that the court was desperate to find something wrong.

Here’s the list of tweets she draws on.

The first is “Undercover Huber,” one of the two most ardent recyclers of her garbage propaganda. For some reason Powell redacts his avatar but here it is:

Powell has likely violated PACER rules with this filing, as she submitted the personal information of a bunch of random people without redacting it. Suffice it to say that these people are responding to:

  • High Gaslighter Catherine Herridge
  • Powell herself
  • Mike Flynn himself
  • QAnon account @SSG_Pain
  • Jack Posobiec
  • Epoch Times
  • John W Huber
  • Lara Logan
  • President Trump
  • Tom Fitton
  • The Last Refuge

 

 

Some are fairly obviously bots.

But the craziest bit is that Sidney Powell includes these two tweets in her totally random collection of tweets which she has obviously searched for by searching on “Eric” and “Judge Sullivan” (which means they’re not random at all):

It turns out, however, that one of just a few that had that reaction to this hearing. The rest of tweets that come up on such a search invoke a more generalized conspiracy about a black judge being friends with a black former Attorney General.

That doesn’t matter to Sidney Powell. She’s got a point to manufacture.

Back in her motion to recuse, she suggests (having lauded Sullivan in the past in this case because of his actions in the Ted Stevens case) that the reason Sullivan did dismiss Stevens’ case but not Flynn’s is because Holder made the motion in the former.

There are only two material differences between the government misconduct here and that in the Stevens case. The first is that the government misconduct against General Flynn is far worse—and it goes all the way to the Obama oval office. ECF No. 248; Exs. D, E. The second is the name of the Attorney General. As the court noted on the record last week, “Eric” moved to dismiss the wrongful Stevens case—with prejudice—and the court granted it immediately on a two-page motion. Hr’g Tr. 09-29-20 at 90.

I think the suggestion is that if a black Attorney General had made the request here, Sullivan would have granted it.

And from there, she goes exactly where her Twitter nutjobs want her to, and demands — with no basis whatsoever — all communications between Emmet Sullivan and Eric Holder.

All communications and visits with Eric Holder about this case or General Flynn, identification of the number of visits Eric Holder has made to Chambers about this case or General Flynn, or other personal meetings regarding General Flynn with Eric Holder to whom Emmet Sullivan referred as “Eric” on the record in the hearing. Hr’g Tr. 09-29-20 at 89.

Powell’s fevered motions have literally become just the expression of the Id of her own crazed Twitter thread.

 

Propaganda and Flattery: Jack Posobiec Parrots Adam Schiff’s Case for Impeachment

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Several members of the frothy right have listened to the recording Igor Fruman made of a dinner with Trump in April 2018 and declared that Parnas and/or Fruman must be a spy.

And while neither of these men seem to have figured out that Fruman, not Parnas, reportedly made this recording, their assessment is not as crazy as most frothy conspiracies. After all, the government has very pointedly not denied that it had a FISA order on one or another of the grifters (one that Bill Barr would probably have known about if not approved personally). If the government did have a FISA order, it means the FBI showed the FISA court there was probable cause that one of these guys was clandestinely working as an agent of a foreign power. And WSJ suggested that the reason SDNY is not interested in a cooperation deal with Parnas is because he will not admit he got Marie Yovanovitch fired — precisely the ask recorded on this video — at the behest of some Ukrainian.

At a meeting with prosecutors from the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office late last year, people familiar with the matter say, Mr. Parnas’s attorney disputed that he pushed for the removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine at the behest of a Ukrainian official—one of the charges in the campaign finance indictment.

So prosecutors, this time, appear to suspect that Jack Posobiec may be right, that when Parnas and Fruman made this recording they were working as clandestine agents of a foreign government.

Mind you, Posobiec and Benny Johnson, having not even figured out that Fruman made the recording yet, have assuredly not thought through what this means.

It means that someone they believe is a “spy” could gain direct access to Donald Trump with no more than the promise of a $325,000 campaign donation. It means that a “spy” could incite Donald Trump to take a certain policy action — one that happens to be one that corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine and Russia would support — with no more than a bunch of lies about what the US Ambassador had said. It means that these “spies” further managed to become business partners with the President’s defense attorney. One of these “spies” even managed to become an auxiliary member of the President’s Mueller defense team, privy to sensitive secrets about how he would successfully obstruct that investigation.

Having made Rudy Giuliani their agent, these “spies” managed to use him to supplant the beliefs of the US government, not just the professional Deep State, but a bunch of solidly Republican Trump appointees up to and including John Bolton. It means these “spies” used Rudy to get Trump to believe conspiracy theories ginned up by foreign government officials. And it means these “spies” managed to get the President to take actions that gave Russia an advantage in their war against Ukraine.

With little more than propaganda and flattery — and some money laundered through a shell company — these “spies” managed to alter the stated policy of the United States. That is the direct implication of Posobiec’s allegation.

As it happens, that’s precisely the same argument House Impeachment Manager Adam Schiff made on Friday (h/t Crooks & Liars for the video).

Admittedly, Schiff was focusing on a slightly different set of propaganda talking points, that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election rather than Russia. But the model by which President Trump came to reject the conclusion of our intelligence community and instead parrot the words that Vladimir Putin gave him are the same: flattery and propaganda.

I’m sure you remember this. It was I think unforgettable for every American. But I’m sure it was equally unforgettable for Vladimir Putin. I mean, there he is, the President of Russia, standing next to the President of the United States, and hearing his own Kremlin propaganda talking points coming from the President of the United States.

Now, if that’s not a propaganda coup I don’t know what is. It’s the most extraordinary thing. It’s the most extraordinary thing. The president of the united states standing next to the president of Russia, our adversary, saying he doesn’t believe his own intelligence agencies. He doesn’t believe them. He’s promoting this crazy server theory cooked up by the Kremlin. Right next to the guy that cooked it up. It’s a breathtaking success of Russian intelligence. I don’t know if there’s ever been a greater success of Russian intelligence.

Whatever profile Russia did of our president, boy, did they have him spot on. Flattery and propaganda. Flattery and propaganda is all Russia needed. And as to Ukraine, well, they needed to deliver a political investigation to get help from the United States. I mean, this is just the most incredible propaganda coup.

Because as I said yesterday, it’s not just that the President of the United States standing next to Vladimir Putin is reading Kremlin talking points. He won’t read his own national security staff talking points but he will read the Kremlin ones. But it’s not just that he adopts the Kremlin talking points. That would be bad enough. It is not bad enough, not damaging enough, not dangerous enough to our national security that he’s undermining our own intelligence agencies. It’s not bad enough that he undermines those very agencies that he needs later that we need later to have credibility.

[snip]

How do you make that argument as the President of the United States when you just told the world you trust the Russians more than your own people? You trust Rudy Giuliani more than Christopher Wray. How do you make that case? If you can’t make that case what does that mean to our security? But that’s not the end of it. It’s not just a propaganda coup. It is not just the undermining of our agencies.

It is also that the buy-in to that propaganda meant that Ukraine wasn’t going to get money to fight the Russians. I mean, that’s one hell of a Russian intelligence coup. They got the President of the United States to provide cover for their own interference with our election. They got the President of the United states to discredit their own intelligence agencies, to drive a wedge between the United States and Ukraine, the President of the United States to withhold aid from Ukraine in a war with Russia, in a war claiming Ukrainian lives every week.

Has there ever been such a coup? I would submit to you in the entire length of the Cold War the Soviet Union had no such success, no such success and why? Because a former mayor of New York persuaded a president of the United States to sacrifice all of that. Was it worth it? I hope it was worth it. I hope it was worth it. For the president. Because it certainly wasn’t worth it for the United States.

To be sure, Posobiec has barely started to figure out that grifters with some laundered money and sweet talk can get this President to adopt policies contrary to those Congress and Trump’s entire national security establishment think is best. He’s far from adopting Schiff’s view that a President who can be manipulated so easily by flattery and propaganda is unfit to be President. He presumably still believes that Trump can’t be impeached for extorting Ukraine campaign assistance because, as President, Trump can set whatever policy he wants; if Posobiec believes that, though, he should account for the fact that someone he believes is a “spy” got Trump to adopt that policy.

But Posobiec has nevertheless made the same argument that Schiff made Friday: that what he sees on this recording is a “spy” who managed to get close to Trump, tell him something guaranteed to trigger his narcissism, in response to which Trump took action.