Balloon Juice | Adam L Silverman, Author at Balloon Juice

Adam L. Silverman is a consulting national security subject matter expert specializing in low intensity warfare (asymmetric, irregular, and unconventional warfare, revolution, insurgency, terrorism), civil affairs, psychological operations, and cultural considerations for strategy and policy.

He routinely provides operational support to a number of US Army, DOD, and other US Government elements. Dr. Silverman holds a doctorate in political science and criminology from the University of Florida, as well as masters' degrees in comparative religion and international security. Full professional bio available here: https://www.balloon-juice.com/adam-silverman-bio/

Adam Silverman has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2015.

The Raucous Caucus, Which Is Not In Caracas, Open Thread

by Adam L Silverman| February 3, 20208:48 pm| 178 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election Year, Open Threads, Politics

Looks like we could use a new open thread.

Just a quick note, they have changed the way that they are reporting the Iowa Caucus results tonight.

They will report the initial result. Then the final result after the second round when caucus goers redistribute themselves after their first choices don’t make the 15% cut off threshold. Finally, they will report the preliminary delegate count. The preliminary delegate count is not the final delegate count and that could change, which would be a fourth result, when the Iowa Democratic Party holds its state convention. As a result, we could get three different winners tonight with a fourth potential winner a couple of months down the road.

Obligatory!

This is going to be a shit show.

Open thread.

The Raucous Caucus, Which Is Not In Caracas, Open ThreadPost + Comments (178)

The Best Laid Schemes o’ McConnell an’ Men Gang Aft Agley

by Adam L Silverman| January 31, 20207:06 pm| 125 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Impeachment, Open Threads, Politics, Silverman on Security

Let’s step back a bit and take stock of what has happened today. First and foremost a battle was won. Specifically that there will be no vote tonight, in fact there will be no vote until Wednesday, on the final disposition of the impeachment of the President. While I’m sure this seems like cold comfort to some, it is a win. When faced with an opponent whose capabilities overwhelm your own, when facing a situation where you are at an asymmetric disadvantage, a key strategy is to play for time. The inability of Senator McConnell to call for a vote to dismiss the impeachment charges against the President this evening creates time. While it doesn’t create time for Senator Schumer to move, it creates time for other events to occur.

Between now and Monday morning when closing arguments begin, let alone Wednesday when the vote to dismiss is currently scheduled to be taken, a lot of events can occur. Ambassador Bolton can continue to leak out and tease what he knows. If he was smart, given that his information’s shelf life is now set to expire on Wednesday, he’d get himself booked on all the Sunday AM news talk shows and get his story out. Because if he doesn’t take advantage of this opportunity, it will close and he will then face whatever consequences the President and his closest advisors have cooked up for him.

Between now and Monday morning when closing arguments begin, let alone Wednesday when the vote to dismiss is currently scheduled to be taken, Joseph Bondy, on behalf of his client Lev Parnas can leak more audio and video and documents that further implicate the President, the Vice President, the Acting Chief of Staff, the Secretary of State, the White House Counsel, the Attorney General, the President’s private attorney Rudy Giuliani, Senator Graham (R-Fainting Couch), Congressman Nunes (R-Mooooooo), his staffer Derek Harvey, and several others. If Bondy was smart, and he is, he’s right now in discussion with the Sunday AM news talk shows to get at least some of this material out. His letter this afternoon to Senator McConnell, which seems to have caused Senator McConnell some dyspepsia, laid down this marker.

Below is the letter Stephanie Schuman @LeafLegal and I sent to Senator McConnell earlier today, (202) 224-2541, summarizing the testimony Lev Parnas would be able to provide, were he called as a witness. #LetLevSpeak #AmericansDemandWitnesses #CallTheWitnesses #LetBoltonTestify pic.twitter.com/WPn7ppz2rG
— Joseph A. Bondy (@josephabondy) January 31, 2020

Between now and Monday morning when closing arguments begin, let alone Wednesday when the vote to dismiss is currently scheduled to be taken, a lot of events can occur. The President is currently scheduled for an extended sit down interview with his personal sycophant and Fox News media fluffer Sean Hannity to air at half time during the Super Bowl. And he is, of course, currently scheduled to give the State of the Union on Tuesday evening. Senator McConnell, as well as every other Republican senator, a lot of Republican members of the House, and senior members of the President’s staff such as White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, Attorney General Barr, and likely anyone and everyone within earshot and arm’s reach is going to face an increasingly unhappy President over the next five days. A President who will not be able to take a victory lap because the impeachment charges against him have been dismissed during his interview with Sean Hannity that airs during half time of the Super Bowl on Sunday. A President who will not be able to take a victory lap because the impeachment charges against him have been dismissed during the State of the Union. A President who has to spend the entire weekend, as well as Monday and Tuesday and part of Wednesday, twisting in the wind while we all wait to see what else leaks out or is openly divulged over the next five days. A President who has exceedingly poor self control at the best of times is now faced with a situation that he cannot stand, a situation that is completely beyond and outside of his control.

Right now, because Senator McConnell’s plan failed, there is an opening, an opportunity. Senator Schumer and his minority Democratic caucus may not have the votes to ultimately stop Senator McConnell. Speaker Pelosi and her lead impeachment manager Congressman Schiff may not be able to force the GOP majority Senate to do anything. But Congressman Schiff has proven to be an effective strategist in his management of this process. As has Speaker Pelosi. And Senator Schumer has done his part. So take a step back, look at the bigger picture, and recognize that today’s small victory provides opportunities for future ones. Both in the short term of the next five days and the longer term.

Live today, fight tomorrow!

Open thread!

The Best Laid Schemes o’ McConnell an’ Men Gang Aft AgleyPost + Comments (125)

Breaking: John Bolton Tries To Get Himself Out of His Self Constructed Bind

by Adam L Silverman| January 31, 202012:45 pm| 42 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Impeachment, Impeachment Inquiry, Open Threads, Politics, Silverman on Security

The New York Times has just reported new information regarding the President’s attempt to extort Ukrainian President Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Bidens in exchange for both US military and other aid, as well as a White House visit.

EXCLUSIVE: Bolton book contains new, earlier, allegation of Trump's involvement in pressure campaign. Trump asked Bolton to call Zelensky to ensure he would meet w/Giuliani. Cipollone and Mulvaney were in room. w/@maggieNYT https://t.co/8lZaG4zbfu
— Michael S. Schmidt (@nytmike) January 31, 2020

From The New York Times (emphasis mine):

WASHINGTON — More than two months before he asked Ukraine’s president to investigate his political opponents, President Trump directed John R. Bolton, then his national security adviser, to help with his pressure campaign to extract damaging information on Democrats from Ukrainian officials, according to an unpublished manuscript by Mr. Bolton.
Mr. Trump gave the instruction, Mr. Bolton wrote, during an Oval Office conversation in early May that included the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, who is now leading the president’s impeachment defense.
Mr. Trump told Mr. Bolton to call Volodymyr Zelensky, who had recently won election as president of Ukraine, to ensure Mr. Zelensky would meet with Mr. Giuliani, who was planning a trip to Ukraine to discuss the investigations that the president sought, in Mr. Bolton’s account. Mr. Bolton never made the call, he wrote.
The previously undisclosed directive that Mr. Bolton describes would be the earliest known instance of Mr. Trump seeking to harness the power of the United States government to advance his pressure campaign against Ukraine, as he later did on the July call with Mr. Zelensky that triggered a whistle-blower complaint and impeachment proceedings. House Democrats have accused him of abusing his authority and are arguing their case before senators in the impeachment trial of Mr. Trump, whose lawyers have said he did nothing wrong.
The account in Mr. Bolton’s manuscript portrays the most senior White House advisers as early witnesses in the effort that they have sought to distance the president from. And disclosure of the meeting underscores the kind of information Democrats were looking for in seeking testimony from his top advisers in their impeachment investigation, including Mr. Bolton and Mr. Mulvaney, only to be blocked by the White House.

While all of the reporting and the reporters on this are focusing on what does this mean for today’s/this evening’s votes. Specifically whether this will force the votes on motions to bring witnesses and then to dismiss the impeachment charges against the President back until sometime over the weekend or next week. While that reporting is interesting, it misses the larger point: John Bolton’s information has a shelf life. And we are fast approaching that information passing it’s use by date.

Bolton’s information and use as a fact witness who directly observed what the President and other members of his senior staff – Chief of Staff Mulvaney, VP Pence, WH Counsel Cippolone, and others – has a limited shelf life. That information only has value if he can get it out before the Senate dismisses the impeachment charges against the President. Once the Senate dismisses the impeachment charges, his book is going to fail its pre-publication classification review, because it will be made to fail it’s pre-publication classification review in order to keep it from ever seeing the light of day. The person overseeing that review, National Security Council Counsel John Eisenberg is one of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s deputies. Bolton will likely sue to force his book to be approved, which is the normal response to these things, and that suit will be resolved several years from now. While that suit drags on, as soon as the Senate dismisses the impeachment charges against the President, the President will have AG Barr go after him the way that Deputy FBI Director McCabe and others have been targeted. Bolton’s only chance now is to get ahead of what’s coming. And that chance has a very quickly oncoming expiration date.

Today just went sideways for Senator McConnell, the President, and Pat Cipollone whose long suspected complicity and involvement in all of this has now been further exposed to the light of day. The question is whether Senator McConnell can regain his footing to do what we all know he is planning on doing.

Open thread!

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The Black PSYOP Part VII: Pam Bondi Brings Russia’s Agitprop to the United States Senate

by Adam L Silverman| January 28, 202012:03 am| 23 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Impeachment, Information Warfare, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security

In every one of the Black PSYOP posts I’ve done, I’ve referenced Paula Chertok’s reporting that the earliest mention of Vice President Biden having a potential ethical and/or legal problem was Russian agitprop first reported in Russian state backed media RIA Novosti. I have also referenced in several of these earlier posts that Secretary Kerry’s step-son was also referenced.* As I’ve explained in these previous posts this was done to begin to dirty up Vice President Biden and Secretary Kerry who were both reportedly considering running for president in 2016.

On Saturday I explained that the President’s defense team would try to launder the debunked Russian conspiracy theories about Ukraine, not Russia, interfering in the 2016 election and doing so to frame Russia and the President for doing so, as well as the agitprop that Vice President did something illegal in regard to Ukraine in an attempt to cover up for the fact that his son had a sinecure. This is what the Republican members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Judiciary Committee were using the impeachment hearings to perpetuate the Black PSYOP of laundering Russian conspiracy theories, misinformation, and agitprop through each committees’ hearings and into the mainstream news reporting.

Today former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a member of the President’s defense team, laundered this Russian agitprop from 2014 through the Senate and into the news. And you can see that this is a direct transmission of the agitprop cited above because Bondi suddenly introduces a new player into her narrative: Secretary Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz. The video below is queued up to start at the 5:25 mark just before she introduces the agitprop.

For those that don’t want to watch the audio-visual extravaganza that is Pam Bondi, here’s the transcript:

Here’s how Hunter Biden came to join Burisma’s board in 2014: He was brought on the board by Devin Archer, his business partner. Devin Archer was college roommates with Chris Heinz, stepson of Secretary of State John Kerry. All three men, Hunter Biden, Devin Archer, and Chris Heinz had all started an investment firm together. Public records show that April 16^th, 2014, Devin Archer meets with Vice President Biden at the White House. Just two days later, on April 18^th, 2014, is when Hunter Biden quietly joins Burisma, according to public reporting. Remember this is just one month after the United Kingdom Serious Fraud Office opened a money laundering case into Burisma, Hunter Biden joins the board.

Now compare this with the RIA Novosti reporting above.

As of right now the PBS Newshour and other mainstream broadcast and cable news stations have either the full video of Bondi’s time at the podium or clips of it up on their digital and social media feeds. That’s the first step of the information laundry for the Black PSYOP. The second step has already occurred, if you keyword search “Pam Bondi John Kerry’s stepson” you get results from conservative to far right digital “news” sources. The first page of returns includes The Daily Wire, Breitbart, Towhnall, The Epoch Times, Daily Gaming World, and GLOCKTalk, which is a firearm’s forum and the thread is full of inaccurate conspiracy theories like this one:

Those returns also include mainstream reporting, such as this article from Newsweek. But it won’t be long until the right wing digital news and social media ecosystem push this from the fringes to Fox News. Once there this five year old Russian agitprop, intended to be part of potential active measures campaigns against either Vice President Biden or Secretary Kerry in 2016 will get broadcast to a much wider audience. And just in time for the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary both Vice President Biden and one of his most senior surrogates, Secretary Kerry, will be dirtied up. Just the way Vladimir Putin wanted back in April 2014. Which is why Bondi did it. To get results like this:

ERNST: "IA caucuses are this next Monday evening. And I'm really interested to see how this discussion today informs and influences the Iowa caucus voters, those Demcaucus goers. Will they be supporting VP Biden at this point?"
H/T @JaxAlemany pic.twitter.com/tYYkSPuIDY
— Alan He (@alanhe) January 28, 2020

Open thread!

* I really don’t understand why Elizabeth Cheney was included in the agitprop that was initially placed in RIA Novosti. There was reporting in 2015 that Bill Kristol was floating VP Cheney’s name for a potential 2016 run. And VP Cheney did suggest that he thought VP Biden should run in 2016. But neither of those makes any sense as to why Russia’s misinformation and agitprop campaign would include his daughter in what was clearly a placed piece of agitprop in 2014 to dirty up potential 2016 Democratic candidates.

The Black PSYOP Part VII: Pam Bondi Brings Russia’s Agitprop to the United States SenatePost + Comments (23)

Ambassador John Bolton is a Coward, Has No Professional Ethics, Could Care Less About the Security of the United States, and Cares Only for His Personal Profit

by Adam L Silverman| January 26, 20208:42 pm| 139 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Impeachment, Impeachment Inquiry, Information Warfare, Media, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security

Ambassador Bolton, the Frank Burns of American national security, has allowed his unpublished manuscript to be selectively leaked to Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt at The New York Times. Bolton’s book deal reportedly came with a $2 million advance! Haberman and Schmidt have excerpted the material that is pertinent to the President’s impeachment and which Bolton would not share with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence or the House Judiciary Committee because there isn’t any profit in doing so.

President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.
The president’s statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy firm while his father was in office.
Mr. Bolton’s explosive account of the matter at the center of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, the third in American history, was included in drafts of a manuscript he has circulated in recent weeks to close associates. He also sent a draft to the White House for a standard review process for some current and former administration officials who write books.
Multiple people described Mr. Bolton’s account of the Ukraine affair.
The book presents an outline of what Mr. Bolton might testify to if he is called as a witness in the Senate impeachment trial, the people said. The White House could use the pre-publication review process, which has no set time frame, to delay or even kill the book’s publication or omit key passages.
Over dozens of pages, Mr. Bolton described how the Ukraine affair unfolded over several months until he departed the White House in September. He described not only the president’s private disparagement of Ukraine but also new details about senior cabinet officials who have publicly tried to sidestep involvement.
For example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged privately that there was no basis to claims by the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani that the ambassador to Ukraine was corrupt and believed Mr. Giuliani may have been acting on behalf of other clients, Mr. Bolton wrote.
Mr. Bolton also said that after the president’s July phone call with the president of Ukraine, he raised with Attorney General William P. Barr his concerns about Mr. Giuliani, who was pursuing a shadow Ukraine policy encouraged by the president, and told Mr. Barr that the president had mentioned him on the call. A spokeswoman for Mr. Barr denied that he learned of the call from Mr. Bolton; the Justice Department has said he learned about it only in mid-August.
And the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, was present for at least one phone call where the president and Mr. Giuliani discussed the ambassador, Mr. Bolton wrote. Mr. Mulvaney has told associates he would always step away when the president spoke with his lawyer to protect their attorney-client privilege.
During a previously reported May 23 meeting where top advisers and Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, briefed him about their trip to Kyiv for the inauguration of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mr. Trump railed about Ukraine trying to damage him and mentioned a conspiracy theory about a hacked Democratic server, according to Mr. Bolton.
Charles J. Cooper, a lawyer for Mr. Bolton, declined to comment. The White House did not provide responses to questions about Mr. Bolton’s assertions, and representatives for Mr. Johnson, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Mulvaney did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment on Sunday afternoon.
Mr. Bolton’s submission of the book to the White House may have given the White House lawyers direct insight into what Mr. Bolton would say if he were called to testify at Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial. It also intensified concerns among some of his advisers that they needed to block Mr. Bolton from testifying, according to two people familiar with their concerns.

Bolton’s real concern, according to Haberman’s and Schmidt’s reporting is that if he doesn’t get to testify in the President’s impeachment trial in the Senate, that people will think he’s only interested in his personal profit.

Mr. Bolton would like to testify for several reasons, according to associates. He believes he has relevant information, and he has also expressed concern that if his account of the Ukraine affair emerges only after the trial, he will be accused of holding back to increase his book sales.

Ya think?!?!?!?!

Ambassador Bolton has long been known as a professionally toxic leader. But for some bizarre reason a portion of America’s very serious people have perceived him as being a legitimate, if somewhat extreme, national security professional who cares deeply about the national security of the United States. Those people need to have their heads examined! Bolton couldn’t care less about the national security of the United States. What Bolton cares about is using the national power of the United States, specifically its intelligence and military power, to prosecute his petty grievances with the rest of the world. And making money. Lots and lots and lots of money. Ambassador Bolton doesn’t have to worry about whether people will think he’s only in it for the money. That ship has sailed, got caught in a storm after leaving port, and has sunk. I’d call Ambassador Bolton a selfish, egomaniacal, megalomaniacal whore, but that would be insulting to selfish people, egomaniacs, megalomaniacs, and whores!

Also, and as something that needs to be called out: WTF is wrong with Haberman, Schmidt, their editor, and The New York Times that allowed this view from nowhere paragraph to make it into the article (emphasis mine):

He, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper had collectively pressed the president about releasing the aid nearly a dozen times in the preceding weeks after lower-level officials who worked on Ukraine issues began complaining about the holdup, Mr. Bolton wrote. Mr. Trump had effectively rebuffed them, airing his longstanding grievances about Ukraine, which mixed legitimate efforts by some Ukrainians to back his Democratic 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, with unsupported accusations and outright conspiracy theories about the country, a key American ally.

If you cannot and will not bring yourselves as reporters at the paper of record in the US to unequivocally report this for what it is, a Russian created lie intended to get the President to lift sanctions on Russia, direct the power of the US against Ukraine, and achieve one of Putin’s strategic objectives, then you need to get out of the way and let reporters with professionalism and courage do the reporting. Haberman and Schmidt have failed here as journalism professionals as clearly as Ambassador Bolton has as a national security professional.

Open thread!

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Lordy It’s The Tape: The President’s Fundraising Dinner Tape Has Been Released

by Adam L Silverman| January 25, 20209:41 pm| 128 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Economics, Election 2016, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Impeachment, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security

The entire tape is out!

The closest I’ve found to a transcript is from Susan Simpson’s, a DC attorney, Twitter feed, which I’ll excerpt below and provide snarkmentary on:

Here’s the clip/part about Ambassador Yovanovitch.

The bleeped out part was apparently "the ambassador of Ukraine."
Okay who the hell bleeped that out and why?https://t.co/ANIEhCuVm9
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

Now everyone is discussing steel tariffs. Trump expresses frustration that South Korea dare competes with the U.S. steel industry: "Can you believe it." "How we ever got involved in South Korea in the first place, tell me about it."
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

The President apparently slept through the Korean War.

Trump is bragging about his steel tariffs to one of the people at the dinner, and how much steel prices has gone up, and isn't that great. The man then gently corrects him, "I'm not a steel producer, I'm a steel buyer."
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

The President does not seem to understand 19th Century economic policy at all!

Trump: "China didn't become great until the WTO." Trump is explaining how China was going nowhere, then they joined the WTO and bam, like a rocket ship.
Trump is just making up random econ stats, and then everyone around the table goes, "Wow," "Incredible," "Woooww," "Amazing."
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

Trump, laughing: "Can you imagine getting hit by a hundred pounds of drugs?"
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

I got nothing…

Parnas: 'We're in the process of purchasing an energy company in Ukraine that should cut off Russia.'
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

Narrator Voice: Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were not, in fact, in the process of buying a Ukrainian petroleum company!

Parnas: "They're waiting for your support to go on" with oil development, so that they don't lose it all to Russia.
Trump: "How long would they last in a fight with Russia?"
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

Let’s get serious for a minute, Ukraine is fighting for its sovereignty and national integrity, which is something that a nationalist-populist like the President is supposed to be all about. Every day that the US screws itself into the ground over and over again on its foreign and nat-sec policy regarding Ukraine, Europe, and Russia is another day that Ukrainians are being killed so that Vladimir Putin can recreate what he thinks are the necessary boundaries that Russia deserves to have as the Soviet Union’s successor.

The bleeped out part was apparently "the ambassador of Ukraine."
Okay who the hell bleeped that out and why?https://t.co/ANIEhCuVm9
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

Here's the section with the BLEEP – Maddow suggested on her show that, whatever it was, it wasn't because of profanity. https://t.co/jRbkswAQ77
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

As I referenced in this morning’s post, European Union member states provide approximately 2/3rds of all the aid to Ukraine. Which is more than what the US is providing.

Everyone at this dinner party from hell is on Team Reefer, it seems.
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

Can you imagine this crowd with the munchies? No hamberder would ever be safe. And we’d soon experience a strategic KFC gravy shortage! Watching the President mesmerized by the size of his hands, however, might be fun to watch for a few minutes.

Parnas: "We're in the process of purchasing — Ukraine is privatizing one of it's biggest energy companies –"
Naftogaz, if that's what they're referring to, was obviously not in the process of being purchased.
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

It will soon be Pam Bondi’s time in the barrel!

They're wondering why Bernie Sanders hasn't gone "crazier" agains the Democrats, for betraying him or something, and start debating whether Sanders will run for 2020. Someone — maybe Parnas? — just said, laughing, "I hope Biden runs."
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

Ruh Roh! Clean up on aisle Bernie, clean up on aisle Bernie!!!!!

This is killing me. Someone at the table keeps trying to move the conversation to natural gas policy, and I am silently rooting for him because I want to hear that discussion, but Trump keeps bringing it back to the aluminum cars.
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

The President does not seem to know what cars are made of. Who knew?

The table was discussing the embassy in Jerusalem for a bit, but now we're back to the Messiah talk again.
And Trump abruptly ends the dinner, with a joke about having "a long way back."
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

Yep, Parnas, Fruman, Giuliani and a couple of oligarchs have set up an Ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Ukraine with something called the Anatevka Foundation, a fake village on the outskirts of Kyiv for Jewish refugees called Anatevka, and a bogus US scam charity the US Friends of Anatevka. Rudy Giuliani is the Honorary Mayor of Anatevka. And the pet rabbi appears to have declared that the President is the messiah through the use of gematria. Yidee bidee, yidee, bidee, yidee bidee bidee buum! Also, obligatory:

Let’s see where were we? Oh, here we are:

Parnas definitely brings up Biden at several points throughout the dinner, including during this discussion.https://t.co/zuPCG6DlMh
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

I don't think Parnas's referenced to Biden are necessarily significant, though. At this point in time, I'm not convinced the Biden part of the scheme had come together yet.
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) January 25, 2020

And that’s a wrap!

Updated at 10:20 PM EST

I’ve added the three tweets, including the audio clip, where the President says to “take out” Ambassador Yovanovitch.

Open thread!

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The Black PSYOP Part VI: The President’s Defense in the Senate

by Adam L Silverman| January 25, 202010:30 am| 121 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Impeachment Inquiry, Open Threads, Russia, Silverman on Security, War

The ongoing Black PSYOP by the President, his Congressional defenders, his surrogates, and his supporters is set to enter its next phase: using the defense of the President in the Senate trial of his impeachment to launder the Russian misinformation and agitprop about Vice President Biden, Hunter Biden, and the conspiracy theory that the Clinton 2016 campaign and Ukraine to interfere in the 2016 presidential election not the Russians through the Senate into mainstream reporting and to the American people.

From The Washington Post:

White House lawyers are gearing up for a scorched-earth defense of President Trump in the impeachment trial, mounting a politically charged case aimed more at swaying American voters than GOP senators — and damaging Trump’s possible 2020 opponent, Joe Biden.
Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal attorney, plan to use their time in the trial to target the former vice president and his son, Hunter, according to multiple GOP officials familiar with the strategy. Trump’s allies believe that if they can argue that the president had a plausible reason for requesting the Biden investigation in Ukraine, they can both defend him against the impeachment charges and gain the bonus of undercutting a political adversary.

This is why Senator Cruz floated his one for one deal on witnesses. Specifically that if the House Democratic impeachment managers are allowed to call John Bolton, then the President’s defense team gets to call Hunter Biden. It is why Senator Graham has been suggesting a special counsel be appointed to investigate the Bidens and if one isn’t appointed he’s going to do it himself through the Senate Judiciary Committee.

We know the President’s and his surrogates allegations about Vice President Biden and Hunter Biden are Russian agitprop. As Paula Chertok has reported and I’ve repeatedly referenced here in the previous Black PSYOP posts, it was created in the spring of 2014 in order to begin to dirty up Vice President Biden ahead of a potential 2016 presidential run.

The repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory the Clinton campaign conspired with Ukraine to steal the 2016 presidential election and frame the Russia and the President now appears to have been established by Russia as early as 2015.

Three weeks after Election Day 2016, the Kremlin officially floated a theory that would ultimately lead to only the third presidential impeachment in U.S. history.
“Ukraine seriously complicated the work of Trump’s election by planting information” aimed at damaging his campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry told reporters on Nov. 30, 2016, accusing the Ukrainian government of scheming to help elect Hillary Clinton.
Russian officials offered no evidence—on that day or on any other day—that it was really Kyiv and not Moscow that meddled in the 2016 election. Nor have U.S. intelligence agencies backed off on their collective finding that the Kremlin orchestrated a major effort to help Trump win office.
Zakharova’s claims seemed easy enough to shrug off at the time. It was not surprising that the Kremlin, highly skilled in the dark arts of dezinformatsiya, would try to shift blame to its adversaries in Kyiv.
But that effort to shift blame may have started months earlier. A review of Russian state media reports from the time and interviews with a dozen current and former officials and experts in Kyiv and Washington paint a more sinister picture: that Zakharova’s seemingly throwaway accusation was actually the culmination of a year-long effort to frame Ukraine for a Russian attack, ultimately leading to parallel efforts by Moscow and President Donald Trump to try to game the 2020 election by seeking dirt on former vice president Joe Biden.
Cindy Otis, a former political and military analyst at the CIA who now leads the disinformation analysis program at Nisos, a cyber security firm, says that Moscow may even have planted the seeds even earlier than Zakharova’s news conference.
“There’s been an evolution of the main narrative” tying Ukraine to the 2016 election, Otis said. She pointed to a March 2015 article in the Kremlin-funded outlet Russia Today that tried to connect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the future Democratic presidential nominee, to the popular uprising against the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2013.
“The Russian narrative in 2015-2016 was that Clinton interfered in Ukraine, and that her campaign was being directed or driven by Ukrainian oligarchs,” Otis said.
As is typical of Russia’s disinformation operations, it hinged on a kernel of truth—the reports cited donations her charity had received from Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk beginning in 2008, which were initially reported by the Wall Street Journal.
“They really seized on that Wall Street Journal article,” Otis said, pointing to a chart included in the article listing “Ukraine” as the Clinton Foundation’s top donor that was widely shared by suspected Russian trolls and the far-right on social media.
But it wasn’t just isolated accounts accusing Ukraine of manipulating the 2016 election; lawmakers say they’ve seen signs of an organized, top-down effort directed by the Kremlin to create a false narrative and exonerate Russia.

Russia’s disinformation and agitprop campaign was laundered through the usual sources starting with Russia’s state backed news media platforms designed to propagandize Americans, such as RT, and from their through a variety of far right and alt-right sources until it hit places like Brietbart, The Gateway Pundit, and then, ultimately, John Solomon at The Hill.

This phase of the Black PSYOP will be wrapped within faux righteous indignation that the Democrats are simply continuing the conspiracy against the President, by using the impeachment to finish the job delineated in Russia’s conspiracy theory about the election, to remove him from office, overturn the 2016 presidential election results, and fix the 2020 election by doing so, as well as a lack of burden sharing by the EU in support of Ukraine. None of this is true! Approximately 2/3rds of the aid that Ukraine receives is from European Union member states. The Ukrainians are forbidden from using the Javelin missiles we’ve sold them, and which his defenders constantly reference as something the President did for Ukraine when no one else – not Obama, nor the EU leaders – would, because the President doesn’t want to upset the Russians, so they’re stored across the country from where the Ukrainians are actually fighting a Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russians are the ones who actually conspired with and interfered in the 2016 elections on behalf of the President, not the Ukrainians conspiring with the Clinton campaign. If the Senate were to vote to convict the President during the trial phase of his impeachment it does not overturn the 2016 election, it simply removes him from office and bars him from running again at the Federal level. VP Pence would become president if this were to happen, which is not overturning the 2016 election. Overturning the 2016 elections would make Secretary Clinton president, which isn’t even in the realm of the possible. Finally, the President has repeatedly indicated that he would welcome foreign assistance in his reelection campaign or solicited it – on camera, to reporters!

The Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative country club, is just another front in the Black PSYOP campaign to fix the 2020 presidential election and absolve Russia of responsibility for the unconventional war it has been waging on the US so that sanctions against Russia can be lifted.

We are off the looking glass and through the map!

Open thread.

The Black PSYOP Part VI: The President’s Defense in the SenatePost + Comments (121)

Information Security Is Essential!

by Adam L Silverman| January 21, 20209:24 pm| 102 Comments

This post is in: America, China, Foreign Affairs, Israel, Open Threads, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Silverman on Security

The Guardian has now reported that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia hacked Jeff Bezos’s cell phone, which is what many of us who work in the information warfare area of national security had assessed shortly after The National Enquirer ran their hit piece on him. What we got in today’s reporting, however, were important and disturbing details! (emphasis mine)

The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone “hacked” in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message that had apparently been sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, sources have told the Guardian.
The encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone of the world’s richest man, according to the results of a digital forensic analysis.
This analysis found it “highly probable” that the intrusion into the phone was triggered by an infected video file sent from the account of the Saudi heir to Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post.
The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on 1 May of that year, the unsolicited file was sent, according to sources who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity.
Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Guardian has no knowledge of what was taken from the phone or how it was used.

WhatsApp is notoriously insecure and should not be used! It is now owned by Facebook and there are serious concerns about what Facebook may be doing with the data from the app, including the personally identifying information (PII), of its users. Another security flaw is that the app itself isn’t encrypted, just the information while it is in transit from device (user) to device (user). So any spyware, on either the device on the sending or receiving end of the transmission, can pick up what is being sent and/or received.

The larger issue here is that WhatsApp is very popular. We know from reporting that Jared Kushner uses it to communicate with Muhammed bin Salman, as well as others. From the late Congressman Cummings’ March 2019 letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone:

During this period the Committee obtained additional information raising even more concerns about the use of private email and messaging apps by Jared Kushner and other White House officials.
For example, during a meeting with Mr. Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, Mr. Lowell confirmed that Mr. Kushner has been using the messaging app WhatsApp as part of his official White House duties to communicate with foreign leaders.

Jared isn’t the only US official using WhatsApp.

Multiple Trump administration officials are known to have used WhatsApp to carry out sensitive conversations, raising the prospect that their communications have been intercepted.
Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union and a key figure in in the administration’s campaign to pressure Ukraine to launch investigations that would benefit the president, communicated with other US diplomats about the effort over WhatsApp. During Trump’s run for the presidency campaign chairman Paul Manafort regularly sent polling data to a Russian associate via the app.

The problem isn’t isolated just to Jared and other US officials.

Senior government officials in multiple U.S.-allied countries were targeted earlier this year with hacking software that used Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) WhatsApp to take over users’ phones, according to people familiar with the messaging company’s investigation.
Sources familiar with WhatsApp’s internal investigation into the breach said a “significant” portion of the known victims are high-profile government and military officials spread across at least 20 countries on five continents. Many of the nations are U.S. allies, they said

Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas were also using WhatsApp!

WhatsApp messages from Parnas to Giuliani and Republican congressional candidate Robert F. Hyde are included in the evidence.

Let’s see what the President’s Cybersecurity Advisor and the First Name in Cybersecurity has to say:

Ruh Roh!

Anyone and everyone who has messaged Muhammed bin Salman using WhatsApp have likely had their phones or tablets compromised. And there is no telling what he collected, who he collected it from, and what he intends to do with it. Though we can be pretty sure it isn’t anything good. WhatsApp is not a secure form of communication. You should not be using it. More importantly, US government officials – from political appointees to civil servants to uniformed personnel to contractors – should not be using it either. Not for personal communications and certainly not for official and work related communication. That the President’s advisors, both those in the White House like his son in law Jared Kushner and those outside of it like Rudy Giuliani, and his other political appointees like Gordon Sondland are using WhatsApp means that over three years worth of official US communications have been compromised. And Muhammad bin Salman is not the only one whose intelligence and security services have compromised WhatsApp. Both the Israelis and the Russians have compromised WhatsApp, So have the Chinese.

Whatever information that Muhammed bin Salman or the Israelis or Putin or Xi have managed to pull off of the phones of US officials, as well as those of other governments, that use WhatsApp is a ticking political warfare information bomb. We don’t know when this information will be used. We don’t know how it will be used. But we do know that it will be used. It may be used subtly to try to force US officials to do something they ordinarily wouldn’t. Or it might be used, as was the case with Bezos’s data, in an almost brutish assault. But it will eventually be used.

Does anyone really want to contemplate what Mark Zuckerberg might do with the information transmitted via WhatsApp, which he owns? Zuckerberg has the ability to blackmail and extort everyone who uses his social media products because those products are designed to suck up everyone’s information and data so that Zuckerberg can monetize it. That is not a good thing.

Every one of these government officials that are using WhatsApp, from Jared Kushner to Ambassador Sondland to those we don’t even know about should have their security clearances suspended pending a full counterintelligence investigation. They have made themselves into insider threats by refusing to follow best information and operational security practices. Rudy Giuliani doesn’t have a security clearance to suspend, but he and his associates who have been using WhatsApp all need to be subjected to a full counterintelligence investigation as well given Giuliani’s pro-bono work as the President’ private attorney and all the activity he has been up to in Ukraine and other parts of Europe.

Open thread!

Information Security Is Essential!Post + Comments (102)

McConnell Has Released His Motion for the Senate Impeachment Trial Rules

by Adam L Silverman| January 20, 202010:50 pm| 73 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, IOKIYAR, Open Threads, Politics

Senate Majority Leader McConnell has released the motion, which will be voted on tomorrow, that delineates the rules for the Senate’s impeachment trial.

Also, as expected, there will be a debate of up to four hours on the question of "whether it shall be in order to consider and debate under the impeachment rules any motion to subpoena witnesses and documents." The Senate will then vote on whether to subpoena any witnesses.
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 20, 2020

Resolution allows for a vote “at a later time on the question of whether or not (evidence) may be admitted as part” of trial, per GOP aide, who noted it’s different than Clinton trial, which admitted evidence automatically. GOP argues bc Trump was “denied due process” in House
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 20, 2020

– Tomorrow: Debate on amendment(s) and vote on McConnell resolution
– Wednesday: Dem arguments
– Thursday: Dem arguments
– Friday: Trump team arguments
– Sat: Trump team, or senator questions
– Monday: Senator questions
– Tuesday: possible senator questions, vote on witnesses
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 21, 2020

So here’s the bottom line:

The evidence, records, and documents sent over by the House will not automatically be made part of the Senate’s trial proceedings. It may, at such time as Senator McConnell brings up a subsequent motion to allow it and that motion passes with 51 votes. And this will be done on an individual basis for each piece of evidence, not en masse for the whole of it, which is a break from how the Senate handled President Clinton’s impeachment.
The Democratic impeachment managers from the House will have 24 hours to make their case, divided into two days. Each day will start at 1 PM EST and will conclude no later than 1 AM EST the next morning. Then the President’s defense team will have the same arrangement.
According to Senator Halwey (warning: auto play video at that link!), Senator McConnell has built a kill switch into the rules package allowing him to move to summary dismissal whenever he feels he has the 51 votes to do so.
There will be no vote on witness or additional evidence until after the Democratic House managers and the President’s defense finish presenting their cases.
Senator McConnell controls the audio and video in the Senate chamber. He has already pissed off C-Span by informing them that he will control their cameras and feed during the trial, not C-Span, as part of his news media control rules that he has implemented for the Senate trial. Americans will see as much or as little as Senator McConnell wants them to see and only what he wants them to see.

Yes, I know Senator Schumer is putting up a fight. And he’s doing a good job, he almost looks like he’s caffeinated! More seriously, Senator Schumer is fighting the good fight, but he doesn’t have the terrain, nor does he have the ammunition to win. The simple reality of the Senate is that Senator McConnell as the Majority Leader controls the Senate. Especially if he has the votes. And for everything involving the Senate’s impeachment trial he only needs 51 votes and, according to all the reporting, he has the 51 votes he needs to at least get started the way he wants. And as soon as he has the 51 votes to acquit, he’ll entertain that motion from the President’s defense and hold that vote. Until he has those 51 votes, he’ll allow things to continue, even if that is through a crooked and corrupt process.

Senator McConnell knows, because he has been doing it successfully since January 2009, that the majority of Americans do not care about process, if they even understand it. And that the vast majority of Americans aren’t political junkies either. So if he just does what he’s going to do, give his regular more in sadness than in anger remarks, and is boring, then the news media will move along to whichever shiny object catches their attention. This is how he stymied President Obama for eight years. This is how he brought the Republicans back into the majority in the Senate. This is how he stole a Supreme Court seat. This is how he stole over 150 Federal judgeships. And this is how he was able to place Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. As I wrote back in June 2018 when people were hoping that Senators Corker, Flake, and Collins might break with him:

Senate Majority Leader McConnell really isn’t a politician or like any politician who has ever served as Senate Majority or Minority Leader. Rather than view him as a politician, it is more appropriate to understand Senator McConnell as an insurgent, albeit a non-violent one. He recognizes no legitimacy but his own. When out of power he’ll do whatever is necessary using asymmetric, irregular, and/or unconventional means to achieve power. And once he achieves power he will do whatever he can to achieve his objectives to consolidate his gains as quickly as possible using any means necessary as he believes his actions are self justifying – that his achievement of power justifies his by any means necessary strategy. This is, by the way, the basic argument of the premier Italian fascist (national-syndicalist) theorist Sergio Panunzio, who delineated the fascist theories for the use of political violence and low intensity warfare in the 1920s. As a result, there is no law, rule, tradition, norm, ethic, promise, and/or deal he won’t violate or renege on. This also makes him an unreliable interlocutor and makes it impossible to negotiate with him in good faith as he doesn’t believe in good faith negotiations.
Since Senators Corker, Flake, and Collins, let alone anyone else, cannot negotiate with Senator McConnell in good faith, because Senator McConnell doesn’t do anything in good faith, if they want to get anything done, then they need to rely on their leverage as senators in a very slim Senate majority caucus to force their initiatives through. This means threatening to and/or actually caucusing with the Democrats. The last thing that Senator McConnell wants is to lose control of the Senate. Whether now because of the defections of a pair of his retiring members using it as leverage to achieve their own objectives or in the mid terms because enough voters want a check on the President to override the partisan Republican advantage in this senatorial election cycle. It is why he’s ground everything in the chamber other than handling nominations, specifically judicial nominations, to a halt. It is why he doesn’t want to do the legally required annual budgetary resolution so he can avoid having his members take tough votes before the midterms. And it is why he’s cancelled most of the August recess under the pretense that it is the only way he can move judicial nominees because of what he alleges is Democratic obstruction. Nominations that only exist because he prevented President Obama from seating almost any judicial nominees during his final two years in office. The Democratic minority has no tools to stop these nominations, regardless of what Senator McConnell says because Senator McConnell in conjunction with Senator Grassley has gotten rid of the blue slip rule and refuses to recognize Democratic senators holds on nominees. Senator McConnell’s cancellation of the August recess is really just a thinly veiled attempt to keep incumbent Democratic senators up for reelection off the campaign trail. Every Senate rule, tradition, norm, ethic, and even law (Congressional Budget Act) has been bent or stretched to breaking or just outright ignored by Senator McConnell in his quest to consolidate his power and achieve his revanchist and reactionary objectives. As an insurgent, albeit a non-violent one, Senator McConnell only understands and recognizes the application of leverage and force. Senators Corker, Flake, and Collins have the ability to apply significant leverage and force. The question is whether or not they have the will to do so. The sad reality is the answer is almost certainly not.

If you are counting on Senators Romney, Murkowski, Alexander, and/or Collins to do what Senators Corker and Flake did not in 2018, please email me about the great bridge I have to sell you on a lovely beachfront in Florida. The Senate runs according to McConnell’s rules and Senator McConnell’s only rule is doing whatever he can get away with to maintain power to achieve his objectives. That’s it. Expecting anything else to happen is self delusion.

Open thread!

McConnell Has Released His Motion for the Senate Impeachment Trial RulesPost + Comments (73)

WhitePeoplePalooza 2020 Has Ended

by Adam L Silverman| January 20, 20205:07 pm| 232 Comments

This post is in: America, Ammosexuals, Crazification Factor, Domestic Politics, domestic terrorists, Election Year, Gun Issues, Gun nuts, Open Threads, Politics, Silverman on Security

WhitePeoplePalooza, doing business as The Virginia Citizen’s Defense League’s (VCDL) annual day of lobbying in Richmond, Virginia, has come to an end. Without, apparently any acts of extremist domestic terrorism.

Aaaaand I think that is about it. The rally is mostly dispersed. Random groups of heavily armed men and women will continue to traipse about for a while but this is essentially done.
— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) January 20, 2020

Robert Evans (above), as well as Eve Ettinger and JJ McNabb have all the details in their twitter feeds.

Just fine yep pic.twitter.com/Zsw1PEFzhJ
— Eve Ettinger (@eve_ettinger) January 20, 2020

There are thousands of attendees in Richmond for the pro gun rally. People inside the fenced area surrounding the Capitol have been screened for weapons. Many who are staying outside the fenced area are armed.
— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) January 20, 2020

The most depressing part is the result of discretion being the better part of valor. The counterprotestors, from legitimate civil rights groups to antifa stayed home because they couldn’t be sure they’d be safe. Some of that is they were unsure just who was going to show up and what kind of agro they’d encounter. The proud boys and patriot prayer and III%ers and OathKeepers and a bunch of other “patriot” and “militia” groups with a history of street violence did turn out. Including leadership, despite them being either wanted for arrest in other jurisdictions for violent behavior at previous events or being on bail awaiting trial for the same thing. And these groups, especially the OathKeepers, blew enough smoke on social media, that no one could be sure if they had law enforcement support for what they might do. As a result those who would oppose them stayed home or out of the way. While this meant that WhitePeoplePalooza ended with no violence, at least that I’ve seen reported, it also meant that if you can turn out enough white Christians in support of extreme positions who are heavily armed and make a lot of noise that they have law enforcement support, that you can prevent others from dissenting for fear of violence – both from the white Christian demonstrators and, possibly, from police allied with them. And that’s a problem.

And then there were these dipshits!

I’m pretty sure this guy isn’t Jewish, despite his outfit.

This fellow claims the former of his house, a deported Mexican woman, is being registered to vote by Governor Northam. Personally I have doubts. pic.twitter.com/4Dk7IYBWG3
— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) January 20, 2020

And this guy is definitely not an ancient Israelite. Also, why is Joe Stalin laying hands on the President in prayer?

This dude brought a Shofar. He tells me it is what ancient Jew blew when going to war. And feasts. pic.twitter.com/l4jOavKTDq
— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) January 20, 2020

Anyone know why Ice T is doing security for the InfoWars schmucks?

This is the proud Infowars film crew and security, respectively. pic.twitter.com/uMD1NQ7CAC
— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) January 20, 2020

This man has decided today is the day to show off his $10,000 rifle. pic.twitter.com/vLHCQC3Ux3
— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) January 20, 2020

Here’s a better picture of this genius:

As for the doofus with the Barrett .50 cal, I don’t think the guy did much marching, just stood around posing for pictures. Those things aren’t light, they’re not ergonomic, and they’re not designed to be humped around all day. They’re a long range sniper rifle, though there are now better and lighter alternatives thanks to improvements in ballistics. Barretts weigh about 30 lbs depending on how they’re configured and customized. Comparatively, most AR pattern rifles weigh between 6 and 10 lbs depending on caliber and configuration. My guess is if he had to walk farther than a block carrying that thing he’d stroke out.

Obligatory:

Open thread!

WhitePeoplePalooza 2020 Has EndedPost + Comments (232)

The Parnas Interview: Information, Misinformation, Agitprop, and a Terrible Interviewer

by Adam L Silverman| January 16, 202012:04 am| 49 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security

I’ve watched the Rachel Maddow interview with Lev Parnas. I’m not impressed. I’ll get to that in a moment, but I want to do the substance before I get into format/process.

The information that Parnas presented was a mixture of accurate information, misinformation, and agitprop. For instance, we already know, from previous reporting that has been verified by subsequent reporting, that Giuliani had a strange fixation on the Ukrainian black ledger that implicated Manafort. So it isn’t surprising when Parnas presented that in one of his answers. Nor was it surprising when he made it very clear that it was never about corruption, it was just about Vice President Biden, his son Hunter, and getting dirt on them for political purposes in the 2020 election. This too has been reported on extensively and verified in subsequent reporting. As was the information about the quid pro quo given to Ukrainian President Zelensky And the information about trying to get a deal cut for Dmitro Firtash in exchange for his help. And I have no doubt, despite his attempt to get ahead of things on Fox News tonight, that Congressman Nunes is up to his eyeballs in this meshugas.

But there was also misinformation and agitprop. Let’s start with AG Barr. We know from reporting that Toensing and DiGenova met with AG Barr to try to get the charges dropped against Firtash. But we also know that Barr rebuffed them. However, we also know from the Memorandum of the Conversation for the second phone call in July 2019 between the President and Ukrainian President Zelensky that the President told President Zelensky that he would have AG Barr follow up. This prompted the Department of Justice spokesperson to issue a statement that AG Barr had no idea what this was about and was not involved. That said, we know from the Intelligence Community whistleblower’s complaint that the whistleblower asserted that AG Barr was involved. Whether this was in reference to the President’s statement that he’d have the Attorney General follow up in the July 2019 phone call or based on some other information the whistleblower has is unclear. So some of this is accurate and confirmable, some of it may be accurate, but is not currently confirmed, and some I’m not sure could ever be confirmed.

As for the answers regarding erstwhile Republican congressional candidate Rob Hyde, I find it hard to believe that Parnas was more concerned about him when he was drunk at the bar at a Trump property than when he was texting Parnas that he had a US ambassador under surveillance and wanted to know if money was available to move on her. I’m also not buying Hyde’s answers in his interview with Sinclair’s Eric Bolling this evening. He’s in a lot of trouble, has a history of making terroristic threats, and has something of a drinking problem.

The releases of the information that Parnas has turned over to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are all interesting. And like tonight’s interview some of that information is accurate and true, some is disinformation, and some is agitprop. The proof will be in the vetting of that documentary information, just as it will be in the vetting of the information Parnas provided this evening. It is important to remember that Parnas is alleged to be a low level member or associate of post-Soviet and Russian organized crime. He is only as credible as his statements and documentary evidence can be verified.

And that’s where I get to the format/process problem. I’ve conducted semi-structured interviews as part of my work for the US Army and I’ve trained Soldiers on how to do them to collect information and intelligence. I’ve mentioned before that over a four to five month period I interviewed around 50 sheikhs, imams, and other local elites and notables using a semi-structured format across central Iraq (Baghdad Province and parts of Anbar, Wassit, and Diyala Provinces). I’m a huge fan of putting the subject of the interview at ease and letting them tell you their story – the true parts, the false parts, and the parts that fall in between. But there is a difference between doing that, and being prepared to ask sound follow up questions rooted within the context of the answers and information you’re being provided, and credulously just eating it up while looking focused and concerned. And this means asking questions like: “how do you know?” and “can you provide verification for that?” or “do you have documents about that?” or “who else should we talk to in order to verify that?”. I’m not qualified to judge whether Maddow’s interviewing process made for compelling television, but from an information gathering standpoint it was a failure. Maddow was far too credulous and failed to ask the necessary follow on questions. I will make an important caveat: she may have been prevented from doing so by agreement with Parnas’s attorney about the format of the interview. But, if that was the case, then it should have been disclosed. I’ve seen Maddow do far more adversarial and far better interviews with friendly guests. This was not one of her best outings.

Open thread!

The Parnas Interview: Information, Misinformation, Agitprop, and a Terrible InterviewerPost + Comments (49)

The Debate Part II: The Debating!

by Adam L Silverman| January 14, 20209:59 pm| 261 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election Year, Open Threads, Politics

I came in about 1/2 an hour late, then had to hit pause on the DVR, and am running about five minutes behind actual. But it looks like we can use a fresh debate thread, so here you all go.

Open thread!

The Debate Part II: The Debating!Post + Comments (261)

The Black PSYOP Part V: Russia Was, Apparently, Listening – Election 2020 Edition

by Adam L Silverman| January 13, 202010:45 pm| 63 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security

I’ve written several posts about Black PSYOPs, which are attempts to launder misinformation, disinformation, and agitprop through legitimate sources to influence people’s, groups’, and governments’ attitudes and actions. I’ve specifically focused on attempts by Republican elected and appointed officials, as well as the President’s surrogates, to launder the debunked, factually inaccurate, lie that Vice President Biden knuckled the Ukrainian prosecutor back in 2014 and 2015 in order to protect his son Hunter Biden. The truth is that Vice President Biden, representing the official policy of the United States and working with US allies in Britain, the EU, and the IMF sought to force out a corrupt prosecutor who was covering up and slow walking investigations into corruption in the post-Maidan Ukraine.

Moreover, as I’ve repeatedly covered since September, the assertion that Hunter Biden did anything wrong is actually Russian created agitprop that was first put forward in Russian state backed news media in May 2014. It emerged because it was being reported at the time that Vice President Biden was considering running for president in 2016 and Putin was looking to dirty him up should he emerge as the Democratic nominee. It is the same reason that one of Secretary Kerry’s, who was also being reported in 2014 as considering another run for the presidency, step-sons was mentioned in the reporting by RIA-Novosti.

The New York Times is reporting that the GRU, Russian military intelligence, appears to have now hacked Burisma, which is the Ukrainian natural gas company that employed Hunter Biden.

The GRU attacks appear to be running parallel to an analog effort by Russian spies to dig up information that could embarrass the Bidens. Russian spies are trying to penetrate Burisma and working sources in the Ukrainian government in search of emails, financial records.
— Nicole Perlroth (@nicoleperlroth) January 13, 2020

With President Trump facing an impeachment trial over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, Russian military hackers have been boring into the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the affair, according to security experts.
The hacking attempts against Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served, began in early November, as talk of the Bidens, Ukraine and impeachment was dominating the news in the United States.
It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for. But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.
The Russian tactics are strikingly similar to what American intelligence agencies say was Russia’s hacking of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign. In that case, once they had the emails, the Russians used trolls to spread and spin the material, and built an echo chamber to widen its effect.
Then, as now, the Russian hackers from a military intelligence unit known formerly as the G.R.U., and to private researchers by the alias “Fancy Bear,” used so-called phishing emails that appear designed to steal usernames and passwords, according to Area 1, the Silicon Valley security firm that detected the hacking. In this instance, the hackers set up fake websites that mimicked sign-in pages of Burisma subsidiaries, and have been blasting Burisma employees with emails meant to look like they are coming from inside the company.
The hackers fooled some of them into handing over their login credentials, and managed to get inside one of Burisma’s servers, Area 1 said.
“The attacks were successful,” said Oren Falkowitz, a co-founder of Area 1, who previously served at the National Security Agency. Mr. Falkowitz’s firm maintains a network of sensors on web servers around the globe — many known to be used by state-sponsored hackers — which gives the firm a front-row seat to phishing attacks, and allows them to block attacks on their customers.
“The timing of the Russian campaign mirrors the G.R.U. hacks we saw in 2016 against the D.N.C. and John Podesta,” the Clinton campaign chairman, Mr. Falkowitz said. “Once again, they are stealing email credentials, in what we can only assume is a repeat of Russian interference in the last election.”

The purpose of this hacking is not just to get access to emails and other documents, remove them, and either leak them through third parties to gullible members of the US news media who will be all to happy to publish them in a repeat of 2016 or to credulous surrogates of the President like his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. The purpose of hacking into these systems is also to be able to adjust actual emails and documents, as well as plant false ones, that can then be removed, leaked, and laundered through the news media with the real emails and documents as part of the ongoing Black PSYOP campaign. If there’s nothing actually incriminating in Burisma’s employees’ or board of directors member’s emails or the company’s documents about Hunter Biden, then the GRU will be happy to fabricate them (agitprop), embed them with the real information, and then ensure that all of that information – real and fabricated – makes its way to the information laundries of the US news media so it can be weaponized against Vice President Biden and on behalf of the President. They did this with the Clinton campaign and DNC emails in 2016 and they’ll do it again here too.

And the GRU’s, as well as other hostile state actors and, most likely, those of some partners who have a preference in the outcome of the 2020 elections efforts will not be confined to Vice President Biden. I guarantee that they have operations ready to go for any of the leading Democratic candidates contesting for the Democratic nomination. Some of these efforts will be easier than others. Attempts will be made to get to files, documents, and emails from Senator Warren’s time doing legal consulting. And you’ll see hacks attempting to bring to light that she got unfair treatment by falsely claiming to be Native American or lying about when she was pregnant. Four decades of speeches and public access show episodes and writings from Senator Sanders will be released in toto (the most controversial ones) or barbered and adjusted for maximum influence effect to make fairly banal left of center statements seem nefarious. Documents, emails, and records from Senator Klobuchar’s time as a local prosecutor will be combed through. And attempts will be made to get into McKinsey’s systems, as well as those of South Bend, Indiana looking for anything that can be used against Mayor Buttigieg. And if nothing really damaging can be found on any of these candidates, then it will be manufactured and that will be weaponized. Remember, part of what led FBI Director Comey to usurp the authority of the Attorney General in 2016, including not even just recommending that then Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates take the lead regarding Secretary Clinton’s email investigation, was a false memo fabricated by the GRU, which they allowed US intelligence to collect. When even the most senior professionals with extensive experience can be manipulated to make terrible professional errors through agitprop, imagine what it is going to do to the Ken Vogels and Mike Allens of the world, let alone Rudy Giuliani, Jeanine Pirro, Seant Hannity, and Lou Dobbs? All of whom are just salivating for someone to hand them this type of information gift wrapped and ready to go regardless of who is providing it and whether or not it is accurate or even germane to the election.

As I wrote way back in March 2019, the 2020 elections are an information war. And that information war is wrapped within an undeclared interstate war between Russia and the US. And that is the reality that every Democratic campaign, up and down the ballot from municipal special districts to those seeking the presidency, America’s Intelligence Community, the National Security Directorate’s at the DOJ and FBI, and the news media, especially those covering politics, need to understand and prepare for. After the 2016 election and what has now been well documented as happening since as far back as 2014, there is no good excuse for refusing to learn from the past 5 and 1/2 years, for campaigns and the new media to not have counter-influence operations in place and operating, and for Americans not to be informed and realize that we are at war. The 2020 election is not just taking place while that war is ongoing; the 2020 election is actually one theater of operations in that war.

Aux armes, citoyens!

Open thread!

The Black PSYOP Part V: Russia Was, Apparently, Listening – Election 2020 EditionPost + Comments (63)

Bloomberg Reports That the “US Probes If Russia Targeting Biden in 2020 Election Meddling”: YA THINK?!?!?!!?!?!

by Adam L Silverman| January 10, 20204:21 pm| 144 Comments

This post is in: America, Election 2016, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Iran, Open Threads, Politics, Silverman on Security, War

Today in water is wet reporting:

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are assessing whether Russia is trying to undermine Joe Biden in its ongoing disinformation efforts with the former vice president still the front-runner in the race to challenge President Donald Trump, according to two officials familiar with the matter.
The probe comes as senior U.S. officials are warning that Russia’s election interference in 2020 could be more brazen than in the 2016 presidential race or the 2018 midterm election.
Part of the inquiry is to determine whether Russia is trying to weaken Biden by promoting controversy over his past involvement in U.S. policy toward Ukraine while his son worked for an energy company there.

YA THINK?!?!?!?!

As I delineated way back in September when The New York Time‘s Ken Vogel was peddling his agitprop about Hunter Biden and Vice President Biden with a “I’m just asking questions here…” smirk, the Russians started this disinformation and agitprop based influence campaign against Vice President Biden in 2014. Because they thought that he was likely to run for president in 2016 and they were starting their campaign to dirty up every potential candidate tied to President Obama’s administration and that administration’s actions regarding Russia.

In 2014 Russian propaganda went off-the-rails demonizing Ukraine, w/ a blizzard of fake news to justify annexing Crimea & invading Ukraine after Ukrainians rose up to oust Putin's puppet. Russia's disinformation said Ukr's democracy movement was a US coup, invoking Hunter Biden. pic.twitter.com/uSpicINTHt
— Paula Chertok🗽 (@PaulaChertok) May 11, 2019

The RIA-Novosti, a Russian state backed news outlet, excerpt that Paula Chertok reported on back in May 2019 and posted above is from May 2014. It also includes allegations against Hunter Biden, Vice President Biden, and then Secretary of State Kerry’s step-son. There was informed speculation in 2014 that both Vice President Biden and Secretary Kerry were considering presidential runs in 2016. This initial piece of agitprop and disinformation, casually placed in a Russian state backed news media article, forms the basis for the Black PSYOP that I’ve delineated and written about here over the past several months. A disinformation and agitprop laundry that includes the Republican members of Congress, especially those involved in the impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives, members of the US Senate, and Rudy Giuliani’s OANN documentary.

There can be no doubt that Russia is not just continuing its political warfare campaign, as part of Putin’s undeclared war against the US, leveraging information warfare, cyber operations, and other active measures in 2020 to effect the 2020 campaign, but that the bullshit story about the Bidens and Ukraine is central to it. It is nice to see that both the news media and the US Intelligence Community are now focused on this reality, but it is unfortunate that they are late to the game.

Open thread!

Bloomberg Reports That the “US Probes If Russia Targeting Biden in 2020 Election Meddling”: YA THINK?!?!?!!?!?!Post + Comments (144)

Australia is Still Burning: An Update From The Mighty Trowel

by Adam L Silverman| January 7, 202010:35 pm| 10 Comments

This post is in: Bleg, Changing Climate, Climate Change, Open Threads

The Mighty Trowel sent me the following update for you all:

While there’s still lots of bad news coming out about the impact of the new years fires, here’s some good news updates from a country on fire. All of the missing people from Victoria have been accounted for and are alive. Also the Bureau of meteorology long term forecast suggests that the worst of the heat has passed (https://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/signs-heat-may-have-peaked-as-outlook-shifts-to-milder-wetter-weather-20200107-p53pk0.html) as we have more moisture (though still below average) and lower temperatures (though about average) in store for us. In other words, the fires are expected to keep burning, but there may be fewer catastrophic fire days and hopefully we’ll have more than 5 days between them. Friday, for what it’s worth, is predicted to be really bad so positive thoughts and donations welcome (prayers too, but only when they’re attached to money or genuine help in the form of mobilised resources and expertise).

Speaking of donations, she sent along this specific GoFundMe:

Emily is a brilliant former student of mine and her very rural community has been hit hard by the present fires. They’re trying to raise funds for a fire truck for their volunteer firies (ALS: I think that’s Aussie for fire fighter)
https://twitter.com/Emily_M_Arch/status/1213595181674426368?s=19

And here’s the list of donations that The Mighty Trowel sent me for her guest post on the fires last week.

Donations can be made to:

Red Cross bushfire disaster relieve and recovery fund: https://www.redcross.org.au/campaigns/disaster-relief-and-recovery-new-years-eve?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialorganic&utm_campaign=201913_drr_disaster-relief-and-recovery_don_transient_bushfires_none

Rural Fire Service: https://quickweb.westpac.com.au/OnlinePaymentServlet?cd_community=NSWRFS&cd_currency=AUD&cd_supplier_business=DONATIONS&action=EnterDetails

Country Fire Authority: https://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/about/supporting-cfa

South Australian Country Fire Service: https://cfsfoundation.org.au/donate

Community support org Givit, active nationally: http://www.givit.org.au/donate-funds

Emergency Management Victoria community relief fund: https://www.emv.vic.gov.au/news/community-relief-fund-launched-to-support-fire-affected-communities

Some affected community members have launched GoFundMe’s for their towns – this is one the Australian Broadcasting Corporation posted, so I assume it’s legit: https://www.gofundme.com/f/xycjem-cudgewa-has-burnt?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet

Here’s another legit gofundme to put on the list, this one for First Nations communities affected by the fires: https://www.gofundme.com/f/fire-relief-fund-for-first-nations-communities

Open thread!

Australia is Still Burning: An Update From The Mighty TrowelPost + Comments (10)

Barbara on Mandatory Masking in WV (Jul 6, 2020 @ 4:23pm)

Another Scott on Mandatory Masking in WV (Jul 6, 2020 @ 4:23pm)

Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) on Mandatory Masking in WV (Jul 6, 2020 @ 4:22pm)

Roger Moore on Mandatory Masking in WV (Jul 6, 2020 @ 4:22pm)

Danielx on Mandatory Masking in WV (Jul 6, 2020 @ 4:22pm)

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Australia is Still Burning: An Update From The Mighty Trowel