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You are here: Home / Archives for Adam L Silverman

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.

House Impeachment Hearings Day 2: Ambassador Yovanovitch

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The second day of the House impeachment hearings is scheduled to get started at 9:00 AM EST. Expect more of what we observed on Wednesday. The Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence focused on fact finding through Ambassador Yovanovitch’s testimony while the Republicans attempt to use the hearing as an information laundry to promote the conspiracy theories and agitprop that they want people to believe exonerates the President.

Update at 9:10 AM EST

News broke late last night that one of the senior career civil servants at the Office of Management and Budget assigned to the White House with firsthand information of the illegal orders to hold up the congressionally mandated and appropriated aid for Ukraine will give a closed door deposition if subpoenaed. We now know the officials name, that he has been subpoenaed, and that he’ll likely sit for that deposition tomorrow.

The President is going to have a very, very, very, very bad weekend. As is Mick Mulvaney. And several others.

Here’s the live feed:

Open thread!

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Breaking: Saugus High School Shooting

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There’s been another school shooting. This time at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, CA. The LA County Sheriffs Office is currently reporting 3 wounded dead. The other schools in the area are on lockdown as the shooter is still at large.

Here’s the live feed from NBCLA Channel 4:

More to follow as it comes in.

Updated at 11:48 AM EST

And MSNBC’s Pete Williams has just reported is that law enforcement authorities have informed reporters that the suspect has been found and is no longer a threat, but he is unclear what “no longer a threat” means. And while there are five wounded, there are no fatalities, so that’s a revision.

Updated at 12:40 PM EST

I had to step away for a bit, but here are the most recent updates.

First, the number of victims has been revised again.

And the suspect has taken his own life.

Update at 12:43 PM EST

The latest information on the suspect from the LA Sheriffs Office contradicts Pete Williams reporting that the suspect is dead.

Pete Williams is correcting his reporting on air as I type this.

Update at 1:22 PM EST

Open thread!

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T-12: The House Impeachment Hearings Begin Tomorrow AM, Here’s What to Expect

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We are just under 24 hours out from the first of the publicly facing House impeachment hearings. The first hearing begins tomorrow at 10:00 AM EST and if we have a functional blog, I’ll have a live feed up for you all.

Tomorrow’s hearings are Ambassador William Taylor, the Acting US Ambassador to Ukraine, at 10:00 AM and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in the afternoon. The next day of public hearings will be Friday when Ambassador Yovanavitch, the former US Ambassador to Ukraine will be testifying.

Next week’s schedule was released earlier today.

The procedure for these hearings will be that the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), Congressman Schiff, and the ranking member, Congressman Nunes, will each make an opening statement. Each session’s witness will then be given a chance to make an opening statement if they so desire. Questioning will begin with a forty-five minute round of questioning for the committee chair and ranking member, rather than the 5 minute rounds we’ve become accustomed to over the past several years. It has already announced that Congressman Schiff’s time will be taken by the majority (Committee) counsel, Dan Goldman, a former Federal prosecutor and former NBC/MSNBC legal analyst who was specifically hired by Congressman Schiff back in February to oversee this investigation. It is not clear yet whether Congressman Nunes will do the questioning himself, have his counsel conduct the questioning, or some combination thereof. It is important to remember that Congressman Schiff is, himself, a former Federal prosecutor and one of the few who has successfully prosecuted a case involving a US official engaged in spying for a hostile foreign power. Goldman was involved in very high profile prosecutions of Genovese crime organization members. Congressman Nunes has a degree in agriculture, states his occupation as farmer, but his family farm is now in Iowa, not in his congressional district in California. So expect more of the conspiracy theory laundering that Congressman Nunes has been doing throughout the closed door depositions when he could be bothered to actually show up to them.

After that, the questioning will devolve back to the alternating five minute blocks of questioning for each of the remaining Democratic and Republican members of the committee. I fully expect that the Republican members, like they do for every hearing, will have a coordinated a list of questions intended to derail and sidetrack the hearings into conspiracy theory territory so they can launder their misinformation, disinformation, and agitprop through the hearings. And since Congressman Jordan (R-Men’s Showers) has been temporarily placed on the committee so he can do his jacket off, sleeves rolled up, rapid fire, staccato badgering of witnesses, I fully expect a lot of the Republican questioning time will be yielded back to him so he can badger at will as we’ve seen in House Oversight Committee hearings earlier this year. The Democratic members of the committee, unlike their Republican counterparts, are largely former Federal and state prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and staff judge advocates in the US military so their questions will at least be on topic and germane even if they’re not coordinated. And they really should be coordinated, but I’m not counting on that type of message discipline in strategic communication.

Congressman Schiff has established the rules so that all of the various points of order and personal privilege and parliamentary procedure will be dealt with at the end of each hearing day to avoid the Republican members of the committee from grinding the hearing to a halt for up to an hour as soon as it begins as they’ve done with other high profile televised hearings over the past 10 months.

I have no idea what time the ritual bodily ejection of Congressman Gaetz (R-DUI) from the committee chambers is scheduled for. You’ll just have to watch the whole thing. Personally, I’m hoping Congressman Schiff has a Gaetz sized trebuchet installed so they can really go for distance! (that was sarcasm, lest anyone think I’m advocating for violence against Congressman Gaetz).

Expect a lot of what we already know from the now released deposition transcripts to be publicly confirmed. Expect the committee Republicans, their staff, and Congressman Gaetz to be disruptive and try to turn the hearings into a circus. And, provided the blog is actually up, running, and functioning with the change over to the new site, expect that I’ll have a live stream of the proceedings up as soon as I can get access.

Open thread.

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Black PSYOP Part II: The Republicans Are Trying To Turn the US Congress Into an Information Laundry for Misinformation, Disinformation, and Information for Provocation,

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On October 25th I went over what a Black PSYOP is and how the President’s attempt to extort Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election on his behalf by having newly elected President Zelensky go on CNN and announce his government was opening investigations into the Bidens and Ukraine’s conspiracy with the Democrats to fix the 2016 election for Secretary Clinton and frame Russia for doing it (NEITHER OF THESE THINGS IS TRUE!) is a Black PSYOP. But they form the basis of the conspiracy theories, rooted in Russian disinformation planted in late Spring 2014 about the Bidens and during the 2016 election via Paul Manafort, that are at the center of the President’s animosity to Ukraine and Attorney General Barr’s, and the House and Senate Republican caucus’s, attempts to validate these conspiracy theories to protect and please the President.

To briefly recap:

Psychological Operations, popularly known as PSYOP, are the weaponization of information for effect. The effect being to influence the targeted population, whether a group, an organization, a society, an element within a society, or a government, to either undertake an action or to prevent an action from being taken. Black PSYOP refers to the attempts to launder the influence operation through a legitimate third party that is not connected to those conducting the influence operation.

Before we go further, let’s just get the documentation of why the two different conspiracy theories that the President and his surrogates have internalized and are pushing, are completely made up out of whole cloth. The accusation against the Bidens was first planted in Russian state backed media in April of 2014: to muddy the waters around Putin scarfing up Crimea and invading eastern Ukraine, as well as dirty up VP Biden and Secretary Kerry who were considered two potential candidates for the Democratic nomination in 2016.

The conspiracy theory that Ukraine conspired with the Democratic Party to fix the 2016 election for Secretary Clinton and to frame Russia for it was created by Russian military intelligence (GRU) and pushed to Paul Manafort via his GRU handler Konstantin Kilimnik. Manafort started pushing this conspiracy theory on the President in 2016. The purpose of this conspiracy was, of course, to create a plausible reason for the President to lift the sanctions that President Obama had placed on Russia because Russia, according to this conspiracy theory, are innocent victims of those scheming, malevolent Democrats and Ukrainians. This is, of course, a lie.

In my 25th October post I delineated the three domestic lines of effort of the Black PSYOP the President, AG Barr, and his surrogates were undertaking. Over the past two weeks we’ve seen the opening up of a fourth domestic line of effort, by Republican members of the House of Representatives. This fourth domestic line of effort in the Black PSYOP is to use the impeachment hearings and eventual trial in the Senate – from the behind closed doors depositions to the public hearings set to start tomorrow to whatever Senator Graham and AG Barr are cooking up in their meetings about AG Barr’s line of effort in the Black PSYOP – to launder both the conspiracy theories through the US Congress. This is why the Republican members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and their staffers, including the minority counsel, keep asking questions of witnesses like Fiona Hill and LTC Vindman about Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine, Ukraine’s conspiring with the Democrats to steal the 2016 elections and frame the Russians and the Trump campaign for doing so, and trying to get the name of the person they believe to be the whistleblower into the transcripts that will be released publicly. All of this is being done to launder these conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation, and information for provocation into the Congressional Record and through the House impeachment hearings into the mainstream media. From there, like every other good Black PSYOP, once the information has been laundered through legitimate sources, in this case the US Congress, the broadcast networks, the mainstream cable news networks (CNN and MSNBC), and the mainstream print and digital news media, the laundered conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation, and information for provocation can then be effectively weaponized in support of the President’s reelection efforts in 2020, as well as other Republican and conservative movement efforts.

Forewarned is, hopefully, forearmed.

Open thread!

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Veterans Day 2019: Veterans in Exile

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Senator Duckworth is a national treasure.

And the President, the Vice President, Stephen Miller, DHS Secretary Kelly, DHS Secretary Nielsen, Acting DHS Secretary McAleneen, Acting USCIS Secretary Cucinelli, Acting Director of ICE Homan, Steve Bannon, and every single American that supports these officials and their actions is a national disgrace. And the next president, provided she or he is a Democrat, damn well better bring these veterans home and hold all of the above to account. I don’t care if some of these veterans have criminal records, I don’t care if some of them have serious PTSD or other issues from their service that led to those criminal records or otherwise somehow violating their immigration status. I don’t care if some of them are undocumented. They raised their hands, they took the oath, and they served the US, many if not most in harm’s way, which is something no one in the Trump family has ever done across five generations in the United States. These people disgust me!

Open thread!

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Video test

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<iframe src=”https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/embedded-video/mmvo73175621578” width=”560″ height=”315″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” allowfullscreen=”allowfullscreen”></iframe>

 

<iframe width=”400″ height=”500″ frameborder=”0″ src=”https://www.bbc.com/news/av/embed/p07tmq0t/50370715“></iframe>

 

<iframe width=”416″ height=”234” src=”//fave.api.cnn.io/v1/fav/?video=business/2019/11/07/disney-streaming-analysis-orig.cnn-business&customer=cnn&edition=domestic&env=prod” frameborder=”0″></iframe>

 

<iframe width=512 height=330 src=’https://www.c-span.org/video/standalone/?466185-5/washington-journal-stew-magnuson-discusses-us-defense’ allowfullscreen=’allowfullscreen‘ frameborder=0</iframe>

Second attempt failed using the text tab and I’ve deleted it because it broke the post’s, if not the blog’s, formatting.

Here’s the third attempt, using the Add Media button.

 

This seems appropriate though. Sort of. Maybe.

Video testPost + Comments (29)

US Marine Corps 244th Birthday

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The US Marine Corps is 244 years old today. And yes, there will be cake!

For those who have never participated in a USMC birthday, there is a very interesting tradition and ritual involved. The cake is escorted by Marines, including the most senior (oldest) and the most junior (youngest) Marines in attendance. The cake is then cut with a Mameluke sword, which is the style/type of sword worn by Marines as part of their dress uniforms. The first slice is then presented to the guest of honor in attendance. The second piece is then presented to the oldest Marine present out of respect. He or she then passes that slice of cake to the most junior Marine present to signify the passing of experience knowledge from the oldest to the newest members of Corps. Here’s B-roll from the cake cutting ceremony at Camp Pendelton this year.

Here are US Marine Corps Commandant, Gen. David H Berger’s and Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Troy E Black’s birthday message to the Corps.

And since it’s a long holiday weekend:

Open thread!

 

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Kristallnacht 81 Years Later

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Tonight is the 81st anniversary of the NAZI pogrom of November 1938 known as Kristallnacht.

I’m not sure 81 years on what there is left to say. Especially that I didn’t say in a post memorializing this day last year and the year before and the year before that and the year before that… Or in the posts I’ve done on the Red Summer or any other number of atrocities.

Perhaps we just need to pay attention because the revanchist, neo-fascist, and neo-nationalist descendants of the NAZIs and the other fascists that set the conditions for and carried out the atrocities on Kristallnacht and the even worse atrocities during the Holocaust proper still need to be combatted. They need to be exposed whenever possible. Dragged out into the sunlight for all to see and, should it come to it, once again physically combatted until they are defeated on the battlefield as they were during WW II.

Just this past week a neo-NAZI was arrested for trying to blow up a synagogue in Pueblo, Colorado. A young African American man had to stand his ground in Georgia in the face of a racist attack from a now deceased white man.* And we learned that the President and his racist, white supremacist administration have actually separated an additional 1,500 migrant children from their parents and that number may still be an undercount. I’m sure there are more examples of the revanchist, racist, and fascist throughline that runs from Kristallnacht in 1938 to the President, his administration, his surrogates, his supporters, and the tyrants and dictators that he so idealizes with just a few minutes more searching, but I don’t think I need to belabor the point.

Also, the Auschwitz Memorial is trying to get 750,000 followers by the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 2020. So if you’re on Twitter, give them a follow!

Open thread.

* I’m actually surprised it has taken this long for a person of color to have to use force/lethal force to defend him or herself from a white racist’s attack. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in the courts, given that Georgia is a stand your ground state, but the person who stood his ground this time is African American. As I’ve written here many times in comments, I expected this to happen. And I expect that once white people realize that the old maxim that “G-d made man, Samuel Colt made all men equal” doesn’t just apply to white people, they’ll freak out. I’m honestly not sure what the nature of that freak out will be. It might be a response similar to that of then Governor Reagan’s to Black Panther’s openly carrying unarmed long guns in the California state capitol building by signing gun control legislation. Or it may be more similar to the Tulsa Race Riot, the Red Summer, and the response to Forest Joe’s slave revolt in the 1820s among others. But if people of color exercise their statutory rights to self defense, and they are both justified in doing so and do so in response to attacks on their persons and property by racist whites, there will be a backlash. And we all need to be prepared for it.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, Allow Me To Introduce To You the Political Genius of Mayor Bloomberg

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Mayor Bloomberg may be a decent person in his personal life. He certainly is as wealthy as he claims and, as far as anyone knows, he made that fortune legally. The one thing he is not is a Democrat or aligned with even the center to center right most constituencies within the Democratic Party. I give you exhibits 1 through 7!

And the recounting above doesn’t even get into his authoritarian streak as NY City mayor, which, to be honest, verged on the creepy, which ranged from asserting he had the second largest intelligence and security apparatus in the world and was not afraid to use it to trying to ban Big Gulps. The fact that he’s supported some of the worst ideas in policing and law enforcement, which has left him a pariah among African Americans in New York. And his bankrolling of a number of gun control organizations and his public support for gun control make him a pariah in the fifteen or so states where the 2020 presidential election is actually going to be contested. And that includes among some of the Democratic and Democratic leaning Independent voters in those states.**

I’m not particularly worried about his announcement this week. He’s made it clear he won’t run third party because unlike Howard Schultz and the four dumbeats that were his principal advisors, he understands Durveger’s Law and doesn’t want to risk creating the conditions that would allow the President to once again eke out a narrow victory in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote. And he’s not going to be the Democratic nominee because he’s out of touch with all but a slim sliver of one of the constituencies that make up the broad multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-generational coalition that is the Democratic Party in 2019. That said, I’d wish he and Steyer would use their money for far more productive purposes in the 2020 election, but I’m not advising either of them and doubt I’d ever be asked to.

Open thread.

* In the next few days I’ll have a more substantive post about the 2020 campaign.

** This is not an attempt to ignore the need for reasonable firearm regulation, nor to argue against it, just a realistic assessment that this issue is fraught with danger for the potential Democratic nominee, as well as Democrats down the ballot from the presidential election. And before anyone starts, I’ve seen estimates that about 60% or so of concealed weapons license holders are registered Democrats and Democratic leaning Independents in Florida even though there aren’t any firm numbers of the political affiliations of the nearly 2 million Floridians with concealed weapons licenses. And yes, I think that percentage is high, though it wouldn’t surprise me if it wasn’t close to a 50-50 split. (this paragraph has been edited for clarity)

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Election Returns!

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With 99% of precincts reporting, but all the votes in (don’t ask me what that means, I just have a PhD that’s joint in political science…) Democrat Andy Beshear has been declared the winner of the Kentucky gubernatorial race by a little over 5,000 votes. Governor-elect Beshear has already given his victory speech and confirmed that he will restore voting rights for over 140,000 Kentuckians who have had their civil right to vote taken away because of the legacy of Jim Crow.

Governor Bevin, gracious and classy as always (that was sarcasm), has, of course, refused to concede claiming irregularities. Those irregularities are, of course, that he lost the election.

Anyhow, there is no automatic recount in Kentucky. Governor Bevin would have to request one. If he actually does so, the request is made in a petition to a state of Kentucky court and whichever judge is assigned the case will determine if a recount does or does not occur. Given Bevin’s known proclivity for being a raging asshole, I don’t expect him to go quietly, gracefully, and/or professionally into the political night. But we’ll see, so stay tuned.

In Virginia the Democrats have flipped both chambers in the Virginia state legislature giving them unified control of Virginia’s executive and legislative branches.

This wonderful election result also happened in Virginia!

Both of these results, in Kentucky and in Virginia, are exceedingly important going into the next congressional reapportionment as it will make it very hard to gerrymander Kentucky’s congressional and state legislative districts as Governor-elect Beshear will have a veto over whatever maps the Kentucky legislature produces and the Democrats control the entire process in Virginia.

That leaves the Mississippi gubernatorial race. As of right now Republican Tate Reeves is leading Democrat and incumbent Attorney General Jim Hood.

Mississippi was always going to be a tough pickup, even for Hood who has won statewide four times. One of the reasons for this is that Mississippi has a Jim Crow based electoral system for all statewide races that aren’t for the US Senate. Ian Millhiser has the details:

Jim Hood is a political unicorn. A Democrat, Hood nonetheless has won four consecutive statewide elections in the red state of Mississippi — all of them for attorney general. Now he hopes to add a new line to his résumé. He’s the Democratic candidate for governor in Tuesday’s election. And the polls suggest that he’s got a real fighting chance.

But there’s a catch. Mississippi held a constitutional convention more than a century ago to, in the words of one former state governor and US senator, “eliminate the n***er from politics.” One still-remaining vestige of that convention is the unusual way the state conducts its statewide elections.

For statewide positions other than US senator, Mississippi uses a system similar to the electoral college. It’s not enough for a candidate to simply win the statewide popular vote. Rather, they must win both a majority of the popular vote and win a majority of the state’s 122 state House districts. If no candidate clears both of these hurdles, the House chooses the winner from the top two candidates.

Thus, as a practical matter, Mississippi’s system all but ensures that Reeves will win the election, even if a majority of the state’s voters prefer Hood (the incumbent, Republican Phil Bryant, cannot run again due to term limits). Republicans currently control almost 60 percent of the state’s House of Representatives. And state House districts are gerrymandered in a way that would make it very difficult for Hood to win a majority of those districts. Though there is a chance that the courts could intervene to declare Hood the winner of the election if he wins the popular vote.

Hood has his work cut out for him regardless of the Jim Crow legacy in Mississippi’s constitution. There is a lawsuit pending to overturn this racist, neo-Confederate, white supremacist portion of the Mississippi constitution. The plaintiffs are being represented by Democratic election lawyer supreme Marc Elias. And the Federal district court judge who is assigned the case has clearly stated that if Hood wins the popular vote, but loses the election because of the Jim Crow legacy constitutional provisions, that he is likely to overturn that provision and declare Hood the governor. He made it clear he wouldn’t preemptively do it because the voters who brought the suit hadn’t suffered any harm as the election hadn’t happened yet, but that he would rule if the election winds up going in Reeves’ favor despite Hood winning the statewide popular vote. Of course this would be appealed first to the extremely conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is chock full of Federalist Society extremists and then, potentially, to the Supreme Court. Where, given that Mississippi’s constitution is discriminating on the basis of race in regard to how it allows Mississippians to elect/select their governor, one wonders if Chief Justice John Roberts would side with the liberal justices to overturn this Jim Crow legacy because, as he famously stated when striking down the pre-clearance enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, that the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. Consistency, hobgoblins, small minds…

There is some good news in the Mississippi results, even if they are tied to a Republican being elected.

Anyhow, we wait and see what Mississippi will bring us.

Open thread!

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Public Service Announcement!

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For those of you asking about me in comments to various posts, I spent the past two week’s or so with my annual autumnal sinus infection. I did manage to catch it early, got to my doctor’s as soon as I was sure it was a sinus infection and not my allergies, and got the script for the antibiotics straight away. The good news is after a ten day course of generic levaquin, I’m back to feeling human.

The bad news, however, is your public service announcement: DO NOT MIX levaquin and salsa verde/green chili!

Open thread!

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Black PSYOP, l’Affaire Ukraine, AG Barr’s Investigation, and the Impeachment Inquiry of the President

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The short definition of Psychological Operations, popularly known as PSYOP, is the weaponization of information for effect. The effect being to influence the targeted population, whether a group, an organization, a society, an element within a society, or a government, to either undertake an action or to prevent an action from being taken. Black PSYOP refers to the attempts to launder the influence operation through a legitimate third party that is not connected to those conducting the influence operation. Former FBI Special Agent and Counterintelligence Officer Asha Rangappa provided an excellent run down with one of the classic historical examples in a tweet thread on Tuesday.

Yesterday, Julian Sanchez’s tweeted an analysis of the leaks indicating that the DOJ (read AG Barr) had opened a criminal investigation into how the counterintelligence investigation into the President’s campaigns contacts and connections with both formal and informal Russian state actors, as well as Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was started and undertaken. I think his assessment is plausible. You can find that thread here:

With one exception. Specifically that Sanchez doesn’t tie what he’s describing in to the larger influence operation. That larger operation, which is a domestically focused Black PSYOP, has three lines of effort, each with multiple parts, and they all are now interconnected.

1) The Ukrainian deliverable.
A) The real deliverable wasn’t manufactured dirt on the Bidens. Rather, it was getting Zelensky to go on CNN to announce the opening of an investigation into the Bidens, because CNN is a mainstream news outlet and is in opposition to the President in its reporting. As soon as that happened, the President’s team would have campaign ads running 24/7 with this. They’d be pushing the reporters they often use, or who are primed for this type of cheap high like Ken Vogel, at mainstream outlets to get all over Zelensky’s announcement, thereby further laundering it and disseminating it through mainstream and legitimate outlets.
B) The fallback, when Zelensky wouldn’t play ball, was to have Hannity interview Shokin – the disgraced, corrupt prosecutor who was forced out under pressure from the US, EU, the IMF, and others. From the reporting over the past two or three days, Parnas and Fruman and Giuliani were all going to Vienna to arrange for this to happen the next night, which would be the night after Parnas and Fruman were arrested. It was also the night after Barr both returned to the US from his “fact finding trip”, met with the SDNY, and then had dinner with Rupert Murdoch.
C) The Romania and China gambits are also fallbacks. The President’s senior advisor for trade issues, Peter Navarro refused to answer CNN’s Jim Sciutto’s questions yesterday about whether the PRC had been told that in order to get a trade deal they had to manufacture dirt on Hunter Biden. I think it is reasonable to conclude that his refusal to answer should be taken as a yes. NBC/MSNBC had new reporting on Hunter Biden and Romania earlier this evening.
D) Barr’s criminal investigation is another fallback here. In this case it turns the DOJ into the propaganda laundry.

2) The Firtash initiative. Firtash wants off house arrest in Vienna and out from under the extradition order to send him to the US to face the Federal crimes he’s been indicted for. The reason Firtash wants this done is because he’s Putin’s man in Ukraine’s natural gas industry. If Firtash can get back to Kyiv he can then once again try to take over Ukraine’s natural gas sector, suck it dry of profits, and fuck up its operations, which will force the Ukrainians to buy natural gas from Russia while removing Ukrainian natural gas as an alternative to Russian natural gas for the rest of the EU market. This all benefits Putin, who is Firtash’s krysha (roof/ceiling) in the Russian mob. Just as he is for every other one of these oligarchs aligned with him.
A) Firtash’s efforts weren’t going very far, so he fired his US attorneys and hired Toensing and DiGenova. They then hired Parnas to do their translation work despite it being reported that Firtash and most of his staff speaking fluent and/or functional English.
B) Firtash was laundering manufactured dirt and conspiracy theories about the Bidens, about the Democrats working with Ukraine to steal the 2016 election, etc through Parnas and Fruman and Toensing and DiGenova to Giuliani. Giuliana who was being paid/worked for Parnas, but also somehow also Parnas’s boss.
C) Toensing and DiGenova are also working for free to assist Giuliani with manufacturing dirt on the Bidens.

3) The lift Russian sanctions initiative. Here’s where it all ties together, by laundering these conspiracy theories, especially that the Democrats and the Ukrainians, in conjunction with DNI, CIA, FBI, NSA, and DOJ, conspired to steal the 2016 election by running a false flag (maskirovka) operation to make it look like Russia was actually conspiring with Trump, his campaign, Republicans, and major conservative movement organizations to steal the 2016 election, it provides a fig leaf for Trump to order the lifting of US sanctions against Russia that went on after the seizure of Crimea and the invasion of Donbass and were expanded as a result of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
A) Manafort, through his attorney, was feeding Giuliani this conspiracy theory from jail and then prison.
B) This provides cover to pardon Manafort and Flynn and several others.
C) It was reported today that DiGenova and Toensing are the attorneys representing the conspiracist masquerading as an investigative journalist John Solomon who was (finally) just fired from The Hill. And here is where #3 wraps back into #1. Solomon was laundering all of these conspiracy theories, from Uranium 1 to the Democrats conspired with the Ukrainians, the DNI, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the DOJ to frame the Russians for trying to steal the 2016 election in order to steal the 2016 election for the Democrats to the Biden bullshit.

A couple of final points. Both Giuliani and Toensing and DiGenova are now claiming that Parnas, Fruman, and now, I suppose, Solomon cannot be deposed, questioned, etc by investigators since they were either working for Giuliani and/or Toensing and DiGenova or are represented by them and therefore everything they know is either attorney-client privilege or attorney work product. So you can’t ask Giuliani about what Toensing or DiGenova are doing. Or what Parnas or Fruman are doing. You can’t ask Toensing and DiGenova about what Giuliani, Parnas, and/or Fruman are doing. You can’t ask Parnas and Fruman what Giuliani or Toensing or DiGenova are doing. You can’t ask Toensing and DiGenova what Solomon is doing. You can’t ask Soloman what DiGenova and Toensing are doing. You can’t ask Firtash what Giuliani, Toensing, DiGenova, and/or Parnas and Fruman are doing. You can’t ask Giuliani, Toensing, DiGenova, and/or Firtash is doing. And because Giuliani claims all of this is on behalf of his client, the President, you also can’t, because of executive privilege, ask Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman who are working for him and who he is working for, and/or Toensing and DiGenova who are assisting him pro bono and employing Parnas anything because they are all covered from having to divulge anything or answering any questions under executive privilege.

If this sounds familiar, it is similar to how Roy Cohn handled his legal representation of the organized crime families he represented in New York. They’d hold all their business/decision making meetings in his dining room with him present or with him on the phone in case of an emergency, so it was all covered under attorney-client privilege. Nobody, from any angle of inquiry, can say nothing about nothing and no one because everything is privileged.

Finally, I guarantee that there is an equivalent of the Black PSYOP delineated in #1 queued up for Warren, Sanders, Harris, and Buttigieg as the front runners. And if a new front runner emerges from the primary field, one will be cooked up for them too.

Open thread!

Black PSYOP, l’Affaire Ukraine, AG Barr’s Investigation, and the Impeachment Inquiry of the PresidentPost + Comments (130)

The Gaetz Maneuver or Why Forcing Entry Into a Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) Is a Really Bad Idea

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While Tamara and John covered Congressman Gaetz’s and his colleagues’ stupidity earlier today, I wanted to focus a little more on just why exactly this wasn’t just a stupid stunt, but was very, very, very bad in terms of Information Security (INFOSEC). It has now been reported that Congressman Gaetz gave the House Minority Leader, Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), a heads up about what he had planned.

We don’t know if this was done verbally face to face, by text, or by phone call. My guess is either verbally face to face or phone call. But these chuckleheads seem to be enamored of WhatsApp, which is notoriously insecure despite claiming to be a secure method of texting and calling, so they may have used that.

We also now know that this was coordinated with the President.

In this case, because it was reported, we know it was done by face to face communication.

And this is where the Information Security issues really come into play. If you recall from my posts from May 2018 and September 2019 we know from reporting in Wired and Politico that the President calls, texts, and tweets from a pair of unsecured smart phones and that allied, peer competitor, and hostile foreign countries have set up mobile wireless interception devices near the White House to intercept these electronic communications. Congressman Gaetz has publicly bragged of his relationship with the President. Congressman McCarthy’s has been reported on as well, especially involving red and pink Starbursts candies. If you were an allied, partnered, peer competitor, or hostile foreign power and wanted to try to gain access to the President’s communications, one way to do it would be to try to hack either Gaetz’s or McCarthy’s cell phones. Or those of any number of the other 30 Republican members of Congress and their staffers who pulled this stupid stunt today.

These morons, in an attempt to create a spectacle that will take over the news cycle about impeachment so that the majority of the public that isn’t paying close attention at all times just throws its hands up in disgust, didn’t just force entry into the House of Representatives’ Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), they brought their unsecured cell phones with them. Moreover, they then took imagery with those phones – pictures and/or videos – of classified spaces and, potentially, any classified information that had been taken out in advance of the deposition and was in public view for those members of the House, Republicans and Democrats alike, who actually had the need to know to access it today. And then they started texting and tweeting and emailing that out. On unsecured devices and unsecured and non-governmental networks! This required, as was reported, the SCIF to be closed once they finished their pizza, Chick Fil-A, their stunt and finally gave up and left, so it could be swept and resecured before the delayed deposition could finally take place. What Congressman Gaetz, Congressman Scalise who is the #2 Republican in the House/Republican House Caucus, and their 28 or so colleagues did wasn’t just a stupid stunt, it was a major security violation.

How major? Off the top of my head the number of Federal felonies committed by Gaetz and his colleagues is:

  1. Forced entry into a SCIF
  2. Criminal trespass in a SCIF
  3. Bringing unsecured electronic devices into a SCIF
  4. Taking imagery – pictures and video – of classified spaces and materials on unsecured devices
  5. Transmitting imagery – pictures and video – of classified spaces and materials on unsecured devices to unsecured devices through a variety of unsecured platforms (texting, tweeting, emailing, etc)

It has now been reported that Congressman Thompson (D-MS), the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee has asked the House Sergeant of Arms to take action agains Gaetz and his colleagues.

I don’t know what exactly Congressman Thompson has in mind, as he doesn’t specify in his letter, but here’s what should happen at a minimum.

  1. Each of the cell phones, smart phones, tablets, and/or any other electronic devices that these 30 Republican members of the House and their staffers brought with them into the House SCIF need to be confiscated by the House’s Special Security Officer (SSO).
  2. Each of these devices then needs to be forensically checked for any hacking and/or malware and the results of those checks passed to the appropriate counterintelligence officials for follow up.
  3. Each of these devices should, at a minimum, be completely wiped before being returned to their owners. The appropriate action is to actually destroy them.
  4. The staffers who accompanied these House Republicans should have their access immediately terminated, their clearances suspended pending a completed counterintelligence investigation, and they should be suspended from duties and barred from returning to work until that investigation is completed. While I won’t prejudge the outcomes of such an investigation, frankly, they should be terminated and their files flagged at the Defense Security and Counterintelligence Agency (DSCA), which is now in charge of overseeing all clearances, to prevent them from every obtaining a clearance again.
  5. While I doubt it will happen because they are Constitutional Officers of the United States, because they are elected members of the House of Representatives and will claim their actions today are covered under the Speech and Debate Clause, the 30 or so Republican members of the House should also have their access immediately terminated, their clearances suspended pending a completed counterintelligence investigation, and they should be suspended from duties and barred from returning to work until that investigation is completed. Here too their files should be flagged at the Defense Security and Counterintelligence Agency (DSCA) to prevent them from every obtaining a clearance again.

I expect that while Congressman Gaetz and the 29 or so other Republican members of the House that committed multiple felonies with him this morning are unlikely to face any really serious repercussions, that their staffers will not be so lucky. Those men and women, who based on the video being televised all appeared to be in their 20s and 30s, are likely to have their professional lives ruined by this as they don’t have the same protections that members of the House do. Especially, since Congressman Gaetz has already thrown the staffer that accompanied him to the wolves.

Lest Congressman Gaetz get away with that, here’s the picture of him taking video on his unsecured smart phone when he illegally entered the House’s SCIF. Kind of hard to miss the sign!

I would like to think that Speaker Pelosi has had a long, serious talk with Congressman McCarthy about the behavior of his caucus members, what is and is not appropriate behavior, and what will and will not be tolerated going forward. If she is as good as reported and as many of us believe she is, then nuts will be cut over this, even if public examples are not made.

Regardless, if you were a foreign actor – allied, partner, peer competitor, or hostile – and you’ve been trying to collect Signals Intelligence on what the US is doing, what Congressman Gaetz and his Republican colleagues and their staffers did today was unearned profit.

Open thread!

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The New York Times Botched Their Reporting on Secretary Clinton’s Remarks About a Democratic Primary Candidate Being Groomed

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If you can remember back to last week, The New York Times ran a story that Secretary Clinton had stated that the Russians were grooming one of the female Democratic primary candidates for a third party run as a spoiler to ensure the President’s reelection. She also took a justified and accurate swipe at Jill Stein. It turns out that The New York Times made an error in their reporting. And they’ve corrected it. But, as appears to be standard operating procedure for The New York Times, they didn’t announce the correction. The now corrected article doesn’t actually make logical sense anymore as it includes Congresswoman Gabbard’s initial response to the assumption that Secretary Clinton was referring to her. Congresswoman Gabbard’s initial response was based on the misquote/misreporting that Secretary Clinton stated that the Russians were grooming this unnamed female Democratic candidate.

This really significant error set off days of commentary slamming Secretary Clinton, which included the President weighing in both on Twitter and in remarks to one of the press gaggles he has every day. It also allowed Congresswoman Gabbard who was not named by Secretary Clinton to use this for fundraising. And Congresswoman Gabbard did so using terminology and verbal imagery that is usually only directed at Secretary Clinton by Republicans, conservatives, and Russian bots and trolls! Secretary Clinton is, of course, correct in her analysis, especially as now properly and correctly reported. Some of Congresswoman Gabbard’s biggest promoters, especially on and through social media, are the various neo-nationalists, neo-fasicsts, neo-NAZIs , and white supremacists that are collectively labeled the alt-right and conservative media figures, as well as a host of Russian backed and funded bots and trolls.

This also led to a number of people, including several other Democratic primary candidates, coming to Congresswoman Gabbard’s defense because she’s a veteran. As if current or former US military personnel haven’t unintentionally aided foreign actors from allies to peer competitors to hostile foreign actors, as well as deliberately selling out the US. And the same goes for civilian, non-uniform US personnel. Names like Arnold, Pollard, Manning, Snowden, Hansen, and Ames come right to mind. Just because one has served the US, in uniform or out, in a war zone or in much more permissive environments, doesn’t automatically confer some sort of special protection from doing the wrong thing, intentionally or unintentionally, at a later date.

While Congresswoman Gabbard pledged several months ago that she wouldn’t run as a third party so as not to spoil the election for the Democratic nominee and throw it to the President by allowing him to once again lose the popular vote while eking out a narrow Electoral College victory, this has been a concern for almost 10 months. I delineated this concern last January in a discussion of whether Senator Sanders might be pushed to run third party by his key advisors, supporters, and surrogates if he didn’t get the nomination (emphasis mine)!

Sanders, no matter what he does, has the potential to function as a super spoiler for the Democrats in 2020. Think Jill Stein’s effect on the electoral college on steroids. And if he decides he’s going to be a team player and not do so, his trusted agents won’t play ball and you’ll have the same problem regardless. And we can now add Congresswoman Gabbard to the potential spoilers category emanating from Sanders orbit.

Regardless of what Congresswoman Gabbard may or may not do next year, The New York Times made a huge error here. They misreported what Secretary Clinton said, which sparked several days of controversy and negative reporting, and then, when they realized they’d inaccurately transcribed the quote, they corrected it without announcing they’d made the mistake and the correction. This isn’t responsible. We are currently living in the fifth or sixth year, depending on when you want to date its start, of an unconventional Russian war against the US that uses information warfare to influence Americans to destroy ourselves. The US is not doing a particularly good job of fighting Russia as the US government and most Americans don’t seem to have figured out that we are at war. One of the major effects the Russians are trying to achieve is to influence Americans through the weaponization of information, misinformation, disinformation, and information for provocation in order to enflame American political; ethnic, racial, and religious; rural, urban, and suburban; sexuality/gender; and economic differences so that Americans destroy ourselves. In order to do this they have to use weaponized information for effect. And the effect they are trying to achieve is to make it impossible for Americans to both agree on what is true, factual, and accurate and, in many cases, even know what is true, factual, and accurate. The objective is to make it so that for Americans nothing is true and, therefore, anything and everything is possible. The New York Times needs to stop doing this. Not least of which because they do it over and over and over again and that pattern leads to an ugly conclusion: that as an organization they’re doing it on purpose. But even if they aren’t doing it on purpose, what they’re doing only assists the Russian’s information war against the US.

Open thread!

The New York Times Botched Their Reporting on Secretary Clinton’s Remarks About a Democratic Primary Candidate Being GroomedPost + Comments (105)