Russia

The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will Be

by Adam L Silverman| May 19, 202010:21 pm| 34 Comments

This post is in: America, An Unexamined Scandal, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Russia, Russiagate, Saudi Arabia, Silverman on Security, Trump-Russia

The President, Republican members of the House and the Senate, Fox News personalities and talking heads, the President’s surrogates on other broadcast and cable news shows, the conservative social, digital, and news media, and the President’s campaign officials and surrogates have been calling for the release of the email that former Assistant to the President-National Security Advisor (AP-NSA) Susan Rice sent to herself in January 2017 as a memorialization of the meeting about what the FBI’s counterintelligence officials had been discovering about LTG (ret) Flynn and his activities before he joined the President’s 2016 campaign, during the campaign, and during the transition.

This was purposefully conflated with unmasking by Congressman Nunes as part of his agitprop that President Obama and his senior officials spied on the President’s campaign, including seeking to unmask LTG (ret) Flynn in signals intelligence collected on foreign targets. When the Trump administration declassified and released Rice’s email to herself, they only declassified and released part of it. Which, of course, led to screaming and yelling about coverups and conspiracies. Dr. Rice has long requested they declassify the whole email, as well as the transcripts of LTG (ret) Flynn’s calls with Ambassador Kislyak, as well as other Russian officials, and officials from other countries. Earlier today the Trump administration declassified and released the remainder of Dr. Rice’s email and no surprises at all, there’s nothing untoward at all in it.

As can be clearly seen from reading the email, no one involved did anything untoward, unethical, and/or illegal. As was the case with the unmasking conspiracy theory, there is no there there.

Here is Dr. Rice’s statement from this afternoon:

And while Republican elected officials* and their surrogates are trying to spin this as evidence of illegality, it isn’t. And the most amusing part of today is that Senator Graham hung his tuchas way, way, way, way out over the edge this morning expecting to turn this into a scandal that he could weaponize on behalf of the President’s, as well as his own, reelection chances.

This could backfire on Graham-Trump.
Graham letter to Grenell, Barr asks for new list of unmasking requests that revealed Trump campaign/transition associates "and the reason given for any such request."
Likely to show national security threats involving those US persons. pic.twitter.com/h2nzo0GQco
— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) May 19, 2020

Ooopsie!!!!!

To quickly summarize:

Dr. Rice’s email to herself memorializing the 5 JAN 2017 meeting with President Obama, VP Biden, FBI Director Comey, herself, and several others clearly indicates that nothing untoward, unethical, and/or illegal took place. Rather, President Obama made it very clear that everything was to be done by the book.
The release of the entire email further undercuts the Congressman Devin Nunes created agitprop and conspiracy theory that President Obama ordered the FBI to spy on the President’s 2016 campaign and he knows this because the evidence is being covered up in Dr. Rice’s email to herself, which is classified.
That email is now declassified and released and once again Congressman Nunes is unmasked as a none too bright, conspiracy mongering fabulist.
The declassification and release of Dr. Rice’s entire email memorializing the 5 JAN 2017 meeting undercuts Senator Graham’s plans for a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation to get to the bottom of these allegations, because the declassified email shows those allegations to be complete bullshit.

Open thread

* Obligatory:

The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will BePost + Comments (34)

The Senate Select Committee On Intelligence Has Validated the Intelligence Communities Sources, Methods, and Findings That Russia Interfered In the 2016 Election To Help Elect Trump President

by Adam L Silverman| April 21, 20206:52 pm| 46 Comments

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

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) has issued the fourth volume of its bipartisan report examining Russian interference in the 2016 elections. This fourth volume specifically focused on reviewing the US Intelligence Community’s (IC) assessment of that interference. The SSCI, in this fourth volume, has validated the IC’s sources, methods, and findings. They also found that multiple intelligence disciplines were used to attribute the hacking to Russia, which debunks the conspiracy theory that someone created the computer evidence to frame Russia. In short, the US IC had multiple sources and used multiple methods to come to this conclusion. The SSCI found that the investigation was properly predicated and undertaken and that there was no political pressure placed on the analysts. The SSCI report noted that the Steele Dossier was not used by the IC as source material for its analysis and assessment and that it is only included in an annex because the FBI insisted it had to be based on the directive the FBI received to conduct its part of the investigation. Finally, and just as importantly, the SSCI has concluded that not only did Russia interfere in the 2016 election, they did so specifically to elect Trump president.

This report undercuts Attorney General Barr’s repeated lies about the investigation into Russian efforts in the 2016 campaign and its efforts to both support the President’s 2016 campaign to ensure his election and to make contacts with the campaign to do so. It also undercuts the basis that AG Barr has provided to US Attorney John Durham as the predicate for his investigation into whether senior Obama administration officials, including Director of National Intelligence Clapper, Director of Central Intelligence Brennan, and Director of the FBI Comey, as well as other senior officials such as Deputy Director McCabe, acted illegally in an attempt to prevent Trump from being elected president. The SSCI’s findings all confirm DOJ IG Horowitz’s own findings, which AG Barr has both misrepresented and ignored. I do not think that this will stop the bogus investigation that AG Barr has tasked US Attorney Durham with conducting.

Here are the findings (bold dashes indicate redacted materials – the big black bars didn’t copy and paste):

I. (U) INTRODUCTION
(U) The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence acknowledges the impressive accomplishment in drafting and coordinating the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which was completed as a “Memorandum for the President” on December 30, 2016, – and a declassified version dated January 6, 2017, and made available to the public on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) website. The Committee’s review focused on the highly compartmented “Memorandum to the President.”
II. (U) FINDINGS
1. (U) The Committee found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidentialelection. On the analytic lines of the ICA, the Committee concludes that all lines are supported with all-source intelligence, although with varying substantiation. The Committee did not discover any significant analytic tradecraft issues in the preparation or final presentation of the ICA.
(U) The ICA reflects proper analytic tradecraft despite being tasked and completed within a compressed time frame. The compact time frame was a contributing factor for not conducting formal analysis of competing hypotheses.
(U) The differing confidence levels on one analytic judgment are justified and properly represented. Those in disagreement all stated that they had the opportunity to express differing points of view. The decision regarding the presentation of differing confidence levels was the responsibility of the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Brennan and the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) Admiral Michael Rogers, both of whom independently expressed to the Committee that they reached the final wording openly and with sufficient exchanges of views.
(U) Multiple intelligence disciplines are used and identified throughout the ICA. Where the Committee noted concerns about the use of specific sources, in no case did the Committee conclude any analytic line was compromised as a result.
(U) In all the interviews of those who drafted and prepared the ICA, the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions. All analysts expressed that they were free to debate, object to content, and assess confidence levels, as is normal and proper for the analytic process.
2. (U) The Committee found that the agencies responsible for the !CA-CIA, NSA, and FBI, under the aegis of ODNI-met the primary tasking as directed by President Obama, which was to assemble a product that reflected the intelligence available to the Intelligence Community (IC) regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election.
3. (U) The Committee found that the ICA provides a proper representation of the intelligence collected by CIA, NSA, and FBI on Russian interference in 2016, and this body of evidence supports the substance and judgments of the ICA.
– Regarding FBI, the ICA states, in its “Scope and Sourcing” introduction, that “[w]e also do not include information from ongoing investigations.” – The Committee found that the information provided by Christopher Steele to FBI was not used in the body of the ICA or to support any of its analytic judgments. However, a summary of this material was included in Annex A as a compromise to FBI’s insistence that the information was responsive to the presidential tasking.
4. (U) The Committee found the ICA makes a clear argument that the manner and aggressiveness of the Russian interference was historically unprecedented. However, the ICA and its sources do not provide a substantial representation of Russian interference in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, as the Committee understands was part of the President’s original tasking.
5. (U . . – ) The Committee found that the ICA did not provide a set of policy rec~ations on how to respond to future Russian active measures, which was part of the tasking the President conveyed to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper. The ICA did include, in the compartmented version, an unclassified section independently produced by OHS, FBI, and the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), “OHS/FBI/NIST Recommendations : Options to Protect and Defend US Election Infrastructure and US Political Parties.”
(U) The absence of policy recommendations was deliberate, due to the well-established norm that the IC provides insight and warning to policy makers, but does not itself make policy.
6. (U) The Committee found the ICA would benefit from a more comprehensive presentation of how Russian propaganda-as generated by Russia’s multiple state-owned platforms-was used to complement the full Russian influence campaign.
(U) Open source collection is a long-standing discipline for CIA and other elements of the IC, and open source reporting is used throughout the ICA to support specific analytic assertions. However, open source reporting on RT and Sputnik’s coverage of WikiLeaks releases of Democratic National Committee (DNC) information would have strengthened the ICA’s examination of Russia’s use of propaganda. On this point, the Committee finds that Annex – of the ICA — “Open Source Center Analysis: Russia: Kremlin’s TV Seeks to Influence Politics, Fuel Discontent in US,” published December 12, 2012-should have been updated to provide a summary of Kremlin propaganda in 2016, thereby making a more relevant contribution to the ICA. An update to this assessment was not produced by the Open Source Enterprise until after the publication of the ICA.
7. ———————————————————————————————————————————————– The role of social media has been a significant focus by the Committee and is discussed in a separate volume of this report.

Someone is going to need to do a welfare check on GG and the Intercept crowd. Whomever it is should demand both hazard and danger pay!

Open thread!

The Senate Select Committee On Intelligence Has Validated the Intelligence Communities Sources, Methods, and Findings That Russia Interfered In the 2016 Election To Help Elect Trump PresidentPost + Comments (46)

Open Thread: Russian Interference Programming Note

by Anne Laurie| March 8, 20206:08 pm| 94 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Impeachment Inquiry, Republican Venality, Russia, Saudi Arabia

“Putin, sadly, has got all of our political class, every single one of us, including the media, exactly where he wants us.” Fiona Hill speaks to Lesley Stahl in her first interview since the impeachment inquiry. Watch tomorrow on 60 Minutes. https://t.co/VioR1BrQ7Z pic.twitter.com/LK7Q2mZjEZ
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 7, 2020

Peripherally related:

There’s another reason things turned for the US economy last week… A geopolitical game over oil prices outside US control.
https://t.co/oXJARP3ws7
— Shawn Donnan (@sdonnan) March 7, 2020

At 10:16 a.m. on a wet and dreary Friday morning, Russia’s energy minister walked into OPEC’s headquarters in central Vienna knowing his boss was ready to turn the global oil market upside down.
Alexander Novak told his Saudi Arabian counterpart Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman that Russia was unwilling to cut oil production further. The Kremlin had decided that propping up prices as the coronavirus ravaged energy demand would be a gift to the U.S. shale industry. The frackers had added millions of barrels of oil to the global market while Russian companies kept wells idle. Now it was time to squeeze the Americans.

For over three years, President Vladimir Putin had kept Russia inside the OPEC+ coalition, allying with Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to curb oil production and support prices. On top of helping Russia’s treasury – energy exports are the largest source of state revenue – the alliance brought foreign policy gains, creating a bond with Saudi Arabia’s new leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
But the OPEC+ deal also aided America’s shale industry and Russia was increasingly angry with the Trump administration’s willingness to employ energy as a political and economic tool. It was especially irked by the U.S.’s use of sanctions to prevent the completion of a pipeline linking Siberia’s gas fields with Germany, known as Nord Stream 2. The White House has also targeted the Venezuelan business of Russia’s state-oil producer Rosneft.
“The Kremlin has decided to sacrifice OPEC+ to stop U.S. shale producers and punish the U.S. for messing with Nord Stream 2,” said Alexander Dynkin, president of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow, a state-run think tank. “Of course, to upset Saudi Arabia could be a risky thing, but this is Russia’s strategy at the moment – flexible geometry of interests.”
The OPEC+ deal had never been popular with many in the Russian oil industry, who resented having to hold back investments in new and potentially profitable projects. In particular, Igor Sechin, the powerful boss of Rosneft and a long-time Putin ally, lobbied against the curbs, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.
The Kremlin was also disappointed the alliance with Riyadh hadn’t yielded major Saudi investments in Russia.
For several months, Novak and his team had been telling Saudi officials they liked being in the OPEC+ alliance but were reluctant to deepen production cuts, according to people familiar with the relationship. At the last OPEC meeting in December, Russia negotiated a position that allowed it to keep production fairly steady while Saudi Arabia shouldered big reductions.
When the coronavirus started devastating Chinese economic activity in early February – cutting oil demand in Saudi Arabia’s biggest customer by 20% — Prince Abdulaziz tried to convince Novak that they should call an early OPEC+ meeting in response to cutback supply. Novak said no. The Saudi king and Putin spoke by phone – it didn’t help.
As the virus spread and analysts forecast the worst year for oil demand since the global financial crisis, the Saudi camp was hopeful Moscow could be won round at the next scheduled OPEC meeting in early March. The Russians didn’t rule out deepening cuts, but kept making the point that shale producers should be made to share the pain. Putin, who has been the final arbiter of Russia’s OPEC+ policy since the alliance started in 2016, met oil Russian producers and key ministers last Sunday…

Open Thread: Russian Interference Programming NotePost + Comments (94)

The Weaponization of Intelligence for the President’s Political Purposes: The Coming Influence Operation Against Senator Sanders

by Adam L Silverman| February 22, 20206:04 pm| 44 Comments

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

Last night I wrote that it was a problem that Senator Sanders sat on the information that Vladimir Putin was interfering in the Democratic primaries to elevate his candidacy for a month. That by waiting, by not finding a way to get the information released or even leaked in a manner that he could control to get ahead of the information, he placed himself at the mercy of someone else leaking it. Someone else did leak it. And that leak was not done to assist Senator Sanders or his campaign. By sitting on the information, Senator Sanders made himself vulnerable to the other two principal leaders who also had the information: the President and Vladimir Putin. Neither of whom wants Senator Sanders to be the nominee because they want him to become President. Rather the President wants Senator Sanders to be the nominee because he has determined that Senator Sanders will be the easiest of the Democratic primary candidates to defeat. Vladimir Putin wants Senator Sanders to be the nominee because he has assessed that Senator Sanders is the most likely to create chaos within the Democratic Party, which furthers his goal of seeing the President reelected.

As was easily predictable, the information is now being weaponized by the President’s surrogates.

National security adviser Robert O'Brien tells ABC in interview to air tomorrow that he hasn't seen any evidence of Russia seeking to help Trump. Asked whether Russia might be helping Sanders, he says reports could be credible. "That's no surprise. He honeymooned in Moscow."
— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) February 22, 2020

Assistant to the President-National Security Advisor (APNSA) O’Brien’s statement clearing the President of suspicion, but reaffirming the negative information against Senator Sanders will just be the first of many. Expect the Acting DNI, Ambassador Grennell, to make similar statements. Likely backed up by further leaks and/or official disclosures. US intelligence will be weaponized to dirty up Senator Sanders by the political loyalists the President has placed in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The narrative will be to tie the information that Putin is interfering in the primaries on behalf of Senator Sanders with Senator Sanders long history of support for hard socialist and communist leaders and officials in Central and South America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia. This may not be fair, but this is what is going to happen.

This influence campaign, one which will be carried out not just by surrogates and supporters outside of government, but by actual appointed senior officials in the President’s administration like APNSA O’Brien has done with his statement today are not really intended to effect Senator Sanders’ core supporters. Nor is it really intended to influence the Democratic primary. What it is intended to do is create material for Facebook ads to micro-target more moderate Democrats, Democratic leaning Independents, and formerly Republican leaning Independents, as well as to provide material that can be weaponized to reach these same people on Twitter and other social and digital media platforms. The point of doing this will be to depress Democratic turnout, as well as the turnout of non Democrats that will be needed to ensure an Electoral College victory against the President should Senator Sanders be the Democratic nominee. It is also intended to effect down balance races to maintain the Republican majority in the Senate, flip the House majority back to the Republicans, and capture as many Democratic held governorships and state legislatures as possible before the next round of redistricting after the 2020 census.

I’m not writing this to harm Senator Sanders. I guarantee that there is a similar influence operation already planned for each of the potential Democratic nominees. Whichever Democrat gets the nomination is going to face something similar. We’ve been watching the operation against VP Biden for well over a year now. And we know, because I’ve put it on the front page at least eight times, that the seeds of that influence operation against VP Biden were first sown in 2o14. And that should be a concern to Senator Sanders, his campaign, his key surrogates, and his supporters because Senator Sanders has over 40 years of taking controversial, hard left positions and supporting some of the worst hard left, socialist, and communist leaders outside the US. And because the Soviet Intelligence Services were collecting video and audio on him the entire time he was in Soviet Russia for his honeymoon; video and audio that Vladimir Putin will weaponize if and when he feels the need too. And that’s before the President, his campaign, and his surrogates decide to juxtapose the now leaked intelligence that Putin is acting to aid Senator Sanders in the Democratic primary with Senator Sanders voting record regarding Russia – a voting record that leaves a lot to be desired. He voted against the Magnitsky Act in 2012, the sanctions against Russia in 2014 and 2017, and didn’t vote at all when the sanctions against Russia bill came up in 2019. This voting record combined with the now leaked intelligence that Putin is interfering in the Democratic primary on his behalf is all the President, his campaign, and his surrogates need to argue that the President is the one who has and will continue to stand up to Putin, not Senator Sanders who always votes in Putin’s favor. That’s not my argument, that is me anticipating the President’s argument.

This is the reality of the 2020 election. I warned everyone who reads Balloon Juice that the 2020 election was going to be open information warfare back in March 2019. What is happening should not be surprising to anyone. And if Senator Warren or Mayor Buttigieg or Senator Klobuchar were the front runners right now, we would have different weaponized information to produce influence being deployed against them right now. And if one of them should become the front runner, we will.

Open thread.

The Weaponization of Intelligence for the President’s Political Purposes: The Coming Influence Operation Against Senator SandersPost + Comments (44)

Senator Sanders and the President Have Both Been Briefed that Vladimir Putin Is Interfering On Their Behalf In the 2020 Presidential Election

by Adam L Silverman| February 21, 20209:03 pm| 151 Comments

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

The Washington Post has reported that both Senator Sanders and the President have both been briefed that Vladimir Putin is interfering on both their behalf in the 2020 election:

U.S. officials have told Sen. Bernie Sanders that Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest, according to people familiar with the matter.
President Trump and lawmakers on Capitol Hill have also been informed about the Russian assistance to the Vermont senator, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
It is not clear what form that Russian assistance has taken. U.S. prosecutors found a Russian effort in 2016 to use social media to boost Sanders campaign against Hillary Clinton, part of a broader effort to hurt Clinton, sow dissension in the American electorate and ultimately help elect Donald Trump.

Senator Sanders both gave The Washington Post an appropriate response, but had his campaign issue it as a formal and official one as well.

“I don’t care, frankly, who Putin wants to be president,” Sanders said in a statement to The Washington Post. “My message to Putin is clear: stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do.

Unfortunately Senator Sanders was briefed on this information a month ago!

Sanders tells reporters he learned about Russian interference in his campaign about a month ago.
But asked why it came out now, Sanders points to the fact that the NV caucuses are a day away. And adds sarcastically, "Washington Post? Good friends."
— Abby D. Phillip (@abbydphillip) February 21, 2020

That’s a problem. Despite the briefing being classified there are ways to get ahead of these things and getting the information out, because eventually the information is going to leak out anyway. This information did, indeed, leak out. And it would not surprise me if the President didn’t leak it to try to distract from the reporting about the briefing he and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence received about Putin’s ongoing election interference. The specific problem here is that Senator Sanders knew, the President knew, and Vladimir Putin knew. The rest of us, however, did not know. We may have surmised based on what we know happened in 2016, but we did not know. And that means for the past month the President and Vladimir Putin have had leverage over Senator Sanders. I’m not suggesting that Senator Sanders is an agent of either one’s influence, but by sitting on the information for a month it provided both of them leverage that they could have used against him.

If there is one overarching lesson that we should all take away from what Putin did in 2016 and has been doing since 2016 is that when senior officials, or those seeking high office, refuse to be forthcoming about their activities, actions, and interests (personal, professional, business), it provides the other people that know about these activities, actions, and interests leverage over them. The problem in 2016 wasn’t that the President, as a candidate, was trying to do business in Russia. The problem was he kept lying about it over and over and over all while Putin and several of those around Putin knew the truth. Which provided Putin with leverage over the President. The same dynamic was also at play when Senator Sanders and his supporters demanded to see transcripts of Secretary Clinton’s speeches during the 2016 campaign because they wanted to know what she may or may not have said or promised to those who were paying her to give those talks. There was no indication she promised anyone anything, But the argument then was that it provided the interests paying for her to give a speech leverage on her above and beyond the speaker’s fee and expenses she was paid.

I know, you know, we all know that Senator Sanders is not a witting or unwitting asset of Putin’s. We know that Putin doesn’t actually want him to be president, Putin just wants him or his supporters to create chaos by ripping the Democratic Party apart* in order to achieve the strategic effect that Putin does want: having the President reelected to a second term. Because that strategic effect creates even more chaos, which increases the likelihood that Putin achieves his overarching strategic objective: weakening the US and with it the US created and backed post WW II international order; leaving Putin free to operate with impunity. Loose lips may sink ships, but in this case being forthcoming is the way to ensure operational security and dispel questions and doubts.

Open thread.

* I do not actually know what will happen if Senator Sanders wins the Democratic nomination for president. I would like to believe that we are all mature enough and realistic enough to recognize the threat to the Republic overrides our individual political preferences in a potential Democratic candidate. I would like to say I was sure this would be the case, but I cannot.

Senator Sanders and the President Have Both Been Briefed that Vladimir Putin Is Interfering On Their Behalf In the 2020 Presidential ElectionPost + Comments (151)

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!

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 ProfitPost + Comments (139)

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!

Lordy It’s The Tape: The President’s Fundraising Dinner Tape Has Been ReleasedPost + Comments (128)

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)

Follow The Money!

by Cheryl Rofer| January 16, 20204:26 pm| 26 Comments

This post is in: Rofer on International Relations, Russia, Trump Crime Cartel

Detective-looking guy following dollar signs embedded in pavement to St. Basil’s Cathedral, just across Red Square from the Kremlin

Following the money is difficult and tedious. Each story is detailed, and the stories appear at different times, later overshadowed by the next Trump scandal. In this post, I collect instances of Russian-associated money going into Republican coffers.

There aren’t enough instances to connect into a pattern beyond that theme, although some names occur in more than one example. I hope reporters will see this as a fertile path forward. Foreign money is prohibited in US political campaigns, but there are ways to get around that.

There are probably more – add them in the comments, preferably with a link, if you have them.

Rusal Aluminum Rolling Mill in Kentucky

Shortly after sanctions against Russia were lifted in early 2019, Rusal, a Russian metals company in which Oleg Deripaska has an interest, announced that it would participate in building an aluminum rolling mill in Ashland, Kentucky. Mitch McConnell, of course, is from Kentucky. (Washington Post, New York Times)

Dallas Morning News, Updated May 2018

Donations from several Russian-associated American citizens to campaigns of Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham are documented. The donors are Len Blavatnik, Andrew Intrater, Alexander Shustorovich, and Simon Kukes. There are connections among them and to Rusal, in which Blavatnik holds a 20.5% stake with Viktor Vekselberg. Blavatnik gave $6.35 million to GOP political action committees in 2015-2016, including $2 million from one of his companies to McConnell’s PAC.

Vekselberg is the president of the Renova Group, a Russian conglomerate with interests in aluminum, energy, and other sectors. Intrater is the chief executive of Columbus Nova, Renova’s US investment arm.

Shustorovich, chief executive of IMG Artists, attempted to give the Republican Party $250K in 2000 to support the Bush campaign, but his money was rejected because of his ties to the Russian government. $1 million to Trump’s Inaugural Committee.

From 1998 to 2003, Kukes worked for Vekselberg and Blavatnik. He contributed a total of $283K, much of it to the Trump Victory Fund. He had no significant donor history before that election.

Steven Mnuchin owned a Hollywood financing company with Blavatnik until he sold his stake to accept Trump’s appointment as Treasury Secretary.

The Citizens United decision made these contributions legal.

A quote from the May 17, 2017, Washington Post:

A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016, exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy….

News had just broken the day before in The Washington Post that Russian government hackers had penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee, prompting McCarthy to shift the conversation from Russian meddling in Europe to events closer to home.

Some of the lawmakers laughed at McCarthy’s comment. Then McCarthy quickly added: “Swear to God.”

Ryan instructed his Republican lieutenants to keep the conversation private, saying: “No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here.”

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman

Kevin McCarthy has said he will donate to charity funds totaling about $185,000 received from Rudy Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. His campaign organizations received the money just before McCarthy called for US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich to be removed from her job. Parnas and Fruman have received some of their money from Dmytro Firtash, who is in Austria, fighting extradition to the US on bribery charges and has been a front man for the Kremlin in attempting to gain control of Ukrainian natural gas supplies. Giuliani, who Trump says is his lawyer, has accepted money from Parnas and Fruman. Investigation continues.

Michael Cohen and Essential Consultants Inc.

Columbus Nova, mentioned in the Dallas Morning News article, paid $500,000 to Michael Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants Inc. That company was the vehicle for paying hush money to one of Donald Trump’s mistresses. Viktor Vekselberg and Andrew Intrater were involved. Cohen was the treasurer of the Republican Party, and this payment may have been made while he was in that post.

National Rifle Association (NRA)

The NRA has been closely associated with the Republican Party in fighting limitations on gun ownership. Maria Butina infiltrated the organization as a Russian agent, establishing “lines of communication to advance Russian interests.” An 18-month investigation by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic staff found that the NRA supported Butina’s activities and those of her supervisor, Alexander Torshin in setting up a trip for NRA executives to travel to Russia with the expectation of enhancing their personal business activities. Such use of a nonprofit’s funds is illegal.

Counterintelligence Investigation

A counterintelligence investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election preceded the Mueller investigation, was folded into it, and still continues. We need to hear more from that investigation. That investigation may have turned up the hacking of the Republican National Committee by Russians, from which no information has been leaked.

Hotel in Azerbaijan and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard

This money in this story is not Russian, but rather from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The Trump organization may have laundered money for the Revolutionary Guard through a hotel built in Baku, Azerbaijan. The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson did the investigation and has been trying to get the attention of other media on Twitter, given the current hostilities with Iran. Here’s one of his Twitter threads.

Not money, but it might be useful to cross-check the 16 times that Trump has spoken privately with Vladimir Putin.

Paul Manafort worked for Deripaska and owed him millions of dollars.

This may not be a full listing of Russian money going to Republican candidates and organizations. If you have other examples, add them in the comments, preferably with links.

Russia is not a friend of the United States, so one might ask a number of questions. Why are Republicans willing to accept Russian money? Is there similar evidence for Democrats? The account in the Dallas Morning News says that they are reporting on “99% Republican donations.” Does this money influence officeholders’ opinions and votes?

Seems important to me.

Image source

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

Follow The Money!Post + Comments (26)

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 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)

Moving Into The New Year With Molotov And Ribbentrop

by Cheryl Rofer| December 31, 201912:51 pm| 154 Comments

This post is in: Rofer on International Relations, Russia

In 1939, the Soviet Union formally allied with Nazi Germany and agreed on how to split up the countries located between them. Immediately after, Germany invaded Poland. It is generally thought to be the beginning of World War II. Russia did not acknowledge the existence of the secret protocol on dividing Europe until 1989.

Cartoon by David Low in the *Evening Standard* depicting Hitler greeting Stalin after the invasion of Poland,

But that is not what Vladimir Putin wants you to believe. No, it was dastardly France, United Kingdom, the United States, and others who joined up with Hitler first at Munich, leaving the poor Soviet Union with no choice! Putin has mentioned this in several speeches, and in the last several weeks, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has joined in.

The notorious August 23, 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was not what triggered World War II. The date for the attack on Poland on September 1 had been designated by Hitler in the Fall Weiss directive on April 10, 1939. pic.twitter.com/1a8lc51lzm
— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) December 30, 2019

It was the Munich Betrayal that was a prelude to World War II. The Munich Agreement by Nazi Germany, the UK, France and Italy not only deformed the entire system of international relations, but marked the beginning of the invasion and re-division of Europe. pic.twitter.com/X40YsnDuiJ
— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) December 30, 2019

On April 17, 1939 the Soviet Union once again proposed signing a comprehensive agreement with security guarantees – a proposal that was declined by its Western partners and rejected by the Baltic countries, which categorically refused to participate in any plans against Germany. pic.twitter.com/IAgRkLnW67
— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) December 30, 2019

At the same time Hitler’s war machine was created with the assistance of leading American companies like #GeneralElectric, #GeneralMotors, #Ford and others. The pro-Nazi German American Bund promoted a view of Hitler without any obstacles in the US in the pre-war period. pic.twitter.com/uhSMCLj2Fj
— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) December 30, 2019

And they’re dissing diplomats who disagree with them.

Dear Ambassador, do you really think that you know about history any more than you do about diplomacy? https://t.co/q6IQuwwX1Z
— Russian Embassy, PL (@rusemb_pl) December 30, 2019

The nations Russia has accused of starting World War II are pushing back.

Statement by the Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki. pic.twitter.com/l0Y2ApEhd9
— Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland (@PremierRP_en) December 29, 2019

❝This year, we will commemorate not only 1989, but also the 80 years of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the organization of Nazi and Soviet occupations of Europe which occurred simultaneously and successively.❞

➖ @JY_LeDrian
— France Diplomacy🇫🇷 (@francediplo_EN) December 31, 2019

Even Germany…

German🇩🇪 Ambassador to Poland🇵🇱:

The position of Federal government is clear: Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact served to prepare the criminal war of aggression executed by national-socialist Germany against Poland. Jointly with Germany, USSR participated in forceful partition of Poland. https://t.co/yRDZmUQTOG
— LT MFA StratCom (@LT_MFA_Stratcom) December 31, 2019

And, of course, a lot more from amateur and professional historians on Twitter. If you ever wanted to learn more about the beginnings of World War II, this is your big chance.

It’s hard to know what is motivating this propaganda storm from Russia. Here’s a person I trust.

I presume this is largely for internal consumption. It is hard to believe that he expects to be taken seriously elsewhere. When Russia wants to use WW2 to gain friends tends to divert attention to its sacrifices post-Barbarossa and away from culpability for war's origins.
— Lawrence Freedman (@LawDavF) December 31, 2019

That’s a little unclear, but I think the second sentence is intended to say that when Russia wants to use WW2 to gain friends, it usually talks about its sacrifices rather than the war’s origins.

There is speculation, as you see in the Dalsjö tweet, that it’s in preparation for some sort of military action from Russia. I tend to doubt that – Russia doesn’t need that kind of trouble right now. OTOH, Putin has been feeling cocky about his new weapons designed to deter the United States.

Moving Into The New Year With Molotov And RibbentropPost + Comments (154)

New Year’s Eve Open Thread: “Please to Celebrate in Orderly Manner!”

by Anne Laurie| December 31, 20194:35 am| 87 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Russia

Word of the Day: CAROL-EVEN (n.) the last night of the year
— Haggard Hawks 📚🦅 (@HaggardHawks) December 31, 2019

Russian immigrant and cynic Slava Malamud is my new favorite twitter discovery. In the tradition of Damon Runyon, Hunter S. Thompson, and Charles P. Pierce, he is by profession a sports writer, but both his tweetstream and his blog are broad-ranging. As in this explanation of the Russian winter holiday:

… [T]he only real holiday anyone knows or cares about in late December is the New Year. The secular, godless, multicultural, all-inclusive, gloriously drunk holiday when kids can stay up all night, presents are distributed, and citizens are allowed to harbor a fleeting hope that things might just change for the better with a flip of the calendar.
The New Year became Russia’s major holiday during Soviet times, when it was felt that completely depriving folks of reasons to celebrate was no longer prudent, and that the Soviet Constitution Day (December 30) just didn’t quite cut it as a merry enough occasion. The idea to celebrate the New Year instead of Christmas was such a smashing success that within a generation or two it was utterly ingrained in the Soviet psyche…
The Russian tradition of celebrating New Year with decorating a fir tree indoors dates back thousands of years, probably, and has been copied by other cultures and holidays. Sadly, this occurred shortly before Russians invented copyright laws, so now everyone does it. Wrongly.
Of course, in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire, the tree was coopted by the dark forces of organized religion and mounted (exclusively in rich houses) on January 7, which is when the true Russian Jesus was born by his absolutely non-Jewish mother. But the glorious Communist Revolution had dispensed with all that nonsense, and the tree got itself outlawed for a while, until the wise proletarian government revived the tradition for the secular New Year.
Traditionally, the fir is decorated with glass baubles as well as electric lights in honor of Vladimir Lenin’s glorious invention of the light bulb. Prior to that, many Russians would mount actual lit candles on it, because any new year could be your last one so what the hell. “Fir tree, ignite yourself!”, children yell at New Year parties, quoting the visionary Russian poet Alexander Pushkin who ingeniously predicted the triumph of the Socialist Revolution with his immortal verse: “A flame shall be ignited from a spark!” Every year, several Russian homes majestically burn down on New Year’s Eve from people’s taking these words too literally.
The ornaments, known as “fir toys”, include both the glass globes and other such trinkets familiar in the West, but also cosmonauts, Sputniks, peasant women, revolutionary sailors, village huts, tractors, and, because, Russians are all about realism, squirrels…
Grandpa Frost, or Dedushka Moroz, is a mythical bearded giftman who makes his appearance on New Year’s Night, distributing presents to children who may or may not have studied the works of Vladimir Lenin with due diligence over the course of the year. Said diligence, as well as behavior appropriate to a fierce Russian patriot, are the determining factors in the children’s eligibility to receive free-of-charge presents from the terrible and magnanimous Grandpa. Other factors may involve school grades and manufacturing quotas…
Grandpa Frost wears a long fur-lined coat and a similarly manufactured hat. Unlike the sad American imitation Santa, who apparently has elves murder polar bears for the lining of his coat, Grandpa Frost does his animal-murdering himself, as attested by the club he also carries.
Children who haven’t behaved as becoming a Young Communist Pioneer over the course of the year are sometimes told that the club shall be used on them in lieu of the presents from Grandpa Frost’s bag. According to Grandpa himself, “whoever touches my staff, shall never wake up.”
Grandpa Frost’s preferred method of transportation is a decidedly ground-borne sleigh pulled by a team of three horses, though he isn’t above traveling on foot or by skis. He enters children’s homes proudly and directly, through a front door, occasionally bothering to knock.
Grandpa Frost’s facial expression is rarely jolly and usually conveys the message that Grandpa is not one to be screwed with. In almost all versions of the story his nose is pronouncedly red, which is attributed to both cold weather and habitual drinking…
In Russia, the holiday season lasts between December 31 and January 8, with the period between January 1 and January 8 known as The National Hangover, or Mother Russia Needs To Lay Down a Bit. Almost all businesses are closed, right down to newspapers, which don’t come out the whole week, because small letters make Russia’s head hurt this time of the year…

Many illustrations, mostly vintage, at the link. (Also not to be missed: Malamud’s descriptions of festive Russian cuisine, much of it — as with the centrality of alcohol — reminiscent for me of the mid-50s…)

New Year’s Eve Open Thread: <em>“Please to Celebrate in Orderly Manner!”</em>Post + Comments (87)

Darkrose on Buckle Up, Buttercups (Jun 1, 2020 @ 4:33pm)

Ladyraxterinok on Buckle Up, Buttercups (Jun 1, 2020 @ 4:32pm)

Betty Cracker on A Thorough Depiction of My Current Mood (Jun 1, 2020 @ 4:31pm)

Kay on Buckle Up, Buttercups (Jun 1, 2020 @ 4:31pm)

MisterForkbeard on A Thorough Depiction of My Current Mood (Jun 1, 2020 @ 4:26pm)

Usually wrong but never in doubt.

Verified, but limited!

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail.

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

This is how realignments happen…

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Also, too.

Yes we did.

I personally stopped the public option…

No one could have predicted…

Too inconsequential to be sued

We have all the best words.

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

This Blog Goes to 11…

What fresh hell is this?

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

Naturally gregarious and alpha

The revolution will be supervised.

Not all heroes wear capes.

The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will Be

The Senate Select Committee On Intelligence Has Validated the Intelligence Communities Sources, Methods, and Findings That Russia Interfered In the 2016 Election To Help Elect Trump President

Open Thread: Russian Interference Programming Note

The Weaponization of Intelligence for the President’s Political Purposes: The Coming Influence Operation Against Senator Sanders

Senator Sanders and the President Have Both Been Briefed that Vladimir Putin Is Interfering On Their Behalf In the 2020 Presidential Election

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

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

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

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

Information Security Is Essential!

Follow The Money!

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

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

Moving Into The New Year With Molotov And Ribbentrop

New Year’s Eve Open Thread: “Please to Celebrate in Orderly Manner!”