Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

… down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Let there be snark.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Hot air and ill-informed banter

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

Mission Accomplished!

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Tick tock motherfuckers! Tick fucking tock!

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

We still have time to mess this up!

Dinky Hocker shoots smack!

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail

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AHEM!!!!! The National Security Agency, As Well As Other US Intelligence Agencies, Are Prohibited From Conducting Electronic and Signals Collection Inside the US. But Not In Russia

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There are two interesting takeaways here.

The first is that anyone in the US planning further acts of low intensity warfare and political violence in the US on Parler are now going to be much, much, much, much easier for US intelligence to track. Because Parler’s now being hosted in Russia. MORONS!!!

The second is that this supports the theory that Parler was always a Russian data collection, surveillance, misinformation, and disinformation op to begin with. As this detailed Twitter thread, which I’ll excerpt, seems to suggest:

Much more at the Twitter thread. It doesn’t mean that The guy with the Russian wife, whose mother in law  who is a long time Russian government functionary, and who can’t provide a straight answer about his funding is getting his funding from Russia, but that is a question that needs to be answered.

Open thread!

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Breaking: Alexei Navalny’s Plane Landed Safely In Russia; He Was Immediately Arrested

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Here’s Sky News video of the arrival. There’s a much shorter clip of the arrest as the tram reaches the terminal in the first tweet below the YouTube embed.

I don’t have much more to add other than he and his family have real courage to continue to fight this fight.

Open thread!

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Pwned!

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Alexei Navalny is a Russian critic of the Putin government. He was nearly killed by a Novichok nerve agent in August. Yesterday, he talked to the FSB agent who poisoned his underwear and got a full confession.

Bellingcat is an investigative organization that developed out of Eliot Higgins’s investigations of Syrian munitions, particularly nerve agent munitions, when he blogged as Brown Moses. They worked with CNN and Navalny in this operation.

Bellingcat uses open source information in their investigations. They exposed the two FSB poisoners of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia and have uncovered large amounts of information about nerve agent use in Syria.

[Disclosure: I consult with Bellingcat and occasionally write for them.]

The Bellingcat folks do a good job of telling their own story, with CNN’s help. So I’ll let them give the details. Here’s their full report on the Navalny investigation. The report on the phonecall, with a recording and transcript. The transcript is in English, and the phonecall video has English translation. CNN report.

Navalny called several FSB officers with no luck, then decided to pretend that he was an FSB higher-up who wanted a readout of the operation. It worked stunningly.

Why did they poison his underwear?

Bellingcat has been wildly successful in using open-source information to scoop conventional news sources and, probably, national intelligence services. National intelligence services have been reluctant to admit that open source information can be as useful as their classified sources. Bellingcat is not the only non-governmental organization doing this kind of work. The James A. Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Middlebury’s Monterey campus is also excellent. Datayo is a newcomer and much quieter than I think they should be. The New York Times has recently acquired a visualization unit who use overhead photos.

Bellingcat, with its Skripal and Navalny investigations, have shown that the Russian intelligence services are sloppy in their execution, dropping clues everywhere and leaving far too many things, like telephone numbers out in the open.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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Properly Framing the Recently Acknowledged Russian Hacking of the US Government and Private Sector

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The whole discussion around the recently disclosed Russian hacking – “is it traditional SVR espionage using the cyber domain or is it subversion or is it an act of war?”- is all fascinating and completely misses the two most important points.

The first is that from the Russian perspective this is war. As can be seen in the delineations in the table below:

Properly Framing the Recently Acknowledged Russian Hacking of the US Government and Private Sector

Moreover, Russia considers the information domain to consist of two critical components: the technical side (which includes communications sabotage, electronic warfare, cyber attacks, and other C4ISR sabotage or degradation efforts), and the psychological side. That is demonstrated in the graphic below (from this publication at the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Federation):

Properly Framing the Recently Acknowledged Russian Hacking of the US Government and Private Sector 1

The Russians aren’t making these distinctions, but they’re sure glad that Richard Haass who runs CFR is all over the US news, nat-sec and foreign policy sites, and Twitter muddying the water for them.

From the Russian doctrinal perspective this is part of what they call New Type War, which is how they doctrinally understand hybrid and unconventional warfare these days.

The second, and equally important point, is that it will take months, if not years to figure out everywhere and everything the SVR’s cyber-operators got into, what they actually did inside those systems, and what the actual ramifications are. Since we don’t have months or years, the strategic assumption to drive strategy and operations in response has to be “they got into everything, they’ve compromised everything they could, and we can expect anything and everything that can be controlled by computer code can and will go down at the least optimal time for the US and our allies and the most optimal time for the Russians”. Imagine what happens when the power grid goes down at 12:01 PM on 20 JAN 2020 just to make a point that Biden may now be President of the US, but Putin has control of the US. Or when he takes it down someplace that has a major winter weather event so people freeze to death. Or he has his people tamper with the emergency broadcast systems to cause chaos, injury, and death during a major weather event or other natural disaster – he did a dry run on this back in 2015 in Louisiana.

It’s great that Haass has the luxury from his home office to ponder whether this is a fish or if it is a fowl, but that luxury is a mirage. And I have serious doubts that anyone but GEN Nakasone is taking this seriously right now. Maybe Christopher Wray, but if he is, he’s going to continue to keep his head down and his mouth shut. Ratcliffe isn’t because that man is almost as dumb as Louis Gohmert. O’Brien and the Acting SecDef aren’t because that’s now what they’re being paid to do. From all the reporting Haspell is packing her office up as she knows she’s either getting fired between now and 20 JAN or on 20 JAN. We know the tennis player who is illegally acting as the DHS secretary isn’t. To use a Star Trek analogy: they’ve taken the shields down from inside the ship and have spent a lot of effort to make it look like they’re still up.

As for Trump downplaying it and trying to blame it on China, that also makes no sense. He and his people have spent so much time since 2017 trying to blame stuff on China that every Republican, every conservative, and everyone on conservative news from Fox to OANN to talk radio to Breitbart, and conservative social and digital media no longer call China China. Nor does Pompeo or any elected or appointed Republican official refer to it as either China or by its official name or acronym the People’s Republic of China/PRC. Now it is the Chinese Communist Party/CCP. Oogah Boogah!!! So if “the Chinese Communist Party” is so bad, then having the PRC responsible should be as bad, if not worse, than having Russia do it. And that is beside the point that if the PRC did it, given that they’re a lot more careful and subtle than the Russians, we still probably wouldn’t know about it.

I’ve been making the same point since early spring 2016: we are at war. With Russia. Not just cyberwar or information war, but war. And we’re at war not because we want to be at war with Russia or because it’s good that we’re at war with Russia, but because Russia has been stating for the better part of a decade that they are at war with the US and that the US is the aggressor and the cause of the war. When someone clearly and consistently tells you and demonstrates to you what it is they believe it is foolish to ignore it. My paper on this new, largely non-kinetic/non-lethal form of 21st century war and warfare that deemphasizes military power while leveraging and weaponizing all the other elements of national power was published this past July. It attempts to frame and contextualize the war and warfare that we’re seeing hostile state actors, peer competitors, and regional powers use as part of great power competition, Gray Zone conflict, and subversion. As well as how non-state actors such as violent extremists, ultra wealthy individuals, and corporations that have more financial resources than 90% of nation-state’s gross domestic product are leveraging their own non-state equivalents of national power to wage war for their own benefit and achieve their own objectives as well. The 21st century operating environment is as dangerous as the 20th century one, even as the character and characteristics of war seem to be becoming less kinetic.

Open thread!

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Regarding the Alleged Hunter Biden Materials: This Is Some of the Most Amateur Looking Garbage I’ve Ever Seen

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Since Tucker Carlson, the host of the White Power Hour of Glower Hour, has been told that UPS has found whatever documents and materials he was bitching were stolen last night have been found and will be delivered, I want to make a couple of quick points about the alleged Hunter Biden materials. These will be in line with my previous remarks, but I wanted to add a few things before Tucker starts peddling doctored documents, misinformation, and agitprop on the air tonight.

Cole texted me to ask if I’d seen the repository of alleged Hunter Biden pictures, videos, and emails posted on a site owned by Guo Wengui. I’ve now gone through the materials and here are my takeaways:

  1. These are some of the most amateur looking materials I’ve ever seen!
  2. Some of the pictures are legitimately of Hunter Biden.
  3. Some of the pictures may be of Hunter Biden.
  4. Some of the pictures are clearly altered/adjusted.
  5. Some of the pictures, specifically the vast majority that purport to show actual or simulated sex acts, could be of anybody. Some of these only show the face of one person so it is unclear who the other person is. A lot of them don’t show anyone’s faces, so there is no way to tell who the pictures are of.
  6. The picture of “Malia Obama’s credit card” is most certainly not of Malia Obama’s credit card.
  7. There are NO pictures depicting sex or simulated sex acts with minors/juveniles.
  8. There are several pictures with blurred out faces of women, including one with a blurred out upper body, that have text box overlays asking “are these underage?” Based on the visual evidence presented, there is no way to know, but if they are then everyone in possession of the unaltered photos is in a lot of trouble.
  9. In all the other pictures showing sex or simulated sex acts, the women are clearly not underage.
  10. The picture of the threesome/simulated threesome, which has a text box overlay asking if the women are Malia Obama and one of Hunter Biden’s daughters, is CLEARLY NOT A PICTURE WITH MALIA OBAMA AND/OR HUNTER BIDEN’S DAUGHTER IN IT!!!!! Frankly, I’m not even sure Hunter Biden is in the picture. Specifically, I’m not sure that the picture is not altered.
  11. The couple of network analysis charts are absolute crap. Also, they’re captioned in Chinese, which doesn’t help as my Chinese is limited to martial arts terms. And menu items.
  12. The few emails posted, like the emails published by The New York Post, are dead images. There’s no metadata, so know way to demonstrate their provenance. This implies to me they’re not legit. The same for the photos, though they all have text books with the alleged date, time, and location of where the pictures were taken. But here too, there’s no way to verify any of that.
  13. I did not watch the videos because based on the photos, I’m sure that a few will be of Hunter and some will be doctored, most likely by deep faking them.

This stuff is just incredibly amateurish. They are clearly not intended to persuade anyone, let alone really convince law enforcement or intelligence personnel to take them seriously. Rather, they’re intended to push misinformation and agitprop out through outlets like Carlson’s show on Fox News, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and The New York Post so the President and his key surrogates like Rudy Giuliani can refer to them at rallies and during media hits. And Don Jr. can shitpost them on Twitter.

And now a little bit about Guo Wengui. Guo’s back story is that he’s in self imposed exile from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) because he pissed of Xi and Xi wants him back for what would be a political trial. As a result, Guo took his billions and fled to the US where he’s embraced the hardest of the hard right within the GOP, the conservative movement, and Trumpworld. Guo’s thrown his money around to them as well, which is why he’s funding Bannon’s operations and why Bannon was arrested on Guo’s yacht. They appear to have an initiative they call the New Chinese Federation, which is tied to the Guo backed website that is now posting the alleged Hunter Biden material.

While it is possible that Guo’s story is legit, it is just as likely, and in my professional assessment highly likely, that the story is a cover story*. It’s just too good to be true. Just as the Russians sent a somewhat physically attractive young woman to penetrate the GOP and conservative movement using both gun rights and white Christian religious freedom as the cover story, a cover story that was catnip to the folks at the NRA, other shooting organizations, the National Prayer Breakfast folks (C Street/the Family/the Fellowship), and other white Christian conservative organizations, I think Guo’s cover story is engineered to be equally irresistible.

The Trumpified GOP and conservative movement have over the past four years stopped talking about, as in literally have stopped using the terms China or the PRC and started screaming about the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, and/or the ChiComs. This is language used for the boundary maintenance of GOP/conservative/Trumpworld identity by allowing for easy identification of those who speak the right words (the literal definition of political correctness that came out of the crypto-fascist movement of Father Coughlin).

Guo’s story seems to be created to be equally irresistible to the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and Trumpworld and to capitalize off of this weird Republican, conservative, and Trumpworld reimagining of the PRC. Just as Butina’s cover story of the emergence of a 2nd amendment absolutism movement in Russia, which is implausible if you know anything about Russia, was designed to be irresistible to the GOP and the conservative movement in the US. When you combine the cover story with all the money he has to share, just as Butina managed to have money to share, you’ve got what appears to be a not for cover operation to penetrate the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and Trumpworld.

It is important to remember, that despite the President’s statements, as well as those by former Acting DNI Grennell and current DNI Ratcliffe, as well as other of the President’s surrogates, Xi does want to see the President reelected:

Donald Trump has argued frequently of late that China is rooting for Joe Biden come November’s U.S. presidential election. In Beijing, however, officials have come around to support four more years of Trump.

Interviews with nine current and former Chinese officials point to a shift in sentiment in favor of the sitting president, even though he has spent much of the past four years blaming Beijing for everything from U.S. trade imbalances to Covid-19. The chief reason? A belief that the benefit of the erosion of America’s postwar alliance network would outweigh any damage to China from continued trade disputes and geopolitical instability.

While the officials shared concerns that U.S.-China tensions would rise regardless of who was in the White House, they broke largely into camps of those who emphasized geopolitical gains and those who were concerned about trade ties. Biden, the former vice president, was viewed as a traditional Democrat who would seek to shore up the U.S.’s tattered multilateral relationships and tamp down trade frictions.

“If Biden is elected, I think this could be more dangerous for China, because he will work with allies to target China, whereas Trump is destroying U.S. alliances,” said Zhou Xiaoming, a former Chinese trade negotiator and former deputy representative in Geneva. Four current officials echoed that sentiment, saying many in the Chinese government believed a Trump victory could help Beijing by weakening what they saw as Washington’s greatest asset for checking China’s widening influence.

Having a catspaw – Guo – with an irresistible to Republicans and conservatives cover story and lots of money to spread around on those same Republicans and conservatives pet projects, including smearing VP Biden to weaken his election chances, makes sense. It also explains why Russian agitprop that was seeded in 2014 to dirty up VP Biden, Secretary Kerry, and VP Cheney, is now being pushed by a self exiled ultra-wealthy Chinese national who has ingratiated himself with and is funding Steve Bannon and other key Trumpworld figures.

We are off the map and through the looking glass.

Open thread!

* The link is to a lawsuit by a private US research firm that Guo had hired to dig up dirt on Chinese nationals in the US that Guo believed to be working for the PRC. However, in the lawsuit that US research firm alleges that Guo was actually having them try to dig up dirt on Chinese working for the US government under false allegations that they were working for the PRC. The case was ultimately dismissed.

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The DNI/FBI Announcement On Election Interference: Before Anyone Asks, I Really Have No Idea

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Not that I don’t appreciate getting texts and emails asking me about breaking news… So let me just start with: I have no idea.

I watched the press conference, I’ve read The Washington Post‘s reporting on this, and I’m basically like, (except with much more facial hair):

The DNI/FBI Announcement On Election Interference: Before Anyone Asks, I Really Have No Idea

The Washington Post provides us what I think are the important details:

The technical data embedded in the emails did not make immediately apparent who was behind the messages. But metadata gathered from dozens of the emails pointed to the use of servers in Saudi Arabia, Estonia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, according to numerous analysts.

The hosting service that previously carried the Proud Boys domain canceled the registration after Google Cloud notified the customer that a nonprofit group had raised concerns about the controversial organization, said Ladd, the Google Cloud spokesman.

Following the action from the hosting service, the domain appears to have been left unsecured, allowing anyone on the Internet to take control of it and use it to send out the menacing messages, said Trevor Davis, CEO of CounterAction, a Washington-based digital intelligence firm.

I have no idea what other, corroborating information that the CIA, NSA, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA, which is part of DHS), National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NSCS, which is part of ODNI), and the National Security Division at the FBI have, but this doesn’t scream Iran to me. Could it be Iran? Sure. Can I say it is or isn’t definitively based on what I know about how Iran behaves after working on issues dealing with Iran for the Army and DOD for over a decade? I can’t. With this information I could just as easily make an argument that this is an Emirati Crown Price Mohammad bin Zayed and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman effort intended to make Iran look bad, which is a fair amount of the attempted covert and clandestine efforts made by the Emiratis and the Saudis. The whole point of the recent agreements between Israel and the UAE, Israel and Bahrain*, and attempt to get agreements between Israel and Saudi Arabia are really attempts to formalize and make overt the decades long covert and clandestine relations that these states have had with Israel in order to establish an anti-Iranian regional alliance.

Part of the problem here is that DNI Ratcliffe has no credibility. Especially as I’m not sure anyone who isn’t a partisan would classify emails like the one below as being anti-Trump.

The DNI/FBI Announcement On Election Interference: Before Anyone Asks, I Really Have No Idea 2

My read of the email above is an attempt to deactivate Biden voters through intimidation. And based on what was said, I’m not even sure these were the emails that DNI Ratcliffe was referring to.

This leads to my other concern here, especially given what Ratcliffe said and what FBI Director Wray did not. DNI Ratcliffe stated that the intelligence points to Iran and Russia, and that in the case of Iran he generically referenced intimidatory emails and then specifically stated that these Iranian efforts are intended to harm the President’s reelection chances. He provided no details regarding whatever Russia is doing. Director Wray said nothing specific at all; he just provided a general warning that both Iran and Russia are actively trying to disrupt the election and that the US government has thwarted one such attempt.

DNI Ratcliffe is both highly partisan and highly unqualified for the position he is currently serving in. My worry is that by making the statements that he did, and rushing to do them tonight before 8 PM EDT, he has provided the President with talking points for his rally tonight. Something the President can pitch to the rally goers as “Did you hear what Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe – great man, great man – said earlier tonight? He said the Iranians are interfering in the election to get Sleepy Joe elected. Can you believe that? Can you? It’s true, it’s true!”

Frankly what was presented by DNI Ratcliffe was very thin and very concerning because it was very thin. The more generic statements of Director Wray was better largely because he didn’t provide just enough details to make people question the integrity of what was being briefed.

I want to make one final point. What Director Wray told Americans tonight was what should have been announced back in August, September, and/or October 2016 in regard to what Russia was doing in 2016. The Obama administration wanted to do it, but decided it also wanted bipartisan buy-in, so the President pitched it to both the Democratic and Republican leadership in Congress. Senator McConnell killed it by threatening to use any announcement, no matter how appropriate and how non-partisan, as a weapon to politically attack both President Obama and Secretary Clinton. My issues and concerns here are not that a press conference to warm Americans about foreign election interference was done. My issues and concerns of the lack of specificity except in regard to one statement from DNI Ratcliffe that the interference was intended to harm the President and his reelection chances and the need to do this tonight before 8 PM when there’s nothing that couldn’t have waited till 9 AM tomorrow morning.

We are off the looking glass and through the map!

Open thread!

* Just earlier today we learned that Israel has been running a clandestine embassy in Bahrain that was being presented as a development corporation. This reporting raises the questions of 1) how many other Gulf States has Israel done this in, 2) how many US companies, defense or non-defense sector, have been compromised by doing business with companies that are secret Israeli embassies that only Israel and the host country know are fronts, and 3) how much US intellectual property, especially critical for US national security, wound up being stolen as a result?

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Betty Cracker Asks, We Answer! Hunter Biden’s Phone Being Hacked Is the Most Likely Pathway For the Information Giuliani Is Peddling

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BettyC asked this very good question this afternoon:

One thing in this tawdry tale I’m truly curious about is the origin of that laptop. From what I’ve been able to piece together, it sounds like the FBI really did take possession of a hard drive?

But the MAGA computer store guy’s story isn’t believable. If Russian agents and/or some of Giuliani’s other shady minions planted stuff on a laptop that didn’t belong to H. Biden and contrived this whole tale, I think a forensic investigation would reveal that, but I don’t really know how all of this works…

I think the simple answer is that Hunter Biden’s cellphone was hacked. And it really wouldn’t matter if it was an iPhone or some other type of smart phone. Let me unpack this a bit, but before I do I want to make one very specific point. The tradecraft here, the actual details of how this operation, for lack of a better term, has been conducted, does not negate the fact that the disinformation, misinformation, and agitprop that Giuliani is pushing is the creation of Russian intelligence and that he has been pushing it for almost a year now while working with active Russian intelligence assets as part of Russia’s ongoing political war against the United States.

Let’s stipulate, as I explained in a comment reply earlier today, that:

the structure, if you will, of this type of operation is to hack for actual documents and photos and video and audio files, remove them, doctor some, fabricate others completely, and then dump them all together. This makes it impossible for someone, especially if they didn’t realize they were hacked, to assert that they are all forgeries. Because the forgeries and doctored materials are shuffled in with the legit materials. This was attempted by the Russians against Macron in 2017. This was also done against AG Lynch in 2016, which led to Comey being stupid in the most Comey way ever.

I would add that it is also why it becomes impossible to state that the materials being released are all fakes, because there are some outright fakes, some modified and partial fakes, and some actual real materials all bundled together. And remember, neither Giuliani nor The NY Post has provided anything that isn’t a pdf or a screen grab, so there’s no actual real metadata for you techie types reading this to analyze.

Hacking Hunter Biden’s smartphone – iPhone, Samsung, or what have you aside – as a way to access all this information would not be surprising. The NSO Group developed a smartphone hacking program named Pegasus, which has been sold/licensed to the United Arab Emirates, allegedly in partnership with the Saudis. There are concerns that it was the Pegasus software that was used to gain access to material on Jeff Bezos’s phone, which was then conveniently laundered through the disgruntled and MAGA manic brother of the woman Bezos was having an affair with. The NSO Group is currently under Federal investigation. While the NSO Group is technically now owned by a US investment firm, it is headquartered in Herziliya, Israel, which is also where the Israeli security and intel firm Black Cube is headquartered. Black Cube has done work for NSO Group in an attempt to disrupt, through private intelligence operations, researchers trying to prove that NSO’s Pegasus software was used to target dissidents. Black Cube is the firm responsible for targeting former Obama administration senior national security officials Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl. NSO has also impersonated Facebook to spread their spyware. Pegasus and NSO’s other tools are very, very, very effective. Bezos had to hire one of the top names in personal security services to actually figure out what had happened.

If whomever managed to hack and exfiltrate the data from Hunter Biden, and my professional guesstimate is it was from his smartphone, they would have been able to get access to all of his emails and text messages through the email and text message clients on the phone, as well as pictures, audio, and/or video that were stored on the phone. If it was an iPhone and he had Safari set up to share history and bookmarks across devices, then they would also have access to his entire search history. Once whomever did the hack had all that information, then select items would be altered, other items would be completely fabricated, and then all of them together – the real, the altered, and the completely fabricated – would be bundled together, placed on one or more devices, in this case one or more old MacBooks and/or the external hard drive, and then given to someone to discover this treasure trove and feed it to someone like Giuliani who would then launder it through something approaching a legitimate news source.

Here’s the screen grab of the computer store receipt that Giuliani provided to the New York Post:

Betty Cracker Asks, We Answer! Hunter Biden's Phone Being Hacked Is the Most Likely Pathway For the Information Giuliani Is Peddling

There are a couple of things that have my antenna up on this receipt. The first is the date, April 2019. By all reports Hunter Biden was living in Los Angeles throughout 2019 having moved to LA after his divorce in 2018. Is it possible that Hunter Biden went home to visit his father and step-mother in Delaware in April 2019, brought one or more broken, water damaged MacBooks and possibly a brand new external hard drive with him, and decided to take it to a strip mall computer repair place instead of driving 20 minutes to the Apple Store in Newark, DE? It’s possible. Is it possible he did all that rather than take it in for repair in LA? This too is possible. But neither make a lot of geospatial, let alone logical sense. Especially as Hunter Biden had to go to Arkansas in April 2019 to produce a DNA sample pursuant to a court order in a paternity case. The next thing that bothers me is that signature. I spent about an hour yesterday looking for any image of a document with Hunter Biden’s signature and I could not find one. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one on the Internet somewhere, but I couldn’t find one to compare that scribble against. Is it possible that that is Hunter Biden’s signature? Sure it’s possible, but that could be anything. The cell phone number and iCloud email address that supposedly belong to Hunter Biden are in the upper left corner of that receipt. Both of those pieces of information would be available for extraction and to be used to generate a bogus receipt if his smartphone had been hacked.

This is my semi-informed professional estimate/guesstimate, but given the people involved in this insanity – Giuliani and Bannon and Col Allan at the NY Post – using a highly sophisticated phone hacking program like Pegasus to exfiltrate all the information possible from Hunter Biden’s smartphone, then modifying some documents and images and video and fabricating others, dumping them on to a different device and then leaving them all with a credulous individual to be discovered makes both logical sense and sense in terms of how we’ve seen subversion tradecraft change as the technology finally caught up to the concepts and doctrine for undertaking this type of operation. And this leads me to concerns about any alleged video that Rudy plans to leak out. Deep fake technology has increased by leaps and bounds over the past four years. Either modifying existing video that Hunter Biden might have had on his smartphone or modifying video of someone else to look like Hunter Biden can be done with better results in 2020 than they could have been done in 2016. Would a deep fake hold up to proper analysis? Probably not, but it wouldn’t have to. It just has to make it through a news cycle or two on Fox News, Breitbart, The New York Post‘s website, the Epoch Times’ website, The Daily Caller, The Daily Signal, The Gateway Pundit, etc. Especially as none of those outlets will print a correction or retraction if a deep fake modified video is debunked.

I want to make one final point and it is a human/humane one. One of the things that isn’t being remarked on is that Hunter Biden was three years old when he, his brother, his baby sister, and his mother were in the car accident that killed his mother and baby sister. While everyone remembers the picture of four year old Beau Biden in his hospital bed with a broken leg being suspended on a pulley, Hunter Biden was also injured. He had a skull fracture. I’m not a medical doctor, I’ve got a PhD, but I’d be willing to wager good money that both Biden boys were given significant pain killers as needed/required during their stays in the hospital. Anyone care to guess the effect that the pain killers that would have been used in the early 1970s would have had on the developing neurotransmitters and receptors of a three year old? Hunter Biden has an addiction. I’m not sure that over 45 years later anyone can definitely say if whatever he was treated with for pain after the accident predisposed him to drug addiction, a preexisting condition if you will, but it really doesn’t or shouldn’t matter. We all know people in our personal lives, as well as online lives, who have addiction problems. It doesn’t matter if they’re for things that are deemed legal, such as food addictions or addictions to alcohol or even gambling, let alone for controlled substances – addiction is a disease. There is a real scandal here and that scandal is that the President, his sons and daughter in law, Giuliani, Bannon, his other surrogates, the Fox News evening talking heads, the chuckleheads at Breitbart, etc have such a basic lack of humanity and are so obsessed with obtaining power or being near those that do, that they’ve decided to exploit someone’s battle with addiction in the hope of increasing the President’s electoral outcomes by a couple of percent. This is both the real scandal and the real tragedy of this entire sordid story. This isn’t just traumatizing Hunter Biden and likely pushing all of his triggers for addictive behavior*, it is doing the same thing for a lot of other people who struggle with addictions. It isn’t just as Adam Serwer says that cruelty is the point. Cruelty is also the ways and the means too!

Open thread!

* I would not be surprised, given Giuliani’s deranged rantings on his and Bannon’s YouTube channel, as well as Fox News, if we ultimately find out that Giuliani is doing this to try to trigger Hunter Biden into relapsing in the hope of a news media feeding frenzy that the Democratic nominee’s son was caught smoking crack just weeks before the election.

Betty Cracker Asks, We Answer! Hunter Biden’s Phone Being Hacked Is the Most Likely Pathway For the Information Giuliani Is PeddlingPost + Comments (193)