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Dog Whistles Are So Passé: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base

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Over the past several weeks, a number of people have noticed that the President’s campaign, as well as the President, seem to be sending some very unique messages using some very unique imagery. On 18 June, Media Matters caught the President tweeting out this alleged Antifa symbol:

Dog Whistles Are So Passe: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base 1

 

This is not an Antifa symbol. It is the symbol the NAZIs made political prisoners wear. Here’s the symbology classification system as explained by the US Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia Holocaust:

Dog Whistles Are So Passe: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base 2

Here’s the new America First T-Shirt being offered for sale by the President’s campaign store:

Dog Whistles Are So Passe: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base 3

Here’s a better screen grab of the logo:

 

Dog Whistles Are So Passe: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base 5

And this is the partieadler, or (NAZI) party eagle and its description from the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) website:

Dog Whistles Are So Passe: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base 6

The Nazi Eagle is a symbol developed originally by the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1920s (also becoming a symbol of the German government after the Nazis took power), based loosely on traditional German coats of arms. Following World War II, the symbol was appropriated by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists worldwide, with many variations. The symbol originally featured an eagle clutching a swastika, but many variations replace the swastika with some other hate symbol, such as SS bolts or a Celtic Cross. Occasionally, extremists will leave the circle blank where the swastika normally would appear; this seems to be more common in countries where the swastika is prohibited.

It should be noted that eagles are a common symbol among nations worldwide, including the United States, and not every image of an eagle is derivative of the Nazi eagle. It is not uncommon, for example, for some Americans to mistake the Blue Eagle logo of the Roosevelt-era National Recovery Administration for a Nazi-derived symbol.

Here’s the National Recover Administration’s crest so you can see for yourself that it looks nothing like the parteiadler or the logo on the America First T-shirts.

Dog Whistles Are So Passe: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base 8

But it isn’t just the imagery. The Trump Make America Great Committee purchased 88 Facebook ads that used the NAZI symbols for political prisoners in the screen grab at the top of the post. 88 is the code that neo-NAZIs and white supremacists use for Heil Hitler. Recently the President, in defending monuments and statues to Confederate military leaders and personnel, tweeted out this 14 word tweet, which included two words with capitalized “H”s right next to each other:

The 14 words is the most popular white supremacist slogan and statement. From the ADL:

“14 Words” is a reference to the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The slogan was coined by David Lane, a member of the white supremacist terrorist group known as The Order (Lane died in prison in 2007). The term reflects the primary white supremacist worldview in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: that unless immediate action is taken, the white race is doomed to extinction by an alleged “rising tide of color” purportedly controlled and manipulated by Jews.

Because of its widespread popularity, white supremacists reference this slogan constantly, in its full form as well as in abbreviated versions such as “14 Words”, “Fourteen Words,” or simply the number “14.”

A sober person would say that this is just a coincidence. That argument would have more validity if the President and his campaign and his administration did not have a history of using this type of symbolism. One of the President’s 2016 campaign ads, in July of 2016, was a picture of Secretary Clinton’s face and a Star of David (six pointed star/Jewish star) imposed over piles of cash. Which he tweeted! Another of his campaign’s final ads during the 2016 election included the faces of then Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Holocaust survivor, billionaire, philanthropist George Soros as exemplars of corruption.

The use of this imagery is not an accident. Without having to actually go looking for them, including the T-shirt the President’s campaign just made available for purchase, I was able to come up with a number of examples using clearly anti-Semitic imagery and language. But it goes beyond these campaign ads, merchandise, and tweets by the President. For instance, the initial number of children that HHS was reporting had been lost in the system after being separated at the border was 1,488. This amount of coincidence takes a lot of work!

The dog whistle is clearly passé. Why whisper when you can scream!

Obligatory!

Open thread!

 

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

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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.

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

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:

The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will Be 1 The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will Be 2

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.

Ooopsie!!!!!

To quickly summarize:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. That email is now declassified and released and once again Congressman Nunes is unmasked as a none too bright, conspiracy mongering fabulist.
  4. 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:

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The Black PSYOP IX: The Unmasking of Obamagate

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When SARS-CoV2 and COVID-19 began to sweep across the globe, and became the focus in news coverage and reporting, the Black PSYOP that the President, his campaign, his elected Republican surrogates in the House and Senate, his other surrogates, and Fox News and the rest of the conservative and right wing news, digital, and social media had been pushing against Vice President Biden to excuse and justify the actions that the President was impeached for got shelved for a while. At least in terms of an attempt to promote it day to day. But now that the President has declared victory against SARS-CoV2  and COVID-19 in an attempt to reopen the US it has been reinvigorated in an attempt to change the subject.

Since Mother’s Day on Sunday, the President has been tweeting and shouting about something he calls Obamagate. This isn’t actually anything new. Back in 2017, in an attempt to divert attention from him, his campaign, and a number of his senior campaign staff and political appointees involvement with or connections to Russia, the President and his surrogates argued that President Obama had ordered the FBI to spy on his campaign. This included wildly inaccurate accusations, because the people making them didn’t understand what they were talking about or were acting as if they did, that the Obama administration spying went beyond having the FBI wiretap the campaign headquarters in Trump Tower. Specifically that Assistant to the President-National Security Advisor (APNSA) Susan Rice asked the National Security Agency (NSA) to unmask the names of Trump campaign and transition officials as part of President Obama’s and his co-conspirators nefarious plot to prevent the President from being elected. These accusations are back, but they still make no factual sense.

Acting Director of National Intelligence and Ambassador to Germany (previously a noted Internet troll and shitposter) Richard Grenell declassified and released three pages of unmasking requests made by Obama administration senior personnel between 30 NOV 2016 and 12 JAN 2017.

The Black PSYOP: The Unmasking of Obamagate

The Black PSYOP: The Unmasking of Obamagate 1

The Black PSYOP: The Unmasking of Obamagate 2

Despite the breathless reporting by tweet that “SCOOP @CBSNews  obtains @RichardGrenell notification to congress declassified “unmasking list” Flynn between late 2016 and January 2017 – Read 3 pages provided by NSA here”, you’ll notice the following statement at the top of the first document Grenell declassified (emphasis mine):

Each individual was an authorized recipient of the original report and the unmasking was approved through NSA’s standard process, which includes a review of the justification for the request.

And:

In this case 16 authorized individuals requested unmaskings for REDACTED # of different NSA intelligence reports for select identified principles. While the principles are identified below, we cannot confirm they saw the unmasked information.

In short: everything was done in accordance with the law and regulations within normal channels.

But it goes beyond this, because the people requesting the unmasking, from APNSA Susan Rice to Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power to VP Biden had NO WAY TO KNOW WHO THE UNIDENTIFIED AMERICAN OR AMERICANS WHOSE NAMES WERE REDACTED IN THE INTELLIGENCE REPORTS THEY WERE READING ABOUT CONTACTS WITH RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT PERSONNEL, INCLUDING AMBASSADOR KISLYAK WHO WAS RUSSIA’S PRIMARY INTELLIGENCE HANDLER IN DC AS WELL AS RUSSIA’s AMBASSADOR TO THE UN AND OFFICIALS OF OTHER GOVERNMENTS, WHEN THEY MADE THE UNMASKING REQUESTS! WHICH IS WHY THEY MADE THE REQUESTS BECAUSE WITHOUT KNOWING WHO WAS TALKING TO KISLYAK, OTHER RUSSIAN OFFICIALS, AND OFFICIALS FROM OTHER COUNTRIES IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW WHETHER WHAT HAD BEEN COLLECTED ON THE COMMUNICATIONS – THE TRANSCRIPTS OF THE COMMUNICATIONS – REALLY POSED POTENTIAL THREATS TO THE UNITED STATES THAT AMERICANS WERE INVOLVED IN!!!! It was NOT UNTIL any of these Obama administration officials got the unmasking reports from the National Security Agency that they would have known that LTG (ret) Flynn was the unidentified American citizen speaking with Russian Ambassador Kislyak, or any other official of a foreign government, Russian or otherwise, because that information was redacted in the original reports they were being briefed on. The whole point is to minimize the risk that any American citizen could have their privacy intruded upon by including their names if they are incidentally collected on because we are collecting on the foreign national that they are either speaking with or who mentions them in communication with a third party.

This reality, however, is not the point of what Grenell has done. Grenell’s objective is to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Republican majority US Senate, as well as the President’s twitter feed, Fox News, other presidential surrogates, and other news networks to launder the story that Vice President Biden was involved in the plot to both prevent the President’s election and then to destroy his presidency. See!!!! His name is right there on the last line of page 3! Since the declassification of this information by Grenell, Senators Grassley and Johnson have publicly released the documentation and proceeded to act like they do not know and understand how unmasking works. They have been joined by Senator Paul who held a press conference about it this afternoon heavy on innuendo and accusation and very short on actual facts. And AG Barr has indicated that US Attorney John Durham will now include these unmasking requests in his review of the investigations into the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia.

What these gentlemen are obfuscating, or, perhaps, are really too ignorant and uninformed to understand, is that when these 16 officials, including VP Biden made these requests THEY DID NOT KNOW WHO “US INDIVIDUAL 1” was in the intelligence, which is why they asked for the unmasking. Simply, they had no way to know if it was LTG (ret) Flynn, Jared Kushner, Senator Grassley, Senator Johnson, any of the five other Republican senators and one Republican representative who spent Independence Day 2018 visiting Putin in Moscow, Senator Paul who hand carried a communique from the President to Putin in August 2018 (and don’t get me started how far outside of normal and usual that was!!!), your great aunt Petunia, or the ever loving blue eyed Thing who was talking to officials of foreign governments, Russian or otherwise. All they knew is that a US citizen was in contact with senior officials of foreign governments, including the Russian ambassadors to the US and to the UN, and the discussions were about how Russia should respond to recent US actions against Russia, how Russia should vote in an upcoming UN Security Council vote the US had called about Israel, as well as other matters that have yet to be revealed and reported on*., but that based on the dates in the materials Grenell released, were collected and reported by the National Security Agency in late November and early December 2016, which was well before Flynn’s calls with Ambassador Kislyak and Russia’s ambassador to the UN. The US citizen in all of those calls was LTG (ret) Flynn. And then there were the reports that indicated an American citizen was discussing being paid to organize and facilitate the kidnapping legal US resident Fethullah Gulen and illegally extraditing and rendering him back to Turkey so that Erdogan could execute him. That was also LTG (ret) Flynn.

The objective here is the same objective that it has always been since I first started writing about, delineating, and explaining the Black PSYOP the President and his surrogates are undertaking back in October 2019:

  1. Continue to dirty up VP Biden, which is an extension of the influence operation begun by Putin’s state controlled media in May 2014 to dirty him up in case he ran in 2016, to drive down VP Biden’s popularity to damage his chances of being elected president. This included getting Ukrainian President Zelensky to announce the opening of an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business activities in Ukraine, as well as the attempts to get China to do something similar, which is all intended to promote the suggestion that Vice President Biden misused his position to enrich his son.
  2. To get the US Federal charges dropped against Dmitro Firtash, so he could get back to Ukraine from his house arrest in Vienna and retake control of Ukraine’s petroleum industry on behalf of Putin’s objectives regarding Ukraine and the EU. This line of operation was how Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman got tied into the Rudy Giuliani’s scheme to get dirt on VP Biden from Zelensky, as well as their connection to Victoria Toensing and Joseph DiGenova, who are both Firtash’s attorneys and working with Giuliani.
  3. The ultimate goal here was to find an excuse to lift Russian sanctions, which Putin desperately wants and the President has been hellbent to do, for reasons that make no domestic political, national security, and/or geopolitical sense, but make a lot of sense as a payoff. This is only possible if the Mueller investigation, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigations into the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians actions in that campaign, as well as the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s assessments and reports on Russian interference in 2016 could be obfuscated and undermined.
  4. The drive to come up with a way to lift US sanctions on Russia and normalize relations ties everything together. Part of dirtying up VP Biden is the promotion of a bizarre and debunked conspiracy theory that it was not the Russians, on orders from Putin, interfering in the US 2016 election to elect Trump president; including failed and aborted attempts between the Russians and the President’s campaign to actually work together. Rather the Democratic National Committee, Secretary Clinton, many of her senior campaign staff, President Obama, Vice President Biden, APNSA Rice, Ambassador Power, former DNI Clapper, former FBI Director Comey, former DCI Brennan, former FBI Director and future Special Counsel Mueller, former AG Lynch, a number of senior Obama and Biden national security staffers, and the Ukrainian government actually conspired with the mainstream news media to keep the President from being elected in 2016. And when that failed to destroy his presidency with the creation of a fake scandal – that Putin wanted Trump to be president because he was angry at Secretary Clinton from something she did in 2011, that Putin had Russia interfere in the 2016 presidential election, that Putin is still interfering in American politics, that senior officials in the Trump 2016 campaign, as well as senior outside surrogates, were attempting to make contact with Russian officials and proxies to facilitate Putin’s influence operation to elect Trump president – in order to hide the truth, their crimes, and destroy the President and his administration. Because if the actual conspirators were the Obama administration, Secretary Clinton, her campaign, and the Ukrainians, then Russia is being punished for something it didn’t do. If you believe that, I also have a bridge to sell you…
  5. The last piece of this convoluted, conspiracy driven puzzle is the prosecution of LTG (ret) Flynn. Whatever Special Counsel Mueller’s team had actually collected on LTG (ret) Flynn’s was so damning and disturbing, that Judge Sullivan told him in open court at a sentencing hearing that he had “sold out his country” and all but accused him of committing treason! But in order for the Black PSYOP to work, LTG (ret) Flynn has to be an innocent, wrongly accused, and maliciously prosecuted patriot who loves the US and the President. This is why LTG (ret) Flynn fired his attorneys and replaced them with a conspiracist who used to be a legal contributor to Fox News. And it is why AG Barr has assigned two separate US Attorneys to look into it in order to undermine the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation into the President’s 2016 campaign, Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, and all the prosecutions, including Flynn’s, that resulted from it.

And this is why Acting DNI Grenell declassified these unmasking requests, gave them to AG Barr, and then released them to Senators Grassley, Johnson, and Paul. To launder this information – information that clearly demonstrates that nothing illegal, untoward, or even unusual was done by anyone in the Obama administration through the DOJ and the US Senate  – to both dirty up VP Biden to damage his campaign and to facilitate the other parts of the Black PSYOP ultimately leading to the lifting of US sanctions against Russia and normalization of US relations with Russia. Which the President once again discussed with Putin last week in a phone call about “the hoax”.

In May 2020, the President, AG Barr, Acting DNI Grenell, senior administration officials like Kellyanne Conway, a number of Republican senators, members of the Trump campaign, other surrogates for the President and his campaign, and a number of Fox News personalities are all actively promoting a Russian influence operation against the US targeting Americans to effect US politics and the outcome of the 2020 election. Someone should really be looking into this…

Open thread.

Update at 12:30 PM EDT

I’ve made some minor edits for clarity and added some links as in text citations. I also want to direct everyone to this twitter thread from Cheryl that she sent me late last night, which is applicable to the section with the *.

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Late Night Open Thread: Flagrant Nut-Picking

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HuffPost, via commentor Immanentize:

The presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) submitted a letter to the New York State Board of Elections on Sunday challenging a looming decision on whether to keep him on the ballot for the state’s primary.

Sanders formally suspended his campaign earlier this month, but said that he planned to stay on the ballot in upcoming primaries in order to maximize his influence on the Democratic Party’s platform and rules.

Five days later, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) signed a budget bill with an obscure provision authorizing the state’s board of elections to remove from the primary ballot those candidates who have withdrawn from the presidential campaign.

Malcolm Seymour, an attorney representing the Sanders campaign, argued in the letter to the board that the provision should not apply to Sanders “retroactively,” since he might have acted differently if it had been in effect when he decided to suspend his campaign…

Governor Cuomo is not, per CNN, a Friend of The Bern:

New York became the first state to cancel its presidential primary over coronavirus fears, the co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections said.

Douglas Kellner told CNN the decision came after Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign earlier this month, which “basically rendered the primary moot.”

“At a time when the goal is to avoid unnecessary social contact, our conclusion was that there was no purpose in holding a beauty contest primary that would marginally increase the risk to both voters and poll workers,” said Kellner, one of the Democratic commissioners on the board…

[NY Dem Chair Jay] Jacobs had told CNN in a phone interview earlier Monday that he agreed with the decision to cancel the state’s presidential primary contest — calling it a “necessary move” by New York election officials to protect the health and safety of voters and poll workers.

He noted that the outcome was essentially “predetermined” since Sanders dropped out of the Democratic race and emphasized the need to protect voters amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“We’ve stopped all nonessential business. This certainly is a nonessential primary if ever there was one,” Jacobs said.

Both Jeff Weaver and Nina Turner are reported to be “outraged”, but no current Sanders spokespersons had responded, as of 10:54pmEST.

His supporters, however, WILL NOT BE IGNORED!

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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

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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!

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Late Night Schadenfreude Open Thread: Nobody Loves A Defunct Campaign

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From the Washington Post, this afternoon, “Some top Sanders advisers urge him to consider withdrawing”:

A small group of Bernie Sanders’s top aides and allies — including his campaign manager and his longtime strategist — have encouraged the independent senator from Vermont to consider withdrawing from the presidential race, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

The group includes campaign manager Faiz Shakir and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a top Sanders surrogate and ally, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive private discussions.

Sanders himself has become more open to the prospect of dropping out, according to one of the people with knowledge of the situation and another close ally, especially if he suffers a significant defeat in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, which polls suggest Joe Biden will win handily.

Beyond Shakir and Jayapal, longtime strategist Jeff Weaver has privately made a case that exiting the race more quickly and on good terms with Biden would give Sanders more leverage in the long run, according to one of the people; the other said Weaver has used a light touch in presenting his case. Weaver and Jayapal did not return calls and messages seeking comment. Shakir declined to comment.

Sanders has not a made a final decision, the people said, and other close allies have privately urged him to keep running, such as national campaign co-chair Nina Turner, while Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) is also said to favor him remaining in the race. Larry Cohen, a longtime ally who chairs a nonprofit aligned with Sanders, is waging a public campaign for him to stay in until the Democratic National Convention.

The Sanders campaign declined to comment on internal deliberations…

Emphases mine. Vulgar speculation: Maybe Shakir and Jayapal were not the ‘two people with knowledge‘ mentioned in the first paragraph, but that phrasing is a well-known form of reportorial snark. Also, if Jeff ‘Comic Book Guy’ Weaver thinks it’s time to cut & run, that’s a prime indicator there’s no hope left of reviving the embers. Nina Turner is either nuts or playing nuts for the media, and Tlaib backed herself into a bad corner when she publicly encouraged Sanders supporters to boo Hillary Clinton — no other campaign will touch her now, and she’s liable to lose the seat she won in a split race in 2018. And Larry Cohen, chairman of ‘Our Revolution’, has his own reasons for encouraging Sanders to continue running the grift all the way to the end.

Elsewhere, the postmortem infighting has already begun!

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Election Year Schadenfreude Open Thread

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Disclaimer: A 78-year old recent heart attack survivor absolutely should be self-quarantining right now. On the other hand, someone who’s second only to Trump in the ‘It’s Always About ME’ sweeps… maybe could’ve been a little more temperate when it came to proclaiming the shortcomings of every other not-Republican candidate. Or at least required his paid surrogates to dial it back a notch, when it came to publicly hoping on social media that the current Democratic ‘Shadow president’ would either die of coronavirus or lose all his supporters to it.

(Give me a break, it’s 3am in my time zone, and this is my self-reward for putting up yesterday’s virtuous info & respite threads, prior to setting up some more for tomorrow.)

You can tell how badly the Very Media Serious People rate Bernie’s chances at this point, because they’re suddenly willing to name names. From the Washington Post, paper of record in the town where the monopoly industry is national politics:

Sen. Bernie Sanders has convened a series of weighty discussions about the future of his presidential campaign with his closest confidants, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations, and at least three potential paths forward have come up in the private talks.

One option that has been raised: Keep the campaign technically active with a goal of winning votes and accumulating delegates to the July nominating convention, but forgo attack ads aimed at delegate leader Joe Biden. Another: Stay in the race and aggressively compete for the nomination. A third choice: End the campaign…

With Biden staked to a solid lead and the future of the remaining primaries in doubt, many in the party are calling for Sanders to bow out, in recognition of the destructive divisions that could deepen if he sticks around. They are eager to pivot to a general election posture against President Trump and want to empower Biden to get started as soon as possible.

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COVID-19 & National Security Part III: The Black PSYOP Against Vice President Biden Evolves

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The Black PSYOP against Vice President Biden, begun in 2014 to dirty him up ahead of a potential 2016 presidential run and now intended to damage him in the 2020 presidential election cycle, has evolved. Since the novel Coronavirus/SARSCOV2 and COVID-19 pandemic have now overtaken the news cycle, beating on the joint, repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories that VP Biden interjected himself into Ukrainian politics to protect his son from investigation for corruption and that the Ukraine, not Russia, conspired with the Obama administration, the Clinton 2016 campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the news media to illegally influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election and frame Russia for doing so has been abandoned. The Black PSYOP has shifted to tying VP Biden, his campaign, the Democratic Party, and the news media to the People’s Republic of China’s attempts to destroy the United States in general and the President in specific through the novel Coronavirus/SARSCOV2 and COVID-19 pandemic.

This was emailed around to people on the Trump/Pence 2020 reelection mailing list:

COVID-19 & National Security Part III: The Black PSYOP Against Vice President Biden Evolves

I first saw it retweeted by Fred Guttenberg, who is the parent of one Parkland student survivor and one Parkland student who did not survive. But it is also posted on the President’s campaign website at this link.

Yesterday, Chanel Rion, the conspiracist and fabulist hired by the One American News Network (OANN) who had been conspiring with Rudy Giuliani on the Ukrainian conspiracy Black PSYOP against VP Biden, switched to the China conspiracy BLACK PSYOP against VP Biden. She did this by teeing up a two part question focusing on the fact that Democrats, reporters, and just decent people everywhere objecting to referring to the novel Coronavirus/SARSCOV2 as the “China virus”, which allowed the President to go off on the Democratic Party, the news media, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Rion and OANN have been pushing this for a bit, culminating in both an expose broadcast on OANN last week and yesterday’s question.

By teeing up the question the way she did, Rion was able to get it covered live by all the broadcast networks, as well as reported by all the print and digital news media. This laundered the false and untrue conspiracy theory linking VP Biden, Democrats and the Democratic Party, and the news media with the People’s Republic of China through the actual news media and from there into social media. From there further reporting was done on the responses to the fabricated bullshit that Rion is pushing. The entire Black PSYOP circuit occurred in less than 24 hours. And while it is all completely false – VP Biden, the Democrats and the Democratic Party, and the news media are not conspiring with the PRC against the US and the President – it now provides the context, because it was covered by the news media, for the President’s reelection campaign’s use of it to rile up his base and generate donations.

A Black PSYOP conducted from start to finish in a day.

Open thread!

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Late Night Open Thread: Time for Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

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Senator Sanders — yes, he has a job already! — could be working with his Senate colleagues tomorrow. Murphy the Trickster God knows we could use every available hand in this crisis, if only to help reading through the various GOP proposals to see what kind of Ayn Rand boobytraps they’re trying to sneak through. Step up and do the hard thing for once, Bernie!

The counter-arguments are, to say the least, unconvincing:

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*Another* DNC Debate! Open Thread (Joe vs. Bernie Edition)

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Barring the Oval Office Occupant finds a way to fvck this up too during his immanent ‘briefing’, here’s the word per CNN:

The Democratic debate scheduled for Sunday will be moved from Arizona to Washington, DC, the Democratic National Committee announced Thursday.

“Out of an abundance of caution and in order to reduce cross-country travel, all parties have decided that the best path forward is to hold Sunday’s debate at CNN’s studio in Washington, D.C., with no live audience,” DNC communications director Xochitl Hinojosa said in a statement.

Additionally, Univision’s Jorge Ramos was possibly exposed to coronavirus. While he is not exhibiting any symptoms, he has has stepped down from his role as one of the moderators for the debate, the DNC said. The network’s Ilia Calderón will take his place, alongside CNN’s Dana Bash and Jake Tapper. The debate is still set to take place 8 to 10 p.m. ET Sunday.…

The debate partners had previously announced that there would be no live audience, press filing center or spin room at the event.

The debate will air exclusively live on CNN, CNN en Español, CNN International, and Univision at 8 p.m. ET. The debate will stream live in its entirety, without requiring log-in to a cable provider, on CNN.com’s homepage, across mobile devices via CNN’s apps for iOS and Android, and via CNNgo apps for Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire, Chromecast and Android TV, as well as Univision’s digital properties. The full debate will be available exclusively the day following the airing on demand via cable/satellite systems, on CNNgo (at CNN.com/go on your desktop, smartphone, and tablets, and via CNNgo OTT apps), and CNN mobile apps on iOS and Android.

There’s supposed to be one last, as yet unscheduled, debate after this… but Vox says it will presumably be cancelled if ‘a candidate’ has ‘the nomination sewn up’ by then.

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Election Year “Respite” (!!!) Open Thread: Scrabbling Through the Ashes

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Yes, I am a terrible terrible excuse for a human being (yet a proud Democrat). For those of you who share my weakness: Let. Us. Savor…

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Late Night Change of Topic Open Thread: Cue the Exploding Vape Pen

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Yeah, about that…

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Election Year Open Thread: Another Note Before the Florida Primary

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Maybe it’s ideological commitment, or maybe it’s just a stubborn inability to see beyond his own point of view. The Cuban government was treating Bernie Sanders very nicely — why should anyone else have complaints?

From the local Miami Herald:

… “I don’t know what’s so wrong about this country,” Sanders said during a one-hour meeting with the prisoner and two other members of Congress visiting Havana, Gross told the Miami Herald.

“I thought it was a pretty insensitive thing for him to say,” Gross said. “Couldn’t he see, with his own eyes, what was going on around the country that he’s been traveling through? And I was a hostage to the government of the country that he didn’t see anything wrong with.”

Gross said he didn’t reply to the senator. Although there were no guards present, Gross suspects Cuban authorities were recording the conversation…

Sanders’ campaign did not respond Wednesday to Gross’ comments, published first by NPR Wednesday less than two weeks before the March 17 Florida Democratic primary…

Sanders’ comment on Cuba in 2014 came almost at the end of an hour of an “engaging conversation,” said Gross. Sanders was part of a congressional delegation that visited Cuba in February 2014. He met with Gross along with Sens. Heidi Heitkamp and Jon Tester.

Sanders was not “really involved” in most of the talk, Gross said.

Gross does not remember the details of the discussion other than that the subject of U.S. policy towards Cuba came up. Being imprisoned with little food available, he said what he remembered the most was that Heitkamp and Tester brought him two bags of cookies and a “giant” package of M&Ms with peanuts.

“I appreciated the visit,” Gross said. “Each one of them wanted to see me free. I had no contact with any of them before that time or after.”…

At the time he was imprisoned in Cuba, Gross was working as a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development in a project to expand internet access for the Jewish community on the island. He was not the only one sneaking in internet technology banned by the Cuban authorities. Radio and TV Martí, two US government stations broadcasting to Cuba, also introduced satellite communication equipment into the country.

But Gross, a U.S. citizen, was the only one arrested in 2009 and charged with espionage. He was sentenced to 15 years. He was finally released on Dec. 17, 2014, in a prisoner exchange in which the Barack Obama government returned three Cuban spies to the island…

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Election Year Open Thread: If I Can’t Vote for Warren, Biden’s Looking Better All the Time

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This morning:

This afternoon:

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Election Year Horrorshow Open Thread: These Are Not Serious People

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Potentially dangerous, yes — but not serious.

This was not a last-minute “response” rally; it was scheduled in advance of the Biden/Buttigieg/Klobuchar lovefest tonight:


I checked the ‘donate’ link; the funds go to Bernie, through Williamson’s account — I assume she takes a percentage, but I’m a cynic that way. But the rally is credited as “Featuring Spiritual Teacher and Author Marianne Williamson and Bernie’s Daughter Heather Titus, Director of Sedona Yoga Festival,” so I guess it’s a joint grift.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota:

Attract a clown, expect a circus…

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