Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s not even safe to go out and pick up 2 days worth of poop anymore.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

I really should read my own blog.

This is a big f—–g deal.

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

Consistently wrong since 2002

Fuck if i know. i just get yelled at when i try it.

There’s some extremely good trouble headed their way.

People are complicated. Love is not.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

Just a few bad apples.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Tick tock motherfuckers! Tick fucking tock!

How does anyone do Gilligan’s Island as trump world and not cast Jared as Gilligan?

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

Something seems odd about that, but i have been drinking.

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

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

The willow is too close to the house.

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

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

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An Unexamined Scandal

Senator Whitehouse Is Surprised By Something He Should Not Be Surprised About: That the Secondary Kavanaugh Background Investigation Was Rigged

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Germy, in the comments to Mistermix’s post, has brought breaking, though previously known, news to our attention via Senator Whitehouse:

AFTER NEW DETAILS ON KAVANAUGH INVESTIGATION SURFACE, SENATORS CALL ON FBI FOR ANSWERS ON HANDLING OF ‘TIP LINE’

4,500 tips to FBI went uninvestigated following supplemental investigation, newly released FBI letter shows

Washington, DC – Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Chris Coons (D-DE), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray last evening requesting additional information on the FBI’s 2018 supplemental background investigation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The senators’ request follows a letter from the Bureau to Whitehouse and Coons revealing new details on the Kavanaugh background investigation, including that the FBI gathered over 4,500 tips in relation to the investigation without any apparent further action by FBI investigators. The Bureau also confirmed that tips from the tip line were instead provided to the Trump White House Counsel’s office, where their fate is unknown.

“The admissions in your letter corroborate and explain numerous credible accounts by individuals and firms that they had contacted the FBI with information ‘highly relevant to . . . allegations’ of sexual misconduct by Justice Kavanaugh, only to be ignored,” the senators write in their letter sent today. “If the FBI was not authorized to or did not follow up on any of the tips that it received from the tip line, it is difficult to understand the point of having a tip line at all.”

Whitehouse and Coons initially raised the lackluster supplemental background investigation in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Director Wray in July 2019. Whitehouse observed during the hearing the clear lack of process through which the public or members of Congress could relay information to the FBI after the troubling allegations against Kavanaugh made headlines nationwide. Coons likewise pressed Wray for a clear procedure. As both senators noted, the only conduit for information potentially relevant to the allegations was a “tip line,” the product of which was apparently never pursued by the Bureau. During the hearing, Wray echoed Republican claims that the FBI conducted the investigation “by the book,” while asserting that supplemental background investigations are less rigorous than criminal and counterintelligence investigations.

On August 1, 2019, Coons and Whitehouse wrote to Wray asking for a complete picture of how the FBI handled the supplemental background investigation of Kavanaugh. They asked why the FBI failed to contact witnesses whose names were provided to the FBI as possessing “highly relevant” information; how involved the Trump White House was in narrowing the scope of the investigation; whether the FBI had used a tip line in previous background investigations to manage incoming allegations and information regarding a nominee; and more.

Nearly two years later and after repeated follow-up requests, the FBI finally responded to Whitehouse and Coons’s questions. The June 30, 2021 letter from the FBI Office of Congressional Affairs revealed new information on the Kavanaugh investigation: that Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination “was the first time that the FBI set-up a tip line for a nominee undergoing Senate confirmation,” and that tip line received “over 4,500 tips, including phone calls and electronic submissions.” The FBI apparently pursued none of these tips. Instead, by the FBI’s own account, it merely “provided all relevant tips” to Trump’s Office of White House Counsel, the very office that had constrained and directed the limited investigation.

Whitehouse, Coons, Durbin, Leahy, Blumenthal, Hirono, and Booker call on the FBI to answer a range of outstanding questions surrounding the Bureau’s use of the tip line and the relevant information it yielded. The senators press the Bureau for any records and communications related to the tip line investigation, including “all relevant tips” described in Wray’s letter that the FBI “provided . . . to the Office of White House Counsel.”

Full text of the senators’ letter yesterday is available below. Also available as PDFs are:

• Senators’ letter sent yesterday;

• June 30 FBI letter to Whitehouse and Coons;

• Whitehouse and Coons August 2019 letter to Wray.

There’s also a long tweet thread by Senator Whitehouse:

I explained during the Kavanaugh hearings, in comments and on the front page, that what Senator Whitehouse is now rightfully angry over today was what was in fact going on. What is amazing here isn’t that Senator Whitehouse is upset, he is and should be. What is amazing here is that he seems to not understand the process that the FBI adheres to when conducting background investigations for judicial and political nominees, which, as a senator, he should know.

As I explained at the time, background investigations conducted by the FBI for judicial and political appointments are NOT criminal investigations. They are done by special agents and investigators and analysts detailed for that duty and the client is not the DOJ, nor is it the Senate committee of jurisdiction. The client for these background investigations is the White House Counsel’s Office and the White House Counsel is in ultimate charge and provides the ultimate direction of the inquiry. Only information that the White House Counsel wants released is released to the Senate committee of jurisdiction for their review. This whole secondary/reopened investigation, just like a game of chance in a casino, was rigged for the White House by the White House through the White House Counsel and his office. The FBI was only ever going to respond to Don McGahn’s instructions and work within the parameters he gave them because that’s the process.

It is important to remember that the only reason Don McGahn was first the Trump 2016 campaign counsel and then the White House Counsel is because his real boss is Mitch McConnell. Whenever Senator McConnell needs a trusted agent – to make a Federal agency dysfunctional and break it or to babysit a temperamental candidate/president – McConnell places McGahn into that position. McGahn controlled this secondary, supplementary investigation into Kavanaugh, just as he controlled the first one, not anyone at the FBI or the DOJ. And McGahn controlled it for McConnell. My guess is McConnell was thrilled when Senator Flake came to him with this compromise proposal for a secondary FBI investigation because it allowed McConnell to play Flake for the chump he is while getting what he wanted – Kavanaugh confirmed and the ability to leverage the contentious confirmation process for political gain – all while allowing it to seem that a rigged game was really an honest process.

No one who was paying attention should be surprised at all at what happened then or at what is being reported now. Not least a Democratic senator. That seven members of the Senate Judiciary Committee do not seem to understand the process for FBI background investigations for judicial and political nominees, including who controls them, is a bit concerning. They’re right to be asking for details and Senate Judiciary Committee investigation now, but it would have been better if they all had known how the process works and been hammering this over and over and over again during the confirmation. Especially Senator Coons who is the one who cut the deal with Senator Flake for the supplemental FBI background investigation.

If these seven senators did not realize this was how the process for FBI background investigations into judicial and political nominees until today, then, quite frankly, shame on them. This process is neither a state secret that is highly classified and compartmented, nor is it rocket science. It was reported on and commented on in real time. And it was their job to know and act on that knowledge. If they knew and didn’t act then, then shame on them. If they didn’t know until now, it’s still shame on them. While I doubt it would have made much of a difference, it was their job to know and to act on that knowledge, which they didn’t. They failed then and are angry now. The time to have been angry was then, because it might have prevented failure.

The reason that Senator McConnell and his caucus have been embarrassing Democratic senators and frustrating their, as well as Democratic president’s, efforts since January 2009 is that Senator McConnell pays attention to every possible process that could be useful to him or could be used against him. Senate Democrats are not going to beat him if they are constantly surprised by how the government they are supposed to be overseeing as part of their jobs works.

DO BETTER SENATE DEMOCRATS!

Edited to add:

I realize this is most likely performative surprise. It would have been nice if there’d been some performative surprise at the time when it might have made even a little bit of difference.

Open thread!

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Your Mellow, I Am Here To Harsh It: The Agreed To 6th January Commission Is Not Worth the Paper the Agreement Was Announced On

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Everybody is champing at the bit for the 6th January investigative commission announced last week to get to work. Even Liz Cheney is stating unequivocally that one of the key people they need to subpoena and interview is House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Speaking to ABC News’ This Week in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday, Cheney said McCarthy “absolutely should” testify before any commission, and that she “wouldn’t be surprised if he were subpoenaed”.

Congressman Thompson who negotiated the agreement for the commission has his sights on even bigger prizes:

None of this, not one little bit, is ever going to actually happen. I’m not even sure the commission will happen as that will require both the House and the Senate to move at least a resolution through both chambers to establish it. But even if it does get established, provided it is established on the agreement reached last week between Congressman Thompson, the Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee and Congressman Katko, the committee’s ranking chair. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

From the fact sheet released by Congressman Thompson (emphasis mine):

Key features of the Commission:

  • The Commission will be charged with (1) investigating and reporting upon the facts and causes of the January 6th attack on the Capitol as well as the influencing factors that may have provoked the attack on our democracy; (2) examining and evaluating evidence developed by relevant Federal, State, and local governments, in a manner that is respectful of ongoing investigations, regarding the facts and circumstances of the attack; (3) building upon other investigations regarding the attack and targeted violence and domestic terrorism related to such attack; and (4) reporting to the President and Congress regarding its findings, conclusions, and recommendations for corrective measures taken to prevent future acts of targeted violence and domestic terrorism, including against American democratic institutions, improve the security posture of the United States Capitol Complex in a manner that preserves the accessibility of the Capitol Complex for all Americans, and strengthen the security and resilience of nation and American democratic institutions against domestic terrorism.
  • Like the 9/11 Commission, the measure establishes a 10-person bipartisan commission with five commissioners, including the Chair, appointed by the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate and five commissioners, including the Vice Chair, appointed by the Minority Leaders of the House and Senate.
  • Commissioners must have significant expertise in the areas of law enforcement, civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, intelligence, and cybersecurity. Current government officers or employees are prohibited from appointment.
  • Like the 9/11 Commission, the Commission will be granted authority to issue subpoenas to secure information to carry out its investigation but only upon agreement between the Chair and the Vice Chair or a vote by a majority of Commission members.
  • The Commission will be required to issue a final report with findings regarding the facts and causes of the attack, along with recommendations to prevent future attacks on our democratic institutions, by December 31, 2021.

Currently, Congressman McCarthy is trying to tap dance around the fact that he authorized Congressman Katko to negotiate this agreement and, amazingly enough, Congressman Thompson agreed to McCarthy’s stipulations because the agreement appears to have wrong footed McCarthy with Trump, his caucus, and the base of the Republican Party. It is important to remember that McCarthy is not a particularly smart man. Rather, he’s simply outlasted everyone but Steve Scalise in terms of seniority and if Scalise can shiv McCarthy over this, he will! And it isn’t clear if what was agreed to would even pass just on Democratic only majorities in each chamber without significant revision, but let’s say the agreement holds up. If it does, you’ve got a dysfunctional committee that is structured to do nothing but obstruct itself.

The committee will be bipartisan and will have ten members, five selected by the Democratic leadership of Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer and five selected by Congressman McCarthy and Senator McConnell. And while it will have subpoena power, subpoenas can only be issued if either the Democratic appointed chair and the Republican appointed ranking member/vice chair agree or if a majority of the commissioners vote to issue one. And this is where everything breaks down.

Ordinarily, the Republicans go to play on something like this would be for Senator McConnell to place his trusted agent and catspaw on the commission: Don McGahn. McGahn, even if he wasn’t the ranking member/vice chair, would be there to organize and ensure complete Republican opposition to everything. This is how McGahn was used by McConnell to break the Federal Election Commission (FEC), but because of McGahn being placed by McConnell on Trump’s 2016 campaign as the lead campaign counsel and then as the White House Counsel for the first several years of the Trump administration, he’s not going to be usable for this assignment. Instead, Senator McConnell and Congressman McCarthy will simply pick other Republican legal operatives with the appropriate experience who can be counted on to gum up the works. I expect to see former NJ governor Chris Christie’s name floated for ranking member/vice chair. Same with former Congressman Trey Gowdy’s. It would not surprise me if McCarthy goes back to the same well of ratfuckers that Congressman Nunes has been using for several years – Kash Patel, Michael Ellison, and LTC (ret) Derek Harvey – as potential Republican appointees, especially as most of McConnell’s proteges have now been packed onto the Federal courts.

Regardless, because the agreement establishes an equal number of Democratic and Republican appointees and gives veto power over subpoenas to the Republican ranking member/vice chair, if this commission does actually get created with these parameters, then nothing of any import or value will be done. It will serve as a rhetorical tool for Republicans and conservative movement leaders, who it is important to recognize are still involved in the ongoing insurrection against the Constitution and constitutional order that boiled over into explicit violence on 6 January and may very well do so again, to state that they are taking this seriously because they voted to establish a toothless and ineffective commission to look into it.

Congressman Thompson is a sharp guy. And Speaker Pelosi is almost always five steps ahead of her Republican colleagues. But if there is some grand strategy here, I’m not seeing it. Best case scenario from this agreement is a dysfunctional committee with only six months to do anything and that produces nothing of value when what we need is a real truth and reconciliation commission led by someone of impeccable and unimpeachable character that takes as long as it needs to get to the truth in order to hold people and organizations to account so there can be reconciliation. Worst case scenario is it falls apart because the resolutions that would establish it can’t get through both chambers of Congress and once that happens everyone decides the lift is too heavy and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Have a happy Monday!

Pooh, Piglet, Monday

Open thread!

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The Black PSYOP Comes Home To Roost: The National Security Implications of Today’s DOJ Raids on Giuliani and Toensing

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So About That Third Party Spoilers Thing... The Libertarian Presidential Candidate And A Possibly Rabid Bat Edition

Now that the news has broken that the DOJ executed search warrants at Rudy Giuliani’s home and office, as well as for Victoria Toensing’s electronic devices from her office in DC, here’s what I think is going under the water line. This is connecting the known, through open source reporting national-security dots. It is not a legal analysis of what the warrants and their execution means in terms of potential criminal prosecutions. For that, I recommend Ken White, who tweets as Popehat. His excellent legal analysis is in this thread. And Ryan Goodman’s excellent analysis in this thread, which has a much more national-security approach to the news.

Back in October 2019, I laid out what Rudy Giuliani, Victoria Toensing, and her husband Joe DiGenova were doing in Ukraine, especially in terms of where the national security and political implications overlapped. And this context is important to review and keep in mind in regard to today’s news. Pay specific attention to the second and third parts of the operation:

That larger operation, which is a domestically focused Black PSYOP, has three lines of effort, each with multiple parts, and they all are now interconnected.

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

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

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

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

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

It is important to note that John Solomon, who was laundering disinformation and agitprop through The Hill and Fox News is referenced in the warrant for Giuliani and Toensing’s phones/electronic devices.

(Do read Goodman’s entire thread)

Now that we’ve refreshed ourselves on the context, here’s what I think is going on:

  1. Parnas, recognizing that his only way out is to give up people more important, more powerful, and more well connected than him, which is basically everyone, agreed to cooperate early on and has given the Feds what they need to work their way up the network.
  2. All of this is going to wind up connected back to Firtash, who, again, is Putin’s guy in Ukraine’s natural gas sector, and, likely, several other pro-Putin Ukrainian oligarchs.
  3. A Federal magistrate seems to have decided that the Roy Cohn gambit – that every one of these people’s communications regarding Ukraine was covered under attorney-client privilege because they were working for Giuliani who is Trump’s lawyer or for Toensing who is a lawyer and was assisting Giuliani for free as he was assisting her for free while working for Trump for free – is not in play here. Hence, the specific reference to communications regarding John Solomon and others.
  4. Trump world has just an astounding level of connections to pro-Putin Ukrainian oligarchs. The Philadelphia lawyer they brought into the campaign to advise on Pennsylvania’s recount rules is the attorney for Igor Kolomoiski. So is Bruce Kasowitz, who is one of Trump’s other personal attorneys. Just off the top of my head, Giuliani is tied to Kolomoiski, Derkach, Firtash, and several others. Toensing is tied to Firtash. And there’s plenty more that would take too long to list.
  5. I expect that the Feds will play the bigger fish off of each other as the investigation moves forward. If part of that is playing Toensing off against Giuliani, she’s going to eat him alive to save her, her husband’s, and her son’s tuchases as she’s still very sharp, despite being way through the map, whereas Rudy is Rudy.

If you want in on the “will Rudy Giuliani be able to stay off of Sean Hannity’s show tonight” action, please see Ann Laurie on the mezzanine level between the concession stands and the merchandise shop. While you’re waiting to get in on the action, I recommend the nachos and the Balloon Juicers hockey jersey. Pro tip: spring for the authentic one with the tie down strap, it comes in handy in a fight…

Open thread!

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The Real Purpose of the Leak of the Zarif Interview Tape: Dirty Up John Kerry

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Cole asked what the takeaways are from The New York Times reporting on a leaked tape of an interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif. As I put in a comment in that post, there are four. I’m going to copy and paste them below, but then I want to really focus on the fourth one because I think that’s the real tell.

  1. There are three possible leakers of the tape: Israel, Russia, or Iran’s Quds Force. All three don’t want the nuclear deal back on the table for different reasons, though some of them overlap. In the case of Israel, Bibi is desperate to maintain a foreign threat that only he can safely lead Israel against. And he definitely does not want Iran to be incentivized to open up to the west, which will have profound impacts on Iranian society, economy, and ultimately politics. Without Iran, Israel has no foreign threat for Bibi to rail against as an existential problem that requires his experienced leadership to survive. Russia doesn’t want the deal because it also doesn’t want an Iran incentivized to come in from the cold in order to get out from under sanctions. Doing so would open up Iran, which would have profound impacts on Iranian society, economy, and ultimately politics. An isolated Iran needs Russia. The Quds Force is working this angle from the other direction – internal to Iran instead of external. Anything that potentially empowers the more moderate reformist elements, that potentially leads to a relaxation of sanctions, that potentially leads to Iranians actually being able to interact with Americans and Europeans on a more regular basis weakens the Quds Force. Because if real, legitimate political reform ever comes to Iran, it has to come at the expense of the Quds Force.
  2. While all of these three have means, motive, and opportunity to have gotten the audio and leaked it, the leak was done to make it harder to reach a deal to get Iran either back into the JCPOA or into a new, revised version of it.
  3. If Israel is the leaker on this, the Quds Force and the other elements of Iranian security and intelligence are fully puckered right now. Being able to get hands on to this indicates a level of Israeli intelligence penetration into Iranian elite circles that is beyond what we know and suspect based on reporting.
  4. Someone really wants to dirty up John Kerry. Given that Putin has been working this angle, as I’ve covered here repeatedly on the front pages, since May 2014 when the initial agitprop plant of misinformation was placed in RIA Novosti against Biden, Kerry, and Cheney, via attacks on their children, because all were being discussed as possibly running for president in 2016. Is this an indicator that Russia is the leaker? I don’t know. I just find it curious that Russia has previously tried to ensure that Kerry looks bad, so this might be a two birds, one stone type of thing. Especially as Putin does not want to see any action on climate change because of his own strategy to leverage its effects to the benefit of Russia. And yes, I know, that strategy is stupid and its objectives are not achievable.

This is the specific portion of The New York Times reporting dealing with Secretary Kerry:

Former Secretary of State John Kerry informed him that Israel had attacked Iranian interests in Syria at least 200 times, to his astonishment, Mr. Zarif said.

While it follows a section about how the US, presumably US intelligence, knew about the Quds Force’s reprisal strike on US forces stationed at the Balad Air Base in Iraq before the Quds Force informed Zarif, the sentence about Kerry just sticks out like a very out of place sore thumb. It is completely out of context and contextless. Did Kerry do this when he was Secretary of State, pursuant to a strategy of confidence building with Zarif around the JCPOA negotiations that was deconflicted and cleared with the Director of National Intelligence and Director of Central Intelligence or was this Kerry just shooting the breeze with Zarif sometime after the change of administration between January 2017 and January 2021? We don’t know because the reporter, in his reporting, doesn’t provide us any context.

There has been a concerted effort by Putin, via his active measures campaign, to dirty up very specific American politicians who he believes are or would be detrimental to his interests. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Dick Cheney. As I wrote way back in November of 2019, Putin first planted the agitprop about Hunter Biden in a Russian state backed news outlet- RIA Novosti – as part of a black PSYOP strategy to launder the misinformation through legitimate, or perceived to be legitimate outlets, to dirty up potential presidential candidates. You’ll notice the three names in the highlighted portion below: Biden, Cheney, Kerry in the question from the RIA-Novosti reporter to a peace activist no one has ever heard of outside of the people that read his blog.

RIA_Novosti

And right on time, the usual people in the US bit on what seems to be a singular contextless throw away sentence about Secretary Kerry. All of these below, with the exception of the two Brad Moss tweets and the Stefanik tweet courtesy of commenter Jim, Foolish Literalist, are from just doing a keyword search for “John Kerry” using Twitter’s search function. There are dozens and dozens I’m not including here so as to not gunk up the front page, but this is now on fire in Republican and conservative political, news, and social media circles. The Daily Wire, that’s Shapiro’s agitprop outfit, has picked it up, which means it is now all over Facebook where he’s got dozens of sock puppets pushing his garbage into everybody’s feeds, so the real purpose of this leak in terms of US politics, policy, and strategy is completely successful.

Here’s the link to the search if you want to copy and paste it and see for yourself: https://twitter.com/search?q=john%20kerry&src=typed_query

Current Trump spokesman:

Former Trump spokesman:

The National Review:

Amazingly enough Fox News almost gets it right:

By Fox almost gets it right, I mean that they recognize that the real news in the reporting about the leaked tape is this one out of place, contextless sentence about John Kerry. It is a bombshell because it was intended to be a bombshell. It is a piece of contextless information placed in the middle of an article about an oral history interview given by Iran’s foreign minister that largely confirmed what all of us who actually pay attention to Iran for professional reasons already know. And we already know it largely because of open source reporting, not even anything classified. I can think of over three dozen news reports about Israel striking Iranian targets in Syria without expanding much effort. So this isn’t exactly a state secret in the US, Israel, or Iran.

And this brings us back to the real purpose of the leak. A lot of people are going to focus in on it undermining Zarif and the other members of his reformist party in the civilian facade government ahead of Iranian elections. Others will focus on it undermining attempts by the Biden administration to either get Iran back into the JCPOA or into a new, revised JCPOA. But the Quds Force attempting to prevent that, let alone Bibi or Putin attempting to prevent it, are also not a state secret. The only thing Bibi hasn’t done to tell everyone that’s one of his objectives is host a 24 hour global telethon with that as the theme like Jerry Lewis used to do for MDA every year.

The real purpose of the leak was to get that one, contextless sentence about John Kerry into the reporting. It sticks out like a sore thumb visible from space because it is supposed to stick out like a sore thumb visible from space! The objective here is two fold. The first is to undermine Kerry, who is currently the Special Envoy for Climate Change so that he has to either step down or be fired. That really won’t stop the Biden administration’s efforts on climate change as President Biden will just appoint someone else. The second is to damage President Biden and his administration. So far nothing, and I do mean nothing, has been able to stick. Nothing about Hunter Biden has stuck. Major Biden’s nipping didn’t stick. President Biden has dementia and is being manipulated by VP Harris hasn’t stuck. President Biden is a tool of the Chinese Communist Party, which is the term now doing business for Republicans and conservatives for the People’s Republic of China and everything to do with the People’s Republic of China which is scary because it’s communist, ooga booga! So now, it is going to be all about how President Biden failed to vet John Kerry properly before appointing him the Special Envoy for Climate Change. John Kerry is clearly working for the Iranian government, there’s collusion, we HAVE COLLUSION, IT’s IRANIAN COLLUSION WITH THE DEMOCRATS!!!!! And, finally, can we really say that President Biden didn’t know all the time and that he’s not also, secretly colluding with Iran?

That’s the real news here. This was a hit job on John Kerry, and through John Kerry on President Biden and his administration, masquerading as a leaked oral history interview. That one, contextless, seemingly throw away sentence about John Kerry was the whole point. A perfectly executed black PSYOP. And everyone in Republican politics, the conservative movement, and conservative news, digital, and social media is going to hammer it until they can’t get any further use for it. You all thought Senator Cotton was obnoxious for stating he was holding up all US Attorney appointments, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Just watch, he’ll be holding up all the nat-sec nominations as a result of this too.

Open thread!

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LTC (ret) Grossman Has Grossly Misrepresented Himself, His Service, and His Qualifications

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A while back one of my closest friends, who is a SWAT sniper, asked me about Grossman, specifically because I’ve spent a fair amount of time working with US Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF). I said I didn’t think he was SOF, especially not a Green Beret as I’ve never seen a Green Beret not mention which Special Forces Group they’ve served with in their professional bios. After yesterday’s post I emailed a friend who’d have a better idea and he responded that Grossman was conventional infantry who’d done the Ranger course, served only in conventional line units, and never saw combat. This was fully confirmed when the Marine vet who tweets as The Warax tweeted Grossman’s DD 214, in this case the National Archives Form 13164 (NA 13164), which is what is released when someone makes a FOIA request for someone else’s military service record:

Fixing American Policing In the 21st Century Means Fixing the Training and Education Problem

Fixing American Policing In the 21st Century Means Fixing the Training and Education Problem 1

For the uninitiated, LTC (ret) Grossman is a conventional infantry officer who only ever served in conventional Army assignments. He attended and completed the Ranger course in 1979, meaning he is Ranger tabbed. He never served in the Ranger Regiment, he was never a Green Beret/Special Forces. He wasn’t even Army Special Operations despite listing himself in his bio as a US Army Ranger. He was not branch qualified as a major and not selected for battalion command. He has no combat experience or deployments at all. This guy has never killed anyone, at least not while in uniform.

Failing to properly vet people’s actual credentials, experience, and expertise as opposed to their claimed credentials, experience, and expertise is a HUGE problem in the US. I’ve spent years fighting this problem within different US Army programs. I’ve managed to expose more phony PhDs than I can shake a stick at. Unfortunately, some of them are dug in and protected and can’t be gotten rid of. So I’m not surprised that law enforcement has the same problem.

Grossman is a fake and a fraud in terms of what he is promoting himself to be versus what he has actually done and is qualified to do.

He’s not a psychologist in the sense that anyone who is a psychologist in the civilian world of practitioners or academics would use the term. He’s qualified to be a high school guidance counselor. Don’t take my word for it, here’s how the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Counselor Education describes the masters in counselor education:

Graduates of our program will be prepared to:

  • Pursue employment as academic advisers, career counselors and student affair officials in colleges and universities
  • Pursue doctoral studies in counseling psychology or other related fields
  • Pursue certification as a Licensed Professional Counselor or School Counselor (with additional requirements / coursework – see Program Details for more information).

He’s not Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) in the sense that anyone within the various communities that make up Army Special Forces would use, he’s just Ranger tabbed. This is an accomplishment in itself as the course is brutal. It makes him Ranger qualified. But to those who haven’t served or haven’t worked with the Army/military, the way he presents the qualification is meant to imply something that he is not.

He has no experience in combat as he’s NEVER ACTUALLY BEEN IN COMBAT! He has no experience, that we know of, in actually killing anyone. And certainly not while in uniform in the US Army. He certainly has no law enforcement experience.

LTC (ret) Grossman is a combination of the death of expertise and a dearth of expertise pretending to be the expertise in order to run a very lucrative grift at taxpayer’s expense on both the front end (what he gets paid to teach this bullshit) and on the back end (when municipalities have to pay out in the lawsuits because law enforcement practiced what Grossman preaches).

I’ve placed a correction and an update to yesterday’s post to reflect this new, accurate information regarding Grossman’s misrepresentation of himself.

Open thread!

Just in case anyone decides they want to know who this Adam L. Silverman guy is to say such things, here’s my credentials:

I have a PhD in criminology and political science (awarded by the Department of Political Science with a specialty in Criminology) from the University of Florida. I have taught in several criminology programs and was the undergraduate and graduate core curriculum – epistemology, research design and methods, theory, and statistics – coordinator in an applied criminology and security program. In 2007 I was recruited to go to work for the US Army. First in a supervisory contract position, which included my deployment to Iraq in 2008. This was followed by a civilian mobilization under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act of Title IV of the Federal code, where I served as a supervisory GS 15 assigned as the Cultural Advisor to the Commandant and Professor of Culture, Strategy, and Policy at the US Army War College, as well as the staffer acting as the Deputy to the Director of the Army Culture and Foreign Language Directorate. During this assignment I served, under temporary assigned control, as the Cultural Advisor to the following: the Commanding General of US Army Europe, the Commanding General of III Corps, the Director of the Institute for NCO Professional Development, the Branch Chief of Civil Affairs. I also provided subject matter expertise support to SOCOM, CENTCOM, EUCOM, Army Special Operations Command, Army Central Command, the 101st Airborne Division, SOCOM’s Civil Affairs Capability Based Assessment, SOCOM’s Joint Civil Information Management Test Development, JIEDDO, and the Near East Desk at the Department of State. My subsequent civilian mobilization was with the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Security Dialogue in the Middle East and my assignment was as the Cultural Advisor to the Commanding General of US Army Europe. Following that I served as Senior Fellow for Special Operations, which was a contract position, at SOCOM’s Joint Special Operations University. My training to work for the US Army as a cultural subject matter expert was overseen and conducted by retired Green Berets, Civil Affairs, and Psychological Operations Soldiers.

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Senior Military Leaders – Officers and Senior Enlisted – Have Decided To Very Publicly Smack Tucker Carlson Around

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Like every guy else on this site who has served in a uniform, as a DOD or Service civilian, or in the US intelligence community, we’ve all served with women. And not just in support positions regardless of what the official designators were. In the wars we’ve been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past 20 and 18 years respectively, no matter where we put the phase lines on the map, there were no defined lines that indicated where the fighting would and wouldn’t be. Women Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines, despite being designated in combat support roles for almost the entirety of these wars, often saw as much combat as their male counterparts. Every convoy of supplies, every Civil Affairs Team-Alpha mission, every Medical or Veterinary Operation could, at any moment, go from being a support or enabling mission to a combat one.

Similarly, women working within the US intelligence community, as well as in other agencies within the Interagency that deployed forward also often served in harm’s way. And lots of them – those working for the State Department, USAID, USDA, US Department of Energy, etc – went forward despite knowing they, like their male colleagues from these agencies, would NOT be authorized to be armed despite being deployed in a war zone! And yet they went. And the civil service women from the Interagency all went because they volunteered as part of what was referred to as the “civilian surge” to better enable and enhance the US military’s ability to successfully conduct Phase IV Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I fought hard to have two women on my small team of cultural analysts – one a former student I’d recruited and the other a former Army intelligence NCO. I got my former student and was glad to have one woman on the team*. Why? Because we were deployed in a high context communicating, near-far relationship, honor-shame society that was also Muslim. This meant that women, and being able to talk to them, to have them talk to us and tell us what they needed – as women in general and as mothers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc in specific – was largely impossible without a woman on the team!

I once did a ride along on a MedOps with one of our Civil Affairs Teams-Alpha (CAT-A) and my former student did not come along. And we didn’t have a female medic or interpreter with us either. It took over half the day before anyone without a Y chromosome would come talk to us. Eventually someone sent a five year old girl to ask for something figuring that that was somehow not improper. Once we were able to get her what she needed for her mother, that broke the ice and the Civil Affairs medic was suddenly swamped by women. The first thing that was decided at the post mission after action review was that from now on a female CA Soldier, a female medic, and a female interpreter would be on the list of required personnel for these missions.

In Afghanistan they actually built all women teams – known as Lioness Teams – to go do this type of work with Afghan women. There was some discussion of doing this within our brigade, leading to the cringeworthy suggestion that since we were the Iron Brigade they should be called the Iron Maidens, but it was ultimately decided to simply ensure women were on all the essential missions because we didn’t have any female personnel who had gone through the specialty Lioness Team training. Here’s the link to a great, though infuriatingly sad, documentary on the Lioness Teams done by Frontline at PBS.

So I’m very glad to see a number of senior military leaders – officers and senior enlisted – visibly and vocally push back against Carlson’s offensive stupidity. Here’s a sampling I came across without even looking. If the WordPress formatting isn’t showing you the full, embedded tweet with the video, just click on the links to see and hear for yourselves.

Command Sergeant Major Michael Grinston, the 16th Sergeant Major of the Army:

US Training and Doctrine Command Deputy Commanding General LTG Ted Martin:

US Space Command Senior Enlisted Advisor/Command NCO:

GEN Paul Funk, Jr; Commanding General Training and Doctrine Command (who has also been using his social media feed to retweet and amplify other’s similar statements):

Major General Pat Donahoe, Commanding General Maneuver Center of Excellent and Ft. Benning:

MG John R. Evans, Commanding General US Army Cadet Command:

MG Dennis LeMaster, Commanding General US Army Medical Center of Excellence:

 

Statement made by GEN James McConville, US Army Chief of Staff:

I found these without really looking and I’m sure there are more out there. The US military is not perfect when it comes to dealing with women who are Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, or Marines, but the responses of the senior leadership to Carlson’s stupid agitprop is encouraging and reassuring. I would also suggest that this open support is possible because of who is president. The senior uniformed leadership knows that if they publicly push back on Carlson’s stupidity that they won’t be called out on it by any of the political loyalty officers that Trump had appointed to senior positions in the White House, at the DOD, and at the Services.

Open thread!

* Of the women who served in the US Army Human Terrain System, two lost their lives during their deployments as a result of enemy action. Both of these were peers of mine – they were also the field social scientists, read research and analytical directors and technical leads, for their teams. Nicole Suveges was blown up in Sadr City in Iraq in late June 2008, we had been emailing just the day before about an HR issue of all things. Paula Lloyd, who I did not know, died in early January 2009. She had served through the rank of Staff Sergeant in the US Army before going on to get her advanced degrees. Paula was attacked in early November 2008 by an Afghan local who doused her with gasoline that had been concealed in a container used for cooking oil and lit on fire while accompanying and assisting an Army patrol in Afghanistan. She ultimately died of her burn wounds two months later.

My former student, one of the best ones I ever had, came through her deployment successfully.

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The Two Real Reasons the House Cancelled Today’s Session, Which Was An Understandable, But Really Bad Idea

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Earlier this morning Anne Laurie highlighted that the House of Representatives would be taking today off because of a threat assessment, based on intelligence collected from social media and other sources, that some group of right wing violent domestic extremists – white supremacists, neo-NAZIs, armed and illegal paramilitary groups (aka “militias” and “patriot” groups), and/or other anti-government extremists – working off of a historically bonkers QAnon drop that is itself rooted in sovereign citizen (anti-government extremist) bullshit that 4 March is the real inauguration day and that since today is 4 March, Donald J. Trump is going to be inaugurated for his second term today. And that to celebrate, these anti-American violent domestic extremists were planning on attacking the Capitol again to kill as many members of Congress as possible. Or as members of the Bundy family call it: Thursday.

Just a few minutes ago, not realizing that he’d fallen for my nefariously cunning plan to turn him into my warm up routine, Mistermix asked the following question:

My second question is why the Capital is not ringed with soldiers, why every member and staffer doesn’t have an armed escort, and why some kind of armored vehicles aren’t patrolling streets around the building so the House can meet today?  (The Senate is in session, which makes little sense if you’re closing the House for a threat.)  Is not capitulating to terrorists reserved for foreign terrorists only?

There are two reasons that the House decided to cancel, even though the Capitol is nominally open for business given the pandemic protocols and the US Senate – the world’s greatest deliberative country club – is in session. Both reasons are different types of insider threats. An insider threat is defined as:

An insider threat is any person with authorized access to any U.S. Government resources, including personnel, facilities, information, equipment, networks, or systems, who uses that access either wittingly or unwittingly to do harm to the security of the U.S.

This threat can include damage to the U.S. through espionage, terrorism, unauthorized disclosure of national security information, or through the loss or degradation of government, company, contract or program information, resources or capabilities.

The first of these insider threats is from within the Capitol Police specifically and Federal law enforcement in general. Right now there are six officers from the Capitol Police Department that are suspended and another twenty-nine who are under investigation as part of the ongoing investigations into the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol. As a result, there is a very real worry that members of the Capitol Police may be sympathetic to these violent domestic extremists or, even worse, actually subjectively or objectively affiliated with them. It was reported yesterday that a DEA agent from LA has been suspended pending the outcome of an investigation into his activities during the insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January. There is a credible threat of both specific insider threats within the Capitol Police Department and a general concern that there may be additional insider threats within and throughout other Federal law enforcement agencies. This means that those who work in the Capitol – from elected members of both chambers to their staffs to the committee staffs to the staff that just keep the building running for everyone else – may be at risk from those who are supposed to be protecting them.

The second insider threat is from members of the House Republican Caucus and/or members of their staff. Within hours of the attack on the Capitol, Democratic members of the House, led by Congresswoman Mikie Sherill, alleged that Republican members of the House and/or their staff gave reconnaissance tours to the insurrectionists in the days leading up to the attack.  Congressman Tim Ryan, who chairs the sub-committee with oversight over the Capitol complex itself, indicated last week that this question is now under active investigation by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Colombia:

Ryan also told reporters the issue of “reconnaissance tours” given by members of Congress to alleged rioters before the attack was now “in the hands of the U.S. attorney here in D.C.”

He said they were “reviewing the footage.”

In this case the concern is that there are members of the House of Representatives, specifically the House Republican caucus, or members of their staffs who aided and abetted the insurrectionists in planning and facilitating the domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol on 6 January. One of the reasons that this investigation has to be done by reviewing footage and not reviewing visitor log details is because there are no visitor logs right now as the Capitol is closed to visitors under the pandemic control protocols that have been put into place. Ordinarily everyone who enters for one of these member or member’s staff given tours has to provide a significant amount of personally identifying information (PII) that would be logged into the system and cross referenced against who was escorting them, for what purposes, and the day, date, and time of entry and departure. That information isn’t available for this investigation because none of the members or their staffs are supposed to be giving tours, which makes it a perfect time to aide and abet surveillance ahead of a domestic terrorist attack by taking advantage of the normal record keeping process being suspended.

Given these two potential and suspected insider threats, it is perfectly understandable why the House would go into recess for the week a day early. It is also a terrible decision for all that it makes perfect sense. Every time one or more of these specific domestic extremists, domestic extremist group, or the members of the Republican House or Senate caucus who have decided to either represent them or indulge them in the hopes of electoral success (Senator Micro Rubio is definitely in the latter category), make a threat and get a response to them that is a rewards for making a threat, they win. Moreover, they learn that making a threat or actually carrying out a threat – stalking, harassing, and verbally assaulting members of the House or Senate, attacking the Capitol or a member’s office back in their districts and states, doing the same thing at the state and municipal levels, etc – they receive reinforcement not just for their revanchist, reactionary anti-American, and anti-constitutional beliefs, but for the actions they take to make those beliefs real. The more rewards and reinforcement they receive, the more they will engage in these behaviors and others will be inspired and motivated to adopt these beliefs and behaviors for themselves.

And that is why this moment is very different and uniquely dangerous compared to previous moments of hyper-polarization in US politics. Normally we would all want to try to make a distinction, painting with a very fine brush if you will, between those who hold ideologically extreme views, but work within the existing political system and processes to achieve their goals and those who hold those same views, but advocate and undertake the use of violence to achieve the same goals. We would want to do this because by channeling even those with ideologically extreme views through the existing political system and process it keeps them both in touch with those that don’t hold their views, exposes them to counter-arguments, and uses the system to temper their extremism by using the systems and processes to prevent their extremist beliefs from becoming extremist outcomes. This moment is unique, however, because that is both not possible and because the system is not working to do that. Hawley, Cruz, Cotton, Lee, Johnson, Grassley, McConnell, Graham, Tuberville, and almost thirty other Republicans in the Senate and Greene, Boebert, Cawthorne, Gaetz, Jordan, McCarthy, Scalise, and almost 140 other Republicans in the House have all made it explicitly clear that if the existing political system and processes won’t produce the outcomes that they prefer, that they are perfectly happy to subvert them and if that doesn’t work destroy them to achieve their objectives. Moreover, they are using the threats of and actual violence and terrorism by the violent domestic extremists to justify their actions and achieve their objectives. This is not one or two ideological fellow travelers that happened to just get elected and are not able to accomplish much. This is an insider threat from within the Republican House and Senate caucuses that make up a majority of the GOP caucus in the House and between a third and half of the Republican caucus in the Senate.

These two insider threats are the answer to MisterMix’s question.

Open thread!

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