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What is Section 702 and Why Should You Fear It
You’ve been warned — a fight over the U.S. government’s ability to spy on its own citizens is coming to Congress. Section 702 is up for renewal again in December.
Section 702 grew out of an illegal post-9/11 program called Stellarwind exposed by NSA whistleblower Tom Drake. It refers to a provision of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that was enacted in 2008. It authorizes the U.S. government to collect the communications of non-U.S. persons located outside of the United States for the purpose of obtaining foreign intelligence information. But the program also allows for the incidental collection of information about U.S. persons who may be communicating with the targeted foreigners. Section 702 was renewed by Congress in 2018 with the passing of the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act. This reauthorization extended the authority for Section 702 for another six years, through December 31, 2023, hence the looming fight.
The reauthorization included some modifications to the program, including new reporting requirements and limitations on the use of information obtained under Section 702 in certain types of legal proceedings. The law also included some new privacy protections, such as the requirement for a warrant to search for and use information related to U.S. persons in certain cases. The latter only applies to the FBI, which is required to obtain a court order to review anything that comes up in response to queries using American identifiers that are purely for a criminal investigation with no link to national security. Oh yes, that’s right: Section 702, which was written to stop another 9/11, is widely used by domestic law enforcement as part of regular police work.
But the most controversial aspect of the law remains the “Three Hops Rule.” If you are speaking with a foreigner outside the U.S. by phone, then that makes everyone else you speak with, American or not, eligible for monitoring. That’s one hop. Everyone they talk to is also eligible, that’s two hops, and so forth. The number of people subject to legal surveillance under Section 702 thus grows geometrically every time someone sends an email, like some sick version of the old game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Suddenly one communication sweeps in many, often unrelated, persons, and the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy is reduced to dryer lint because no warrants are generally needed and little if any oversight is applied. The scooping up of American communications is now (who says the Feds have no sense of humor) referred to as “incidental collection” even though it is quite purposeful.
The two things, three hops and Section 702, were never intended to be used together but certainly are. Technological advances, primarily the internet and fiber-optic lines, made foreigners’ messages available on domestic U.S. networks — the routing of a communication from Beijing to London passes through America. Since the Reagan years, the NSA, with the help of communications companies, has been able to vacuum up in bulk, without targeting anyone, messages that both originate and terminate abroad as they travel across American networks.
The potential for abuse is underscored by the scale of all this in an age when almost all of our communications are electronic (including phone calls) and when hubs of communication (Google and email providers, most of whom cooperate directly with the government to collect and hand over your data, as exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden) concentrate more and more of what we say, read, watch, and buy into fewer nodes to tap. In 2021, there were more than 230,000 foreign targets of Section 702 warrantless surveillance (that number multiplied by the three hops rule, of course.)
In contrast, the government obtained FISA court warrants to eavesdrop on about only 300 Americans or noncitizens on domestic soil. Proponents of Section 702 argue obtaining warrants for all those foreigners would sharply curtail the intelligence the government is able to gather. Applying for court orders requires time and resources, and then there are those nasty legal and evidentiary standards to be met. Because everything is highly classified, absent whistleblowers, public oversight is limited. One declassified audit showed the FBI misused the system for routine employment checks and other unauthorized sneak peeks. The FISA court, in an example of what passes as oversight, criticized the FBI for “widespread violations” of rules intended to protect Americans’ privacy but still signed off on the program’s continuance.
“Section 702 allows mass warrantless surveillance of individuals’ communications, including Americans. It embodies a long history of government overreach and abuse, including the most recent oversight report released in December 2022, which found that the FBI conducted numerous unlawful searches for Americans’ information,” Kathleen McClellan of ExposeFacts.org told The Spectator.
One idea being floated is to separate the collection of raw material from the query process, i.e., actually using the material. A revised Section 702 would continue to allow mass monitoring, but before the NSA or FBI, et al, could search that collected date for Americans by identifier (name, Social Security number, etc.) they would need a warrant to show probable cause. Something like this change might be the key to seeing Section 702 reauthorized, as House Judiciary Committee members focus on civil liberties while members of the Intelligence Subcommittee tend to be more supportive of surveillance powers. The fear-mongering ducks are already being lined up. General Paul Nakasone, head of the NSA and Cyber Command, said 702 powers have helped the U.S. government stop planned terrorist plots and cyber espionage campaigns before they happen. “702 provides a critically important capability to the intelligence community as we face rising challenges from China and Russia, as well as threats from terrorism, cyber actors, and others,” Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner claims.
Congress is expected to rely heavily on the advice of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent executive branch agency led by a bipartisan group of five presidentially nominated and Senate-confirmed Board Members. The Board is examining significant changes to the operation of the 702 program since their Report on the Surveillance Program Operated Pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (2014) in order to provide an accurate description of the current program. The Board’s review covers selected focus areas for investigation, including but not necessarily limited to, U.S. person queries of information collected under Section 702, and ‘Upstream’ collection [data handed over from communication providers.] The Oversight Project also includes reviewing the program’s past and projected value and efficacy, as well as the adequacy of existing privacy and civil liberties safeguards. The changes made to Section 702 on the last renewal go-round in 2018 drew heavily from this report, a good indicator the PCLOB may influence the 2023 renewal process as well.
The bad news is most of the Fourth Amendment protections of Americans’ privacy disappeared in the aftermath of September 11, all in the name of fighting terrorism. There seems no question Section 702, one of the Fourth Amendment-busting laws, will be renewed. The hope for civil libertarians and privacy advocates alike in salvaging some rights lies in marginal changes to the law along the line of PCLOB recommendations to limit use of Americans’ identifiers as query terms and to force NSA and others to disclose more of the extent of the program’s use.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The DNI Two-Step and Trump
If you play poker with a guy named Doc often enough you learn to watch his hands carefully when it’s his turn to hold the deck. Same when the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the Intelligence Community (IC), and the FBI sit down at the table with the American people.
The game right now is will he or won’t he; will Attorney General Merrick Garland indict Donald Trump over something to do with classified information held at Mar-a-Lago? Everyone is holding their cards tight to the vest, but the deal just passed to the DNI and the game is about to get serious. Stakes are high; in the pot is the presidency of the United States.
DNI Avril Haines said that DNI “will lead an Intelligence Community assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents” including those seized. She said the DNI was aiming not to interfere with the ongoing criminal investigation, to which everyone at the table had better shout “bull.” A review of potential risk means the DNI can show a pair of twos and claim they are kings. The DNI’s whole point is to interfere with the investigation, same as they did with Hunter’s laptop, Russiagate, and the Clinton server before that. The IC is as much a part of our elections now as it ever was in any other banana republic.
It works like this: using classified methods in secret to look at classified documents the DNI will come to conclusions about what might happen to the security of the United States if those documents were to fall into “the wrong hands,” i.e., the hands of their choosing and certainly a worst-case scenario.
Without revealing the documents’ contents or why those contents are so important, the DNI gets to say how bad things would be and your role as the public is to believe them and vote accordingly. Since it is a worst-case scenario game, the DNI will no doubt — without any evidence anyone but Trump saw the docs — proclaim nearly the end of the world, that pair of kings. The goal of course would most certainly be to influence the investigation or, more precisely, influence the public opinion outcome. It’s a remake of the January 2017 intelligence community assessment (another form of make it say what you want it to say document) which claimed, without evidence, that Vladimir Putin wanted to put Trump in the Oval Office. Or the 2020 IC letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
Right now the DOJ has very little to prosecute on, basically that Trump held on to some (maybe) classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Did anyone see them? Was there any chance a foreign adversary got a peek? DOJ needs more than simple possession (albeit a crime) to go after a once and perhaps future president and may not have it. The docs may never have left lock and key. Mar-a-Lago surveillance tapes may not show Boris Badenov walking in and out of frame; enter the IC.
The DNI document review itself will of course not be made pubic. In discussing which sources and methods might have been damaged it will need to be more highly classified than the original documents. We’ll never see the Review. But better than the entire document, we’ll all see the leaks, the little snippets meant to take down Trump that will inevitably leach into the New York Times and Washington Post. The IC will provide the ammunition, in carefully measured amounts, DOJ needs to make the unclassified case to the public the classified stuff they’ll never see is a big, big deal.
Conspiracy theory? Ask yourself how crime scene-like photos have already leaked from the Mar-a-Lago investigation as compared to say, the Jeffery Epstein case. Imagine a crime scene-like photo of children’s underwear strewn across the floor, stuff investigators allegedly found in Epstein’s desk. DOJ and Trump have been bickering about these documents nearly since he left office; why was the spectacular raid held just weeks ahead of the midterms?
This is by now a familiar song. Remember the role the IC played in the 2020 election in making sure Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents would not influence Americans. As the New York Post broke the story that a laptop full of Hunter Biden’s files contained potential evidence of a pay-for-play scenario involving then-candidate Joe Biden just ahead of the presidential election, almost in real time more than 50 former senior IC officials signed a letter dutifully published by Politico claiming the emails “have all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The signers said their national security experience made them “deeply suspicious the Russian government played a significant role in this case. If we are right this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.” Small world — the U.S. spy chiefs who signed that infamously misleading letter, including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper, directed America’s IC while Biden was vice president.
The letter was an act of evil brilliance, the weaponization of opinion. It played off cultivated prejudices from 2016 that the Russians manipulated American elections. In fact, most of the signatories — James Clapper and John Brennan among them — had played key roles in misdirecting public opinion around the DNC-server hack and later the whole of Russiagate. Among the establishment, the meme quickly became into “the laptop is fake.”
The major difference in this case was the establishment’s willingness to actively block information. With the letter as “proof” the laptop was disinformation, the media took the handoff. Twitter locked the New York Post‘s account after the Post refused to obey Twitter’s orders to delete its own truthful reporting. Twitter even banned links to the story in direct messages. Facebook announced it would not allow discussion of the issue pending a “fact check,” which never came. Establishment media outlets labeled the laptop fake, social media blocked the news, and the public basically fell in line and voted for Joe without knowing squat about what he and his son Hunter had been up to. Many still do not.
More recent information exposes the IC plan in greater detail, to include the FBI specifically approaching Facebook and Twitter to tell them not to allow the story. Claims of not interfering with the election were fully false, with a cover up until when it seems not to matter anymore, to boot. Like the whole of Russiagate, it was all made up, and the IC worked hand-in-glove with the Democratic media to hide information. Hunter Biden’s laptop had the potential to change the outcome of the 2020 election, and everyone knew it.
So be careful when the inevitable DNI/IC leaks about how serious the whole Mar-a-Lago affair is show up. Now, after all that you wanna play another hand of poker with these guys? Sure, let old Doc here deal you in, sucker…
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Clinton Precedencies and Mar-a-Lago Search
It always ends up back with the Clintons, doesn’t it? The laws Trump may be charged under at Mar-a-Lago appear to have been violated by both of the Clintons, yet the two were never searched, never mind charged and prosecuted. Any action against Trump must account for that to preserve what is left of faith in the rule of law applied without fear or favor, or risk civil disenfranchisement if not outright civil unrest.
The more obvious case involves former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who maintained an unsecured private email server which processed classified material on a daily basis. Her server held at least 110 known messages containing classified information, including e-mail chains classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level, the highest level of civilian classification, that included the names of CIA and NSA employees. The FBI found classified intelligence improperly stored and transmitted on Clinton’s server “was compromised by unauthorized individuals, to include foreign governments or intelligence services, via cyber intrusion or other means.” Clinton and her team destroyed tens of thousands of emails, potential evidence, as well as physical phones and Blackberries which potentially held evidence. She operated the server out of her home kitchen despite the presence of the Secret Service on property who failed to report it. Her purpose in doing all this appeared to have been avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests during her tenure as SecState, and maintaining control over what records became part of the historical archive post-tenure.
Clinton seems to have violated all three statues Trump was searched under:
— 18 U.S.C. §§ 793, “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” says “Whoever, for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation…” This law is part of the infamous Espionage Act of 1917. Parts of the Espionage Act also includes a gross negligence standard, meaning a prosecutor does not have to prove specific intent in all cases. That Clinton’s server was compromised strongly speaks to the question of injury to the United States.
— 18 U.S.C. §§ 2071, “Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally of an record…” is a no-brainer for Clinton, given that she destroyed thousands of emails, physical hard drives, and handheld devices.
— 18 U.S.C. §§ 1519, The “anti-shredding provision” which imposes criminal penalties on anyone who (emphasis added) “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede or obstruct an investigation.” Clinton destroyed much of the data during an investigation into her communications, satisfying intent. Her overall intent was to block FOIA requests, and might speak to intent to impede or obstruct some investigation that required the full diplomatic record be made available.
Absent a trial no one can say conclusively Clinton was guilty of what Trump is likely to be charged with, but the basic elements are there. That is not the point anymore anyway. The point is that if the FBI is going to take a similar fact sets and ignore one while aggressively pursuing another, it risks being seen as partial and political. Any further action against Trump and certainly any prosecution of him must address why Hillary was not searched and prosecuted herself. Fair is fair, after all.
And then there’s Bill Clinton. Bill made a series of some 79 audio tapes from 1993-2001 with a historian inside the Oval Office, sometimes recording his thoughts and decision making, other times directly recording his phone calls. He kept the raw tapes himself after a book was published in 2009, actually storing them in a dresser drawer inside the White House residence. Judicial Watch sued Bill for the tapes claiming they were presidential records and had to be made available to the public through the National Archives, aka NARA, and that the Archives needed to seize the tapes. Clinton argued they were personal records outside the control of NARA.
In directly contravening what is happening with Trump, the court ruled in 2012 “NARA does not have the authority to designate materials as ‘presidential records,’ and NARA lacks any right, duty, or means to seize control of them.”
Judicial Watch argued the Clinton tapes should have been included among the presidential records transferred to the Archivist at the end of the Clinton presidency, but Bill retained them in his personal possession when he left office and refused to produce them for use by Judicial Watch nor hand them over to NARA, considering them his own property just like the underwear and socks he stored the tapes among in his dresser. Judicial Watch lost the case and never appealed, and the tapes presumably remain with the Clintons.
As with the Hillary case, any prosecution of Trump for dispossessing presidential records must address the precedent set in the Bill Clinton case, i.e., the simple assertion by Bill that the tapes were his personal property. More significantly, going forward on the Trump case the DOJ must address the court’s decision in the Bill Clinton case that “NARA does not have the authority to designate materials as presidential records, and NARA lacks any right, duty, or means to seize control of them.” In other words, for what Trump had in his possession to be government records, someone would have had to designate them as such. The court in Judicial Watch v. NARA said NARA could not make such a designation, and the FBI certainly is not legally the one to do it. Could it be the president himself designates when a record is official and when it is personal?
Sort of. It appears a president’s discretion on what are personal vs. official records is far-reaching and solely his, as is his ability to declassify or destroy records at will. Per Judicial Watch, “under the statutory scheme established by the Presidential Records Act (PRA) the decision to segregate personal materials from presidential records is made by the president, during the president’s term and in his sole discretion… Since the president is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records.”
Now to be fair there is a fair amount of case law trying to define more clearly what is a presidential record and what is a personal record. There are also mechanisms to try and resolve differences of opinion between a president and NARA. But none of those mechanisms are criminal, and none seem to involve physically seizing documents under a search warrant. It is clear the PRA does not bestow on the president the power to assert sweeping authority over whatever materials he chooses to designate as presidential records without any possibility of judicial review. But NARA on the other hand cannot do so either. The battleground under the PRA is the courts, not the back rooms at FBI headquarters.
If Trump were to designate a record as personal, not presidential, and NARA disagreed, it appears the standard mechanism (as shown in the Bill Clinton case) would be to go to court to redesignate the record. Step One (as in the Bill Clinton case) is not for the FBI to seize the record acting as some Solomon-like neutral party between the president and NARA. The bottom line is Bill Clinton was able to hold on to his audiotapes as personal records, and the tapes were never seized by the FBI under threat of the Espionage Act.
Any attempts to move the Trump case forward as a criminal one will first need to explain how it differs from the Bill Clinton case. If DOJ can’t do that — as well as differentiate Trump from Hillary Clinton and her server — then they have no basis to claim they are enforcing the law without fear or favor. It will be just plain old political hackery, using the criminal justice system to defeat Trump when the electoral system will not. That’s Third World stuff, skippy.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Russiagate: The Smoking Gun, Part II
Part I of this article showed a conspiracy to smear Donald Trump with false allegations of collusion with Russia took place, with Hillary Clinton at its head. Part II today will show the FBI was an active participant in the conspiracy to destroy Trump. The facts are not in dispute. We are left only to decide if the FBI acted incompetently and unprofessionally, or as part of a conspiracy.
The first part of the smoking gun may have been hiding in plain sight for some time now. In June 2018 Inspector General for the Department of Justice Michael Horowitz released his report on the FBI’s Clinton email investigation, including FBI Director Comey’s drafting of a press release announcing no prosecution for Clinton, written before the full investigation was even complete. In a damning passage, Horowitz found it was “extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors… for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same.”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Comey’s boss, is criticized for meeting privately with Bill Clinton as the FBI investigation into Hillary unfolded. “Lynch’s failure to recognize the appearance problem… and to take action to cut the visit short was an error in judgment.” Lynch then doubled-down, refusing to recuse herself from the Clinton case, creating “public confusion.”
The report also criticizes FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who exchanged texts disparaging Trump before moving from the Clinton email to the Russiagate investigation. Those texts sowed public doubt about the investigation, including one exchange that read, “Page: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” Another Strzok document stated “we know foreign actors obtained access to some Clinton emails, including at least one secret message,” thought that was never prosecuted.
Page and Strzok also discussed cutting back the number of investigators present for Clinton’s in-person interview in light of the fact she might soon be president, and thus their new boss. Someone identified only as Agent One went on to refer to Clinton as “the President” and in a message told a friend “I’m with her.” The FBI also allowed Clinton’s lawyers to attend her interview, even though they were also witnesses to possible crimes committed by Clinton.
If that does not add up to a smoking gun that the FBI conspired pre-dossier to help Hillary Clinton, how about this?
Following Hillary’s exoneration over her emails and mishandling of classified information, the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump-Russia, based in whole or large part on the infamous Christopher Steele dossier. The public now knows the dossier was paid for and stocked with falsehoods by the Clinton campaign. The unanswered questions from that investigation themselves comprise a second smoking gun of FBI conspiracy. For example:
— Why did the FBI not inquire into Steele’s sources and methods, which would have quickly revealed the information was wholly false? Why was the FBI unable to discover Steele (and later, Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann, who gave false info to the FBI about Trump and Alfa Bank) were double agents working for and paid by the Clinton campaign?
— When the FBI found the target of its first FISA warrant out of the dossier, Carter Page, was actually a paid CIA asset, why did they hide this information from the FISA court instead of dropping Page? Why did this not cause them to question the credibility of Steele, a master spy who couldn’t even identify his source was actually a CIA asset? Steele claimed the Russians offered Page an insanely huge bribe, billions of dollars, to end U.S. sanctions if Trump became president. Page clearly could never have played a significant role in ending sanctions. Why did the FBI find those statements credible enough to pursue the warrant?
— Why did the FBI cite an open-source press article by Michael Isikoff claiming Trump had Russian ties as part of its FISA warrant application against Page without finding out who Isikoff’s source was? The source of course was Christopher Steele, who was interviewed in a hotel room booked by Fusion GPS who was paid by Clinton. The FBI nonetheless claimed an article from Yahoo! corroborated the dossier, a cite unlikely to pass muster on an undergrad term paper. Were they really fooled?
— Why did the FBI not discover the dossier’s false claim Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet with Russians? Robert Mueller was able to conclusively dismiss the report. Confirming Cohen in Prague would have been a cornerstone of the FBI’s larger case, but the matter was left open until Mueller.
— Why did the FBI not question Sussmann about the source of his DNS data, some of which came directly from inside the White House? Why would a private citizen have such information?
— When Sussmann, claiming to be a concerned citizen with White House DNS data, first approached the FBI, why was he assigned to meet with the FBI’s General Counsel, its lawyer, and not a case agent? Was something other than his information, such possibly FBI collusion with fraud, being validated?
— Why was the CIA investigation referral saying Hillary was behind Russiagate ignored by the FBI? The memo was addressed to Director James Comey, who claims he has no knowledge of it, and Peter Strzok, who should have been the action officer but did nothing?
— Why did Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief, say “The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one, that the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign. And yet they knowingly ran with its false information.”
— Despite the investigation being run by the FBI, why was it CIA Director John Brennan who briefed (LINK) Obama on the Hillary connection in July 2016 and not Comey?
If any of those questions seem kind of obvious, that is the point. The cover stories only had to hold for a short time, enough to infect the media, enough to make things seem plausible for the FBI. Team Clinton and its co-conspirators were so certain they would win the election they felt none of their tricks needed to stay hidden much past victory. The story is waist-deep rotten.
At this point you can believe the multiple ops paid for and run by Clinton people were uncoordinated events, or that they were part of the broad campaign Hillary was an active participant in, and about which John Brennan warned Barack Obama, and which the CIA warned the FBI, not knowing they were in on it. You can believe the FBI acted incompetently and unprofessionally (yet consistently, no breaks went Trump’s way), or as part of a conspiracy.
What you cannot do any more is pretend this did not happen, and that the person most involved came close to being elected president because of it. If you worry about democracy, worry about that.
In preparing this article, it was fascinating to review the many shameful articles written in 2016 and 2017, the crazy days when every hinted rumor was worth a Breaking! designator. But one piece stood out, from Forbes in 2017. Hillary denied paying for the dossier, and the truth — the campaign paid the law firm Perkins and Coie who paid Fusion GPS who paid Orbis who paid Steele — was not known. The Forbes journalist wrote “If ordered and paid for by Hillary Clinton associates, Russia Gate is turned on its head as collusion between Clinton operatives (not Trump’s) and Russian intelligence. Russia Gate becomes Hillary Gate.” The article went on to say how James Comey refused to comment on Fusion GPS and the dossier in May 2017. Comey by then knew the real story and remained silent, even as the press was still running with the idea the dossier had been paid for by anonymous Democratic donors. If only we’d known.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Russiagate: The Smoking Gun, Part I
We are looking for two smoking guns now in connection with Russiagate. Today’s Part I will show Hillary Clinton herself sat atop a large-scale conspiracy to use the tools of modern espionage to create and disseminate false information about Trump. Part II to follow will show the FBI was an active participant in that conspiracy.
In summer 2016 Hillary Clinton’s private email server and her improper handling of classified information was the political story. Consensus was the election was Hillary’s to lose, that her opponents in general and especially the Trump clown show, could not stop her. Despite the MSM’s heroic attempts to downplay the importance of the emails, the issue lingered in the public mind, often aided by Hillary’s own contradictory statements. The emails nagged at the Clinton campaign — her unsecured server lay exposed during her SecState trips to Russia and China, and the deepest fear was that her internal communications might appear one day on Wikileaks, ending her career.
Clinton fought back. The initial shot was fired on July 24, 2016 by campaign manager Robby Mook, who was the first to claim there was a quid pro quo between Trump and Russia. “It was very concerning last week that Donald Trump changed the Republican platform to become what some experts would regard as pro-Russian,” Mook said, referring to a false story from the GOP convention just a few days earlier. The New York Times sent up a warning flare to all MSM media the next day announcing Clinton was making the Trump-Russia allegation a “theme” of the campaign. As if she knew just what was coming next, Hillary took that as her cue to claim the Russians were trying to destroy her campaign, a theme which soon morphed into the Russians were trying to help Trump. That soon became Trump and Putin were working in collusion to elect Trump as a Manchurian candidate.
A prime driver behind all this was a mysterious “dossier.” The jewel in the crown was a “pee tape,” blackmail, kompromat, Moscow held to control Trump. Word was a former MI-6 intelligence officer named Christopher Steele compiled the dossier, giving the whole thing credibility. America media openly speculated on Trump’s imminent arrest for treason, with Twitter aflutter with phrases like tik-tok, walls closing in, and the like. The FBI’s James Comey and CIA’s John Brennan briefed the newly-elected Trump on the dossier simultaneously with the full contents spilling into the media. Talk shifted to impeachment, alongside claims Hillary might still deserve to be president.
We know now the dossier was fiction. Steele’s raw information was provided by the Clinton campaign, with his chief source working for the Brookings Institute. Steele worked as a double-agent, feeding Clinton-paid for fake info to the FBI pretending he was an FBI informant with sources deep inside Mother Russia. The dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign.
We also now know the Clinton campaign, via one of its lawyers, Michael Sussmann, gathered Internet DNS data on Trump and used that to create a fully fictional story about Trump using a secret server connected to the Alfa Bank to communicate with his Russian “handlers.” Sussmann also peddled a false story about Russian smartphones connecting into the Trump White House. We know Sussmann hid his relationship to Clinton from the FBI, pretending to be a “concerned citizen.” Sussmann is under indictment by Special Counsel John Durham, and in his own defense filing does not dispute the basic facts. He only claims his lying was immaterial.
Both the dossier op and the DNS op were funded by Clinton campaign money laundered through its lawyers at Perkins Coie and then contractors Fusion GPS and Orbis. In both instances the false information created was peddled to the FBI (and CIA) by a Clinton-paid stooge pretending not to be affiliated with the campaign, Steele as an FBI informant and Sussmann as a “concerned citizen.” Both ops used a sophisticated information sub-op, feeding the media as if Steele and Sussmann were not the source and then having Steel and Sussmann step in to serve as anonymous confirmers, an inside loop. In both instances the FBI took the bait and opened unprecedented full-spectrum investigations into first Candidate Trump, and then President of the United States Trump.
Four years after all that, on October 6, 2020, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified documents revealing then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Obama on or about July 28, 2016 on Hillary Clinton’s plan to tie Candidate Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.
The highly-redacted document says “We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]. Cite alleged approved by Hillary Clinton on July 26 a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”
Ratcliffe in 2020 also revealed in September 2016 the CIA forwarded to the FBI an investigative referral on Hillary Clinton approving “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections in order to distract the public from her email scandal.”
The MSM at the time dismissed these two important disclosures as unverified disinformation. The problem with simply waving away these documents is the very high threshold for information to actually reach the president. Every day a near-infinate amount of information is collected by the CIA. A tiny percentage of that is culled for the standing Agency briefings the president receives. An even tinier subset is seen as important and credible enough to be personally briefed by the CIA Director face-to-face with the president.
Rarely is there near-time “verification” with intelligence. There is however “confidence,” how sure the CIA is the information is true, and the Director would not waste his boss’ time with that of low or medium confidence (and neither would the Agency do the same in sending its referral on to the FBI.) Knowing what we know now about Clinton campaign funding of the ops and Clinton personnel involvement, Brennan’s confidence is better understood. And it is important to remember Brennan openly supported Hillary; he was not the guy to dish dirt on her. He was making sure his boss, Barack Obama, had a heads up if the whole thing was ever exposed.
There is also the matter of Ratcliffe, who hand-selected the documents to declassify, lending them more credibility. Why play high stakes with information Radcliffe knew to be false?
One last concern has been that the CIA source appears to be foreign, and therefore suspect. The CIA is legally prohibited from spying on Americans in America, particularly something as sensitive as a presidential campaign. Even if tipped off by an American, the CIA would need to go overseas and recreate the info with a foreign source. That the information was available through a foreign source also suggests strongly Moscow had eyes on inside the Hillary campaign. Perhaps through her email?
Both ops ran on Clinton’s money and Clinton’s people. The smoking gun of Brennan’s notes ties it all to Hillary herself.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Connecting the Dots of Durham, Russiagate, the FBI, and Clinton
Let’s connect the dots among Durham, Russiagate, the FBI, and Clinton. They show the Clinton campaign ran a sophisticated, multi-prong coordinated intelligence operation against Trump with either the active or tacit support of the FBI.
In the case of prong one, the dossier, the Clinton campaign hired MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The hiring was through its law firm, Perkins Coie, who hired Fusion GPS, who hired Steele to hide the funding source. The use of the law firm as a cut out allowed Hillary during the campaign to deny she funded the dossier, and the media to claim for a year or more that it was actually the Republicans themselves who paid for it. This set up the he said/she said cover Clinton would use throughout the operation.
Once they had hired Steele, the Clinton campaign and its allies found Russians and others who would feed lies to Steele. Steele was paid to use his credibility to hide the non-credibility of his pushed-sources. They were taken seriously only because Steele was taken seriously, albeit only because he was paid by Clinton to do so. You could not achieve much putting a thug like Igor Danchenko himself on CNN. This is known as embellishing your sources.
Here are some of Steele’s sources and connections. See if they connect any dots: one of Steele’s key sources is the now-Durham indicted Igor Danchenko. Steele was introduced to Danchenko by Fiona Hill. Hill would go on to play a key role driving the Ukraine impeachment. When Danchenko did not make up stuff himself, he was spoon-fed lies by Charles Dolan, a long-time Clinton hack (it was Fiona Hill who introduced Dolan to Danchenko). Dolan had close ties not only to the Clintons but to the Russians as well; he did PR work for the Russian government and was registered as a foreign agent for Russia. Dolan also fed bogus info to Olga Galkina, another Russian who fed info to Danchenko for inclusion in the dossier. Galkina expected Dolan to get her a job in the Hillary administration.
Steele then took his dossier down two tracks. He used his role as a former FBI informant to push the info deep into the Bureau and help trigger the Crossfire Hurricane investigation which would ultimately feed the Mueller Report. When cracks in Steele’s dossier appeared early on, they were taken care of. For example, one of those Trump staffers Steele accused of being a Russian agent, Carter Page, was actually a CIA agent. Yet when the FBI sought a FISA warrant, the FBI deleted his association with CIA from the application. Special Counsel Robert Durham prosecuted the man who did that, Kevin Clinesmith, who was found guilty, albeit years after the warrant was issued. Steele was worth his weight in gold to Clinton: he got the FBI to launch a full-spectrum investigation that included eavesdropping, use of a honey pot dangle, and foreign agents, all of which lead to three years of Mueller and right to the door of impeachment.
Steele’s second track was the media. Steele set himself up as a source to compliant media about the dossier without revealing to them he was the author of the dossier. This information loop made it appear a second entity was confirming the contents of the dossier, when in fact it was Steele surreptitiously confirming himself. It’s an old spy trick, getting inside, becoming your own corroborating source. In intelligence work, for the receiver of information, this is known as cross-contamination, an amateur error the FBI seemed OK with. The scam also generated cover for all the politicians and intelligence operatives. They could go to their bosses and say the New York Times has found a source which confirms what we’re hearing from Steele.
Every element of the dossier job is present in prong two of the broader operation, Clinton’s electronic spying on Trump. As with the dossier, it begins with the statement of work that Trump is connected with Russia and the job is to create something plausible enough to “confirm” that connection. A cut out was again used to fund things, in this case Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann and again the firm Perkins Coie. Sussmann, with the lure of a big job in the Hillary administration, recruited Rodney Jaffe, a tech guy whose company Neustar had a contract with the Obama administration to provide DNS servers to the White House. Joffe also had connections deep into the DNS community, and used them to gain access to DNS data from Trump Tower and other properties (see what you can do with DNS data.)
Though the DNS data is no more credible than the dossier, Sussmann follows Steele’s playbook. Sussmann first takes his story as an anonymous source to the NYT in late August 2016. He then goes to the FBI and CIA on September 16, 2016, mispresents himself as not working for the Clinton campaign (he is currently under Durham indictment for that) and pitches them the story Trump and the Russian Alfa Bank have set up some sort of backdoor communications. Sussmann later added another unproven tale, that Russian smartphones were connecting regularly with the White House.
Concurrent with Sussmann’s pitch to the FBI, the Alfa story made the press in October 2016 when Slate wrote an anonymous “benevolent posse of computer scientists spurred by a sense of shared idealism” had discovered data showing secret communications between Trump and Alfa. Even after the FBI had largely abandoned the investigation as fruitless, in October 2018 the New Yorker revived it, attributing the story to anonymous “self-appointed guardians of the Internet.” The source for the latter article was Joffe, who did not disclose he was working with Sussmann who was working with Fusion GPS who was working for Clinton. That no Alfa connection was ever found is irrelevant; the story Trump was with the Russians was headlines for months. Despite knowing it was not true as the ultimate source of the false info, Hillary herself pushed it.
There will be more. But what is clear even at this point is the Clinton campaign used textbook modern espionage techniques to build a wholly-false narrative about Trump and the Russians. They deployed this campaign against Trump the candidate and still got beaten. Clinton then kept it alive, in part with the FBI and Crossfire Hurricane as a proxy, even after Trump took office. Was that simple vengeance, or part of some even more elaborate campaign that would somehow end with Hillary in the Oval Office?
We also know the FBI was likely either in the conspiracy, or at best a willful idiot alongside it. Signs the dossier was garbage appeared instantly, and even the slightest investigative efforts by the FBI would have revealed how weak Steele’s sources and methods were, and that Steele was being paid by Clinton. Indeed, when the FBI found one crack, that Carter Page was an American CIA agent, they simply covered that up. The same with Sussmann and his DNS data; it would have been obvious White House DNS data could have only come from inside the White House, yet there are no signs the FBI questioned how Sussmann, supposedly a private citizen, came to possess it. And was the FBI really unable to determine Sussmann was paid by Clinton? It is chilling to remember FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged texts saying “Page: ‘Trump’s not ever going to become president, right?’ Strzok: ‘No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.’”
“The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one, that the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief. “And yet they knowingly ran with its false information.”
A sophisticated, multi-prong coordinated intelligence campaign was run with either the active or tacit support of the FBI. It suggests why Robert Mueller walked so close to the edge of indictment and backed off. If his indictments failed under court scrutiny, the person in charge of all this would have been exposed. Beyond Clinton and Trump, Mueller was protecting someone in his beloved FBI. This goes deep.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Questions for the January 6 Committee
Important questions about what happened on January 6 are left unanswered if they would disturb the Democratic narrative. These potential game-changers are ignored for the most part, or wish-washed away by claiming they are “conspiracy theories” somehow not worth looking into.
This is quite funny, given that the Democrat flailing is built entirely around a narrative of conspiracy, i.e., Trump or one his Dementors working in conjunction with someone else in a criminal act. In a divided America, not answering important questions simply gives them more credibility among their believers. It seems better for a Democracy in Danger [(C) WaPo] to get more information out there to put such conspiracy theories to rest by proving them wrong. Why just assign Seth Meyers to mock troublesome ideas when they could be factually disposed of? Whatcha ‘fraid of? Can’t handle the truth, bro?
So, to the January 6 Committee, please answer the following for us: how many undercover personnel or informants were in the crowd January 6? What part, if any, did they play in planning the entry into the Capitol before or on January 6, or in encouraging the crowd to do so? Did any stray from being accessories after the fact into Agent Provocateurs? As sure as the Warren Commission before them, the people claiming there is no evidence are the same one blocking any investigation which would reveal that evidence.
The Committee has adopted the stance something caused the crowd to bust into the Capitol. They have not spent much time allowing for anything along the lines of group think on the crowd’s part, like when fans swarm the field and tear down the goalposts. Having eliminated spontaneous causes, the only real cause the Committee is considering is Trump. Trump via preplanning the attack as part of some elaborate coup attempt, Trump via his purposeful incitement of the crowd on hand, or Trump through some third parties, doesn’t matter who, so Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani, QAnon, a cabal at the Willard Hotel war room, because that’s called a conspiracy. The Committee does not seem to have any Subject B, just Trump.
So let’s propose a Subject B, in this case, the FBI. It is a simply question from the Committee: Mr. Attorney General, how many undercover people did you have on the ground January 6? How many of them traveled to DC with groups they had previously infiltrated elsewhere? What was their purpose on January 6? What were their rules of engagement? In other words, what were they allowed to say or do? Could they scream “Yeah, let’s go!” and lead people forward? Could they suggest a peaceful group attack Pelosi’s office? Could they give statements to the media misrepresenting the aims and mood of the crowd without revealing their identity? Were any working as “sources” for the media, planting rumors?
You would think at least the number of officers on the ground would be an easy one, yet when Rep. Thomas Massie asked AG Merrick Garland if any Federal agents or assets entered the Capitol or incited others to riot, Garland refused to answer. Massie played a video of a man January 5 saying “we” have to go into the Capitol, and asked Garland if that man was a Fed. No comment, said Garland.
The man in the video has been identified as Ray Epps, who is also seen on video organizing the first group to breach the Capitol, and that just one minute after a pipe bomb had been found, as if the acts were themselves a conspiracy. This all appears to have happened even before Trump even finished his “incitement” speech. Epps was also President of Arizona Oath keepers and a former Marine. Epps has refused to answer journalists’ questions about whether or not he is a Federal agent or informant. Epps is still a free man. Why?
After Garland’s non-answer about undercover operatives failed to satisfy even the squishy MSM, the January 6 Committee decided to issue a tweeted statement claimed they “spoke” to Epps, who by golly said he was not an agent and the matter was dropped as cleanly as the Umbrella Man was in the JFK assassination. The always-helpful NYT said “while it remains unclear why Mr. Epps was encouraging people to go into the building, a person cannot be charged with incitement unless his statements present an imminent threat of unlawful action.” That too is funny, because a week later Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes, who also did not enter the Capitol, was indicted on the legal pastiche of “seditious conspiracy.” Without double standards there would be no standards at all.
The Epps case raises two key questions. Since Epps was talking about storming the Capitol the night before, that would seem to be exculpatory evidence that Trump’s speech had little to do with it. The plan was already in motion. And of course if Epps was working in any way with law enforcement, that would suggest it was he who played at least a role in getting the crowd to attack. You can’t just call it paranoia and conspiracy theory to simply ask why after some 700 prosecutions of others involved with January 6, Epps has not been prosecuted. Or why Epps’ photo was at one point included on the FBI Capitol Violence most wanted website and then removed without explanation in July from the website.
It is as simple as this. Under oath and before the Committee, ask FBI Director Wray, AG Garland, and Ray Epps to answer yes or no: did Ray Epps work for or with the Federal government in any way? Yes or no moves the narrative productively forward and could even add to the credibility of the Committee among skeptics. Why won’t they do this?
If Epps was working for the Feds on January 6, we already know he was not alone. A Proud Boys member turned by the FBI was texting his handler from the middle of the crowd (the Times also claims the FBI had a second informant in the crowd; other sources suggest a group of protestors wearing blaze orange caps were purposely exempted from prosecution as they were informants of some sort.) The story has not received much play in the MSM, because the informant was adamant the Capitol attack was not planned in advance. In fact, none of the 737 people charged so far with January 6 related crimes claimed the attack was preplanned, that Trump incited them, or anything to suggest anything but that what happened happened because of events on the ground in the crowd. Quite the contrary; several have stood up in court and admitted they felt betrayed by Trump and were deluded by his efforts to portray the election as rigged.
Undercover officers can legally commit crimes, including perjury. Same for paid sources, informants, and snitches. This practice of authorized criminality is secret, unaccountable, and in conflict with some of the basic premises of democratic policing. It exists independently of whether or not the person of concern can be listed as an unindicted co-conspirator. That is relatively meaningless anyway as the easiest thing is simply to not list the undercover on any charging documents at all.
There are other simple questions whose answers could send the investigation down complex paths. While the Justice Department has called the inquiry one of the largest in its history, why has no information come to light on the pipe bomber, who planted two unsuccessful bombs and set off an aura of panic? Official Washington is one of the most heavily surveilled spots on earth; why hasn’t the Justice Department allowed for the public release of more than a few minutes of the 14,000 hours of security camera footage? The nearly endless social media video online only shows the riot well in process. The surveillance video would show what happened just before the breach.
Knowing the FBI had informants in the crowd and among the organizations behind the initial rally, we need to know what did they know and when did they know it, specicially in answer to the quesion of what role if any Trump played in the unfolding events. Why has the report on the cop who gunned down protestor Ashli Babbit not been released? Why and on who’s order did the Capitol Police allow hundreds of people to simply walk into the building on the afternoon of January 6? Over 300 protesters entered the building without resistance from Capitol Police. And who was the man in a bicycle helmet whom video shows initiating the window-smashing that ended in the shooting of Ashli Babbitt and why was he welcomed behind police lines once things got out of hand?
We would not need to ask all these questions if the FBI and others did not have such a clear and present history of infiltrating protests and provoking violence; here’s a brief history going back to the Vietnam War era. Hand-in-hand is the FBI’s history of “creating” crimes using planted agents. The Terrorism Era was littered with “plots” that once laid bare, were built around an FBI person recruiting fellow “terrorists,” supplying them with money and (fake) weapons, and then busting them for believing him. Read more here and here.
A more recent example involved a supposed plot, seen by many as a precursor to the January 6 assault, to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. At least 12 FBI confidential informants were involved. However, an investigation also reveals some of those informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a far larger role than just snitching. They had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them. For all the noise made asking how high the January 6 investigation might eventually go, no one seems to be looking lower, to people who were working that day amongst the protestors just as they had in Michigan.
This is not say claim Ray Epps is this year’s version of the Grassy Knoll, or that the FBI laid out a full-on Mr. X-style operation to destroy Donald Trump. It is to say the narrative needs to be expanded beyond “Trump did it and democracy is finished” to answer some simple questions. Because if one FBI person assisted, instigated, aided, or abetted in any way what happened on January 6, either by orders or in the heat of the moment, that changes everything. And with the January 6 narrative changed, the election of 2024 changes. It really does matter that the investigation look deeper than Trump as the lone gunman, even if to disprove any Federal involvement.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Russiagate: Proof It was Hillary All Along
It was Hillary all along. The indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI demonstrates conclusively the Steele dossier was wholly untrue. Clinton paid for the dossier to be created and Clinton people supplied the fodder. Steele, working with journalists, pushed the dossier into the hands of the FBI to try to derail the Trump campaign. When that failed, the dossier was used to attack the elected president of the United States. The whole thing was the actual and moral equivalent of a Cold War op where someone was targeted by the FBI with fake photos of them in bed with a prostitute.Start with a quick review of what Durham uncovered about the most destructive political assassination since Kennedy.
Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign (after Clinton’s denial, it took a year for congressional investigators to uncover the dossier was commissioned by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, paid through the Perkins-Coie law firm) did no investigative work. Instead, his reputation as a former British intelligence officer was purchased to validate a dossier of lies and then to traffic those lies to the FBI and journalists.
Durham’s investigation confirms one of Steele’s key “sources” is the now-arrested Danchenko, a Russian émigré living in the U.S. Steele was introduced to the Russian by Fiona Hill, then of the Brookings Institute (Hill would go on to play a key role in the Ukraine impeachment scam.) Danchenko completely made up most of what he told Steele about Trump-Russian collusion. What he did not make up himself he was spoon fed by Charles Dolan, a long-time Clinton hack and campaign regular. Ironically, Dolan had close ties not only to the Clintons but to the Russians as well; he and the public relations firm where he worked represented the Russian government and were registered as foreign agents for Russia. Dolan is credited with, among other things, making up the pee tape episode. Dolan also fed bogus info to Olga Galkina, another Russian who passed the information to Danchenko for inclusion in the dossier. Galkina noted in e-mails she was expecting Dolan to get her a job in the Hillary administration. Steele, a life-long Russia and intelligence expert, never questioned or verified anything he was told.
In short: Clinton pays for the dossier, Steele fills it with lies fed to him by a Clinton PR stooge through Russian cutouts, and the FBI swallowed the whole story. There never was a Russiagate. The only campaign which colluded with Russia was Clinton’s. And Democrats, knowing this, actually had the guts to claim it was Trump who obstructed justice.
That the dossier was a sham was evident to anyone who ever read a decent spy novel. It was a textbook information op and The American Conservative, without any access to the documents Durham now has, saw through it years ago, as did many other non-MSM outlets. See here (2/5/2018). Here (2/15/2018). Here (6/15/2018.) Here (3/25/2019.) Here (12/11/2019) and more. What was obvious from the publicly available information was, well, obvious to everyone but the FBI.
The dossier was the flimsy excuse the FBI used to justify a full-on investigation unprecedented in a democracy into the Trump campaign. That included electronic surveillance (obtained by the FBI lying directly to the FISA court and presenting Steele’s lies as corroborating evidence,) the use of undercover operatives, false flag ops with foreign diplomats and case officers, and prosecution threats over minor procedural acts designed to legally torture low level Trump staffers (Carter Page, who the FBI knew was a CIA source, and George Papadopoulos) into “flipping” on the candidate.
Page in particular was a nobody with nothing, but the FBI needed him. Agents “believed at the time they approached the decision point on a second FISA renewal that, based upon the evidence already collected, Carter Page was a distraction in the investigation, not a key player in the Trump campaign, and was not critical to the overarching investigation.” They renewed the warrants anyway, three times, due to their value under the “two hop” rule. The FBI can extend surveillance two hops from its target, so if Carter Page called Michael Flynn who called Trump, all of those calls are legally open to monitoring. Page was a handy little bug used for a fishing expedition.
What’s left is only to answer was the FBI really that inept that they could not see a textbook op run against them or that the FBI knew early on they had been handed a pile of rubbish but needed some sort of legal cover for their own operation, spying on Trump, and thus decided to look the other way at the obvious shortcomings of Steele’s work.
“The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief. “And yet they knowingly ran with its false information to obtain legal process against an American citizen. They defrauded not just a federal court, they defrauded the FBI and the American people.”
The 2019 Horowitz Report, a look into the FBI’s conduct by the Justice Department Inspector General, made clear the FBI knew the dossier was bunk and purposefully lied to the FISA court in claiming instead the dossier was backed up by investigative news reports, which themselves were secretly based on the dossier. The FBI knew Steele, who was on their payroll as a paid informant, had created a classic intel officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source, and gleefully looked the other way because it supported their goals.
How bad was it? At no point in handling info accusing the sitting president of being a Russian agent, what would have been the most significant political event in American history, did the FBI seriously ask themselves “So exactly where did this information come from, specific sources and methods please, and how could those sources have known it?” Were all the polygraphs broken? The FBI learned Danchenko was Steele’s primary source in 2017, via the Carter Page tap, and moved ahead anyway.
From the FBI’s perspective, turning a blind eye was not even that risky a gambit. They were so certain they would succeed (FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged texts saying “Page: “Trump’s not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”) and Hillary would ascend to the Oval Office that they felt they would have top cover for their evil. After Trump won and the FBI’s coup planners shifted to impeachment, they held on to their top cover as James Comey presented himself as the man on the cross, aided by a MSM which cared only about a) ending Donald Trump and b) cranking up their ratings with dollops of the dossier’s innuendo. A mass media that bought lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then promised “never again” did it again.
If a genie granted me a wish, I would want a conversation with Robert Mueller under some sort of truth spell. Did Mueller “miss” all the lies in his lengthy investigation, hoping to protect his beloved FBI? Or did he see himself as a reluctant white knight, having realized during his investigation the real crime committed was coup planning by the FBI and thinking that by ignoring their actions but clearing Trump he would bring the whole affair to its least worst conclusion?
I suspect Mueller realized he had been handed a coup-in-progress to either abet (by indicting Trump on demonstrably false information) or bury. He could not bring himself to destroy his beloved FBI. But the former Marine could also not bring himself to become the Colin Powell of his generation, squandering his hard won reputation to validate something he knew was not true. Mueller split the difference, and kept silent on the FBI and left Trump to his own fates.
This is the third indictment by Durham. Danchenko’s indictment, Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s, and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s depict criminal efforts to get Trump. The arrest of Danchenko makes clear Durham knows the whole story. What will he do with it? Will he walk his indictments up the ladder ever-closer to Hillary? Will he proceed sideways, leaving Hillary but moving deeper into the FBI? Maybe see if Fiona Hill connects the failed Russiagate coup she played a pivotal role in with the failed Ukrainegate impeachment she played a pivotal role in? Or will he use the stage of Congressional hearings as a way to bypass Joe Biden’s Justice Department and throw the real decision making back to the voters?
History will record this chapter of America’s story as one of its more sordid affairs. Only time however will tell if the greater tale is one of how close we came to ending our democracy via an intelligence agency coup, or whether Russiagate was just a nascent practice run by the FBI, on a longer road which led to our demise a president or two later. For those who belittled the idea of the Deep State, this is what it looks like exposed, all pink and naked.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!
The Russians are back, paired alongside the American intelligence agencies playing deep inside our elections again. Who should we worry more about? Hint: Not the Russians.
On February 13 the election security czar in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) briefed the House Intelligence Committee that the Russians were meddling again, and that they favored Trump. A few weeks earlier, the ODNI briefed the Sanders campaign the Russians were also meddling in the primaries, this time in his favor. Both briefings remained secret until this past week, when the former was leaked to the NYT in time to make smear Trump for replacing his DNI, and the latter leaked to the WaPo ahead of the Nevada caucuses to try and damage Sanders.
Russiagate is back, baby. Russiagate II!
You didn’t think after 2016 those bad boys of the intel “community” (which makes it sound like they all live together down in Florida somewhere) weren’t going to play again, and that they wouldn’t learn from their mistakes. Those mistakes were in retrospect amateurish. A salacious dossier built around a pee tape? Nefarious academics befriending minor Trump campaign staffers who would tell all to an Aussie ambassador trolling London’s pubs looking for young, fit Americans? Falsified FISA applications when it was all too obvious even Trumpkin greenhorns weren’t dumb enough to sleep with FBI honeypots? You’d think after influencing 85 elections across the globe since WWII the community would have be better at it, sure, but you also knew after failing to whomp a bumpkin like Trump once they would keep trying.
Like any good intel op, you start with a tickle, make it seem like the targets are figuring it out for themselves. Get it out there Trump offered Wikileaks’ Julian Assange a pardon if he would state publicly Russia wasn’t involved in the 2016 DNC leaks. The story was all garbage, not the least of which was because Assange has been clear for years it wasn’t the Russians. And there was actually no offer of a pardon from the White House. And conveniently Assange is locked in a foreign prison and can’t comment. Whatever, time the Assange story to hit the day after Trump pardoned numerous high-profile scum bag white-collar criminals, so even the casual reader had Trump = Russians = Bad on their minds. You could just almost imagine a baritone announcer’s voice intoning “Previously, on Russiagate I…” as they whole thing unfolded.
Then only a day after the Assange story (why be subtle?), let the sequel hit the theatres with the timed leaks to the NYT and WaPo. Then stand back and watch the MSM descend into free fall.
CNN concluded “America’s Russia nightmare is back.” Maddow was ecstatic, bleating out “Here we go again” realizing her failed conspiracy theories could be recycled whole. Everybody quoted Have Adam Schiff firing off Trump was “again jeopardizing our efforts to stop foreign meddling.” Tying it all to the failed impeachment efforts, another writer said “’Let the Voters Decide’ doesn’t work if Trump fires his national security staff so Russia can help him again.” The NYT fretted “Trump is intensifying his efforts to undermine the nation’s intelligence agencies.” Former CIA Director John Brennan (after leaking for a while, most boils dry up and go away) said “we are now in a full-blown national security crisis.” The undead Hillary Clinton tweeted “Putin’s Puppet is at it again, taking Russian help for himself.” It is reportedly clear we’ll be hearing breaking and developing reports about this from sources believed to be close to those in the know through November. Intel community 1, Trump 0.
Kind of a miss on Bernie. He did very well in Nevada despite the leaks. But the Great Game of Russiagate II has a long way to go. Bernie himself assured us of that. Instead of poo-pooing the idea the Russians would be working for him, he instead gave it cred, saying “Some of the ugly stuff on the internet attributed to our campaign may well not be coming from real supporters.” Sanders handed Russiagate II legs, signaling he’ll use it as cover for the Bernie Bros online shenanigans called out at the last debates. That’s playing with fire; it’ll be too easy later on to invoke all this around Comrade Bernie memes in the already wary purple states.
Summary to Date: Everyone is certain the Russians are working to influence the election… (adopts cartoon Russian accent which also sounds a bit like WWII movie Nazi) but who is the cat and who is the mouse?
Is Putin helping Trump get re-elected to remain his asset in place? Or is Putin helping Bernie “I Honeymooned in the Soviet Union” Sanders to make him look like an asset to help Trump? Or are the Russkies really all-in because Bernie is a True Socialist sleeper agent at heart, the Emma Goldman of his time (Bernie’s old enough to have taken Emma to his high school prom)? Or is it not the Russians but the American intel community helping Bernie to make it look like Putin is helping Bernie to help Trump? Or is it the Deep State saying the Reds are helping Bernie to hurt Bernie to help their man Bloomberg? Are the Russian spies tripping over the American spies in caucus hallways trying to get to the front of the room? Who can tell what is really afoot?
See, the devil is in the details, which is why we don’t have any.
The world’s greatest intelligence team can’t seem to come up with anything more specific than words like “interfering” and “meddling,” as if pesky Aunt Vladimir is gossiping at the general store again. CBS reported House members pressed the ODNI for evidence, such as phone intercepts or other SIGINT to back up claims Russia is trying to help Trump, but briefers had none to offer. Even Jake Tapper, a Deep State loyalty card holder, raised some doubts. WaPo, who hosted one of the leaks, had to admit deep in its story “It is not clear what form that Russian assistance has taken.” Just take our word for it, it’s Russia.
Yes, yes, have to protect sources and methods, but of course the quickest way to stop Russian influence is to expose it. Instead, the ODNI dropped the turd in the punchbowl and walked away. Why not tell the public what media is being bought, which outlets are working, willingly or not, with Putin? Will we be left hanging with the claim “it was something something social media” again? Did the Reds buy $100 of Facebook ads or implant a radio chip in Biden’s skull? If you’re going to scream Communist zombies with MAGA hats are inside the house you’re obligated to provide a little bit more information. Why is it when specifics are required the response is only something like “Well, the Russians are sowing distrust and turning Americans against themselves in a way that weakens national unity” as if we’re all not eating enough green vegetables. Why leave us exposed to Russian influence for even a second when it could all be shut down in an instant?
Because the intel community learned its lesson in Russiagate I. Details can eventually be investigated. That’s where the old story fell apart. The dossier wasn’t true. Michael Cohen never met the Russians in Prague. Oops. The a-ha discovery was that voters don’t read much anyway, so just make claims. You’ll never really prosecute or impeach anyone, so why bother with evidence. Just throw out accusations and let the media fill it all in for you. After all, they managed to convince a large number of Americans Trump’s primary purpose in running for president was to fill vacant hotel rooms at his properties. Let the nature of the source — the brave lads of the intelligence agencies — legitimize the accusations this time, not facts.
It will take a while to figure out who is playing who. Is the goal to help Trump, help Bernie, or defeat both of them to support Bloomberg? But don’t let the challenge of seeing the whole picture obscure the obvious: the American intelligence agencies are once again inside our election.
The intel community crossed a line in 2016, albeit clumsily (what was all that with Comey and Hillary?), to play an overt role in the electoral process. When that didn’t work out as planned and Trump was elected, they pivoted and drove us to the brink of all hell breaking loose with Russiagate I. The media welcomed and supported them. The Dems welcomed and supported them. Far too many Americans welcomed and supported them in some elaborate version of the ends justifying the means.
The good news from 2016 was the Deep State turned out to be less competent than we originally feared. But they have learned much from those mistakes, particularly how deft a tool a compliant MSM is. This election will be a historian’s marker for how a decent nation, fully warned in 2016, fooled itself in 2020 into self-harm. Forget about foreigners influencing our elections from outside; the zombies are already inside the house.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Horowitz Report Shows the FBI Tried to Influence the 2016 Election
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’ report, which shows the Democrats, media, and FBI lied about not interfering in an election, will be a historian’s marker for how a decent nation fooled itself into self-harm. Forget about foreigners influencing our elections; it was us.The Horowitz Report is being played by the media for its conclusion, that the FBI’s intel op run against the Trump campaign was not politically motivated and thus “legal.” That covers one page of the 476 page document, fits with the Democratic-MSM narrative Trump is a liar, and ignores the rest. “The rest” of course is a detailed description of America’s domestic intelligence apparatus, aided by its overseas intelligence apparatus, and assisted by its Five Eyes allies’ intelligence apparatuses, releasing a full-spectrum spying campaign against a presidential candidate to influence an election and when that failed, delegitimize a president.
We learn from the Horowitz Report it was an Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, a man with ties to his own nation’s intel services and the Clinton Foundation, who was set up with a meeting with a Trump staffer, creating the necessary first bit of info to set the plan in motion. We find the FBI exaggerating, falsifying, and committing wicked sins of omission to buffalo the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts into approving electronic surveillance on Team Trump to overtly or inadvertently monitor the communications of Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, Rick Gates, Trump transition staffers, and likely Trump himself. Trump officials were also monitored by British GCHQ and the information shared with their NSA partners, a piece of all this still not fully public.
We learn the FBI greedily consumed the Steele Dossier, opposition “research” bought by the Clinton campaign to smear Trump with allegations of sex parties, pee tapes, and, most notoriously, claims he was a Russian plant, a Manchurian Candidate, owned by Russian intelligence through a combination of treats (land deals in Moscow) and threats (kompromat over Trump’s evil sexual appetites.) The Horowitz Report makes clear the FBI knew the Dossier was bunk, hid that conclusion from the FISA court, and purposefully lied to the court claiming the Dossier was backed up by investigative news reports which themselves were secretly based on the Dossier. The FBI knew Steele had created a classic intel officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source, and gleefully looked the other way because it supported their own goals.
Horowitz contradicts media claims the Dossier was a small part of the case presented to the FISA court. He finds that it was “central and essential.” And it was garbage: “factual assertions relied upon in the first [FISA] application targeting Carter Page were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed,” reads the Report. One of Steele’s primary sources, tracked down by FBI, said Steele misreported several of the most troubling allegations of potential Trump blackmail and Trump campaign collusion.
We find human dangles, what Lisa Page referred to as “our OCONUS lures” (OCONUS is spook-speak for Outside CONtinetal US) in the form of a shady Maltese academic, Joseph Mifsud, with deep ties himself to multiple U.S. intel agencies and the Pentagon albeit not the FBI per se, paying Trump staffers for nothing speeches to buy access to them. We find a female FBI undercover agent inserted into social situations with a Trump staffer (pillow talk is always a spy’s best friend.) It becomes clear the FBI sought to manufacture a foreign counterintelligence threat to import into the United States as an excuse to unleash its surveillance tools against the Trump campaign.
We learn Trump staffer Carter Page, while under FBI surveillance to discover Trump’s ties to Russia, was actually working for the CIA in Russia. The FBI was told this repeatedly, yet it never reported it to the FISA court approving the secret investigation of Page as a Russian spy. An FBI lawyer even doctored an email to hide the fact Page was working for the Agency and not the Russians; it was that weak a case. The CIA rated Page well as a source, and dismissed the Steele Dossier itself as an “Internet Rumor.” Had that information been available to the FISA court, it is hard to imagine they would have approved the warrant against Page, or further considered the Dossier absent additional information the FBI of course did not have.
The Horowitz Report goes on to find “at least 17 significant errors or omissions” concerning FBI efforts to obtain FISA warrants against Page alone. California Congressman Devin Nunes raised these points almost two years ago, in a memo the MSM widely discredited, even though we now know it was basically true and profoundly prescient. Adam Schiff’s rebuttal memo turns out to have been garbage.
Much has been made by the MSM about these “mistakes,” in that the Horowitz Report does not conclude they were indices of political bias. Maybe. But if the mistakes were just that, accidents or sloppiness, you’d expect at least some of them to favor Trump’s side. In fact, all of the mistakes favored the FBI’s poor case and that chips away at the idea there was no motivating element behind them.
Page was a nobody with nothing, but the FBI needed him. Horowitz explains agents “believed at the time they approached the decision point on a second FISA renewal that, based upon the evidence already collected, Carter Page was a distraction in the investigation, not a key player in the Trump campaign, and was not critical to the overarching investigation.” They renewed the warrants anyway, three times, largely due to their value under the “two hop” rule. The FBI can extend surveillance two hops from its target; so if Carter Page called Michael Flynn who called Trump, all of those calls are legally open to monitoring. Page was a handy little bug.
Carter Page was never charged with any crime. He was a small nobody blown into a big deal by the fictional Steele Dossier, an excuse for the FBI to electronically surveil the Trump campaign.
When Trump was elected, the take from all this muckery, focused on the uber-lie that Trump was dirty with Russia, was leaked to the press most likely by James Comey and John Brennan in January 2017 (not covered in the Horowitz Report), and a process which is still ongoing tying the president to allegiance to a foreign power began. “With Trump, All Roads Lead to Moscow,” writes the New York Times even today, long after both the Mueller Report and now again the Horowitz Report say unambiguously that is not true. “Monday’s congressional hearing and the inspector general’s report tell a similar story,” bleats the Times, when in fact the long read of both says precisely the opposite.
Michael Horowitz, the author of this current report, should be a familiar name. In January 2017 he opened his probe into the FBI’s Clinton email investigation. In a damning passage, that 568 page report found it “extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors… for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same. By departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice.”
Horowitz’ Clinton report also criticizes FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who exchanged texts disparaging Trump before moving from the Clinton email to the Russiagate investigation. Those texts “brought discredit” to the FBI and sowed public doubt. They included one exchange reading, “Page: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”
If after reading the Horowitz Report you want to focus only on its page one statement the FBI did not act illegally, you must in turn focus yourself on what is “legal” in America. If you want to follow the headlines saying Trump was proven wrong when he claimed his campaign was spied upon, you really do need to look up that word in a dictionary and frankly compare it to the tangle of surveillance, foreign government agents, undercover operatives, pay offs, and more Horowitz details.
You may accept the opening lines of the Horowitz Report that the FBI did not act with political bias over the course of its investigation. Or you can find a clearer understanding in Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Report “that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions.” You will need to reconcile the grotesque use the information the FBI gathered was put to after Trump was elected, the fuel for the Mueller investigation and years’ worth of media picking at the Russian scab.
To claim none of this is politically biased, you must walk away from the details of the Horowitz report, particularly the gross abuses of FISA, happy that what it says is how democracy works in America today. You must be willing to search and replace every instance of “Trump” with “Elizabeth Warren” a couple of years from now, and be happy with that. You have to see every instance in that report where the FBI orders something done as OK if it was Trump issuing the same words. At that point you can say there is no bias.
The current Horowitz Report, read alongside his previous report on how the FBI played inside the 2016 election vis-a-vis Clinton, should leave no doubt the FBI tried to influence the election of a president in 2016 and then delegitimize Trump when he won. It wasn’t the Russians, it was us. And if you walk away concluding the FBI fumbled things, acted amateurishly, failed to do what some claim they set out to do, well, just wait until next time.
On a personal note, if any of this is news to you, you may want to ask why you are learning about it now. This blog has consistently been one of the few outlets which exposed the Steele Dossier as part of an information op nearly since it was unveiled, and which has explained how the FISA court was manipulated, and which has steadily raised the question of political interference in our last election by the American intelligence services; follow the links above to read some of our past reporting, going back to the election.
I claim no magic powers or inside information; to any of us who have been in or on the fringes of intelligence work what was obvious just from the publicly available information was, well, obvious. Despite what you think you know about spying from TV and movies, most of the work is done the same way every time, using techniques that go back to ancient times. Honey works better than vinegar, so bribes trump pee tapes. There was no Moscow hotel-land deal is the biggest “tell” here nothing else was true. Be careful, because your enemies will tell you what you want to believe. Make people your friends by paying them. Dangling a cool blonde is always a good gambit. Important agents are run by important intelligence officers. If Putin was pulling Trump’s strings, in real life a little man like Carter Page would not know it.
If you are reading any of this for the first time, or know people who are reading bastardized versions of it for the first time in MSM sources, you might ask yourself why those places went along with Steele, et al. Their journalists are no dumber or smarter than me. They do write with a different agenda, however. Keep that in mind as we flip the calendar page to 2020.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
15 Questions for Robert Mueller
You know that movie with Bruce Willis and the kid who says “I see dead people?” In the end it turns out everyone is already dead. Now imagine there are people who don’t believe that. They insist the story ends some other way. Maybe there’s missing footage! Spoiler Alert: the Mueller Report ends with no collusion. No one is going to prosecute anyone for obstruction. That stuff is all dead. We all saw the same movie.
Yet there seem to remain questions to be answered. And while it is doubtful the stoic Robert Mueller will ever write a tell-all book, or sit next to Seth and Trevor dishing, he may be called in front of Congress. Here’s some of what he should be asked.
1) You charged no “collusion,” obstruction, or any other new crime. In simple words tell us why. If the answer is “The evidence did not support it,” please say “That one.”
2) Your Report did not refer any of the crimes in the first question to Congress, the SDNY, or anywhere else. Again, tell us why. If the answer is “The evidence did not support it,” please say “That one again.”
3) Despite you making no specific referrals to others for action, the Report states “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.” Why did you include such restating of a known fact instead of either a direct referral or nothing? Many people have read that line to mean you could not indict a sitting president and so you wanted to leave a clue to others, in Congress, to exercise some role. You could have spelled it all out — “this all is beyond my and the AG’s Constitutional roles and must/can only be resolved by Congress” would have worked. Why not?
4) Many readers of the Report believe they see clues (one footnote looms as the grassy knoll of your work) the specific reason you did not indict Trump was because of DOJ/OLC guidance against indicting a sitting president. In other words, absent that specific guidance, would you have indicted the president? If so, why didn’t you say so unambiguously and trigger what would be the obvious next steps.
5) When did you conclude there was no collusion/conspiracy/coordination between Trump and the Russians such that you would make no charges or indictments? You must have closed at least some of the subplots — Trump Tower meeting, Moscow Hotel project — months ago. Did you give any consideration to announcing key findings as they occurred? You were clearly aware inaccurate reporting continued, damaging to the public trust. You allowed that to happen. Why?
6) But before you answer that question, please answer this one. You did make a rare pre-Report public statement saying Buzzfeed’s story claiming Trump ordered Cohen to lie to Congress was false. You restated that in the Report, where you also mentioned (Vol I, p 198) you privately told Jeff Sessions’ lawyer in March 2018 Sessions would not be charged. Since your work confirmed nearly all bombshell reporting on Russiagate was wrong (Cohen was not in Prague, nothing criminal happened in the Seychelles, etc), why was it only that single instance that caused you to speak out publicly? And as with Sessions, did you privately inform any others prior to the release of the Report they would not be charged? If only some but not all were informed, why was that? What standard did you apply to these decisions?
7) A cardinal rule for prosecutors is not to publicize negative information that does not lead them to indict someone — “the decision does the talking.” James Comey was strongly criticized for doing this to Hillary Clinton during the campaign. Yet most of Volume II is just that, descriptions of actions by Trump which contain elements of obstruction but which you ultimately did not judge to rise to the level of criminal chargeability. Why did you include all that so prominently? Some say it was because you wanted to draw a “road map” for impeachment. Did you? Why didn’t you say that? You had no reason to speak in riddles.
8) There is a lot of lying documented in the Report. But you seemed to only charge people early in this investigation with perjury (traps.) Was that aimed more at pressuring them to “flip” than justice per se? Is one of the reasons several of the people in the Report who lied did not get charged with perjury later in the investigation because by then you knew they had nothing to flip on?
9) In regards to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, where derogatory information on Clinton was offered (but never given) you declined prosecution, citing in part questions (Vol I, p 186) over whether such information constituted the necessary “thing of value” that would have to exist, inter alia, to make its proffer a campaign finance violation. You don’t answer the question in the Report, but you do believe information could be a “thing of value” (the thing of value must exceed $2,000 for a misdemeanor, $25,000 for a felony.) What about the withholding of information? Could someone saying they would not offer information publicly be a “thing of value” and thus potentially part of a campaign law violation? Of course I’m talking about Stormy Daniels, who received money not to offer information. Would you make the claim silence itself, non-information, is a “thing” of value?
10) You spend the entire first half of your report, Volume I, explaining it was some combination of “the Russians” who sought to manipulate our 2016 election via social media and the DNC email hacks. Though there is a lot of redacted material, at no point in the clear text is there information on whether the Russians actually did influence the election. Even trying was a crime, but given the importance of all this (some still claim the president is illegitimate) and for future elections, did you look into the actual effects of Russian meddling? If not, why not?
11) Everything the Russians did, in Volume I, they did during the Obama administration. Did you investigate anyone in the Obama administration in regards to Russian meddling, what was done, what was missed, could it have been stopped, and how the response was formed? Given Trump’s actions toward Russia would follow on steps Obama took this seems relevant. Did you look? If not, why not?
12) Some of the information you gathered against Michael Flynn was initially picked up inadvertently under existing surveillance of the Russian ambassador. As an American person, Flynn’s name would have been routinely masked in the reporting on those intercepts to protect his privacy. The number of people with access to those intercepts is small and list-controlled, and the number inside the Obama White House with the authority to unmask names, i.e., reveal it was Michael Flynn, not AmPerson1, is even smaller. Yet details were leaked to the press and ended Flynn’s career. Given the leak may have exposed U.S. intelligence methods, and given that it had to have been done at a very high level inside the Obama White House, and given that the leak directly violated Flynn’s Constitutional rights, did you investigate If not, why not?
13) The NYT wrote “some of the most sensational claims in the [Steele] dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove. Mr. Mueller’s report contained over a dozen passing references to the document’s claims but no overall assessment of why so much did not check out.” Given the central role the Steele Dossier played in parts of your work, and certainly in the portion of the investigation which commenced as Crossfire Hurricane in summer 2016, why did you not include any overall assessment of why so much did not check out inside such a key document?
14) Prosecutors do not issue certificates of exoneration, and have no obligation to “exonerate” people they consider for charges. The job is to charge or drop a case. That’s what constitutes exoneration in any practical sense. Yet you have as the final line in a report that does not charge anyone “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Can you explain why that line was included, and so prominently?
15) Near the end of the Report you wrote “if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.” You argue elsewhere in the Report because Trump is a sitting president he cannot be indicted, so therefore it would be unjust to accuse him of something he could not go to court and defend himself over. But didn’t you do just that? Why did you leave the taint of guilt without giving Trump the means of defending himself in court? You must have understood such wording would be raw meat to Democrats, and would force Trump to defend himself not in a court with legal protections, but in a often hostile media. Was that your intention?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Mueller: End Game, Das Reckoning Gotterdammerung Fin Apocalypse
The short version? Mueller is done. His report unambiguously states there was no collusion or obstruction. He was allowed to follow every lead unfettered in an investigation of breathtaking depth.
It cannot be clearer. The report summary states “The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 US Presidential Election… the report does not recommend any further indictments, nor did the Special Counsel obtain any sealed indictments that have yet to be made public.”Robert Mueller did not charge any Americans with collusion, coordination or criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. The special counsel also considered whether members of the Trump campaign “coordinated,” a much lower standard defined as an “agreement, tacit or express,” with Russian election interference activities. They did not.
Everything – everything – else we have been told since the summer of 2016 falls, depending on your conscience and view of humanity, into the realm of lies, falsehoods, propaganda, exaggerations, political manipulation, stupid reporting, fake news, bad judgment, simple bull or in the best light, hasty conclusions.
As with Dorothy’s ruby slippers, the proof of no collusion has always been with us. There was a guilty plea from Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, on one count of perjury unrelated to Russiagate. Flynn lied about a legal meeting with the Russian ambassador. Rick Gates, deputy campaign manager, plead guilty to conspiracy and false statements unrelated to Russiagate. George Papadopoulos, a ZZZ-level adviser, plead guilty to making false statements about legal contact with Russians. Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, plead guilty to lying to Congress about a legal Moscow real estate project. Paul Manafort, very briefly Trump’s campaign chair, plead guilty to conspiracy charges unrelated to Russiagate and which for the most part occurred before he even joined the campaign. Roger Stone, who never officially worked for Trump, awaits a trial that will happen long after Mueller turns the last lights off in his office.
Mueller did indict some Russia citizens for hacking, indictments which in no way tied them to anything Trump, and which will never see trial. Joseph Mifsud, the Russian professor who supposedly told Papadopoulos Moscow had “thousands of Hillary’s emails” was never charged. Carter Page, subject of FISA surveillance and a key actor in the Steele dossier, was also never charged with anything. After hours of testimony about that infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting to discuss Hillary’s email, and other meeting around the Moscow hotel, no one was indicted for perjury.
The short version of Russiagate? There was no Russiagate.
What Will Happen Next is already happening. Democrats are throwing up smoke demanding the full Mueller report be made public “rushing to judgment” on Mueller’s black and white conclusions. Speaker Pelosi announced whatever AG Barr would release as a summary of the Mueller report would not be enough even before he released the summary. One Dem on CNN warned they would need the FBI agents’ actual handwritten field notes.Adam Schiff said “Congress is going to need the underlying evidence because some of that evidence may go to the compromise of the president or people around him that poses a real threat to our national security.” Schiff believes his committee is likely to discover things missed by Mueller, whose report indicates his team interviewed about 500 witnesses, obtained more than 2,800 subpoenas and warrants, executed 500 search warrants, obtained 230 orders for communications records, and made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence.
Mueller may still be called to testify in front of Congress, as nothing will ever be enough for #TheResistance cosplayers now in charge. Overnight, Mueller’s findings, made by Mueller the folk hero, the dogged Javert, the Marine on his last patrol suddenly aren’t worth puppy poo unless we can all look over his shoulder and line-by-line second guess him. Joy Reid for her part has already accused Mueller of covering up the crime of the century.
The New York Times headline “As Mueller Report Lands, Prosecutorial Focus Moves to New York” says the rest — we’re movin’ on! Whatever impeachment/indictment fantasies diehard Dem have left are being transferred from Mueller to the Southern District of New York. The SDNY’s powers, we are reminded with the tenacity of a bored child in the back seat, are outside of Trump’s control, the Wakanda of justice.
The new holy land is called Obstruction of Justice, though pressing a case Trump obstructed justice in a process that ultimately exonerated him will be a tough sell. In a sentence likely to fuel discussion for months, the Attorney General quotes Mueller “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”It sounds dramatic, but in fact means while taking no position on whether obstruction took place, Mueller concluded he did not find enough evidence to prosecute. Mueller in the report specifically turns any decision to pursue obstruction further over to the Attorney General; Attorney General Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein meanwhile have already determined the evidence does not support prosecution of the president for obstruction of justice.
Mueller also specifically noted obstruction of justice requires proof of intent, and wrote since he found Trump, et al, did not conspire with Russia, there can be no intent to obstruct an investigation Trump knew could not lead to anything. The case is thus closed judicially (Mueller essentially telegraphed the defense strategy), though Democrats will likely Quixotically poke at pursuing it.
This is developing as a major talking point among those seeking to dilute how clear this is. So, in simple language:
— Mueller had to see if he had enough evidence to prosecute obstruction. He did not find sufficient evidence. The choices are sufficient to prosecute, sufficient to exonerate, or neither. He chose neither. That’s where his job ends. Insufficient to exonerate does not equal “guilty.”
— At that point any future decisions go to the AG and DAG. They have already said there is not enough evidence to prosecute, the exact same decision Mueller made. They confirmed Mueller saying there was not sufficient evidence to prosecute.
— Mueller then telegraphs the real point: Mueller found no collusion. Trump of course knew he did nothing wrong with Russia (dammit, that is proven now). So how can anyone show Trump intended to block an investigation he knew would find nothing wrong? You’re going to try and impeach him for supposedly trying to block an investigation he knew would find him innocent?
–Since no intent, there can be no prosecution. The rest does not matter.
— Ok, ok, even s l o w e r. Mueller makes clear the Trump campaign did not conspired, collude or coordinate with the Russians. It is impossible to show a corrupt motive to obstruct an investigation into a crime that did not occur.
— Also, grownups charged, appointed and/or elected are doing their jobs. The Constitution does not require concurrence from Twitter, or for you to shout “Release the report!” that those people have already read so you can look over their shoulder and come to a conclusion based on your undergraduate degree in Spanish. The report should of course be released for historians and scholars, but not simply to second guess its conclusions on social media like dumbasses.
That leaves corruption. Politico has already published a list of 25 “new” things to investigate about Trump, trying to restock the warehouse of broken impeachment dreams (secret: it’s filled with sealed indictments no one will ever see.) The pivot will be from treason to corruption; see the Cohen hearings as Exhibit One. Campaign finance minutia, real estate assessment questions, tax cheating from the 1980s, a failed Buffalo Bills purchase years ago… how much credibility will any of that now have with a public realizing it has been bamboozled on Russia?
Will Dems really try to make the case maybe sorta fudging a loan application to a German bank years ago based on differing interpretations of “goodwill and brand value” before running for office is an impeachable offense in 2019? That is what the Founders had in mind when they wrote the rules for driving an elected president out of office?
Then there’s the argument (which Mueller did not make) the investigation had to spare Trump because dang it, some nancyboy spoiled everything by saying a sitting president can’t be indicted. But one can’t conspire alone; even if Trump got a Get Out of Jail Free card, Mueller didn’t take down anyone around him. Same with all the perjury charges which weren’t filed over the Moscow Hotel or Stormy or any meeting(s) with Russians. If Mueller couldn’t indict Trump for the conspiracy so many insist still exists, why didn’t Mueller at least indict someone besides Trump for lying to cover it up?
At some point even the Congresswoman with the most Twitter followers is going to have to admit there is no there, there. By digging the hole they are standing in even deeper Dems will only make it more obvious to everyone but Sam Bee’s interns they have nothing. Expect to hear “this is not the end, it is only the end of the beginning” more often most people check their phones, even as it sounds more needy than encouraging, like an ex- who doesn’t get it is over checking in to see if you want to meet for coffee.
Someone at the DNC might also ask how this unabashed desire to see blood drawn from someone surnamed Trump will play out with potential 2020 purple voters. It is entirely possible voters are weary and would like to see somebody actually address immigration, healthcare, and economic inequality now that we’ve settled the Russian question.
That is what is and likely will happen. What should happen is a reckoning.Even as the story fell apart over time like a cardboard box in the rain, a large number of Americans, and nearly all of the MSM, still believed the president of the United States was a Russia intelligence asset, in Clinton’s own words, “Putin’s puppet.” How did that happen?
A mass media which bought the lies over non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then promised “never again!” did it again. The New York Times, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, et al, reported falsehoods to drive a partisan narrative. They gleefully created a serial killer’s emptywheel-like bulletin board covered blurry photos of everyone in Russiagate connected by strands of yarn.
Another generation of journalists soiled themselves. They elevated mongerers like Seth Abramson, Malcolm Nance, and Lawrence Tribe, who vomited nonsense all over Twitter each afternoon before appearing before millions on CNN. They institutionalized unsourced gossip as their ledes — how often were we told the walls were closing in? That it was Mueller time? How many times was the public put on red alert Trump/Sessions/Rosenstein/Whitaker/Barr was going to fire the special prosecutor? The mass media featured only stories which furthered the collusion tall tale and silenced those skeptical of the prevailing narrative, the core failure from the Iraq War.
The short version: There were no WMDs in Iraq. That was a lie, the media promoted it shamelessly while silencing skeptical voices. Mueller indicted zero Americans for working with Russia to influence the election. Russiagate was a lie, the media promoted it shamelessly while silencing skeptical voices.
Same for the politicians, alongside Hayden, Brennan, Clapper, and Comey, who told Americans the president they elected was a spy working against the United States. None of that was accidental or by mistake. It was a narrative they desperately wanted to be true so they could politically profit regardless of what it did to the nation. And today the whitewashing is already ongoing. Keep an eye out for Tweets containing the word “regardless” to trend.
And someone should contact the ghost of Consortium News’ Robert Parry, one of the earliest and most consistent skeptics of Russiagate, and tell him he was right all along. That might be the most justice we see out of all this.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Was It All Just Pilot Error? IG Report Says No Political Bias Found in FBI Investigation of Clinton Email
What everyone will agree on: Comey and the FBI interfered with the election. What everyone will not agree on: Everything else.
It will be easy to miss the most important point amid the partisan bleating over what the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General report on the FBI’s Clinton email investigation really means. While each side will find the evidence they want to find that the FBI, with James Comey as Director, helped/hurt Hillary Clinton’s and/or maybe Donald Trump’s campaign, the real takeaway is this: the FBI influenced the election of a president.
In January 2017 the Inspector General (IG) for the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz (who previously worked on the 2012 study of the Obama-era gun operation Fast and Furious), opened his probe into the FBI’s Clinton email investigation, including statements by Comey made about that investigation at critical moments in the presidential campaign. Horowitz’s focus was always to be on how the FBI did its work, not to re-litigate the case against Clinton. Nor did the IG plan to look into anything Russiagate.
In a damning passage, the 568 page report found it “extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors… for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same… by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice.” Comey’s drafting of a press release announcing no prosecution for Clinton, written before the full investigation was even completed, is given a light touch though in the report, along the lines of roughly preparing for the conclusion based on early indications. We also learned Comey ironically used private email for government business.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch herself is criticized for not being more sensitive to public perceptions when she agreed to meet privately with Bill Clinton aboard an airplane as the FBI investigation into Hillary unfolded. “Lynch’s failure to recognize the appearance problem… and to take action to cut the visit short was an error in judgment.” Her statements later about her decision not to recuse further “created public confusion and didn’t adequately address the situation.”
The report also criticizes in depth FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who exchanged texts disparaging Trump, and then moved from the Clinton email to the Russiagate investigations. Those texts “brought discredit” to the FBI and sowed public doubt about the investigation, including one exchange that read “Lisa Page: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Rights?! Peter Strzok: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” Another Strzok document stated “we know foreign actors obtained access” to some Clinton emails, including at least one secret message.”
Page and Strzok also discussed cutting back the number of investigators present for Clinton’s in-person interview in light of the fact she might soon be president, their new boss. Someone identified only as Agent One went on to refer to Clinton as “the President” and in a message told a friend “I’m with her.” The FBI also allowed Clinton’s lawyers to attend the interview, even though they were also considered witnesses to a potential set of crimes committed by Clinton.
Page and Strzok were among five FBI officials the report found expressed hostility toward Trump before his election as president, and who have been referred to the FBI’s internal disciple system for possible action. The report otherwise makes only wishy-washy recommendations, things like “adopting a policy addressing the appropriateness of Department employees discussing the conduct of uncharged individuals in public statements.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions indicated he will review the report for possible prosecutions. The IG previously referred former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for possible prosecution after an earlier report found McCabe leaked to the press and later “lacked candor” when speaking to Comey and federal investigators. Sessions fired McCabe him in March 2018.
But at the end of it all, the details really don’t matter, because the report found no political bias, no purposeful efforts or strategy to sway the election. In aviation disaster terms, it was all pilot error. An accident of sorts, as opposed to the pilot boarding drunk, but the plane crashed and killed 300 people anyway.
The report is already being welcomed by Democrats — who feel Comey had shattered Clinton’s chances of winning the election by reopening the email probe just days before the election — and by Republicans, who feel Comey let Clinton off easy. Many are now celebrating it was only gross incompetence, unethical behavior, serial bad judgment, and insubordination that led the FBI to help determine the election. No Constitutional crisis. A lot of details in those 568 pages to yet fully parse, but at first glance there is not much worthy of prosecution (though IG Horowitz will testify in front of Congress on Monday and may reveal more information.) Each side will point to the IG’s conclusion of “no bias” to shut down calls for this or that in a tsunami of blaming each other. In that sense, the IG just poured a can of jet fuel onto the fires of the 2016 election and walked away to watch it burn.
One concrete outcome, however, is to weaken a line of prosecution Special Counsel Robert Mueller may be pursuing. To say Comey acted incompetently during the election, albeit in ways that appear to have helped Trump, does not add to the argument he is otherwise competent, on Russia or any other topic. An FBI director willing to play in politics with an investigation is simply that, an FBI director who has abandoned the core principles of his job and can’t be trusted. Defend him because it was all good natured bad judgment doesn’t add anything healthy to the question of competency.
Mueller has just seen a key witness degraded — any defense lawyer will characterize his testimony as tainted now — and a possible example of obstruction weakened. As justification for firing Comey, the White House initially pointed to an earlier Justice Department memo criticizing Comey for many of the same actions now highlighted by the IG (adding later concerns about the handling of Russiagate.) The report thus underscores one of the stated reasons for Comey’s dismissal. Firing someone for incompetence isn’t obstructing justice; it’s the boss’ job.
It will be too easy, however, to miss the most important conclusion of the report: there is no longer a way to claim America’s internal intelligence agency, the FBI, did not play a role in the 2016 election. There is only to argue which side they favored and whether they meddled via clumsiness, as a coordinated action, or as a chaotic cluster of competing pro- and anti- Clinton/Trump factions inside the Bureau. And that’s the tally before anyone brings up the FBI’s use of a human informant inside the Trump campaign, the FBI’s use of both FISA warrants and pseudo-legal warrantless surveillance against key members of the Trump team, the FBI’s use of opposition research from the Steele Dossier, and so on.
The only good news is the Deep State seems less competent than we originally feared. But even if one fully accepts the IG report’s conclusion all this — and there’s a lot — was not intentional, at a minimum it makes clear to those watching ahead of 2020 what tools are available and the impact they can have. While we continue to look for the bad guy abroad, we have already met the enemy and he is us.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
A Government is Seizing Control of Our Election Process, and It Is Not the Russians
There is an attempt underway for a government to take control of our election process and throw the election to Hillary Clinton. It is not the Russian government. Mark this day — it is when we came to understand that the American government decided to elect a president.
(Note: I understand in the minds of the mass media the most important issue in America today is Trump’s crude remarks, but there are indeed real things to be concerned about otherwise.)Here’s how:
— Two days before the second presidential debate, the government of the United States officially accused Russia of a hacking campaign aimed at interfering in the U.S. election. In a joint statement, absent any specifics or technical details, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence stated “the recent [hacked email] disclosures… are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts… based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
— The statement goes on to detail how only Democratic servers were attacked, meaning the American government is claiming that Russia is trying to throw the election to Donald Trump, plain and simple. It is left unsaid why the Russians would risk cyberwar with the United States to do this, as many have suggested Trump is a neocon in spirit whose loose finger will be on the nuclear button from day one. Clinton is much more of a political realist, comfortable with the business-as-usual of the past eight years that has gone in Russia’s favor in the Ukraine and Syria. She in fact seems like the stable known known, always a preference.
— Though the first “Russian” hacks were reported in July, it is only 48 hours before the second presidential debate that the statement was released. It could easily have been held until Monday, there is no national security urgency for this to come out Friday. However, with the timing, Trump, essentially tied with Clinton in the polls, will now spend much of the debate defending himself. Since the statement includes no details, only accusations, it is hard to see how anyone could defend themselves. It would be near-impossible for Trump to come out ahead Sunday night; this is a near-coup.
— Despite the certainty with which the U.S. government has accused Russia of trying to influence the election by hacking into secured email servers, the FBI maintains there is no evidence the Russians or anyone else accessed Clinton unsecured, unencrypted email server laden with actual classified materials, including during Clinton’s first trip to Moscow when she sent and received encrypted email over the Internet and WiFi.
— In the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton broadly speculated that Donald Trump had paid no taxes. Days later, several pages of Trump’s tax returns, documents that had been sought unsuccessfully by the media for over a year, arrive at the New York Times, who front pages a story. In the Vice Presidential debate which followed, Trump’s running mate spent time on the defensive defending his boss’ deductions.— Clinton sent and received classified material on an unsecured, classified server. That violated the most basic rule of information security. She lied about it. She deleted emails and “lost” both the majority of her devices and many, many emails. The FBI and the Department of Justice, ahead of the Democratic nominating convention, found she violated no law. The Department of Justice granted broad immunity to key Clinton staffers, and allowed two of them to destroy their devices. No further investigation will thus be possible.
— The State Department aided and abetted Clinton for over four years in hiding her private server, and avoiding her responsibilities under the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Records Act. Only under court order has the Department stopped slow-walking its “review” process to release emails publically. There has been no investigation.
— Emails released show a tangle of interests among State Department decisions, the Clinton Foundation and access to Hillary as Secretary of State (“pay for play”). Clinton sought Pentagon and State Department contracts for Chelsea’s friend. There has been no investigation.
— The State Department and White House coordinated to “crush” Clinton’s email coverage.
If you can add it up any other way than direct interference by the White House, the State Department, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the intelligence community, it would be interesting to hear how that works. The comments are open to make a benign case for these actions.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Secret Rules That Allow the FBI to Spy on Journalists
The bones of our democracy — the core elements that separate that way of life from others — lie in the First Amendment to the Constitution, specifically the rights to free speech and a free press.
Without the ability to speak freely, and to have things about our government reported equally freely to us, most of the rest of the concept of what was laid out on July 4, 1776 and later falls away. Thomas Jefferson himself stated that an “informed citizenry” was the key to everything.So it is with more than a little anxiety that we learned secret rules allow the FBI to spy on journalists with such ease that the restraints are really nothing more than a bit of paperwork. As always, the ostensible justifications for another deep step into Post Constitutional America are terrorism, security, protecting the homeland. And, as always, the outcome seems to be much more about stomping out whistleblowers than anything else.
As revealed by an anonymous whistleblower to The Intercept (the government refused to release the information), secret rules allow FBI agents to obtain journalists’ phone records with approval from only two internal officials. No warrant needed. No outside oversight. No courts, no judges, no hearings, no public records.The rules govern the FBI’s use of national security letters (NSL), which allow the bureau to obtain information about journalists’ calls without going to a judge or informing the news organization being targeted. National security letters are themselves an anti-Constitutional outgrowth of the Patriot Act and its successors. The letters allow the FBI and other law enforcement agencies conducting a national security investigation to demand access to information without a warrant, and, in most cases, prohibit the organization required to supply the information (for example, a library asked what books you read) from even acknowledging the request was made.
The FBI issued nearly 13,000 NSLs in 2015 alone. No one outside of government knows why they were issued, who was affected, and what information was gathered.
The FBI’s secret rules in the specific cases of whistleblowers and leaks only require an additional couple of internal signatures. In addition, the rules specify any extra oversight layers do not apply at all if the journalist is believed to be a spy or is part of a news organization “associated with a foreign intelligence service” or “otherwise acting on behalf of a foreign power.” That will easily rope in any national media service, and most likely is broad enough to pull in quasi-national media outlets like the BBC or Japan’s NHK. And once again, it is the FBI itself defining who is and who isn’t whatever it wants them to be.In an era when our government conducts more and more of the “people’s business” in secret, the need for brave men and women to step and an provide information, and the need for brave journalists to report that information, is ever more urgent. Without men like Edward Snowden working with journalists, we would never have known the depths of the NSA’s spying, for example. And without the heroic efforts of the person who leaked these once secret FBI rules, we would never have known what new tools the government had granted itself to weaken the press freedoms that otherwise helped sustain this nation for centuries.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
FBI, Police ‘Visited’ Activists’ Homes Ahead of the Republican National Convention
In another step towards the fascist state Donald Trump has warm dreams envisioning, FBI agents and Cleveland police officers “visited” the homes of local activists in an attempt to gather intelligence on possible planned demonstrations surrounding the Republican National Convention. Such actions step over the line of information gathering into the realm of seeking to chill free speech.
Activists said they viewed the visits as intimidating. A spokeswoman for the local branch of the FBI acknowledged only that “community outreach” took place as law enforcement officials try to ensure the GOP convention is a “safe and secure” event. During their visits, officials asked activists about past addresses, political and social affiliations, and plans for the RNC. The questions appear on their face of dubious constitutionality.A spokesperson for the National Lawyer’s Guild, a group prepared to defend those arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights outside the convention, first reported the visits by teams of federal and local law enforcement officials.
Some of the activists are involved with groups planning RNC demonstrations, while some aren’t, the spokesperson said. She also said that some of the people who were visited were among the 71 people who were arrested in May 2015 in the aftermath of protests that broke out following the acquittal of Michael Brelo, a then-Cleveland police officer who had been charged with voluntary manslaughter in connection with the 2013 shooting deaths of two Cleveland motorists following a police chase.
The FBI and police made no attempts to hide what they were doing; in fact, quite the opposite.For example, in a June 8 public hearing, Deputy Police Chief Ed Tomba told members of City Council’s public safety committee that Cleveland police have “a real, real good idea of who we think is coming here and what their objectives are. And if we can deter those objectives, that’s what we’re going to do.”
Cleveland purchased a $10 million “protest insurance” policy to protect against civil rights lawsuits resulting from the convention.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The FBI ‘Missed’ Orlando Shooter Omar Mateen. What Should We Do?
If I had to choose one phrase to sum up America’s efforts against terrorism since 9/11, it would be that lay definition of mental illness, doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
Following 9/11 we had to go after the terrorists in their dark lairs. So we did, in Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Libya, then Yemen, then by militarizing Africa, the Iraq again and then Syria. We’ve been bombing and invading places in the Middle East continuously since 9/11, every day expecting different results.Literally days after 9/11, it was felt that the problem was the government did not know enough about what was happening inside the U.S. vis-vis terrorists, so the vast capabilities of the NSA and FBI were pointed inward. From a relatively modest start, we advanced to Snowden-esque levels where every phone call, every email and every GPS-tracked move of everyone is monitored, every day expecting different results.
When it seemed we did not have the intelligence and enforcement tools needed, we created a new cabinet level agency, the Department of Homeland Security. That quickly grew into one of the largest bureaucracies in America. We created terror fusion centers, staffed up at the FBI and CIA, every day expecting different results.
Orlando Shooter Omar MateenAnd that of course brings us to Orlando Shooter Omar Mateen, whom the FBI stalked for 10 months, interviewed twice and then ignored. Through that we learned that there are some 10,000 FBI terrorism investigations open, with new cases added daily as Americans are encouraged to see something and say something. The New York Times tells us tens of thousands of counterterrorism tips flow into the FBI each year, some maybe legitimate, others from “vengeful ex-spouses or people casting suspicion on Arab-Americans.”
The flood of leads is so relentless that counterterrorism agents hung a section of fire hose outside their offices in Northern Virginia as a symbol of their mission.
Intelligence Surge, or a Surge of Intelligence?
So having missed the Orlando shooter, the Boston Marathon bombers, angry white anti-abortion shooters here and there, the answer is obvious. We need more FBI resources (Hillary Clinton has already called for an “intelligence surge”), of course every day thereafter expecting different results.
It is almost as if by trying to track every branch, leaf and dirt clod in the forest we are missing the trees. By running down every panicked tip (can you imagine how many calls have come in since Sunday in Orlando?) as a CYA exercise, we get bitten in the YA part over and over.
The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept. If so many are terrorists in one form or another, how can anyone pinpoint the real bad guys, should many of them exist at all?
By imagining we can track everyone and then sort them out, we are leaving outside the door the discussion of just why terrorists seem to keep attacking the U.S. Could it have something to do with our scorched earth policy in the Middle East?
By becoming terrified of every brown-skinned person and Muslim in America, we are leaving outside the door the discussion of how throwing innocent people off planes, maintaining secret no-fly lists, spying on whole communities, and giving media platforms to every nut job that wants to rant about what they don’t know but hate anyway about Islam might be helping “radicalize” folks here at home and abroad.
And certainly never admitting that our culture of easily available weaponry might play a role shuts down any useful discussions about gun control.
I am sure it is reasonable to expect different results by tomorrow.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Hidden Mics as Part of Government Surveillance Program
In another example of multi-dimensional clash among the Fourth Amendment, privacy, technology and the surveillance state, hidden microphones that are part of a broad, public clandestine government surveillance program that has been operating around the San Francisco Bay Area have been exposed.
The FBI planted listening devices at bus stops and other public places trying to prove real estate investors in San Mateo and Alameda counties are guilty of bid rigging and fraud. FBI agents were previously caught hiding microphones inside light fixtures and at public spaces outside an Oakland Courthouse, between March 2010 and January 2011.The apparent goal of the feds was to catch the defendants in their impromptu conversations following court sessions.
At issue is the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unwarranted search, which includes electronic “search,” and the concept that one has no expectation of privacy in a public place. The legal argument is that by choosing voluntarily to enter a public space, such a courtroom or bus stop, one gives up one’s Fourth Amendment rights. In the government’s interpretation, their actions are roughly the equivalent of overhearing a conversation on street corner waiting for a light to change.The lawyer for one of the accused real estate investors will ask the judge to throw out the recordings. “Speaking in a public place does not mean that the individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy. Private communication in a public place qualifies as a protected ‘oral communication’ and therefore may not be intercepted without judicial authorization.”
In addition to the Constitutional issues in the real estate case, the broad use of public surveillance devices also touches on the question of other people who may be swept up alongside the original targets. For example, the FBI’s interpretation means if its microphones inadvertently pick up conversation relating to another alleged crime, they would be free to use that as evidence in court as well.The use of microphones, coupled with technologies such as voice recognition (to identify a person) and keyword recognition (to identify specific terms of interest electronically) means that what appears to be a one-dimensional listening device can actually function within a web of technology to enable broad-spectrum surveillance of masses of people in public spaces.
(The “Golden Nugget” slide above is provided by the NSA, courtesy of former employee Edward Snowden)
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Student Thrown Off Flight After Passenger Heard Him Say ‘God Willing’ in Arabic
So once again people from The World’s Most Frightened Country (C) fully overreacted to nothing. One of the 230 million people worldwide who speak Arabic happened to be on an airplane and happened to use one of the most common expressions in his language.
Hilarity ensued. Bigoted, frightened, discriminatory hilarity, in keeping with the American Way.UC Berkeley student Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, 26, above, whose family fled Iraq in 2002 after his diplomat father was killed under Saddam Hussein’s regime, was booted from a Southwest Airlines flight and questioned by the FBI after another passenger heard him speaking Arabic. Makhzoomi was flying home from attending a dinner at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council with Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon when he stopped to make a call to an uncle.
Makhzoomi explained he was talking on the phone with his uncle and, as he said goodbye, he used the phrase “inshallah,” which translates as “if God is willing.” The student said that after hung up, he noticed a female passenger looking at him who then got up and left her seat.
Moments later an airport employee made Makhzoomi step off the plane into the arms of security officers. Makhzoomi was told the woman thought he said “Shahid,” meaning martyr. Because in-shal-lah and sha-hid sound the same, at least to a dumb ass who speaks no apparent Arabic and likely learned the term shahid when it was last mispronounced on AM talk radio.
The student was told he would not be allowed to get back on the plane. Security officers searched his bag again, asked him if he had any other luggage he was keeping “secret,” and publicly felt around his genital area and asked him if he was hiding a knife.“The way they searched me and the dogs, the officers, people were watching me and the humiliation made me so afraid because it brought all of these memories back to me,” Makhzoomi said. “I escaped Iraq because of the war, because of Saddam and what he did to my father.”
Makhzoomi said the FBI questioned him about his family, and about his phone call and what he knew about martyrism. The FBI informed Makhzoomi that Southwest would not fly him home. He later booked a flight on another airline, arriving home nine hours later than expected.
According to Southwest Airlines, the student was removed because crew members decided to “investigate potentially threatening comments made onboard our aircraft.”
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Talking More About Apple, Encryption and the Fourth Amendment
I had a chance to drop by Ron Paul’s web show to talk more about Apple, Encryption, the evil genius of the FBI/NSA, and the Fourth Amendment.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
FBI Threatens to Demand Apple’s iPhone Source Code, Digital Key
The FBI on Thursday threatened to raise the stakes in its legal battle with Apple, suggesting it could demand access to the iPhone’s source code and the electronic signature used to verify its software updates.
Battle Over Encryption
As part of the ongoing battle between the government and the tech industry over encryption in the United States, the FBI demanded Apple help it defeat the password security features on an iPhone 5C used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Specifically, the FBI wants Apple to create a modified version of the iPhone operating software that would allow the FBI to run an unlimited number of brute force attacks against a phone’s password to gain access.
When Apple refused to assist voluntarily, the FBI went to court, where a U.S. Magistrate Judge cited the 1789 All Writs Act as legal justification to force Apple to comply. Apple is now appealing that court decision.
FBI Wants It AllBut in a new court filing on Thursday, the FBI said that if it can’t require Apple to create the weakened software, it may demand access to Apple’s actual source code instead. Source code is the programming instructions that run the iPhone, and controls every aspect of the phone’s operation, including security protections.
The FBI also said it may demand Apple’s signature digital key, which is required to update software on all iPhones. That key is what allows Apple to push out updates with the assurance that only its software will be installed by a phone. With the digital key, the FBI would be able to push out malware and spyware of its own design to any Apple phone worldwide.
Basically, with the digital key, the FBI would be able to fool technology globally that it “was Apple.” The key is a very powerful tool, to either ensure security, or defeat it.
The Lavabit Case
The Apple case is not the first time the government has demanded encryption keys from private businesses.
In the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, the government demanded the digital encryption keys used by a secure email service, Lavabit, alledgedly used by Snowden. Lavabit shut down its services in August 2013 to avoid being forced to compromise user data, with founder Ladar Levison saying at the time: “I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”
Lavabit has filed an amicus brief in support of Apple.
The FBI’s Threat: Time to Get ScaredIn the Apple case, if the FBI got access to those two items, the source code and the digital key, the Bureau could write a security-weakened version of iOS and install it on any phone they wished. The FBI’s threat was thinly-veiled:
The FBI itself cannot modify the software on Farook’s iPhone without access to the source code and Apple’s private electronic signature,” the agency wrote in its court filing. “The government did not seek to compel Apple to turn those over because it believed such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labor by Apple programmers.
Time to get scared.
The government wants it all — not just your data, but the technical tools and code to control your devices and bypass any security and encryption you or the tech companies might employ. That would be the end of any Fourth Amendment protections left that apply to the digital world.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
FBI Has New Plan to Spy on High School Students
The FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies as potential future terrorists, warning that such “extremists” are in the same category as ISIS.
The FBI’s Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools guidelines try to avoid the appearance of specific discrimination against Muslim students by targeting every American teenager who is politically outspoken, as if that somehow makes all this better. The FBI’s goal is to enlist every teacher and every student as informants. The concept is not dissimilar to attempts by the FBI to require tech companies such as Apple to become extensions of the FBI’s power. FYI, the FBI also now has full access to data collected on Americans by the NSA.
You really do need to scan through the FBI’s materials, which are aimed directly at our children; my words cannot describe the chilling 1984-tone purposely adopted.
As author Sarah Lazare points out, the FBI’s justification for such mass teenage surveillance is based on McCarthy-era theories of radicalization, in which authorities monitor thoughts and behaviors that they claim without any proof lead to acts of subversion, even if the people being watched have not committed any wrongdoing. This model is now (again, welcome back to the 1950s) official federal policy.The FBI guidelines claim “High school students are ideal targets for recruitment by violent extremists seeking support for their radical ideologies, foreign fighter networks, or conducting acts of violence within our borders… youth possess inherent risk factors.” In light of this, the FBI instructs teachers to “incorporate a two-hour block of violent extremism awareness training” into the core curriculum for all youth in grades 9 through 12.
Here are the danger signs the FBI directs teachers keep a sharp eye out for:— “Talking about traveling to places that sound suspicious”;
— “Using code words or unusual language”;
— “Using several different cell phones and private messaging apps”;
— “Studying or taking pictures of potential targets (like a government building);”
— “Some immigrant families may not be sufficiently present in a youth’s life due to work constraints to foster critical thinking”;
— “Encryption is often used to facilitate extremism discussions.”
And just to make sure the connection with McCarthyism and the red baiting days of the 1950s is clear enough, the FBI materials warn “Anarchist extremists believe that society should have no government, laws, or police, and they are loosely organized, with no central leadership. Violent anarchist extremists usually target symbols of capitalism they believe to be the cause of all problems in society — such as large corporations, government organizations, and police agencies.”
So, sorry, Bernie Sanders supporters.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Judge Orders Apple to Help FBI Hack San Bernardino Shooter’s Phone
A magistrate judge in California on Tuesday ordered Apple to help the FBI retrieve encrypted data on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers. Investigators have so far been unable to gain access to the data on killer Syed Rizwan Farook’s phone, which could contain communications between him and his wife and co-conspirator, Tashfeen Malik, and potentially others, prior to the December 2 shooting rampage that killed 14 people.“Prosecutors said they needed Apple’s help accessing the phone’s data to find out who the shooters were communicating with and who may have helped plan and carry out the massacre, as well as where they traveled prior to the incident,” NBC News reports. “The judge ruled Tuesday that Apple had to provide ‘reasonable technical assistance’ to the government in recovering data from the iPhone 5c, including bypassing the auto-erase function and allowing investigators to submit an unlimited number of passwords in their attempts to unlock the phone.”
The court filing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles said “Apple has the exclusive technical means which would assist the government in completing its search, but has declined to provide that assistance voluntarily.” Apple has five days to respond to the ruling.
Can the Feds Break Into the iPhone?
Some interesting issues afoot here. First, it appears the FBI cannot figure out a way to bypass Apple’s security feature, the one that bricks the phone after a certain number of unsuccessful login attempts. If Apple modified the phone so an unlimited number of attempts can be made, then the Feds would simply brute force the password, trying potentially millions of combinations.
Or is it?America’s intelligence agencies have so far been unsuccessful in persuading manufacturers and/or Congress to create and pass on to them backdoors around security and encryption. The FBI may indeed know how to get into the iPhone, but wants to make this a public example case — who can complain about learning more about real terrorists (no ambiguity issues), and of course the phone’s owners are dead, and so cannot claim their Fourth Amendment rights against search and seizure/privacy are being violated.
Also of interest would be an Apple claim that while they will cooperate, it is technically impossible to comply with the request, i.e., the phone simply cannot be modified as the FBI wishes. Could a court require Apple to turn over all of their code and engineering documents so that the NSA could have a shot at what Apple said it could not do on its own?
Equally interesting would be even if Apple can comply this time, would Apple run into future legal issues if they created a next generation phone that truly could not be modified no matter what, making it fully unhackable, even by their own engineers?
Either way, the suit against Apple sets a precedent, likely making it easier for the Feds to compel cooperation from tech companies in more legally hazy cases in the future.
Apple RespondsApple has vowed to aggressively fight the federal order to unlock the iPhone. CEO Tim Cook published a public response that said “We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.”
So the good (?) news is in 2016 we are now depending on a private company to protect our privacy against the wishes of our own government.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Virginia Man Is Accused of Trying to Join ISIS
Another day, another faux-terrorism arrest by the FBI. Who do we really need to be protected from anyway?
Now watch the italics:The Justice Department charged two Virginia men with terrorism-related offenses, a day after FBI agents arrested one of them at an airport where officials believe he was planning to begin a journey to Syria to fight with the Islamic State.
Both men, Joseph Hassan Farrokh and Mahmoud Amin Mohamed Elhassan, are in FBI custody and face up to 20 years in prison if they are convicted.
The department did not cite any evidence that the two men had direct contact with operatives for Islamic State, and based the terrorism charges on conversations they had with three informants.
Farrokh, a 28-year-old native of Pennsylvania, was arrested at the airport in Richmond, Virginia, where he was planning to fly to Chicago and on to Amman, Jordan, according to a criminal complaint released on Saturday. During wiretapped conversations with an FBI informant, Farrokh discussed beginning his journey from a smaller airport to evade scrutiny.
The complaint said that Elhassan, a 25-year-old permanent resident of the United States originally from Sudan, drove Farrokh to within a mile of the airport, and that Farrokh took a taxi the rest of the way. Elhassan is being charged with aiding and abetting Farrokh’s attempts to provide material support to a terrorist organization.
The complaint said that Farrokh did not appear to want to return to the United States.
Quick summation:— No terrorism committed, or even planned, inside America.
— One guy arrested for trying to fly to Chicago.
— Other guy arrested for driving Guy I to the airport.
— 100% of “evidence” are conversations with informants.
— No information on how the two arrested men came together with informants, or what the informants said that might have spurred the conversations.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Terror Arrest After Watching ‘Breaking Bad’
A British software programmer has been sentenced to eight years in prison for trying to buy the deadly toxin ricin (from the FBI) over the Internet.Mohammed Ali was convicted of attempting to possess a chemical weapon. He admitted trying to buy ricin, but claimed he was motivated by curiosity after it featured on the TV show “Breaking Bad.”
He told jurors he was just “curious” and wanted to test the boundaries of the Dark Web, and was unaware ricin was illegal. “I just wanted to know what the fuss was about,” he said.
Computer analysis showed Ali first began trawling the Internet for information on poisons such as abrin, ricin and cyanide in October last year.
The court heard he approached the undercover agent in January with a private message, saying: “Hi, would you be able to make me some ricin and send it to the UK?”Because sure, that’s exactly how one goes about these things, so hey, I need some plutonium, please leave your full name and address in the Comments so me and SWAT can swing by later.
At one point, Ali asked his FBI handler: “How do I test this ricin?” and received the instruction: “You must test it on a rodent.”
Records showed that Ali then made a to-do list on his computer which included the entries “pay ricin guy” and “get pet to murder.” He had also made a series of web searches for chinchillas, animal rescue center, rabbits and “pocket-sized pets.”
Ali has been diagnosed with Asperger’s or autistic traits.
Ali, who is 31, contacted a “U.S. seller” about buying 500 milligrams of ricin for $500. Of course, the contact was just another undercover FBI agent pretending to be a terrorist, and Ali was arrested after he was sent a toy car (below) containing a harmless powder. One wonders if it is 99 percent or 99.9 percent of the FBI that now spends its time pretending to be terrorists online.
A judge said Ali’s sentence was intended to send a message “that the possession of a chemical weapon is extremely serious.” And indeed possession is a serious thing. Only this guy never possessed anything dangerous, and had no chance of actually possessing anything dangerous. He was just another ignorant web dweller who imagined he could pop online and buy highly toxic substances.
Protip: Ricin is a poison found naturally in castor beans. Ricin can be made from the waste material left over from processing castor beans. In other words, you don’t have to buy it, you can brew it, and yes, instructions are online. If the guy really, really wanted to cause mass harm, he was a quick Google and a trip to the supermarket away from getting started. And as far as anyone knows, the FBI is not yet staffing the bean aisle at your local Safeway.Or are they…
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
FBI Saved 9/11 Day By Foiling Another Non-Terror Plot Plot
Did you have a nice 9/11 day Friday? Did you know you almost were killed? No, not really, except…Whew. America survived another never was going to happen terror plot nearly completely driven by the FBI because the FBI arrested the lone, sad loser they tricked into the plot. See, that’s the sound of freedom. Never Forget, m*therfuckers!
Here’s what sort of happened: A Florida man faces up to 20 years in federal prison after authorities say he was trying to help plan an attack on an upcoming 9/11 memorial in Missouri. The U.S. Attorney’s Office announced Thursday that 20-year-old Joshua Ryne Goldberg was arrested and charged with distributing information relating to explosives, destructive devices and weapons of mass destruction.A criminal complaint says Goldberg began communicating online with an FBI informer in July and gave that person information on how to build a bomb with a pressure cooker, nails and rat poison. The complaint says Goldberg also instructed the informer to place the bomb at an upcoming memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, that was commemorating the 14th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Here’s what really happened: a college kid with a history of internet trolling was talking dumb sh*t online. The Australian intelligence services (i.e., the NSA monitoring Americans from abroad where it is legal, versus from inside the U.S. where it is not) alerted the FBI, who had one of their people make contact with the troll online and ease him forward with the plot. The troll ran a Google search for “how to build a pressure cooker bomb”.Boom! That resulted in charges of “distributing information relating to explosives, destructive devices and weapons of mass destruction.”
Once again FBI informants have courageously defended us from a plot that probably would never have existed were it not for the involvement of FBI informants. Absolutely nothing to see here. No one was in danger. Nothing was foiled, but at least some of us may have been fooled.
Happy 9/11 America!
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Florida Man Arrested in FBI/ISIS-Inspired Plot to Bomb a Beach
So you be the judge: which organization, the FBI or ISIS, had more to do with this supposed “threat” to Das Homeland?
The FBI has arrested a man who allegedly wanted to detonate a bomb in what authorities describe as an ISIS-inspired terror attack, officials said.Harlem Suarez, 23, of Key West, Florida, (pictured, and do note the Batman T-shirt) has been charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction in the United States.
So Terrorist Suarez first came onto the FBI’s radar in April, after he posted whatever “extremist rhetoric” and pro-ISIS messages are on Facebook, according to the Justice Department. Facebook, yep, everything people post on Facebook is serious sh*t, man, no boasting or false bravado online, ever. Everybody always means exactly what they say.
Anyway, after creeping Suarez on Facebook, the FBI then sent in an FBI-employed “confidential source” who for months allegedly talked with Suarez online and in person about plans to attack the United States. Not that any of that would have encouraged or emboldened someone whose previous plans would have otherwise never left his bedroom.
In May, according to the FBI, Suarez recorded his own video, declaring: “We will destroy America and divide it into two. We will raise our black flag on top of your White House and any president on duty.”
Nice touch– “any president on duty.” Man, Suarez was obviously well-informed.
The FBI said that in subsequent meetings with the FBI informant, Suarez discussed plans for an attack around the July 4 holiday and said he would “cook American in cages” — an apparent reference to the ISIS video of a captured Jordanian pilot being burned alive while in a cage.
Last week, Suarez allegedly gave the informant two boxes of nails, a cell phone, a backpack and $100 to build a bomb. In the most recent discussions, Suarez talked about bombing a public beach in Key West and placing explosive devices under police cars, according to charging documents filed by the FBI.
Note that without some actual explosive material and the knowledge to build a bomb without first blowing yourself up (yeah, yeah, it’s all online, but so is a lot of stuff. Reading stuff online and actually safely handling explosives and ensuring they work remotely is a whole ‘nother story.) In case you wish to experiment, here are instructions for making a nuclear weapon.
And seriously, a backpack bomb, is that really a weapon of mass destruction?
Also note that at no point was anyone in America in danger in any way whatsoever.
“There is no room for failure when it comes to investigating the potential use of a weapon of mass destruction,” said Special Agent in Charge George Piro, head of the FBI’s Miami Field Office.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
FBI Stops Terrorist Death Ray Plot; Roadrunner Still at Large
Another close call as the FBI announced it stopped another terrorist plot it helped facilitate. The best part of this one is that the plot involved some yahoo trying to develop a “death ray machine” that he was going to unleash on Obama and the Muslims.
A self-proclaimed Ku Klux Klan member conspired to use a remote-controlled X-ray device hidden in a truck, which he called “Hiroshima on a light switch,” as a weapon of mass destruction to harm Muslims and Barack Obama, a prosecutor told jurors.But a lawyer for Glendon Scott Crawford, 51, said that government undercover agents dragged him further into the plot to build what media dubbed the “death ray” machine after he tried to pull away in the initial stages, when he had no more than “a piece of paper” sketching out his ideas.
Government agents apparently gave Crawford an old X-ray machine and an arc welder that he was otherwise unable to procure himself. In opening arguments at U.S. District Court in Albany, a lawyer for Crawford said the device would have never been built if not for the government supplying the necessary components.
The FBI learned of this evil plot after Crawford approached Jewish community leaders in Albany, New York, seeking funding. Those leaders immediately called the FBI.
Here’s the caper: Crawford and another man were arrested in 2013 and charged in the plot to unleash radiation at a mosque and a Muslim school. The men also planned to attack the White House.The weapon: a remote-controlled device Crawford said was going to be like “Hiroshima on a light switch.”
Crawford faces three charges, including attempting to produce, construct, acquire, transfer, receive, possess and use a radiological dispersal device. The other two charges are conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction and distributing information with respect to a weapon of mass destruction.
Left unanswered so far is the vast gap between what a hateful nut like Crawford imagined and reality on Earth.“Death Rays” are notoriously hard to construct, the evidence of which is that none have ever been constructed. One faces issues such as acquiring massive X-ray machines that are portable, powering those massive x-ray machines in a portable way, and directing said x-rays through stuff to reach people somewhere in the distance. Perhaps such devices are sold by the Wil E. Coyote division of the Acme X-Ray Corporation?
Given that Crawford has no training in high-energy physics and has been unable to contact Dr. Evil at his lair for help, this is all another silly attempt by the FBI to entrap some nasty loser who may indeed belong in jail, but to dress it all up as “terrorism” and “weapons of mass destruction” ahead of their next promotion cycle.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
FBI Monitored Peaceful Demos in Baltimore with High-Tech Surveillance Planes
The FBI surveilled peaceful protests in Baltimore following the police killing of Freddie Gray, protest acts protected by the First Amendment, from the air, using high-tech monitoring aircraft.The surveillance aircraft can be equipped with infrared and other surveillance gear that extend the intrusion into privacy far into unconstitutional territory.
When violence rocked Baltimore recently, local Police Captain Jeff Long told reporters “When you’ve got something like this, you’ve got people running all over the place, throwing rocks and looting and starting vehicles on fire and destroying vehicles like this, really the best vantage point you can get is from the air.”
Which is why city and state police took to the air in helicopters and small planes, all clearly marked.
Eyes in the Skies
Less obvious was a single engine prop Cessna and a small Cessna jet flying over the city, not during the worst of the violence, but during periods of peaceful protest. Who did they belong to?
In response to media inquiries, the Baltimore police referred questions to the FBI. The FBI initially refused to comment. They eventually released a statement claiming the aircraft worked for the Bureau, saying also “The aircraft were specifically used to assist in providing high altitude observation of potential criminal activity to enable rapid response by police officers on the ground. The FBI aircraft were not there to monitor lawfully protected first amendment activity.” The local FBI spokesperson also noted any aviation support supplied to local police must be approved at the highest levels of the FBI.
The aircraft, however, are not owned, overtly at least, by the FBI. Research done in part by the Washington Post shows the ostensible owners as NG Research, located near Manassas Regional Airport, just outside of Washington, DC. Searches of public records revealed little about the company, which could not be reached by the Post.
Understanding the TechnologyThe key to understanding the constitutionality of the FBI’s dragnet search is knowing what sensors were mounted on each aircraft.
According to Cessna, “when you choose Citation [the jet believed to have been overhead in Baltimore] for your surveillance and patrol aircraft, we customize your jet to fit your exact mission requirements. For example, jets can be equipped with a securely mounted EO/IR device, technology specially suited to carry out territory surveillance work such as border patrol, land-use patrol, and general policing.”
EO/IR refers to electro-optical and infrared capabilities. In this context the former can be any type of laser or telescopic device used for visible light, the latter measuring “heat,” allowing one to “see” in the dark. Stingrays, electronic devices which can monitor and/or disrupt cell phone communications, can also be mounted on such aircraft.
The FBI is also known to employ aircraft with the Wescam stabilized surveillance sensor pod, allowing high quality images to be taken under bumpy flight conditions.
Such technology has been used extensively by the U.S. military in general, and by Special Forces in the particular, in their hunt for terrorists abroad, and represents another example of the weapons of war coming to the Homeland, now aimed at Americans instead of “the enemy.”
Here’s a sample image via Ars Technica of what a zoomed out nighttime IR image can show:
ACLU ActionsThe ACLU has filed a request with the FBI to learn what video and cell phone data was collected during the flights.
It is possible that the FBI was simply duplicating the visual search capabilities likely to have been employed by regular Baltimore cops and their prop aircraft. However, such duplication of effort seems unlikely. One can reasonably suppose the FBI joined the aerial surveillance with something new to bring to the party, such as more advanced observation tech.
For example, on May 1 and May 2, what is believed to be the FBI Cessna Citation V jet made nighttime flights (path recorded below), orbiting Baltimore at the relatively low altitudes for a jet aircraft of 6,400 and 9,400 feet, based on records from Flightradar24. That action would be consistent with the use of any of the surveillance devices noted above.
Constitutional QuestionsThe constitutional questions are significant.
Civil libertarians have particular concern about surveillance technology that can gather images across dozens of city blocks, tracking the travel, actions and associations of people under no suspicion of criminal activity.
“A lot of these technologies sweep very, very broadly, and, at a minimum, the public should have a right to know what’s going on,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU specializing in privacy and technology issues.
If the FBI was using infrared (IR) devices overhead, that use may have constituted an unlawful search.
In Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), the Supreme Court held that the use of a thermal imaging, or IR, device from a public vantage point to monitor the radiation of heat from a person’s home was a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and thus required a warrant.
Perhaps the ACLU can check if the FBI was issued warrants for most of the city of Baltimore. And then stick a fork in it people, ’cause this democracy is about done.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
How to Communicate Securely with the Media
Glenn Greenwald almost missed the story of his career because he didn’t understand how to communicate securely.The person Greenwald now knows as Edward Snowden began contacting him via open email, urging Greenwald to learn how to use encryption and other web tools to receive sensitive information. When Greenwald was slow to act, Snowden even made a video tutorial to baby-step him through the necessary procedures. Absent these extraordinary efforts by Snowden, who knows when or even if his game-changing NSA information would have come to light.
You don’t have to wait for some future Snowden to teach you how to communicate securely, thanks to Trevor Timm, co-founder and the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
SecureDrop
Freedom of the Press Foundation has helped news organizations install SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that helps sources get documents to journalists in a much more anonymous and secure way than email. Currently, journalists at five major news organizations in the United States use SecureDrop. Here’s how to use it:
— Find a public wifi internet connection that is not connected to your work or home, such as a coffee shop. Take the bus to a new place you’ll not visit again.
— Download and install the Tor Browser Bundle. For more security, also install and use the Tails operating system. For maximum security, run all this off a flash drive you bought with cash, and throw away the drive after one use.
–Using the Tor Browser, enter in your news organization’s Onion URL (below). Only load this URL inside the Tor Browser.
— Follow the instructions on the SecureDrop screen.
Onion URLs
Here are Onion URLs for the five groups of journalists currently operating SecureDrop:
The Intercept: y6xjgkgwj47us5ca.onion
ProPublica: pubdrop4dw6rk3aq.onion
New Yorker: strngbxhwyuu37a3.onion
Forbes: bczjr6ciiblco5ti.onion
Wired’s Kevin Poulsen: poulsensqiv6ocq4.onion
A Plea to Computer People
I have heard from many journalists their concern that sources are unaware or incapable of communicating securely. Many times the journalist, who may or may not really understand this stuff, ends up trying to explain it to an already-nervous source whose computer skills may be basic at best. Every one of the writers say the same thing: someone please create a secure system for dummies.
So, computer people of the web, please consider this. Create a one-button click piece of software that installs all the software needed on a flash drive. The users need only plug in the flash drive and click one button. Create the necessary front ends so that the software can be used by anyone. Please don’t write in and say “But it is already so easy to use.” Experience is that it is not. Think software that your grandma could make work. For better or worse, many people who are or who might communicate important information to responsible journalists need your help. Without your help, many will either not communicate at all, or put themselves at increased risk by communicating insecurely.
Disclaimer
Anyone takes great personal risk, including financial ruin and potential jail time, by transmitting to journalists, so all the warnings and caveats apply. Do not leak or transmit classified information. Courts are attacking journalists’ abilities to protect their sources. Though Snowden and others have endorsed the use of systems such as described here, there is no information now available on if/how the NSA can monitor such communications, now or in the future. The FBI has successfully, on a known, limited scale, monitored some parts of the Tor Network. Everything else. This is America, 2014. We’re on our own to fix our country.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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