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Tag Archive for: Hunter Biden

Posts

The Evolving Robert Costello – Steve Bannon Timeline

February 22, 2023/24 Comments/in 2020 Presidential Election, January 6 Insurrection /by emptywheel

Robert Costello’s law firm, Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, is suing Steve Bannon.

Can you blame them? According to the complaint, Bannon has stiffed the firm on $480,487.87 out of $855,487.87 they’ve billed him.

I’m interested in the complaint, though, for something other than the details of what a cheapskate Bannon is.

Here’s how the complaint describes the firm’s work for Bannon.

From on or about November 2020 through on or about November 2022, DHC provided legal services on behalf of the Defendant regarding several matters that included, but not limited to, a federal action captioned, United States v. Stephen Bannon, 20 Cr. 412 (AT) (S.D.N.Y.) which was dismissed against Defendant subsequent to a presidential pardon of him that was secured through the aid of DHC, represented Defendant with regards to a subpoena issued by the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (“Subpoena”), subsequently represented Defendant in response to a criminal contempt proceeding captioned, United States v. Stephen K. Bannon, 21Cr. 670 (CJN) (D.D.C.) regarding that Subpoena, and represented Defendant in a case brought by the former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, captioned In the Matter of the Application of Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. (collectively the “Legal Services”)

That mostly tracks what we know about Costello’s representation of Bannon. He publicly took over representing Bannon in the Build the Wall case on December 11, 2020 after Bannon’s prior criminal defense attorney, Bill Burck, fired him for threatening to execute Anthony Fauci and Chris Wray.

Costello represented Bannon in his contemptuous refusal to show up before the January 6 Committee and invoke Executive Privielge, and participated in two discussions with the government that the government treated as material to the contempt case against Bannon. There was a brief moment after Bannon was indicted on November 12, 2021, where it looked like David Schoen and Evan Corcoran would represent Bannon, alone. But on December 2, Costello filed to join the case, setting off a long discussion about whether Costello would be a witness or a lawyer on the case. That charade continued until July 2022, when Costello decided he might need to be a witness after all. See this post for some of that timeline.

It is true that Costello represented Bannon in the early period of NY State’s investigation into Bannon for the same fraud for which he was pardoned in the federal Build the Wall case. Though the November 2022 date roughly coincides with Bannon’s sentencing in October 2022.

Again, it mostly checks out.

The reason I’m interested, however, is that back in July 2022, when Costello was withdrawing from the Bannon contempt case, he gave a different timeline for his representation of Bannon, indicating that it went back two years earlier than the timeline DHC has laid out.

I am an attorney and Partner in the firm of Davidoff, Hutcher & Citron, LLP located at 605 Third Avenue, New York, New York. For the past 49 years I have been admitted to the bar of the State of New York, the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, the Second and Third Circuit Courts of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court. I have been counsel to the above listed Defendant, Stephen K. Bannon on a number of different matters for the past three years. I am admitted to the bar of this District by way of pro hac vice motion. I have been co-counsel to Mr. Bannon throughout these proceedings as well as in connection with all interactions with the Select Committee which preceded the filing of Contempt of Congress misdemeanor charges in this Court. [my emphasis]

I noted at that time that it was a different timeline than was publicly known, the timeline that DHC lays out in its complaint.

Still, there may be a ready explanation for this discrepancy too: That Costello is including the period when he played a key role in the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” operation in the time period he represented Bannon, but DHC is not.

Even so, that timeline is a bit hazy, given some variation regarding whether he reached out in 2019 or 2020 in Mac Isaac’s story.

In any case, the discrepancy between DHC’s story and Costello’s about the length of time he represented Bannon may be of interest to Abbe Lowell, as he asks the Feds to investigate — among others — Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and Costello.

These disputes are interesting for another reason. As the Daily Beast laid out, Bannon has also been stiffing Evan Corcoran. And his third lawyer from the contempt case, Schoen, said last month he can no longer work with him in the NYS Build the Wall charges.

Even after the irreparable split in NYS, Schoen remained on Bannon’s appeal, where he has been stalling and where briefing won’t be done until May. Any appeal would be premised on Bannon’s understanding of the expectations surrounding Executive Privilege, which would seem to rely on Costello’s testimony.

I have no idea where this is going. Perhaps Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Lowell, can sort it out.

https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Steve_Bannon_by_Gage_Skidmore.jpg 587 440 emptywheel https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.png emptywheel2023-02-22 05:51:462023-02-22 10:04:10The Evolving Robert Costello – Steve Bannon Timeline

James Comer’s Dick Pics Hearing Just Became an Alleged Stolen Laptop Hearing

February 2, 2023/128 Comments/in Hunter Biden /by emptywheel

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the first thing that James Comer chose to do after becoming Chair of the House Oversight Committee was to schedule a hearing about why he can’t look at non-consensually posted pictures of Hunter Biden’s dick on Twitter.

In letters asking former Twitter executives Jim Baker, Yoel Roth, and Vijaya Gadde to testify next week, Comer described the substance of the hearing to be about their, “role in suppressing Americans’ access to information about the Biden family on Twitter shortly before the 2020 election.” As Matt #MattyDickPics Taibbi has helpfully revealed, some of the “information about the Biden family” that Twitter suppressed Americans’ access to before the election were nonconsensual dick pics, including a number posted as part of a campaign led by Steve Bannon’s buddy Guo Wengui.

Certainly, the Twitter witnesses, who themselves have been dangerously harassed as the result of #MattyDickPics’ sloppy propaganda, would be within the scope of Comer’s stated inquiry to explain why a private company doesn’t want to be part of an organized revenge porn campaign, even if a Congressman from Kentucky wants to see those dick pics.

But Comer’s campaign also just became about something else: Twitter’s decision to suppress a story based off a laptop that its purported owner claims was unlawfully obtained.

As several outlets have reported (WaPo, CNN, NBC, ABC), Hunter Biden has hired Abbe Lowell, who has written letters to DOJ, Delaware authorities, and the IRS, asking for investigations into those who have disseminated the materials from the alleged laptop (though Lowell made clear that no one is confirming any of the versions of the laptop). Those included in the letters are:

  • John Paul Mac Isaac (whom a prior lawyer, Chris Clark, had already referred to SDNY)
  • Robert Costello, who first obtained the laptop from Mac Isaac
  • Rudy Giuliani
  • Steve Bannon
  • Garrett Ziegler (who plays a key role in the January 6 investigation but who now hosts the content as part of a non-profit)
  • Jack Maxey (who provided the “laptop” to multiple outlets)
  • Yaacov Apelbaum (whom Mac Isaac claimed had helped to create a “forensic” image of the laptop)

The lawyers also sent a defamation letter to Tucker Carlson for a story since proven to be false.

These letters aren’t likely to change what DOJ, at least, will do about the laptop. They’ve had the Mac Isaac copy in hand for some time, and the earlier SDNY referral would likely go to the same people already investigating the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary.

Ziegler may be an exception. DOJ likely already has interest for his role in January 6, the invitation to conduct an investigation may give reason to look more closely.

Eric Herschmann is not, according to reports, on these letters but he was even pitching “laptop” content while working at the White House.

But the public coverage of this will undoubtedly change the tenor of next week’s hearing. At the very least, it will validate Yoel Roth’s concerns in real time that the NYPost story was based on stolen data. It will, retroactively, mean that the NYPost story was a violation of Twitter’s terms of service agreement.

None of (the coverage of) these letters describes a key detail: How the Oversight Committee got the copy of the laptop they claim they have. These criminal complaints are broad enough that they likely include at least a few people involved in the channel via which the Committee obtained the laptop, meaning that the Committee would be — is — harboring data from a private citizen that he claims was illegally obtained.

Significantly, the letters include false statements to Congress among the crimes raised (probably with respect to Mac Isaac). Given that Comer’s actions are premised on what Mac Isaac has claimed (and as several of these stories note, Mac Isaac’s story has changed in significant ways, and never made sense in the first place), the allegation may give the Committee further reason to exercise caution.

At the very least, it’ll give Democrats on the Committee plenty to talk about in next week’s hearing.

I thought it would take some doing to top kicking off one’s chairmanship by having a hearing to complain about non-consensual dick pics. But having a hearing to complain that stolen private information wasn’t more widely disseminated may top that.

https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screen-Shot-2022-11-18-at-9.35.06-AM-1.png 410 836 emptywheel https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.png emptywheel2023-02-02 04:50:582023-02-02 07:10:31James Comer’s Dick Pics Hearing Just Became an Alleged Stolen Laptop Hearing

BREAKING: James Comer Jumps Right on Hunter Biden’s Dick Pics

January 11, 2023/51 Comments/in 2020 Presidential Election /by emptywheel

As expected, James Comer has wasted no time after getting the House Oversight gavel before launching an investigation into Hunter Biden.

ABC reports that, in addition to demanding SARs relating to Hunter Biden (at least some of which Ron Johnson already got), Comer has scheduled testimony for three former Twitter executives — Jim Baker, Yoel Roth, and Vijaya Gadde.

Comer sent letters to former top Twitter employees including former Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde, former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth, and former deputy general counsel James Baker, requesting that they testify at a public hearing during the week of Feb. 6.

“Your attendance is necessary because of your role in suppressing Americans’ access to information about the Biden family on Twitter shortly before the 2020 election,” Comer wrote to the former employees.

Among the things Twitter “suppressed access to” before the November 2020 election, of course, was access to Hunter Biden’s dick pics.

Indeed, we know some of those dick pics were sent out as part of a coordinated campaign pushed by Steve Bannon associate Guo Wengui.

Starting on October 22, 2020, Guo then personally managed minute details of the distribution of pictures and videos. In audio messages he sent to groups of supporters using WhatsApp, which I obtained, he set up a process in which key backers would post Hunter Biden pictures on his streaming website, GTV—a sort of Chinese-language YouTube knockoff—and others would then amplify them. He decreed that much of the material would first be posted by followers living abroad, to help prevent any lawsuits seeking to block the effort.

“Look at the video copied from Hunter’s computer,” Guo said in a WhatsApp messages to underlings on October 27. (He spoke in Chinese. The messages have been translated.) In another message, referring to various Hunter videos, Guo ordered: “Post one right now, one every hour from now on…I want everyone to fully promote it.”

In other words, James Comer has made it his top priority — one of the very first things he did as Chair! — to schedule a hearing so he can learn why Twitter prevented him from accessing pictures of Hunter Biden’s dick leading up to the 2020 election.

It is the top priority of the House GOP to inquire why Twitter took down non-consensually posted revenge porn posted by an associate of a top GOP propagandist.

Update: Axios’ story on this is even worse than ABC’s. It falsely suggests the only thing that Twitter only suppressed access to the NY Post story on the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” (and doesn’t note that even Fox wouldn’t report it), giving Comer a pass for prioritizing Hunter Biden’s dick pics.

Driving the news: House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) sent letters Wednesday to several former Twitter executives who were involved in the decision to suppress the New York Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden.

Update: Bloomberg’s Billy House also doesn’t think it worth mentioning that James Comer has called a hearing, in part, because Twitter took down non-consensual dick pics.

https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Screen-Shot-2022-12-03-at-1.24.10-PM.png 556 606 emptywheel https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.png emptywheel2023-01-11 10:01:472023-01-11 11:24:54BREAKING: James Comer Jumps Right on Hunter Biden’s Dick Pics

“Dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter:” Elvis Chan, Hacks, the Klan, and the Twitter Files

December 26, 2022/37 Comments/in 2020 Election, emptywheel /by emptywheel

In one of many false claims Michael Shellenberger made (see this thread for another) in his Twitter Files thread purporting to address Twitter’s handling of the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” (but which focused a lot on non-Twitter material on the “laptop”), he made this claim about the deposition of FBI Assistant Agent in Charge Elvis Chan.

Chan was interviewed as part of the lawsuit filed by Eric Schmitt before Schmitt was elected to the Senate. The suit alleges that the government has violated the First Amendment rights of Americans by pressuring social media companies to take down misinformation. The bolded language below, from an address by George Washington, appears in the first paragraph of Schmitt’s complaint.

if Men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of Mankind; reason is of no use to us—the freedom of Speech may be taken away—and, dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter. [my emphasis]

Shellenberger’s tweet is part of an argument that the FBI warned the social media companies specifically about Hunter Biden. Indeed, his tweet is premised on the claim that the FBI gave “warnings of a hack-and-leak operation relating to Hunter Biden.” [my emphasis]

In fact, though Hunter Biden came up in this deposition 36 times, Chan’s testimony was that Hunter Biden came up in just one briefing with social media companies, one in which someone from FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, Laura Dehmlow, refused to comment in response to a question from Facebook about the already-published NY Post story.

Q. BY MR. SAUER: Do you know that in 20– so you remember sometime in 2020 a Facebook analyst asked the FBI to comment on the status of the Hunter Biden investigation?

A. That’s correct.

Q. And you believe that this occurred after there had been, you know, a New York Post article about the contents of the laptop that you referred to — I think you referred to earlier you finding out about it that way, right?

A. Yeah, I only found out through news media. I have no internal knowledge of that investigation, and yeah, I believe that it was brought up after the news story had broke.

Q. And so the — what did the Facebook analyst ask Ms. Dehmlow? Did they ask, you know, “Hey, we have the story. Can you confirm it,” or what did they ask?

A. Yeah, they just — I can’t remember the exact question, but I believe the investigator asked if the FBI could provide any information about the Hunter Biden investigation.

Q. Did they refer to the laptop in particular that had been the subject of the news stories?

A. I can’t recall.

Q. And what did Ms. Dehmlow respond?

A. She said no comment. She said something to the effect that the FBI has no comment on this.

Q. Did she indicate why the FBI declined to comment?

A. Yes. It was because — at the time I do not believe that we had confirmed that it was an active — we had — at the time we had not confirmed that the FBI was actually investigating Hunter Biden. So she did not have the authority to say anything or to comment about it.

Q. Did she know at the time that the FBI had the laptop and that the contents had not been hacked?

MR. SUR: Objection; calls for speculation and gets into law enforcement privilege.

Q. BY MR. SAUER: To your knowledge?

A. I have no idea. I never asked her, and she never told me.

Q. Did Hunter Biden come up with any other social media platforms during 2020?

A. Not to my knowledge.

Q. Do you recall any mention of Hunter Biden at any meetings with any social media platforms?

A. No. It stood out because that Facebook meeting was the only one where an individual from one of the companies even asked about it.

Q. You’re confident that Hunter Biden did not come up at any other meetings between federal government officials and social media platforms in 2020?

A. I was confident that I was not a party to any meeting with social media companies where Hunter Biden was discussed outside of the one incident that I told you about.

Q. That was the one where it was a FITF Facebook meeting where the analyst asked Ms. Dehmlow and she refused to comment, correct?

A. That is correct. That is correct.

Note that Twitter Files propagandists often refer to Dehmlow’s actions in 2020 and describe that she was in charge of the entire FITF effort, but at the time she was only in charge of the China unit. That has the effect of falsely suggesting she and all the other FITF warnings were focused primarily on Russia (Iran is similarly neglected from the focus of the Twitter Files propagandists).

In his deposition, Chan takes issue with former Twitter head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth’s use, in a declaration explaining why Twitter took down links to the NY Post article, of the word, “expectation,” to describe FBI’s warnings to be on the lookout for hack-and-leak operations and notes that the FBI would have been the only federal law enforcement agency who offered such warnings; CISA, which organized other meetings with the FBI, is not a law enforcement agency (though the Twitter File propagandists have at times claimed it is). He also has to correct Schmitt’s lawyer when he treats Roth’s reference to the Infosec community’s response to the NY Post story to include the FBI, as opposed to the private sector Infosec community.

But Chen’s testimony — whether it accords with Twitter’s own records or not — is quite clear: while the FBI (and CISA and ODNI) were absolutely warning that there might be hack-and-leak operations in 2016, those warnings did not mention Hunter Biden. Rather than admitting that, Shellenberger instead states as fact that these warnings were “relating to Hunter Biden.”

And then he does something funnier. To prove that these warnings “relating to Hunter Biden” that weren’t related to Hunter Biden weren’t based on any new information, he points to Chan’s repeated comments that the FBI had not seen any intrusions like the 2016 ones.

Q. You said that there might be a Russian hack-and-dump operation?

A. So what I said was although we have not seen any computer intrusions into national-level political committees or election officials or presidential candidates at this time, we ask you to remain vigilant about the potential for hack-and-dump operations, or something to that effect.

Q. Did you specifically refer to the 2016 hack-and-dump operation that targeted the DCCC and the DNC?

A. I believe I did.

Q. Did you provide any basis to the social media platforms for thinking that such an operation 20 might be coming?

A. The basis was — my basis was it had happened once, and it could happen again.

Q. Did you have any other specific information other than it had happened four years earlier?

[snip]

THE WITNESS: Through our investigations, we did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016. So although from our standpoint we had not seen anything, we specifically, in an abundance of caution, warned the companies in case they saw something that we did not.

Q. BY MR. SAUER: So did you ask the companies if they had seen any attempts at intrusions or unauthorized access?

A. This is something that we — that I regularly ask the companies in the course of our meetings. 

Q. Did you ask them in these meetings?

A. Not at every meeting, but I believe I asked them at some meetings.

Q. And did you repeatedly warn them at these meetings that you anticipated there might be hack-and-dump operations, Russian-initiated hack-and-dump operations?

[snip]

THE WITNESS: So repeatedly I would say — can you — can you ask your question like — what do you mean by “repeatedly”? Like times, five times?

Q. BY MR. SAUER: Well, did you do it more than once?

A. I did it more — yes. I warned the companies about a potential for hack-and-dump operations from the Russians and the Iranians on more than one occasion, although I cannot recollect how many times. [my emphasis]

But note that Chan specifically referenced hacks of “national-level political committees or election officials or presidential candidates.”

Hunter Biden is not and was not a national-level political committee.

Hunter Biden is not and was not an election official.

Hunter Biden is not and was not a presidential candidate.

Having misrepresented what Chan said about the extent of any discussions of Hunter Biden (whether it is accurate or not), Shellenberger then pointed to testimony about hacks of political candidates to disclaim the FBI had any information about hacks of someone who is not a political candidate.

And while it doesn’t show up in this deposition because Eric Schmitt doesn’t much care about Russian hacking, Chan’s reference to Russia and Iran is significant: because according to former CISA Director Chis Krebs’ January 6 Committee deposition, both did hack “election-adjacent systems” in 2020.

Q Are you able to form any conclusions as to whether there was a cyber intrusion in connection with the 2020 election?

A Yes. In fact, we released alerts on these things throughout. There were both Russian and Iranian actors that were able to gain access to election-adjacent systems. The Iranians, in one case, I think, had access to a voter registration database. But we’re not aware of any instance where they were in a system that would’ve been directly connected or, you know, involved in casting, counting, certifying of votes.

Indeed, Iran conducted the most notable information operation in 2020, emails to Democrats in Florida purporting to be Proud Boys providing disinformation about the election. So a good deal of the wailing about last minute warnings to social media companies in 2020 had to do, in part, with foreigners maligning far right militia members, not Hunter Biden. We haven’t heard anything about the FBI’s efforts to protect the reputation of the Proud Boys from Elmo’s propagandists, though.

Several more points about Chan’s responses on hack-and-leak campaigns are worth nothing. First, Chan said he kept raising the potential of a hack-and-leak campaign, “in case [the tech companies] saw something that we did not.” Russian denialists like Matt Taibbi — who espoused the Single Server fallacy until at least 2019 — don’t understand this, but when GRU engaged in a hack-and-leak campaign in 2016, tech companies were seeing the operation and attributing it to Russia in real time (though not Twitter, that I am aware of). Tech companies saw some parts of the attack before the FBI did. Yet in his deposition, Chan had to repeatedly explain to Schmitt’s lawyer that most of his interactions with social media companies involve hacks, not disinformation.

THE WITNESS: Yeah. The majority of my interaction with Facebook is not in the disinformation or malign-foreign-influence realm. It is actually for things related to my — to the Cyber Branch, which are specifically cyber investigations.

One time Chan even had to explain that “malign foreign influence” sometimes involves hacking (the Iranian campaign targeting the Proud Boys appears to have, for example). And Chan described several times that his team not only investigated part of the 2016 hack, but still had an active investigation into those actors. That’s important not only because he would have firsthand knowledge of the kinds of attribution social media companies (and Google and Microsoft) had in 2016, but for another reason: On October 19, 2020, DOJ indicted a bunch of GRU hackers, including one charged in the 2016 hack-and-leak campaign, for a variety of additional hacks, including the hack-and-leak targeting Emmanuel Macron. The Macron campaign, specifically, included both Google and Twitter components. So in the very same weeks when — right wingers complain — Elvis Chan was in close contact with Twitter about the ongoing election, he or his subordinates were likely working with prosecutors in Pittsburgh on an indictment implicating both Google and Twitter.

Emmanuel Macron is not mentioned in the Chan deposition.

Something else not mentioned in the Chan deposition — not once among the 36 mentions of Hunter Biden!!! — is Burisma Holdings. Mind you, it was not FBI that had attributed a 2019 hack of Burisma to the GRU, the very same actors under discussion, earlier in 2020, it was a Bay Area Infosec company, that same Infosec community that Yoel Roth had attributed some of his concerns about Hunter Biden to. We have no idea whether the FBI — whether a team under Chan’s direction, possibly! — similarly discovered that GRU had hacked Burisma in 2019. Chan was never asked. It’s one of the questions you’d have to ask, though, if you wanted to know whether the FBI had any knowledge that might lead them to believe that Hunter Biden — as distinct from “national-level political committees or election officials or presidential candidates” — had been targeted with a GRU info op during the 2020 presidential cycle.

So there are several things that you would want to ask Elvis Chan about whether he knew of things in 2020 that might have raised concerns that the NYPost article was part of a hack-and-leak campaign, including what hacks Russian and other foreign countries did do, his interactions with Bay Area companies Google and Twitter in those very same weeks in advance another indictment of the GRU, as well as his knowledge of the Bay Area attribution of a GRU campaign targeting Burisma. Eric Schmitt’s lawyer didn’t ask. Which is to say that nothing in this deposition addresses Shellenberger’s specific claims, which unsurprisingly didn’t stop him from claiming it did.

But at least we know he knows of the deposition, though from the looks of his screen cap, he may have mostly just searched it for isolated language that would confirm his priors.

Lee Fang, whose single entry in Twitter Files is the least dishonest, has also read it. He posted a screen cap reporting as “news” that the FBI weighs in on legislation that affects the FBI (which is tantamount to confessing that Fang knows next to nothing about how DC works; Fang did not retract his wildly erroneous article that was significantly debunked by Chan’s deposition).

In other words, two people associated with the Twitter Files have at least claimed familiarity with this deposition.

And yet, as recently as Friday, #MattyDickPics has continued to make grossly false claims about what FBI was doing.

Over and over again, Matty has complained that the FBI sent Twitter URLs for tweets, including tweets written by Americans.

Some of the moderation decisions he reviewed in his first Twitter File thread focus on Tweets about the means and method of voting. He calls Tweets advertising an incorrect day for election day “silly numbers.”

In short, Matt Taibbi has gone from being furious that Twitter removed non-consensually posted dick pics, some of which were the product of inauthentic campaign launched by Steve Bannon buddy Guo Wengui, to being outraged that the FBI shared Tweets advertising the wrong day for election day.

He has done so in spite of the fact that Chan’s deposition explains why the FBI was doing that: because sending false information that might lead someone to lose their opportunity to vote is a crime.

Q. But you received reports, I take it, from all over the country about disinformation about time, place and manner of voting, right?

A. That is — we received them from multiple field offices, and I can’t remember. But I remember many field offices, probably around ten to 12 field offices, relayed this type of information to us. And because DOJ had informed us that this type of information was criminal in nature, that it did not matter where the — who was the source of the information, but that it was criminal in nature and that it should be flagged to the social media companies. And then the respective field offices were expected to follow up with a legal process to get additional information on the origin and nature of these communications.

Q. So the Department of Justice advised you that it’s criminal and there’s no First Amendment right to post false information about time, place and manner of voting?

[snip]

A. That was my understanding.

Q. And did you, in fact, relay — let me ask you this. You say manner of voting. Were some of these reports related to voting by mail, which was a hot topic back then?

A. From my recollection, some of them did include voting by mail. Specifically what I can remember is erroneous information about when mail-in ballots could be postmarked because it is different in different jurisdictions. So I would be relying on the local field office to know what were the election laws in their territory and to only flag information for us. Actually, let me provide additional context. DOJ public integrity attorneys were at the FBI’s election command post and headquarters. So I believe that all of those were reviewed before they got sent to FBI San Francisco.

Q. So those reports would come to FBI San Francisco when you were the day commander at this command post, and then FBI San Francisco would relay them to the various social media platforms where the problematic posts had been made, right?

A. That is correct.

Q. And then the point there was to alert the social media platforms and see if they could be taken down, right?

A. It was to alert the social media companies to see if they violated their terms of service. [my emphasis]

I’ve got a request into the FBI but have not gotten a response about what crime this violated, but I believe the crime DOJ was relying on — Bill Barr’s DOJ! — was the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was passed in 1871 to prevent racists from conspiring to deprive former slaves from voting. This is the same crime that Douglass Mackey was charged with for allegedly conducting a more systematic campaign to misinform black voters about when to vote in 2016 (Mackey has pled not guilty and is vigorously contesting the constitutionality of the statute).

In other words, after complaining that Twitter chose to take down revenge porn targeting Joe Biden’s son, Taibbi is now complaining that DOJ enforced a law designed to protect Black people’s right to vote.

And his fellow Twitter File propagandists, at least two of whom claim familiarity with Elvis Chan’s deposition that explains this, are letting him continue to grossly misrepresent an effort to protect the right to vote.

https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Screen-Shot-2022-12-26-at-12.16.35-PM.png 698 602 emptywheel https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.png emptywheel2022-12-26 13:21:592022-12-26 14:16:17“Dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter:” Elvis Chan, Hacks, the Klan, and the Twitter Files

“Tentacles” with the “Potential to Spiral:” Geoffrey Berman, Bill Barr, and Hunter Biden’s Dick Pics

December 6, 2022/38 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

Given recent news relating to Rudy Giuliani and Hunter Biden[‘s dick pics], I want to belatedly look at what Geoffrey Berman’s book, Holding the Line, says about the Lev Parnas investigation.

Berman’s memoir is, as all autobiographies are, a complex narrative. There are many reasons why that’s true in this case. We all tell ourselves and others false stories about ourselves, often as not unconsciously. There are one or two points in Berman’s story where he makes claims belied by publicly-released documents; I assume those are inadvertent, but they serve as interesting signposts of the limits of his own firsthand knowledge of particular matters. Someone with access to classified or confidential information will be forced, as Berman seems to have been, to either nod to or entirely avoid big parts of the story, probably a really big factor in the matters I write about below. And finally, famous, powerful people shade the truth for posterity and to hide inconvenient truths. There’s a whole bunch of that in this book, a long form effort to pitch his association with the Trump Administration, not unfairly, as a worthwhile opportunity to do a lot of important work holding sex traffickers accountable (including, but not limited to, Jeffrey Epstein) and in key moments, protecting investigations from the interference of all three of Trump’s Attorneys General.

How Berman tells this story — how anyone tells their autobiography — can say as much as the facts relayed.

The most fascinating narrative construction in Berman’s autobiography comes in his discussion of Bill Barr’s confirmation.

It appears immediately after Berman’s recounting of DOJ’s effort to force SDNY to prosecute John Kerry for interfering in Trump’s plan to overturn the Iran Deal. (The SDNY prosecutor in charge of that effort, Andrew DeFilippis, played the most abusive role on John Durham’s team and resigned unexpectedly before the Igor Danchenko trial, but that’s obviously not part of the story of what transpired at SDNY.) Given the timeline laid out in Berman’s book, in which SDNY’s investigation into Kerry lasted for about a year starting on May 9, 2018, that effort must have continued until May 2019. In fact, Berman ties pressure to bring charges from DOJ on April 23, 2019 with Barr: “By the time we got pressured in April 2019, on the same day as one of the Trump tweets, Bill Barr was the attorney general.”

From there, Berman shifts back in time to talk about the turnover at Attorney General. After a short anecdote about Matt “Big Dick Toilet Salesman” Whitaker trying to glom onto Berman’s good press in NY, Berman introduces Barr’s confirmation by suggesting polarization was the cause of Barr’s close confirmation vote in the Senate.

In one marker of how much more polarized our politics have become, Barr’s first confirmation hearing in 1991 was described at the time as “placid.” He was approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee, then confirmed by the full Senate in a voice vote. When Barr’s second nomination went before the Senate early in 2019, he was confirmed, but in a roll-call vote—with the 54–45 count mostly breaking down along party lines.

This was, of course, not a mark of polarization. It was a mark of Barr’s unsuitability to be Attorney General, and it was specifically attributed to his audition for the job in the form of a memo, seemingly based entirely on claims Barr picked up watching Fox News, attacking Mueller’s investigation, as well as his role in shutting down the Iran-Contra inquiry. Spinning the close vote, in a book released in 2022, as partisanship allows Berman to suggest that the close vote wasn’t entirely justified. That, in turn, makes the insipid note Berman wrote welcoming Barr to the post (a note which presumably would be accessible under FOIA) less ridiculous.

I was elated that we were getting somebody to come in to take Whitaker’s spot, and I had high hopes. The new boss was experienced and highly intelligent. He had a reputation as an institutionalist, someone who would respect the traditions and norms of the department. Most of all, I believed Barr would be a steady hand in turbulent times.

I sent him a handwritten note, relating that in his first tour of duty he had signed my certificate when I started out as a young AUSA. I said we had never had an opportunity to meet, but I was looking forward to that soon.

I added that he was “just what the doctor ordered.” Like so many other establishment Republicans, I thought he would clean things up at DOJ and respect the rule of law.

Blech! Yick!

Then, immediately after describing this suck-up note, Berman describes the reason he, of all people, should have known better then to think Barr would “respect the rule of law”: because he knew, as someone who had worked on the Iran-Contra investigation, Barr’s past history interfering in an investigation of the President.

Berman tells a superb anecdote that I hope is not embellished about how, the only time Barr was in Berman’s office, the Attorney General saw a picture of Berman with Iran-Contra Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, on whose team Berman had worked very early in his career. As Berman describes (there’s an extended history of Iran-Contra in-between — go buy the book), Barr simply stared at the picture for a minute.

The one time that Barr met with me in my personal office at the Southern District involved an uncomfortable moment, and it was telling. It happened after he noticed a photo on the wall of me with Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel in the Iran-Contra affair. It was signed, “Thank you Geoff, for all your good work.”

[snip]

That day in my office, Barr fixed his gaze on the picture of Walsh and me. He looked at it for almost a minute straight without saying a word. Just stared with a sour look on his face. It was awkward as hell. [my emphasis]

Only after describing what Berman suggests was an unfairly close confirmation vote, his own sycophantic note to Barr after it, and this exchange of indeterminate date, does Berman turn to what he calls (justifiably) a philosophical divide between him and Barr over the role of presidential power. After describing Barr’s November 2019 Federalist Society speech in which he falsely claimed that Presidential powers had been encroached over the years, Berman reviewed Donald Ayer’s June 2019 article explaining “why Bill Barr is so dangerous.”

There were critics—among them some lawyers who worked in prior Republican administrations—who felt that Barr soft-pedaled his views during the confirmation process and later acted in extreme ways on Trump’s behalf. One of them was Donald Ayer, a highly regarded lawyer who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

In a 2019 essay in The Atlantic, Ayer wrote, “In securing his confirmation as attorney general, Barr successfully used his prior service as attorney general in the by-the-book, norm-following administration of George H. W. Bush to present himself as a mature adult dedicated to the rule of law who could be expected to hold the Trump administration to established legal rules. Having known Barr for four decades, including preceding him as deputy attorney general in the Bush administration, I knew him to be a fierce advocate of unchecked presidential power, so my own hopes were outweighed by skepticism that this would come true.”

Ayer’s piece appeared after the release of the Mueller report, which many believed Barr had both preempted and misrepresented. Ayer continued, “But the first few months of his current tenure, and in particular his handling of the Mueller report, suggest something very different—that he is using the office he holds to advance his extraordinary lifetime project of assigning unchecked power to the president.”

Much of this political back-and-forth was beyond the scope of my concerns in the Southern District. I was a working prosecutor, and my focus was to lead the dedicated and hardworking public servants under me who came into work every day and busted their asses. My political views—and whatever my thoughts might have been on Barr’s high-altitude insights into the Constitution—were beside the point.

But the fact was, Barr’s top-down, unitary theories of power extended to how he viewed himself, how he ran the Justice Department, and how he felt about the people who worked for me. If Barr believed that the president could properly instruct the DOJ to take actions involving specific individuals, including his friends and enemies, that was a concern of mine. [my emphasis]

The narrative structure of this goes: Barr’s close February 2019 confirmation vote, Berman’s insipid note, the undated meltdown when Barr saw a picture of Berman with Walsh, Barr’s November 2019 discussion of views already evident in his June 2018 audition memo, and finally Ayer’s June 2019 description of the danger of Bill Barr, which had most recently been exhibited by his March 2019 response to the Mueller report. In sum, it provides a permissibly partisan frame in which to criticize Barr. But that jumbles the real timeline. Such a narrative structure allows Berman to introduce Barr’s authoritarian views in such a way as to absolve a former member of Lawrence Walsh’s team for writing a FOIAble letter claiming Barr was “just what the doctor ordered” around February 2019. It’s not that the Democrats were right to vote against Barr, the narrative allows Berman to suggest, it’s just that Ayer hadn’t written his condemnation of Barr yet.

And for some reason, Berman puts that exchange in his office, of indeterminate date, in the middle of it all. The single time, Berman says, that Barr visited Berman’s office.

It’s awfully curious that Berman doesn’t date that meeting, because Berman’s story of the Parnas and Fruman prosecution doesn’t describe the visit to SDNY that Barr was reported to have made, in real time, the day that Rudy’s flunkies were indicted — a visit to New York that also included a meeting with Rupert Murdoch. Berman actually tells the story of that day twice, first in conjunction with a contentious fight with Main Justice over whether SDNY must join in the effort to assume Trump’s defense in Cy Vance’s investigation, then in his telling of the Parnas and Fruman indictment. Both were going on at the same time. But in neither telling does Berman describe that the Attorney General showed up in New York, purportedly to meet with people like him and people who worked for him, at a time when Berman was in at least one really contentious fight with the Attorney General’s office.

Maybe Barr went to New York to visit SDNY and got lost at Murdoch’s place and so never showed up??

The Parnas and Fruman story, as told here, begins on October 8, when Berman got pulled out of Yom Kippur service to be told that Parnas and Fruman had just booked one way tickets to Europe.

What he told me was that Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman had just bought airline tickets for travel the next day to Frankfurt, Germany—one-way tickets—and we had to decide whether to arrest them before they boarded the plane.

As Berman described it no one else on the prosecution team supported indicting Rudy’s flunkies before they boarded a plane.

It was quickly apparent to me that I was in a minority of one. I would describe one call as almost like an intervention. I answered and six people were on the line: Audrey Strauss, the chief of the criminal division, Laura Birger, Chief Counsel Craig Stewart, Ilan Graff, Russ Capone, and Ted Diskant. Every one of them said we should let them travel.

Berman got the NY FBI Assistant Director, William Sweeney, to agree with him, and then (having apparently thus won the argument with the line prosecutors) the team worked overnight to complete the indictment, finishing (if I have my timeline correct) less than three hours before the announcement of Barr’s visit to NY.

Donaleski and Roos came into the office at about 11:00 p.m., and I joined them with coffee I had made at my apartment. (The local coffee shops were closed.) They drafted the indictment through the night, with review and revision by others either in the office or from home. Because the charges included campaign finance violations, we needed sign-off from the career attorneys at Main Justice’s Public Integrity Section. Diskant was on the phone with them at 4:00 a.m. and got the approval.

At 7:00 a.m., everyone came into the office for a final edit. At 9:00 a.m., the draft was finished, and [Rachel] Donaleski and [Nicholas] Roos went before the grand jury. By 2:00 p.m., they returned an indictment. Time to spare!

In a later post I’ll come back to that 4AM approval from Public Integrity. But note that Berman doesn’t describe getting approval from anyone else at Main Justice, even though after the indictment DOJ confirmed that Barr had been briefed from shortly after his confirmation. Just career attorneys at Public Integrity at 4AM.

Having told the heroic story of how prosecutors pulled together a last minute indictment, Berman then goes back and explains where the investigation came from. It came not from a referral from Federal Election Commission (which Republicans had made entirely dysfunctional at the time), but because SDNY’s Public Integrity section read the complaint that was submitted to the FEC.

Our public corruption unit monitors complaints filed with the FEC for possible investigation. Nick Roos read the complaint and persuaded Capone and Diskant to open the investigation. Roos and Donaleski began to put the pieces together. We confirmed that Global Energy was nothing but a shell with no business and no capital investment. Lev and Igor ran foreign money through it for the purpose of contributing to political candidates and committees in the United States.

The description of the part of the indictment relating to the firing of Marie Yovanovitch — the part of the indictment that was shelved in 2020 and which just died without charges — covers several pages. The first paragraph starts with a sentence — about the Russian donor behind some of the influence peddling — that should be in the prior paragraph. Then it lumps in the stuff implicating Rudy as a mere addition, almost an afterthought (probably necessitated, in part, by DOJ guidelines about uncharged persons).

[Andrey] Muraviev’s money was also used to donate to statewide races in Nevada. In addition, Lev and Igor contributed money, also through straw donors, to Pete Sessions, who at the time was a congressman from Texas and chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee. The outreach to Sessions was connected to their effort to get Marie Yovanovitch fired from her post as US ambassador to Ukraine. [my emphasis]

This is how it appears in the indictment:

In addition to the contributions made and falsely reported in the name of GEP, LEV PARNAS and IGOR FRUMAN, the defendants, caused illegal contributions to be made in PARNAS’s name that, in fact, were funded by FRUMAN, in order to evade federal contribution limits. Much as with the contributions described above, these contributions were made for the purpose of gaining influence with politicians so as to advance their own personal financial interests and the political interests of Ukrainian government officials, including at least one Ukrainian government official with whom they were working. For example, in or about May and June 2018, PARNAS and FRUMAN committed to raise $20,000 or more for a then-sitting U.S. Congressman (“Congressman-1”), who had also been the beneficiary of approximately $3 million in independent expenditures by Committee-1 during the 2018 election cycle. PARNAS and FRUMAN had met Congressman-1 at an event sponsored by an independent expenditure committee to which FRUMAN had recently made a substantial contribution. During the 2018 election cycle, Congressman-1 had been the beneficiary of approximately $3 million in independent expenditures by Committee-1. At and around the same time PARNAS and FREEMAN committed to raising those funds for Congressman-1, PARNAS met with Congressman-1 and sought Congressman-1’s assistance in causing the U.S. Government to remove or recall the then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. [my emphasis, footnote omitted]

After a few paragraphs about Sessions’ excuses for deciding out of the blue that Yovanovitch should be fired, Berman describes that SDNY was still “exploring” whether this meeting might one day become a FARA charge.

The indictment made reference to this meeting with Sessions. It included an allegation that Lev, at the request of a Ukrainian official, had sought the removal of the US ambassador to Ukraine and had met with a congressman (Sessions) to solicit his support for the removal. We were still exploring whether these allegations might later form the basis of a FARA charge against Lev and others who, through lobbying or media appearances, sought the removal of Yovanovitch at the request of a foreign official without registering as a foreign agent.

As Berman describes it, when they included this Pete Sessions donation in the indictment (a footnote describes that the contribution was made under Fruman’s name, but misspelled), they were “exploring” the possibility that it might tie to illegal foreign influence peddling in part by “others who … sought the removal of Yovanovitch at the request of a foreign official without registering as a foreign agent.” Without naming Rudy yet, this passage suggests that they were only beginning to consider whether Rudy had committed a FARA violation when they prepared an indictment overnight on October 9 — with approval only from Public Integrity, not the FARA people in National Security Division who would one day get involved in the investigation — to arrest Rudy’s grifters before they flew to Europe.

Remember: by November 4, less than a month later, SDNY got warrants targeting Rudy, investigating FARA, 18 USC 951, and conspiracy.

I wonder whether some of the prosecutors opposed arresting Parnas and Fruman because they wanted to see what would happen at the meeting with Dmitry Firtash and what other Ukrainian government officials were involved besides Yuri Lutsenko.

Some paragraphs later, after describing Rudy’s role in the Fraud Guarantee stuff (which was superseded later, in 2020, when the Yovanovitch firing was taken out), Berman acknowledges that Rudy had also been trying to get Yovanovitch fired, effectively confirming that Rudy was one of the “others who” had tried to get Yovanovitch fired.

Yovanovitch’s removal was a major goal of Giuliani’s—and of other Trump allies—who believed that she was an obstacle to their efforts to unearth damaging information about the then presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The ambassador was considered an anticorruption advocate, and some Ukrainian officials—including those working with Lev and Igor—wanted her moved aside.

And then, a few paragraphs after that, Berman acknowledges that Parnas and Fruman were some of the agents mentioned in the articles of impeachment alleged to be soliciting Ukrainian influence to help him get reelected, even while asserting “we had no role to play” in impeachment.

It was, of course, impossible for me or anyone else to be unaware of how politically charged all of this was. The nation was in the third year of Donald Trump’s combustible presidency, and the 2020 election cycle was underway. Two months after the indictment of Lev and Igor, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump.

The first of the two articles of impeachment alleged that the president “solicited the interference of a foreign government” to take actions that would “benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States Presidential election to his advantage.” The foreign government was Ukraine, and the reference to Trump’s being assisted by “his agents within and outside the United States Government” obviously would have to include Lev and Igor.

Impeachment is a political process. We had no role to play in it.

This passage is almost the entirety of any discussion in the entire book of the Ukraine impeachment. Berman makes no mention of the months of focus leading up to impeachment.

Of particular note, he makes no mention of the release of the Perfect Transcript in late September, less than two weeks before SDNY suddenly charged Parnas and Fruman. He doesn’t describe whether the release of the transcript alerted SDNY (if they didn’t already know) how some of the matters under investigation by SDNY — Parnas’ ask of Pete Sessions to help oust Yovanovitch — were centrally connected to the impeachment, with Trump raising them explicitly with Ukraine’s president.

I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.

[snip]

Well, she’s going to go through some things. I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I’m sure you will figure it out. I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly and he was a very fair prosecutor so good luck with everything. [my emphasis]

Berman also makes no mention of the references to Barr that Trump made while trying to coerce Volodymyr Zelenskyy, including those bolded above. Each reference to Barr here appears in close proximity to Trump’s attacks on Yovanovitch, that part of the Parnas indictment that SDNY was “exploring” whether it constituted a FARA violation.

Berman makes no mention of any of that. “We had no role to play” in impeachment.

But all of that had to have been central considerations to the prosecution, not least on October 8 when Berman interrupted his Yom Kippur worship to engage in a debate about whether they should pull together an indictment to charge Parnas and Fruman before they left the country, and not just to pull together an indictment, but to include the traces of a Yovanovitch charge which (Berman admits here) they were “still exploring whether these allegations might later form the basis of a FARA charge against Lev and others.”

As he describes it, they just called some folks in Public Integrity at 4AM to get approval and included the Yovanovitch charge which could implicate the investigation that would become Trump’s first impeachment.

Way before this narrative of the case in the book, and then briefly afterwards, Berman describes how Barr’s Chief of Staff inquired before the arrest announcement (what would have been October 10) about what SDNY was going to do, then bitched out Berman after the fact because it got a whole lot of press attention.

A few hours before we were to announce the charges, Rabbitt asked me, “What are you planning to do for publicity for Lev and Igor?” I said, “I’m going to have a press statement,” and he said, “Okay. Fine.”

Later that day, we made our statement. It was in front of cameras, and it got huge coverage. When I got back to my desk, Rabbitt called me up, livid. “I thought you said it was going to be a press statement?” he barked.

I replied, “I didn’t take questions. It was a press statement. If it were a press conference, we would have had questions.” I thought that was perfectly legit, but Rabbitt wasn’t satisfied. The exchange with him was a little uncomfortable, but the Lev and Igor indictments came at a fortuitous time. (It just happened that way; we didn’t intend it and couldn’t have anticipated the international travel that prompted their arrests.) If Main Justice took action against me in any way, or even just got in a public flap, the media would have assumed it was retribution after we indicted these two individuals who moved in Republican circles. It would have played as blowback from the arrests.

After we got press attention on a big matter and our visibility was high, I always felt sort of bulletproof, at least temporarily. It gave me a couple more months of grace.

[Fifteen page break, including the description of the Parnas and Fruman indictment laid out above]

Except for the concern that we not have a press conference to announce the indictments, Main Justice and Barr did not interfere in the prosecution of Lev and Igor.

The longer description of the exchanges with Brian Rabbitt comes fifteen pages before the reference back to it. In context, the reference to being “bulletproof” seems to pertain to the conflict with Barr’s people over the Vance intervention. By the time we get through the description of the Parnas charges (which Berman put in an entirely different chapter), a reader might well have forgotten that Berman recognized a high profile press conference of the sort that Barr’s Chief of Staff complained about would make it harder to fire him.

But it all makes more sense when you consider the decision to indict Rudy’s grifters overnight with approval only from career officials who happened to be working at 4AM in Public Integrity. It all makes more sense when you think about the reported visit Barr made to SDNY that Berman never mentions (which, admittedly, may never have happened).

Berman’s brief reference back to that Rabbitt complaint appears immediately after he writes, “Impeachment is a political process. We had no role to play in it,” but in a new section. It kicks off a four page section, covering events starting in January 2020 and lasting (based on documents released under FOIA) well past March, describing efforts Barr made to stymie any further investigation from SDNY. Barr wasn’t so much trying to protect Rudy, Berman describes: he thought Barr viewed the President’s personal lawyer as a potential rival. Rather, the Attorney General was trying to prevent “tentacles” from reaching others.

Main Justice and Barr did not interfere in the prosecution of Lev and Igor.

[snip]

To the extent all of this tarnished Rudy, I think Barr was fine with it. But the case had tentacles. It raised other questions and suggested new areas of inquiry. It potentially led to other subjects. And Barr certainly did involve himself in those potentialities.

[snip]

He has no way of knowing where it might go—and really, nobody does—but it looks to him as if it has the potential to spiral. [my emphasis]

In the four pages following this introduction, Berman describes how Barr effectively prevented SDNY from going any further with their investigation, first by assigning the next steps of the Rudy investigation to EDNY (to Richard Donoghue, with whom Barr had tried to replace Berman to kill the Michael Cohen investigation, but who may have gone on to save the Republic on January 3, 2021). That reportedly had the effect of prohibiting SDNY from investigating Rudy’s meetings with Andrii Derkach, who was dangling dirt that closely resembled what would come to be known as the “Hunter Biden” “laptop.” Berman describes what likely is the Derkach investigation this way:

In addition, Donoghue, as part of his new role, was given a sensitive Ukraine investigation that I thought should have gone to us.

Then Berman describes Barr assigning the intake of Rudy’s dirt on Hunter Biden (though he doesn’t describe it as such) to Scott Brady in Pittsburgh.

I didn’t know Brady well, but I considered him a solid guy.

This post describes how that all worked, and pointed to some communications about it all that the Attorney General’s office seemed to have no longer available when they were FOIAed.

The entire section is worth reading — buy the book — for the way it lays out aspects of Barr’s corrupt actions that haven’t gotten as much focus as his intervention in the Roger Stone and Mike Flynn prosecutions.

The one piece of news Berman discloses is that the FBI was withholding the 302s from the intake of Rudy’s Russian disinformation from NY’s Assistant Director, William Sweeney.

There were FBI reports of those meetings, called 302s, which we wanted to review. So did Sweeney. Sweeney’s team asked the agents in Pittsburgh for a copy and was refused. Sweeney called me up, livid.

“Geoff, in all my years with the FBI I have never been refused a 302,” he said. “This is a total violation of protocol.”

This detail is worth considering given the still ongoing GOP witch hunt targeting recently retied FBI Senior Analyst Timothy Thibault because of the compartmented way this information was all treated.

[I]t has been alleged that in September 2020, investigators from the same FBI HQ team were in communication with FBI agents responsible for the Hunter Biden information targeted by [Brian] Auten’s assessment. The FBI HQ team’s investigators placed their findings with respect to whether reporting was disinformation in a restricted access sub-file reviewable only by the particular agents responsible for uncovering the specific information. This is problematic because it does not allow for proper oversight and opens the door to improper influence.

Third, in October 2020, an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed at the direction of ASAC Thibault. My office has been made aware that FBI agents responsible for this information were interviewed by the FBI HQ team in furtherance of Auten’s assessment. It’s been alleged that the FBI HQ team suggested to the FBI agents that the information was at risk of disinformation; however, according to allegations, all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants. In addition, ASAC Thibault allegedly ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason as required by FBI guidelines. Despite the matter being closed in such a way that the investigative avenue might be opened later, it’s alleged that FBI officials, including ASAC Thibault, subsequently attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future.

Chuck Grassley is focusing on later compartmentalization of this investigation, when the origin of that compartmentalization stemmed from Barr’s efforts to limit the tentacles of the SDNY investigation. Instead of reviewing what Barr did, he is hounding one of the last remaining people at FBI who had investigated Trump’s Russian ties, with Chris Wray doing nothing to support the Bureau.

All the more so given that, both the end of this section — which is followed by a section in which Berman describes how the Parnas case ended up with one 2021 jury verdict and one 2022 guilty plea — and at the end of the entire chapter, Berman emphasizes that Barr’s tampering in the Rudy case was exceptional, even amidst all the other tampering he engaged in (to include interference in the Michael Cohen, John Kerry, Halkbank, and Cy Vance cases).

The episode was one of the crazier things I encountered over the whole course of my tenure, which is really saying something.

[snip]

The “intake process in the field” nonsense was clearly not driven by his sense that all that Ukraine material would be too much for the Southern District to handle. The only burden we needed lifted from us was the attorney general’s improper meddling.

And, when Berman describes what must include this investigation among the list of reasons why Barr fired him in June 2020, he includes it under an oblique reference to “prosecutions and ongoing investigations of those in his inner circle.”

I never speculated about the specific reasons Barr wanted me out. As an attorney, I avoid allegations that I do not yet have the facts to support. But it was no secret to me that much of what we did at the Southern District—and did not do—displeased Trump. And if it displeased the president, it would have displeased Barr. That’s how it worked.

From the Greg Craig case through the non-prosecution of John Kerry and on up to the prosecutions and ongoing investigations of those in his inner circle, it was clear to Trump that he could not control SDNY. We were not loyal to him; our fealty was to the mission.

At the time I was fired in mid-June 2020, the presidential election was less than five months away. I’m sure that Barr was tired of the Southern District’s independence. But it is also fair to assume there was a political component in his move to oust me.

Barr did the president’s bidding, no matter how he may try to deny that now. He no doubt believed that by removing me he could eliminate a threat to Trump’s reelection. [my emphasis]

I think there’s a good deal of evidence that Barr was not just trying to remove any threat to Trump’s reelection. He was trying to ensure that any investigations into Trump and his flunkies could not continue if and when Trump lost. In this period Barr not only closed, but disclosed the closure, of investigations into Paul Manafort’s slush funds, a suspected $10 million donation funneled through an Egyptian bank that had kept Trump afloat in September 2016, and probably parts of an investigation into Erik Prince. He replaced Donoghue in EDNY at a time when Tom Barrack was close to being charged (in the since failed prosecution). I’ve raised questions about how it became possible to disclose, literally the day before the 2020 election, the once ongoing investigation into whether Roger Stone conspired with Russia on a hack-and-leak campaign — one that may have involved “solid guy” Scott Brady. During this same period, another hand-picked US Attorney was literally presenting altered documents in the Mike Flynn docket in an attempt to blow up that prosecution (which had the side of effect of making any obstruction charges against Trump post-Presidency untenable); by September, one of those altered documents would serve as a prop in an attack Trump launched on Biden in the first debate.

Berman describes a lot of Barr’s related interventions that happened earlier — what he calls a “hostile takeover” of the DC US Attorney’s Office. But he doesn’t describe the rest of Barr’s tampering. And that tampering, which had more permanent effect, would have extended to SDNY’s investigation had Berman not dug in when Barr first tried to fire him.

Still, I find it interesting that Berman, the guy who saw how Barr prevented his office from receiving copies of the garbage that Rudy Giuliani brought home from Ukraine, describes it instead in terms of removing all threats to Trump’s reelection. As noted above, the part of the investigation that Barr assigned to EDNY rather than SDNY reportedly pertains at least in part to suspected Russian agent Andrii Derkach’s efforts to help Rudy obtain dirt on Hunter Biden, dirt that looks remarkably like the “Hunter Biden” “laptop,” dirt which Rudy brought to “solid guy” Scott Brady rather than SDNY. If Berman believes that an SDNY investigation into those matters, consolidated into one investigation, would have threatened Trump’s reelection chances, it suggests any scrutiny on Rudy’s effort to get dirt on Hunter Biden — the kind of dirt he eventually released!! — would have sunk Trump.

Instead, the circumscribed investigation that Berman managed to protect ended without charges.

As James Comer and Kevin McCarthy prioritize their investigation into Hunter Biden’s dick pics, Democrats might do well to investigate the full effect of Barr’s efforts to dismantle the investigation into Rudy’s meetings with Russian agents to obtain dirt that Trump could use in his reelection bid. Some of the same witnesses, including computer repairman Mac Issac, Rudy lawyer Robert Costello, and Rudy himself would be pertinent to both investigations.

All that’s the story included in the book, proper.

But Berman included an epilogue, perhaps a narrative feature dictated by publishing schedule or a desire to change the emphasis. In it, he describes an exchange that took place around March 9, 2020, during a period when “solid guy” Scott Brady was actively processing dirt that Rudy had obtained from suspected Russian agent Andrii Derkach. Berman describes that between the time Barr spun out the investigation into Rudy and the time when Barr fired Berman in hopes of protecting Trump’s reelection, he answered a question about the Parnas investigation in such a way that implied Barr had interfered in the Parnas investigation for political reasons.

In March 2020, I was asked if Bill Barr had interfered in our Lev and Igor prosecution. The question came to me during a press conference on an unrelated case, having to do with illicit doping of Thoroughbred horses.

“The Southern District of New York has a long history of integrity and pursuing cases and declining to pursue cases based only on the facts and the law and the equities, without regard to partisan political concerns,” I replied. “My primary commitment is and has been to maintain those core values and that’s how our office is operating.”

This was my only public statement as US attorney about the office’s political independence, and it was mild. But I did not answer that Barr never interfered for partisan reasons, because that would not have been true. That might have earned me another demerit. I was fired a few months later.

Though as Berman described it in the book, it wasn’t the Parnas investigation that Barr was interested in. It wasn’t even Rudy. It was the “tentacles” that had the “potential to spiral.”

To be clear, by March 2020, according to the book, Barr had interfered politically in several other ways — John Kerry, Greg Craig, Michael Cohen, Turkey, and others. This is not a comment limited to Rudy’s grifters.

But Berman chose to cap his book — which, as mentioned, focuses significantly on Berman’s success on unrelated cases, including things like the Epstein case — with something that occurred in March 2020, chronologically while Barr’s efforts to prevent the Rudy investigation from spiraling out of control were ongoing. That changes the lesson of Berman’s book, then, to a focus on Barr’s political interference.

Just months ago, the US Attorney for SDNY published a book that laid out in detail how Trump’s corrupt Attorney General intervened to prevent the tentacles of a Hunter Biden adjacent investigation from spiraling out of his own control. And yet that has all been lost amid the din of outrage that Twitter took down Hunter Biden’s non-consensual dick pics.

Full transparency: On Twitter (they’re not coming up on a search of the Elmo-degraded site), I’m sure I also made comments about career people at DOJ preferring Barr to BDTS. I did so even while writing posts — one, two, three, four — that noted his role in Iran-Contra and the specious claims he had already made about the Mueller investigation.

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Matty Taibbi’s Dick Pics

December 3, 2022/104 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

Apparently, Elon Musk decided that the best person to disclose what he promised would show, “what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter” was Matt Taibbi, someone who — by his own admission (an admission on which he has apparently flip-flopped) — apologized for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because he was, “so fixated on Western misbehavior that I didn’t bother to take [the] possibility [of Russian invasion] seriously enough.”

Reverse chauvinism, Taibbi called it.

Taibbi’s own apologies for Russia didn’t just start with the Russian imperialism and war crimes, however.

He was long a critic of what he called “RussiaGate” based on the tried and true tactic of treating the Steele dossier and Alfa Bank allegations — and not the legal verdicts that confirmed Trump’s National Security Advisor, campaign manager, Coffee Boy, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker all lied to hide the true nature of their Russian ties — as the primary substance of the case. Taibbi scolded others about shoddy reporting even while he adhered to the Single Server fallacy that not only assumed all the hacked material came from just one server, but ignored the hack of Amazon Web Services content and abundant other evidence attributing the hacks to Russia from other cloud companies. Then there was the time Taibbi tried to smack down on claims that Maria Butina used sex to entice targets, in which he made error after error, all without allowing his false claims to be disrupted by consulting the actual primary sources.

That’s the guy Elmo decided would be a credible voice to tell us what happened with the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” story.

That matters because, as Andy Stepanian explained last night, Twitter had advance warning of a Russian information operation targeting Hunter Biden during the summer of 2020, months before the release of the “Hunter Biden” “laptop.”

Matt Taibbi is either woefully misinformed about this or cynically lying. How do I know? Because I attended two meetings with Twitter representatives in July and August 2020 wherein the Hunter Biden story was discussed within the larger framework of election integrity.

Matt Taibbi’s analysis has myriad problems but the biggest problem is his failure to underscore what initially prompted twitter staff to designate the content in the Post story as “stolen” or “hacked” material. This came from conversations with law enforcement in summer of 2020.

During the election integrity meetings I was present for little was known about how the material would eventually be published. I recall one spokesperson suggesting the Hunter Biden content may publish via “something like wordpress” or “wikileaks-styled” website.

This is the contact with FBI that Twitter and Facebook had about Hunter Biden in 2020, not any immediate response to the Post story. It’s almost certainly what Mark Zuckerberg was referring to in a Joe Rogan interview that has been misrepresented in the aftermath.

Taibbi, the self-described reverse chauvinist, describes any Hunter Biden-specific warnings as general — mentioning neither Hunter Biden nor Russia — and omits the timing.

Perhaps Elmo didn’t give Taibbi this important earlier context. Perhaps it’s Elmo’s fault that his hand-picked Russian apologist left out the specific details of the warning — that they included Hunter Biden and preceded the NYPost story by months — that are necessary context to the stupid decisions Twitter made. But the silence about those details is anything but “what really happened.”

And note Taibbi’s conclusion: There was no government involvement in the laptop story.

Assuming Taibbi were a credible reporter, that should end it. Game over.

Stupid moderation decisions, but not stupid moderation decisions done as a result of pressure from the government.

Taibbi has debunked the conspiracy theory the frothy right has been chasing for months.

Curiously, Taibbi concludes there was no government interference in the story even while he showed proof of a government surrogate pressuring Twitter about its (stupid) moderation decisions on the laptop story.

Taibbi was so deep in his conspiracy theories he didn’t realize that that — a surrogate of the sitting President demanding that Twitter give his campaign advance notice of their content moderation decisions — is closer to a First Amendment violation than suppressing the Post story, no matter how stupid Twitter’s decision was. To be clear: it’s not a First Amendment violation, but kudos to Taibbi for getting closer than all the frothy Republicans have to finding proof of inappropriate pressure.

It came from Trump.

In fact, Taibbi admits that Twitter was honoring requests from the White House, as well as the private entity of the Joe Biden campaign, for takedowns using the content moderation tools.

Taibbi claims that he’s concerned about First Amendment implications of the government pressuring Twitter about content. And then … he ignores the evidence he presents about (what is probably shorthand for) the Trump White House pressuring Twitter about content. Let’s see those specifics, Matty!

Or rather he excuses it, using the old charade of campaign donations which show what a small portion of Twitter employees spend.

And Taibbi’s other claims of bias are just as problematic. In one Tweet, Tweet 30, Taibbi claims that Ro Khanna was the only Democratic official he could find that expressed concern about the Post takedown.

Three Tweets later, Tweet 33, Taibbi describes an emailed report from a research firm polling the response of congressional offices, including Democrat Judy Chu’s, describing that both Democrats, plural, and Republicans “were angry,” which sure seems like Taibbi missed at least one Democrat besides Khanna expressing concern.

Ro Khanna, incidentally, was the leading recipient of donations from Twitter employees in 2022, almost 10% of the total, so to the extent Twitter employees disproportionately donate to Democrats, they’re funding Taibbi’s chosen voice of the First Amendment problems with Twitter’s decision.

The most telling part of Taibbi’s screed, however, is his complaint that when private entity “the Biden team” asked for some take-downs, Twitter obliged.

What Taibbi is complaining about is the way in which Twitter, the entity, always proved most responsive to high level requests.

He seems to think that damns pre-Elmo Twitter, when if anything, Elmo’s moderation decisions have far more dramatically reflected the whims of those with personal access, starting with Andy Ngo, who has personally gotten a bunch of anti-fascists banned from Twitter. If you have a problem with arbitrary, personalized moderation decisions, Elmo is the last guy you should be fronting for.

But there’s an even bigger problem with Taibbi’s smoking gun, the primary evidence he presents that the Biden crowd got special treatment of any kind.

As numerous people have laid out — most notably Free Beacon reporter Andrew Kerr — a number of these takedown requests were of dick pics and other personal porn, a celebrity kind of revenge porn. Others were of Hunter Biden smoking crack — at least a violation of law. But none so far identified pertain to allegations of influence peddling.

Tabbi’s smoking gun amounts to takedown requests of stolen dick pics, precisely the kind of thing that content moderation should be responsive to.

“Handled,” Elmo responded with glee about proof that his predecessors had seen fit to remove leaked porn and dick pics.

That Matty Taibbi, of all people!, would shift subjects, after debunking the conspiracy theory of government pressure that started all this, to dick pics is fairly stunning. That’s because Taibbi is famously thin-skinned when people on Twitter talk about his own — unlike the Hunter Biden pictures, voluntarily exposed — dick exploits from when he lived in Russia. Every time someone on Twitter discusses what a misogynist slime Taibbi was in his Moscow days, he, suspected sock-puppets, and a few persistent Taibbi defenders show up to complain that people on Twitter are talking about what Taibbi did with his dick while under the influence overseas (or to claim it was all, even the misogynistic language, make-believe).

Taibbi was always a poor choice for an exposé based on primary sources.

But Taibbi is a particularly bad surrogate for Elmo to pick to complain about the takedowns of stolen dick pics.

Yet that, in episode one of what Elmo and Taibbi promise will be a series, is the best they’ve got.

“Handled.”

Update: Matty Dick Pics wouldn’t tell his subscribers what conditions he had to agree to to peddle Elmo’s complaints about dick pics.

What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.

Update: Tim Miller shreds the whole fiasco.

While normal humans who denied Republicans their red wave were enjoying an epic sports weekend, an insular community of MAGA activists and online contrarians led by the world’s richest man (for now) were getting riled up about a cache of leaked emails revealing that the former actor James Woods and Chinese troll accounts were not allowed to post ill-gotten photos of Hunter Biden’s hog on a private company’s microblogging platform 25 months ago.

Now if you are one of the normals—someone who would never think about posting another person’s penis on your social media account; has no desire to see politicians’ kids’ penises when scrolling social media; doesn’t understand why there are other people out there who care one way or another about the moderation policies surrounding stolen penis photos; or can’t even figure out what it is that I’m talking about—then this might seem like a gratuitous matter for an article. Sadly, it is not.

Because among Republican members of Congress, leading conservative media commentators, contrarian substackers, conservative tech bros, and friends of Donald Trump, the ability to post Hunter Biden’s cock shots on Twitter is the number-one issue in America this weekend. They believe that if they are not allowed to post porno, our constitutional republic may be in jeopardy.

I truly, truly wish I were joking.

[snip]

Right-wing commentator Buck Sexton (real name), said this was a “bright red line violation” and that Biden should be IMPEACHED for it. Rep. James Comer (R-TN) was on Fox promising that everyone at Twitter involved with this would be brought before the House Oversight committee. Rep. Billy Long retweeted several MAGA influencers praising Elon for, among other things, “exposing corruption at the highest levels of society” (Projection Alert). Meanwhile Kari Lake hype man Pizzagate Jack Posobiec declared this the “biggest story in modern presidential election history,” claimed that “we can never go back to the country we were before this moment,” and donned this “a digital insurrection.”

In reality, all they really had was a digital erection.

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What that Report Purportedly Authenticating the “Hunter Biden” “Laptop” Really Said

November 18, 2022/52 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2022 Mid-Term Election /by emptywheel

I’ve reported on the WaPo story on the security review of the disk drive commonly referred to as the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” a bunch of times.

But in advance of ripping apart this James Comer fan-fiction about Hunter Biden and before the Twitter thread I did disappears into the Elmo dumpster fire, I wanted to repeat it here. The WaPo asked security experts Matt Green (who worked with his Johns Hopkins students) and Jake Williams to review the drive to see what they could authenticate.

They discovered that people had kept adding content to the “laptop,” making it impossible to say what was on the “laptop” when it was provided to the blind computer repairman.

In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.

Maxey had alerted The Washington Post to this issue in advance, saying that others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files. But the lack of what experts call a “clean chain of custody” undermined Green’s and Williams’s ability to determine the authenticity of most of the drive’s contents.

“The drive is a mess,” Green said.

He compared the portable drive he received from The Post to a crime scene in which detectives arrive to find Big Mac wrappers carelessly left behind by police officers who were there before them, contaminating the evidence.

That assessment was echoed by Williams.

“From a forensics standpoint, it’s a disaster,” Williams said.

Still more important: some of the forensic data that would be necessary to authenticate the drive itself had been deleted.

Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.

“No evidence of tampering was discovered, but as noted throughout, several key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available,” Williams’ reports concluded.

Williams was able to authenticate fewer than 10% of the files on the drive, though that included some emails involving CEFC China Energy.

The portable drive provided to The Post contains 286,000 individual user files, including documents, photos, videos and chat logs. Of those, Green and Williams concluded that nearly 22,000 emails among those files carried cryptographic signatures that could be verified using technology that would be difficult for even the most sophisticated hackers to fake.

[snip]

In particular, there are verified emails illuminating a deal Hunter Biden developed with a fast-growing Chinese energy conglomerate, CEFC China Energy, for which he was paid nearly $5 million, and other business relationships. Those business dealings are the subject of a separate Washington Post story published at the same time as this one on the forensic examinations of the drive.

The “Big Guy” email could not be authenticated.

Some other emails on the drive that have been the foundation for previous news reports could not be verified because the messages lacked verifiable cryptographic signatures. One such email was widely described as referring to Joe Biden as “the big guy” and suggesting the elder Biden would receive a cut of a business deal.

There were authenticated emails from Burisma, but if Burisma was hacked (as a security company, Area 1 Security, said it was before the laptop was disclosed), hackers could have faked cryptographic signatures, including on those from Burisma advisor Vadym Pozharskyi that have been the focus of a lot of attention.

The drive also includes some verified emails from Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company for which he was a board member. President Donald Trump’s efforts to tie Joe Biden to the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma led to Trump’s first impeachment trial, which ended in acquittal in February 2020.

The Post’s review of these emails found that most were routine communications that provided little new insight into Hunter Biden’s work for the company.

[snip]

Both Green and Williams said the Burisma emails they verified cryptographically were likely to be authentic, but they cautioned that if the company was hacked, it would be possible to fake cryptographic signatures — something much less likely to happen with Google.

Note, as I understand the timing, these emails could have been altered only if the laptop reaccessed the Burisma server after the hack.

In any case, the “laptop” is a completely unreliable shitshow precisely because Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon were in such a rush to make it a political scandal.

And yet the new Republican majority in Congress is sure it is “real.”

James Comer has kicked off his tenure as Oversight Chair by proclaiming that the forensic mess left behind by frothy conspiracy-mongers is, instead, “REAL.”

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Welcome to the Jim Jordan and James Comer Look the Other Way Committees, Brought to You By Access Journalism

November 17, 2022/56 Comments/in 2020 Presidential Election, 2022 Mid-Term Election, emptywheel, Foreign Influence, Press and Media /by emptywheel

In an article published 112 days before the November election, Politico included this sentence about all the investigations Republicans planned to conduct if they won the House.

Republicans on the [Oversight] committee plan to hold high-profile probes into Hunter Biden’s dealings with overseas clients, but they also want to hone in on eliminating wasteful government spending in an effort to align the panel with the GOP’s broader agenda.

Politico’s Jordain Carney did not note the irony of planning, almost four months before the election, an investigation into foreign efforts to gain influence by paying the then Vice President’s son years ago, next to a claim to want to eliminate wasteful spending. He just described it as if yet another investigation into Hunter Biden, even as DOJ continued its own investigation, wasn’t an obvious waste of government resources.

Politico’s Olivia Beavers didn’t point that out either in a 1,400-word profile in August on James Comer entitled, “Meet the GOP’s future king of Biden investigations,” the kind of sycophantic profile designed to ensure future access, known as a “beat sweetener.” (Beaver is currently described as a Breaking News Reporter; this profile was posted 3 days after the search of Mar-a-Lago.) She did acknowledge that these investigations were, “directing the party’s pent-up frustration and aggression toward Democrats after years in the minority,” not any desire to make government work or eliminate wasteful spending. But she nevertheless allowed Comer and his colleagues to claim that an investigation into Joe Biden’s son could be credible — that it would somehow be more credible than the bullshit we expect from Marjorie Taylor Greene.

He’s long been known on both sides of the aisle as a sharp and affable colleague, and has the tendency to lean in with a hushed voice, almost conspiratorially, only to crack a well-timed joke that’s often at his own expense. Beyond that personal appeal, though, Comer emphasized it’s his priority to ensure the oversight panel’s work remains “credible.”

That’s a tricky path to tread, given his party’s investigative priorities are still subject to the whims of former President Donald Trump as well as an increasingly zealous conservative base and media apparatus. But Comer’s particularly well-suited to the task, according to more than two dozen House Republicans interviewed. And if he manages to do it right, it could provide a launching pad to higher office — Comer is not discounting a future bid for Senate or Kentucky governor, though that likely wouldn’t occur until after his four remaining years leading the panel.

“I’m not going to be chasing some of these right-wing blogs and some of their conspiracy theories,” Comer told POLITICO in an hour-long interview conducted in a rented RV trailer that his campaign had parked at the picnic. “We’ll look into anything, but we’re not going to declare a probe or an investigation unless we have proof.”

[snip]

And though Comer has said Hunter Biden would likely get subpoenaed in the event of a declined invitation to the committee next year, he doesn’t want to appear trigger-happy with issuing subpoenas, either.

“This isn’t a dog-and-pony show. This isn’t a committee where everybody’s gonna scream and be outraged and try to make the witnesses look like fools,” he said, before nodding at House Democrats’ past probes of the Trump campaign and Russian election interference. “Unlike Adam Schiff, we’re gonna have something concrete, substantive on Hunter Biden or I’m not going to talk about Hunter Biden.”

Beavers didn’t mention the platitudes she included in her August article when she reported, yesterday, on the press conference Comer and Jim Jordan have scheduled for today, less than 24 hours after the 218th House seat for Republicans was called, to talk about the investigation into Hunter Biden.

Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and James Comer (R-Ky.) discussed plans to investigate politicization in federal law enforcement and Hunter Biden’s business affairs.

“We are going to make it very clear that this is now an investigation of President Biden,” Comer said, referring to a planned Republican press conference Thursday about the president and his son’s business dealings.

Beavers has let Comer forget the claim, which she printed as good faith in August, that Comer was “not going to declare a probe or an investigation unless we have proof.”

Olivia. Comer lied to you in August. As a journalist, you might want to call that out.

There is no functioning democracy in which the opposition party’s first act after winning a majority should be investigating the private citizen son of the President for actions taken three to six years earlier, particularly not as a four year criminal investigation into Hunter Biden — still overseen by a Trump appointee — continues.

There is no sane argument for doing so. Sure, foreign countries paid Hunter lots of money as a means to access his father. But according to an October leak from FBI agents pressuring to charge the President’s son (one that Comer pitched on Fox News), which claimed there was enough evidence to charge Hunter Biden for tax and weapons charges but which made no mention of foreign influence peddling charges, that foreign influence peddling apparently doesn’t amount to a crime. Nothing foreign countries did with Hunter Biden is different from what Turkey did with Mike Flynn, Ukraine did with Paul Manafort, Israel did with George Papadopoulos, and multiple countries did with Elliot Broidy. Jim Jordan and James Comer not only had no problem with that foreign influence peddling, they attacked the FBI for investigating them.

If James Comer and Jim Jordan really cared about foreign influence peddling, they would care that, since leaving the White House, the Trump family has entered into more than $3.6 billion of deals with Saudi Arabia ($2 billion to Jared’s investment fund, a $1.6 billion real estate development in Oman announced the day before Trump’s re-election bid, and a golf deal of still-undisclosed value; Judd Legum has a good post summarizing what we know about this relationship). Given that the Oversight panel under Carolyn Maloney already launched an investigation into Jared’s fund — like Hunter Biden’s funding, notable because of the obvious inexperience of the recipient — Comer could treat himself and American taxpayers with respect by more generally investigating the adequacy of protection against foreign influence, made more acute in the wake of the opinion in the Steve Wynn case that guts DOJ’s ability to enforce FARA.

With today’s press conference, you will see a bunch of journalists like Olivia Beavers treating this as a serious pursuit rather than pointing out all the hypocrisy and waste it entails as well as the lies they credulously printed during the election about it. You will see Beavers rewarding politicians for squandering government resources to do this, rather than calling them out for the hypocrisy of their actions.

Maybe, if Comer becomes Governor of Kentucky, Beavers will have the inside track on access to him. I guess then it will have been worth it for her.

This Hunter Biden obsession has been allowed to continue already for three years not just because it has been Fox’s non-stop programming choice to distract from more important matters, but because journalists who consider themselves straight journalists, not Fox propagandists, choose not to call out the rank hypocrisy and waste of it all.

For any self-respecting journalist, the story going forward should be about how stupid and hypocritical all this is, what a waste of government resources.

We’re about to find out how few self-respecting journalists there are in DC.

Update: NBC journalist Scott Wong’s piece on the GOP plans for investigations was similarly supine. The funniest part of it is that it treated a 1,000 page “report,” consisting almost entirely of letters Jordan sent, as if it were substantive. I unpacked the details NBC could have disclosed to readers here.

Meanwhile, this Carl Hulse piece doesn’t disclose to readers that Marjory Taylor Greene’s investigation into the jail conditions of January 6 defendants, besides being an attempt to protect potential co-conspirators, also is falsely premised on claims that the January 6 defendants are treated worse (and not better) than other defendants as well as false claims that many of the pre-trial detainees are misdemeanants.

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The Intercept Helps Protect Rudy Giuliani’s Lies about Ruby Freeman

November 2, 2022/44 Comments/in 2020 Presidential Election, 2022 Mid-Term Election /by emptywheel

I had ambitious plans to do four things today: write this post on what I’m calling the Roger Stone convergence, wash my walls in advance of priming them for paint, writing about how we’d all be better off remembering that Elmo (Elon Musk — like most nicknames I adopt, I wasn’t smart enough to make that one up) just entered a forced marriage, and explaining why this Intercept article is a piece of shit.

Lo and behold, as I was sitting around procrastinating and rationalizing that I shouldn’t climb a ladder while Mr. emptywheel was on his tenth ever visit to the office where he has worked at for 18 months, I saw that Mike Masnick wrote the article about the Intercept piece I was contemplating writing, down to multiple observations that the journalists kept including things that have fuck all with what they claim they’re writing about.

In other words, this entire system has literally fuck all to do with the rest of the article, but the Intercept makes it out to be a system for suppressing information.

[snip]

The article continues to pinball around, basically pulling random examples of questionable government behavior, but never tying it to anything related to the actual subject. I mean, yes, the FBI does bad stuff in spying on people. We know that. But that’s got fuck all to do with CISA, and yet the article spends paragraphs on it.

There are just two things I wanted to add to Masnick’s post (really, go read his), first to add some points about the Intercept’s “Hunter Biden” “laptop” claims, and also to talk about why this matters so much.

Masnick writes at length about how fucking stupid the Intercept’s take on the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” is. I want to add a few key points, interspersed with Masnick’s.

And then, I can’t even believe we need to go here, but it brings up the whole stupid nonsense about Twitter and the Hunter Biden laptop story. As we’ve explained at great length, Twitter blocked links to one article (not others) by the NY Post because they feared that the article included documents that violated its hacked materials policy, a policy that had been in place since 2019 and had been used before (equally questionably, but it gets no attention) on things like leaked documents of police chatter. We had called out that policy at the time, noting how it could potentially limit reporting, and right after there was the outcry about the NY Post story, Twitter changed the policy.

Yet this story remains the bogeyman for nonsense grifters who claim it’s proof that Twitter acted to swing the election. Leaving aside that (1) there’s nothing in that article that would swing the election, since Hunter Biden wasn’t running for president, and (2) the story got a ton of coverage elsewhere, and Twitter’s dumb policy enforcement actually ended up giving it more attention, this story is one about the trickiness in crafting reasonable trust & safety policies, not of any sort of nefariousness.

Yet the Intercept takes up the false narrative and somehow makes it even dumber:

In retrospect, the New York Post reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election provides an elucidating case study of how this works in an increasingly partisan environment.

Much of the public ignored the reporting or assumed it was false, as over 50 former intelligence officials charged that the laptop story was a creation of a “Russian disinformation” campaign.

Interjection: These men likely have spent too much time with Glenn Greenwald, who lies about what the former spooks did as regularly as some people attend church. They didn’t “charge” that the story was a creation of Russian disinformation. They said it had the hallmarks of such a campaign, but emphasized that they didn’t know.

It is for all these reasons that we write to say that the arrival on the US political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

Then they provided around six reasons why they believed it might be true. All six were and remain true (and there has been reinforcement of several since then). Glenn likes to claim these spooks lied, which is nearly impossible, since they simply expressed a belief. Importantly, their belief was and remains eminently reasonable.

Now back to Masnick:

The mainstream media was primed by allegations of election interference in 2016 — and, to be sure, Trump did attempt to use the laptop to disrupt the Biden campaign. Twitter ended up banning links to the New York Post’s report on the contents of the laptop during the crucial weeks leading up to the election. Facebook also throttled users’ ability to view the story.

In recent months, a clearer picture of the government’s influence has emerged.

In an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook had limited sharing of the New York Post’s reporting after a conversation with the FBI. “The background here is that the FBI came to us — some folks on our team — and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election,’” Zuckerberg told Rogan. The FBI told them, Zuckerberg said, that “‘We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump.’” When the Post’s story came out in October 2020, Facebook thought it “fit that pattern” the FBI had told them to look out for.

Zuckerberg said he regretted the decision, as did Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter at the time. Despite claims that the laptop’s contents were forged, the Washington Post confirmed that at least some of the emails on the laptop were authentic. The New York Times authenticated emails from the laptop — many of which were cited in the original New York Post reporting from October 2020 — that prosecutors have examined as part of the Justice Department’s probe into whether the president’s son violated the law on a range of issues, including money laundering, tax-related offenses, and foreign lobbying registration.

Interjection: The Intercept’s representation of what the WaPo and NYT wrote is horseshit (again, it leads me to suspect these gents have spent too much time listening to Glenn’s rants).

First, as I wrote about the NYT “authenticat[ion]” at the time, the description of the emails was of particular interest because it cited someone who had familiarity with the investigation.

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

That person could have been an FBI agent leaking about the investigation (as likely has happened more recently, when someone revealed they believe there is sufficient evidence to charge on crimes unrelated to the “laptop,” probably an effort to pressure US Attorney David Weiss to charge Hunter Biden). Or it could be someone like Mac Issac or Robert Costello, both of whom were in the chain of custody of the “laptop,” the testimony from whom might be of interest to the Hunter Biden investigation and/or might be of interest in the investigation into Rudy Giuliani’s negotiations with known Russian agents for Hunter Biden dirt that almost exactly resembles what the laptop is. The story actually doesn’t say the FBI first obtained the emails from the laptop. Indeed, the story reports that the foreign influence aspect of the investigation started in 2018, before the FBI got the laptop, in which case the FBI may have obtained the emails from Apple, which is where at least some of the content on the laptop came from. Almost certainly the FBI would have obtained the iCloud content independently anyway, to ensure the integrity of their chain of evidence. But all the NYT said is that someone — perhaps someone who has been questioned in the investigation — is leaking details to the press. All the NYT has done is get the emails from someone involved in the attack on Hunter Biden and — possibly with their help — authenticate the same headers anyone else has.

That doesn’t say “the laptop” is authentic; it says the investigation into Hunter Biden has been grossly politicized.

Now, before we review what the WaPo said, remember that reporters are citing this article to support a claim that the “laptop” was not disinformation. The goal here is to suggest authenticity. For those purposes, here’s what that WaPo story says:

Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years. The MacBook itself is now in the hands of the FBI, which is investigating whether Hunter Biden properly reported income from business dealings.

Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify content.

[snip]

In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.

Maxey had alerted The Washington Post to this issue in advance, saying that others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files. But the lack of what experts call a “clean chain of custody” undermined Green’s and Williams’s ability to determine the authenticity of most of the drive’s contents.

“The drive is a mess,” Green said.

He compared the portable drive he received from The Post to a crime scene in which detectives arrive to find Big Mac wrappers carelessly left behind by police officers who were there before them, contaminating the evidence.

That assessment was echoed by Williams.

“From a forensics standpoint, it’s a disaster,” Williams said.

[snip]

Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.

“No evidence of tampering was discovered, but as noted throughout, several key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available,” Williams’ reports concluded.

[snip]

Some other emails on the drive that have been the foundation for previous news reports could not be verified because the messages lacked verifiable cryptographic signatures. One such email was widely described as referring to Joe Biden as “the big guy” and suggesting the elder Biden would receive a cut of a business deal.

I’ve also been told that since the laptop was not airgapped, it’s possible Burisma emails were downloaded after Russia reportedly hacked Burisma, meaning those emails could absolutely be fraudulent.

So the Intercept reporters display their highly attuned nose for disinformation by deeming worthy of reporting a “laptop” that does have emails with valid keys downloaded from iCloud (in partial fashion, which should itself raise questions) but also includes a great deal of shit and obvious alteration. The only thing this “laptop” is useful for reporting on is how unreliable “the laptop” as a package is. It is useful for nothing more than serving as the shiny object it was used for in October 2020. Any reporter citing this report as proof that stuff wasn’t forged — or that the whole “laptop” wasn’t packaged up with the help of the same people who were peddling this information to Rudy in the same time period — discredits themselves. The report specifically said such conclusions were impossible and raised a lot of reasons to be more concerned about “the laptop.” The report shows that this “laptop” was a serial hit job and that for a second straight election, people close to Trump once again tried to win an election by using stolen personal data.

Back to Masnick.

The Zuckerberg/Rogan podcast thing has also been taken out of context by the same people. As he notes, the FBI gave a general warning to be on the lookout for false material, which was a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do. And, in response Facebook did not actually block links to the article. It just limited how widely the algorithm would share it until the article had gone through a fact check process. This is a reasonable way to handle information when there are questions about its authenticity.

But neither Twitter nor Facebook suggest that the government told them to suppress the story, because it didn’t. It told them generally to be on the lookout, and both companies did what they do when faced with similar info.

From there, the Intercept turns to a nonsense frivolous lawsuit filed by Missouri’s Attorney General and takes a laughable claim at face value:

Documents filed in federal court as part of a lawsuit by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana add a layer of new detail to Zuckerberg’s anecdote, revealing that officials leading the push to expand the government’s reach into disinformation also played a quiet role in shaping the decisions of social media giants around the New York Post story.

According to records filed in federal court, two previously unnamed FBI agents — Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent in the San Francisco field office, and Dehmlow, the section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force — were involved in high-level communications that allegedly “led to Facebook’s suppression” of the Post’s reporting.

Interjection: This Intercept story was dated October 31, which last I checked is after October 28. Which means if these reporters were actually reporting from the docket, then they should be accountable for this October 28 filing which says that — according to Meta — the plaintiffs in this nonsense lawsuit made up the bit about Agent Chen.

Meta, however, recently sent Plaintiffs’ counsel a letter—attached as Exhibit A—explaining that Plaintiffs’ understanding of Meta’s statement concerning ASAC Chan is “incorrect.” Meta further stated that that “Mr. Chan at no point in time advised Meta ‘to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story’ . . . [n]or did any of his colleagues.” Based on this newly received evidence, the Court should amend the Deposition Order, and withdraw its authorization of a deposition of ASAC Chan. ASAC Chan, a management-level FBI official, should not have to divert time away from his official duties to participate in an expedited deposition when the record contains no evidence suggesting that he has engaged in the communications that led the Court to authorize his deposition in the first place.

[snip]

Plaintiffs also relied on several of their own self-serving allegations concerning ASAC Chan—rather than actual evidence—to justify his deposition. See ECF No. 86 at 19-21 (referring to various allegations in Plaintiffs’ Second Amended Complaint). Those allegations generally embellished certain innocuous, public statements ASAC Chan made concerning routine cyber threat discussions he had with various companies, including social media companies. For example, Plaintiffs rely on their allegation that ASAC Chan “admits to regular, routine coordination about censorship with social-media platforms,” see id. at 19 (quoting 2d Am. Compl. ¶ 389), but that allegation relies on an interview in which ASAC Chan simply stated: the FBI regularly “shar[ed] intelligence with technology companies, with social media companies, so that they could protect their own platforms . . . we have all of these methods for collecting intelligence . . . [w]e share them with you and then you do what you want with them to protect your networks,” https://www.banyansecurity.io/resource/get-it-started-get-it-done/ (cited in 2d Am. Compl. ¶¶ 387-89) (emphasis added). Plaintiffs could not identify a single quotation in that interview where ASAC Chan ever stated that the FBI asked or pressured any social media company to remove any content from its platform. Plaintiffs also relied on an allegation that ASAC Chan had stated that social media platforms have been “trying to take down any misinformation or disinformation” and that they have “portals where [users] can report” election-related misinformation.” ECF No. 86 at 20. Again, Plaintiffs could not quote any portion of ASAC Chan’s statement where he stated that he, or anyone else at the FBI, asked or pressured any social media company to remove any content from its platform.

[snip]

Meta emphasized that “Mr. Chan at no point in time advised Meta ‘to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story’ . . . [n]or did any of his colleagues.”

The letter from Facebook to the plaintiffs also notes there are no communications that support their Facebook claims.

We identified Mr. Chan to you during a phone call on September 15, 2022. On that call, we identified Mr. Chan as Meta’s primary individual point of contact on the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. And we informed you that we had not identified any emails between Mr. Chan and Meta about Hunter Biden’s laptop. You confirmed in writing after that call that “as referenced in today’s call, we continue to request communications between Meta and FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, especially as it relates to the Hunder [sic] Biden laptop story. Reg represented today that he did not believe there are written communications involving” Mr. Chan.

Which is the perfect setup for Masnick’s conclusion about the Hunter Biden story.

Now here, you can note that Dehmlow was the person mentioned way above who talked about platforms and responsibility, but as we noted, in context, she was talking about better education of the public. The section quoted in Missouri’s litigation is laughable. It’s telling a narrative for fan service to Trumpist voters. We already know that the FBI told Facebook to be on the lookout for fake information. The legal complaint just makes up the idea that Dehmlow tells them what to censor. That’s bullshit without evidence, and there’s nothing to back it up beyond a highly fanciful and politicized narrative.

But from there, the Intercept says this:

The Hunter Biden laptop story was only the most high-profile example of law enforcement agencies pressuring technology firms.

Except… it wasn’t. Literally nothing anywhere in this story shows law enforcement “pressuring technology firms” about the Hunter Biden laptop story.

This story proves the opposite of what it claims.

It proves that the reporters who wrote it read a report that cautioned strongly about relying on the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” because of all the forensic problems with it — which is one reason among many why responsible reporters shouldn’t have reported on it in October 2020 (and most did not, precisely because there was nothing reliable). And it further shows to substantiate their core claim of coercion, the reporters rely on sources that themselves made up claims of coercion.

And here’s why it matters.

As Masnick lays out, the Intercept reporters “pingpong” from topic to topic, with little evident understanding of the topics they’re talking about. Several of the meeting notes they try to spin as wildly spooky deal with how one runs elections in an era of outright disinformation — shit like Presidential candidates repeatedly making false claims about the reliability of the vote count. This one, for example, focused primarily on the difficulties election workers face as they’re trying to tally election results amid a cloud of rumors and deliberately false claims.

The report makes quite clear that what’s at stake is the “peaceful transition of power.”

As Masnick recalled, Chris Krebs debunked a lot of false claims in 2020 and Trump promptly fired him for correctly stating that the elections were free and fair.

This is the kind of thing that the Intercept reporters — reporters who ignored a filing that debunked their key claim about FBI coercion and who didn’t understand that the WaPo said the opposite of what they claimed — appear to want to get rid of. If they achieved what they claim they want, CISA would no longer be able to tell local election supervisors about the false claims armed men trolling dropboxes are making to justify their actions. If they achieved what they claim to want, CISA would not be able to share information nationally about organized disinformation campaigns targeting mail-in votes.

The logical outcome, if these Intercept reporters succeeded in halting what they portray in the story, is that CISA would not be able to protect your vote.

Nor would it be able to protect election workers like Ruby Freeman from false claims that Rudy Giuliani spread, falsely claiming a ginger mint was a thumb drive used to steal votes.

In an opinion denying Rudy’s motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit from Freeman and Shaye Moss, Beryl Howell cites the harm that the mother and daughter claim arises from Rudy’s false claims.

The accusations levied against plaintiffs had consequences. Plaintiffs claim they have experienced online, personal, and professional consequences directly resulting from Giuliani’s statements and conduct. See id. ¶¶ 140–57. Strangers camped out near Freeman’s home in Georgia, harassing her and her neighbors. Id. ¶ 141. “Christmas cards were mailed to Ms. Freeman’s address with messages like, ‘Ruby please report to the FBI and tell them you committed voter fraud. If not[,] you will be sorry,’ and ‘You deserve to go to jail, you worthless piece of shit whore.’” Id. ¶ 143. Protesters targeted her home on January 5 and January 6, 2021, though Freeman had fled her home at the recommendation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Id. ¶¶ 144–45. Pizza delivery orders were ordered to her home that her family never ordered, which is a common tactic of online harassment called “doxx[ing].” Id. ¶ 142. Local police received more than twenty harassing phone calls while monitoring Freeman’s phone and, eventually, she had to change her email and phone numbers. Id. ¶ 140. Freeman has experienced strangers harassing her in public and has lost friendships, id. ¶¶ 148–49, plus she has had to cease her online business because of prolonged harassment on social media and public events, id. ¶ 147.

She also cites Rudy complaining about how he got banned from social media for making those false claims.

3 Statement 8 was made by Giuliani during an OAN interview on January 18, 2021, as follows:

I mean, they pretty much censored it while it was going on, so they would love to turn the page on it. I mean, I get banned from any of the big tech things when I say that not only was there voter fraud, I have evidence of it, I’ve seen it, I have a motion picture of it. I can show you the voter fraud in living color. It was done in Fulton County, Georgia, it was well over 30,000 ballots were stolen. They were attributed to Biden instead of Trump. Had they been caught and held to account for it, Trump would have won Georgia. Amend. Compl. ¶ 89. A reasonable listener could read this message as referencing the Edited Video and the actions of election workers in Fulton County, which workers include Freeman and Moss.

Finally, she deems sufficiently credible Freeman and Moss’ claims that Rudy made these false claims about the two of them as part of a plan to overturn the democratic election.

7 Giuliani defends the Strategic Plan as a plan to “‘educate the public,’” Def.’s Mem. at 13 (quoting Strategic Plan at 1), rather than to disseminate false information. Regardless of how Giuliani characterizes the goal of the Plan, plaintiffs allege that the Plan’s goal was to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and they allege more than enough evidence in their Amended Complaint to infer that unlawful act was the Plan’s underlying purpose. See, e.g., Amend. Compl. ¶ 9 (noting that the Strategic Plan “relied on the following call to action: ‘YOU CANNOT LET AMERICA ITSELF BE STOLEN BY CRIMINALS – YOU MUST TAKE A STAND AND YOU MUST TAKE IT TODAY’”).

If the Intercept reporters achieved what they claim they want, it would be far harder to combat clear abuse like Rudy’s because it would halt CISA’s efforts to debunk such obvious false claims. It would make it less likely that Rudy would get banned for his false claims about two women who did nothing more than help count the vote. It would be harder to protect your vote, and it would be harder to protect the life and livelihood of election workers.

This article fed the efforts of fascists to delegitimize efforts to protect democracy. Tucker Carlson loved it. For good reason: because he peddles bullshit that poses a risk to your vote and the livelihood of Ruby Freeman.

Not only didn’t it substantiate what it claimed, but it discredited precisely the efforts that will be used next week to protect democracy.

Update: ProPublica reports that, contra Intercept’s claim that disinformation efforts are increasing, DHS under Biden has backed off the kind of support for election workers that was so successful (and important) in 2020.

In May, one Department of Homeland Security office instructed staffers that work on “sensitive” topics including disinformation should be put on “immediate hold,” according to material reviewed by ProPublica. In the months that followed, DHS canceled a series of planned contracts that would have tracked and studied the proliferation of disinformation and its connection with violent attacks. And after issuing six nationwide warnings about domestic terrorism fueled by disinformation in the first 13 months of the Biden administration, DHS has only issued one in the eight months since.

The government’s retreat comes ahead of midterms in which election officials throughout the country are being inundated with false rumors about their work. After talks on a project to help election officials monitor and respond to threats stalled, election officials from Colorado and Florida wrote a private letter in August to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pleading for help.

“Threats and harassment of election officials has become an extremely serious concern and terribly frequent experience for election workers,” they warned, adding, “We are ourselves a crucial part of the nation’s critical infrastructure, in need of and deserving of protection.”

“Time is of the essence,” the officials wrote.

Weeks later, DHS scrapped the project.

[snip]

[E]lection administrators remain deeply concerned.

“States need more support. It is clear that threats to election officials and workers are not dissipating and may only escalate around the 2022 and 2024 elections,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said in an email to ProPublica. “Election offices need immediate meaningful support from federal partners.”

Kevin Drum compared the ProPublica’s worthwhile report with the Intercept one here.

https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Rudy.jpeg 1100 1990 emptywheel https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.png emptywheel2022-11-02 17:27:442022-11-03 06:56:14The Intercept Helps Protect Rudy Giuliani’s Lies about Ruby Freeman

Big Criminal Justice News — and Not So Big Criminal Justice Not News

October 6, 2022/101 Comments/in Drug War, January 6 Insurrection /by emptywheel

Joe Biden just pardoned everyone convicted at the federal level of simple marijuana possession, while encouraging Governors to follow suit.

Proud Boy Jeremy Bertino just pled guilty to seditious conspiracy and weapons possession. (Here’s the statement of offense.)

And … far less interestingly, but noting for the record, FBI agents trying to force David Weiss to indict Hunter Biden leaked to Devlin Barrett just like FBI agents trying to harm Hillary Clinton leaked to Devlin Barrett in 2016.

Back to the stuff that matters. Bertino will be a witness not just against Enrique Tarrio and Joe Biggs, but also against Roger Stone (this plea happened as yet more testimony implicating Stone was introduced into the Oath Keeper’s trial). DOJ now has both seditious conspiracy trials focused on the former reality TV show host’s rat-fucker.

And my goodness, the marijuana pardon will positive affect almost as many lives as the student loan forgiveness (But See Ravenclaw’s correction here).

https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Screen-Shot-2022-06-10-at-9.53.36-AM.png 776 1380 emptywheel https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.png emptywheel2022-10-06 16:21:002022-10-06 17:04:53Big Criminal Justice News — and Not So Big Criminal Justice Not News
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