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How John Durham and Chuck Grassley Covered Up Getting Ass-Handed by Russia

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The most important passage of the classified annex of the Durham Report is this one — though you won’t hear it from the frothy mob, in significant part because Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are hiding what these documents are. Durham describes that it is “dated the following day” just after discussing an email dated July 25, so July 26.

Go ahead and read it once. But before I explain why it is so important, first let me illustrate how Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are obscuring the provenance of these documents.

As I explained here, these documents were stolen from Russian foreign intelligence (SVR) by another country’s intelligence service (understood to be the Dutch). The documents themselves generally consist of two different kinds of documents:

  • Emails and other raw intelligence that SVR stole from victims, including US think tanks, State Department, and the Executive Office of the President
  • Discussions among SVR — mostly intelligence analysis — about the files they stole

Sometimes the victim files the Russians stole would be attached to the reports, sometimes they would be incorporated into the reports. Sometimes the Russians would translate the English-language documents they stole, other times they would not. So the game of telephone that most of these documents entail looks like this:

  • SVR steals documents
  • SVR translates documents
  • SVR analyzes documents
  • Dutch intelligence steals documents from SVR
  • Dutch intelligence shares documents with CIA and/or FBI
  • CIA and/or FBI translate the Russian bits
  • CIA and/or FBI analyze what they found
  • CIA sends what they think they found to FBI

But that’s not all. For the key documents in this collection, they report the speech of one or another Hillary Clinton associate, which means the game of telephone looks like this:

  • Debbie Wasserman Schultz or Julianne Smith talk with Think Tank guys (primarily Open Society’s Leonard Benardo, but also OSF’s Jeffrey Goldstein, as well as unidentified people at Atlantic Council and Carnegie Endowment)
  • Think tank guys write what they learned from DWS or Julianne Smith
  • SVR steals documents from Think Tank guys
  • SVR translates documents from English to Russian
  • SVR analyzes documents
  • Dutch intelligence steals documents from SVR
  • Dutch intelligence shares documents with CIA and/or FBI
  • CIA and/or FBI translate the Russian bits to English
  • CIA and/or FBI analyze what they found
  • CIA sends what they think they found to FBI

Best as I can tell, that path is the one involved in the documents Durham claims are the most important in his appendix, the ones that claim to report what Smith said about a Hillary Clinton plan to smear Donald Trump.

Here’s what FBI lawyer Tricia Anderson wrote about the problems with this game of telephone in a memo:

  • The reports likely reflected multiple levels of hearsay given that they were based on purported communications between Wasserman Schultz and potential donors, not any underlying communications between Lynch and Clinton campaign staff;
  • Wasserman Schultz’ communications may have contained exaggerations designed to reassure potential donors who were concerned by news about the FBI investigation;
  • The [Russians] who drafted the reports may have injected opinion, editorialization, or exaggeration into the reports; and
  • Translation errors may have contributed to the potential for unreliability

Durham provided just a summary of this assessment, but a fair one (in part because he’s more focused on later documents that don’t involve DWS but do involve all those levels of reported speech).

Here’s how the purported smoking gun was introduced (note, if Durham provided the date, it is redacted, but it reports something that happened on July 26, so it can be no later than then but could be July 27).

 

There was additional analysis about the provenance following the text.

There are a number of things conveyed in these redactions:

  • The classification marks
  • That CIA received these documents
  • The dates the Dutch passed them on
  • Presumably (though given Durham’s practice elsewhere in his report, not definitely) the date of the underlying memo
  • A description of the people at SVR they were obtained from
  • The import of all the other think tanks
  • The nature of the incorporated messages purported to be from Benardo

I don’t contest some of those redactions. But the amount of redaction, and lack of context elsewhere, obscure what the purported smoking gun is: a draft SVR report that in some way incorporates language attributed to Leonard Benardo. We have no clue whether it is dated July 26, 27, or 28 (by which date CIA had a copy). The section that most frothers are quoting (just like the section of other SVR reports released in recent weeks) is not an email itself, it is a Russian discussion about purported emails.

Durham follows the actual SVR report with the text attributed to Benardo; the description of how this text is incorporated in the document is redacted.

He follows it with another similar (raw) email attributed to Benardo (which should make evident whom Benardo sent the email to, or at what time, but Durham didn’t share that).

John Durham does not mention, at all, that the language of those first two purported Benardo emails — the ones with a date of July 25 — in no way supports the claim made in the SVR Report, that on,

26 July 2016, Clinton approved of a plan of her policy advisor, Julianna Smith … to smear Donald Trump. by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican nominee.

As envisioned by Smith, raising the theme of “Putin’s support for Trump” to the level of the Olympics scandal would divert the constituents’ attention from the investigation of Clinton’s compromised electronic correspondence.

He does note in a footnote that the SVR report got Julianne’s first name wrong, Juliana. He simply asserts that the “Julie” referred to in the purported Benardo emails is Julianne; he doesn’t note that in the purported follow-up Benardo email the name used is “Julia,” not the kind of thing a colleague would normally do. Durham interviewed Benardo, who specifically said he didn’t know who “Julie” (or “Julia”) was.

The only corroboration at all that the language in the Benardo email was real, was evidence it was not: an email sent by someone else, a Carnegie Endowment cyber guy named Tim Maurer, discussing this article on attribution from Thomas Rid. Durham says less about the Rid article than another cited in this correspondence, which is telling, because Rid discussed the Democrats’ decision, back in June, to go public with the hack.

This was big. Democratic political operatives suspected that not one but two teams of Putin’s spies were trying to help Trump and harm Clinton. The Trump campaign, after all, was getting friendly with Russia. The Democrats decided to go public.

Rid also discussed the Guccifer persona at length, which is important for reasons I’ll explain in a follow-up.

As noted, ultimately Durham concludes that the emails themselves — documents that are supposed to be raw collection — are instead “composites,” including from a totally different guy, Maurer.

The Office’s best assessment is that the July 25th and July 27th emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based Think Tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment, and others. Indeed, as discussed above, language from Tim Maurer’s email of July 25th is identical to language contained in Benardo’s purported email of the same date.

Durham is hedging wildly here. I think the NYT overstates when it says, “Mr. Durham concluded that the email from July 27, 2016, and a related one dated two days earlier were probably manufactured.” That would be the conclusion sane normal people would draw, that if emails purporting to be from Benardo were actually cut-and-pasted language from Maurer, but Durham doesn’t make that conclusion (perhaps because he continued to chase this conspiracy theory for another two years after he interviewed all these people, indicting two more men only to discover his theories about them, too, were made up). Indeed, in an almost entirely redacted (and therefore useless) passage, Durham claims that in what must be July 2017, the CIA still maintained that the report and at least some of the purported emails were not fabrications. He also cites interviews he did with people who thought the Benardo emails were authentic.

But yeah, if the emails themselves are “composites,” it means they’re made up, not even attributing the author correctly. In fact, if they’re composites, we have no reason to believe the emails dated July 25 weren’t in fact “composited” on July 26 or 27.

Now’s a good time to mention that Durham is obscuring the sequence of the documents here (not least by withholding the metadata of the real email he obtains, but also thanks to the redactions from Grassley and Tulsi). The sequence looks something like this, but we can’t be sure:

  • July 25: Thomas Rid story
  • July 25, 11 to 11:35AM: Smith texts other people trying to figure out if there was any investigation of the hack (as I noted here, Durham doesn’t disclose anywhere in his report that during the Michael Sussmann prosecution, Sussmann forced him to obtain these emails that show FBI releasing a statement without consulting with the Dems, the victims of the hack.
  • July 25, undisclosed time: Maurer responds to the Rid story
  • July 25, undisclosed time, but the date could be made up: Two drafts of purported Benardo emails
  • July 26: Email between two Russian spooks suggesting “doing something about a task from someone”
  • Unknown date: A draft Russian spy memorandum claiming that on July 26, Hillary Clinton approved a plan to smear Donald Trump, citing July 25 emails purportedly from Benardo
  • July 27: Email between two Russian spooks about illuminating Hillary’s attempts to vilify Trump and Putin that links to a purported Benardo email, in what Durham describes as English but is … probably not written by a native English speaker
  • July 27: Email from Smith soliciting signers for a letter condemning Trump’s attack on NATO

Narratively, Durham puts the draft report, incorporating a July 25 email attributed to Benardo, then citing another July 25 email attributed to Benardo, and describing Hillary approving a plan on July 26, before the email between two Russian spooks, which by description is dated July 26. But I’ve been staring at it for an hour (and reviewing Durham’s unclassified report and now realizing he never provides the date there, either) and for the life of me, I’m not sure if we know whether the two spooks email precedes the draft intelligence report or not (note, too, that it starts, “Great!” by responding to something, suggesting there’s an even earlier one Durham suppressed). If my read that it is dated July 26 is correct, it would have been written on the same day as the purported approval by Hillary, of a plan to smear Donald Trump. But the only email attributed to Benardo reflecting Hillary’s approval is written July 27, meaning it’s more likely it was written on July 27.

So we don’t know. I am still searching but I believe Durham never revealed the date of that memo. But based on what we can see, SVR didn’t “have” an email reflecting Hillary approving this plan until July 27, the day after (at least by Durham’s description) two Russian spooks discussed telling stories about the Deep State.

If that’s right, Russian spooks were discussing “making” such a report before they “found” an email in stilted English that Durham couldn’t match describing Hillary approving this plan.

Based on interviews (italicized here) that appear only in this annex, John Durham first started chasing this conspiracy theory no later than September 2019 (the day after meeting with Nate Batty, the politicized FBI Agent who killed the Alfa Bank investigation). After interviews done by July 2021, Durham should have come to the conclusion he states here: that the purported emails were “compiled” from emails of entirely different people. And yet all the while, the IC was in possession of documents showing one Russian spook suggesting that another one, “do something about a task from someone, I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in IC, Pentagon, Deep State.”

Durham tried to bury all that, that he created precisely the chaos the Russian spooks were trying to manufacture, in this classified annex and — if you believe Kash Patel — burn the proof.

The Russians told you what they were up to.

And yet you fell for it anyway.

Update: Fixed spelling of Benardo’s last name.

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A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

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HPSCI’s dishonesty mirror

My very favorite paragraphs in the entire House Intelligence Report (HPSCI Report) attacking the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian election interference are these two:

They complain that the 2-page appendix of the ICA addressing the Steele dossier didn’t include details about Christopher Steele that would discredit the dossier, chief among them HPSCI’s claim that Steele was terminated “for being dishonest.”

Here’s how the DOJ Inspector General on the Carter Page FISAs described when and why Steele got shut down as a source:

On November 1, 2016, Steele’s FBI handling agent questioned Steele, who admitted speaking to the reporter who wrote the October 31 article. The handling agent advised Steele at that time that his relationship with the FBI would likely be terminated for disclosing his relationship with the FBI to the press, and the FBI officially closed Steele for cause on November 17, 2016. Steele was never paid by the FBI for any of the reports or information that he provided concerning Carter Page or connections between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.

He was terminated “for disclosing his relationship with the FBI to the press.” Now, perhaps it’s churlish to expect a report on accuracy and sourcing dated September 18, 2020 to account for a report released 284 days earlier, on December 9, 2019.

So, let’s try their own claimed source. Here’s how Steele’s handler, Mike Gaeta, described it in a December 2017 HPSCI interview that the HPSCI report cites extensively, including in that first paragraph.

I called him to confront him and ask him if he was the source in that article. So I said, “Was that you in the article?” And he goes, “Yes, it was.” At which point I said, “Why on Earth would you do that?” And I said, “Everything is going to change here on out.”

I told him a couple of things. I told him, you know, you are no longer considering — don’t consider yourself being tasked by us. You are not working on our behalf. You are not to collect any information on behalf of the FBl. I said, you know, the relationship will end. You know, this was because of his violation of the agreement that we had made back on October 3rd, which I don’t believe we got into, but because he clearly didn’t follow directions, because he clearly went against what he was instructed to do, and because he went public, the relationship was then ended that day.

But then, officially, on paper, a few weeks later, we actually shut the file down. And that was — and I also told him he was not being paid. There was a payment that he was expecting at that point, and I said that that’s not going to happen

[snip]

Up until that moment, he had been a complete professional. And so, when I see that in the article, I was just — that’s when I was taken aback. And then when I confronted him, he said, “Yes, I did it.” And then he makes this comment about being upset about the actions of the Director on the Friday before. [my emphasis]

Steele “went public,” which “went against what he was instructed to do,” but he was honest that he had done so. “Up until that moment, he had been a complete professional.”

Even the Nunes memo — the predecessor to this section, largely authored by now-FBI Director Kash Patel — describes that Steele was terminated because he made an “unauthorized disclosure to the media” (though that memo makes plenty of other errors, which I addressed here).

Steele wasn’t closed because he was dishonest (indeed, the IG Report quotes Peter Strzok saying, “We did not close him because we thought he was [a] fabricator”). And he definitely wasn’t closed in October, as the first but not second paragraph claims, before the Mother Jones article that was the precipitating reason for his termination as an FBI source.

The first paragraph above kicked off an entire section of the HPSCI Report attacking Steele’s credibility. The second appears several pages later, in a section scolding the ICA authors for not providing proper source reporting. These pivotal paragraphs in HPSCI’s case against Christopher Steele claim that he was fired for being dishonest.

The claim, itself, was dishonest. The claim, itself, misrepresents source reporting.

That’s a pretty good read of the kind of rampant error and sloppiness found throughout this entire section — and, indeed, the report more generally.

Dossier insertion

And consider the import of that first paragraph’s citation to “interviews with the FBI agent who handled Mr. Steele.”

As I explained in this post, the claimed project of the HPSCI Report was to measure whether the ICA had enough evidence to back the assessments they made in the report, published on January 5, 2017. Elsewhere (with the notable exception of the 2018 indictment of Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s trolls), HPSCI pretends they’ve learned absolutely nothing in the interim period. They don’t know that George Papadopoulos got advance notice Russia was going to drop emails. They don’t know that Don Jr. responded enthusiastically to an email offering, “very high level and sensitive information [that] is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” They don’t know that Trump’s campaign manager met with a suspected Russian spy and shared campaign strategy at the same meeting where they discussed getting paid by pro-Russian oligarchs and carving up Ukraine.

The premise of the report is to play dumb to all that.

The dossier discussion, by contrast, engages in no such conceit. Over and over, HPSCI uses stuff discovered after the ICA to claim ICA authors shouldn’t have included the Steele dossier in the ICA (though once again, this is very selective). It’s a different project entirely.

Even in structure, it feels like HPSCI took an existing, mostly unrelated report on the dossier and plopped it into the middle of this assessment of the ICA. The entire dossier section — almost a quarter of the full report — is actually a subsection of a finding addressing a different document; the dossier is included in that section because the ICA summary of the dossier reportedly included the words, “Russian plans and intentions.”

Given the apparently haphazard ploy to dump the dossier work in here, look closely at what the HPSCI report says about the inclusion of the dossier in the ICA in the first place.

Schrodinger’s dossier

All three reports released recently (CIA’s Tradecraft review, Tulsi’s propaganda presentation, and this 2020 HPSCI report) have some version of complaint that, after a debate among Jim Comey, John Brennan, and Mike Rogers as to how to fulfill President Obama’s mandate to include everything they knew in the ICA, they decided to put it into an annex along with a bullet — newly disclosed — that cited to it as “additional reporting.”

Tulsi even has someone she calls a whistleblower who claimed he remained ignorant that that had happened as late as September 2019, though like so many of her claims that’s based on a misrepresentation of the record.

The HPSCI Report cites those four words, “Russian plans and intentions,” it used them to justify including the dossier in this section. But it doesn’t describe what the CIA report does: the two-page appendix includes a disclaimer.

Ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two-page summary of the Dossier as an annex to the ICA, with a disclaimer that the material was not used “to reach the analytic conclusions.” [my emphasis]

The HPSCI omission is important. That’s true, first of all, because the HPSCI Report goes to great lengths to claim that by including the bullet, the ICA authors effectively incorporated the dossier content in the report itself. But their analysis makes it very clear the dossier material was not in the ICA.  Just as one example, the HPSCI Report claims “The ICA indicated no evidence of similar damaging material being held by Moscow on candidate Trump, making him less vulnerable to such post-election influence operations” [than Hillary]. Elsewhere they claim that Hillary, traveling as either the First Lady or the Secretary of State, was more vulnerable to compromise on overseas trips than Trump, traveling as a beauty pageant promoter. If the dossier is in the ICA, both those claims are ridiculous (once you consider Trump’s secret efforts to build a Trump Tower funded by sanctioned banks, both are ridiculous in any case, but…).

HPSCI adopts another inconsistent claim about how the dossier appendix was included in the ICA. Tulsi’s documents show that the plan for the ICA was to create three versions:

But as both the HPSCI Report and the CIA report complain, “the highest classified version of the ICA” — the one intended for around 30 people — “had been shared with more than 200 US officials.” (The HPSCI report later complains that the dossier couldn’t have been included in the ICA in the service of a defensive briefing because that most classified version went to 250 people.)

Well, who did that? Most of that dissemination would have happened after January 20, 2017. Most of that dissemination would have happened under Donald Trump. And that’s weird, because HPSCI also claims that the dossier was stuck in (an appendix of) only the most classified section to “better able to shield the assessment from scrutiny,” even though they’ve just complained about how broadly it disseminated … under Trump.

Holding the ICA accountable for things discovered a year later

Mostly, though, the vast bulk of the HPSCI report about the dossier is an extended rant that ICA authors did not include stuff the committee itself discovered via a sustained investigation.

A list of just some of the things the HPSCI Report complains the ICA authors did not include includes:

  • Details from the January 2017 debrief of Igor Danchenko, which started on January 24 but wasn’t memorialized until early February
  • A full accounting of how many media outlets Steele shared the dossier with (which may be sourced to Glenn Simpson’s 2019 book or HPSCI’s own investigation)
  • The Buzzfeed publication on January 10, 2017
  • The means by which Steele delivered his reports, which HPSCI’s own investigation unpacked (relying in part on that December 2017 Gaeta interview)
  • Gaeta’s own background (a complaint which ignored how FBI works sources)
  • Steele’s own refusal to be interviewed by the investigation (???), as if the ICA could ever have accounted for that
  • The absence of claims about Steele’s source network — which the FBI first started discovering with their January 2017 Danchenko interview
  • Gaeta’s 2017 testimony about what Bruce Ohr did
  • Details about what Steele did at DOJ (such as what he said to Bruce Ohr) but didn’t do with the Crossfire Hurricane team
  • Other details of the termination discussion HPSCI obtained from Gaeta
  • Details about Fusion’s work for Natalia Veselnitskaya, which came out in the wake of Don Jr’s release of the June 9 emails (largely forced by HPSCI’s investigation)
  • Details about plans to pay Steele, which were killed (HPSCI affirmatively misrepresented the circumstances of the tasking assignment; most of the reports came before the tasking meeting)
  • More details about Steele’s ties to the press
  • A quote from Andrew McCabe’s December 2017 testimony about what the FBI had been able to verify

And some of the things that were known by January 5, 2017 were almost certainly not available to ICA for the same reason that details of George Papadopoulos’ advance notice of the email leak were not: because it was part of an ongoing FBI investigation.

The standard applied to the dossier is wildly different than the standard applied to the rest of the report.

HPSCI bros need to review their hacking claims

Worse still, the HPSCI Report sucks at the thing that should be a slam dunk. The second-to-last part of this section challenges the ICA claim that some parts of the dossier were consistent with other known facts.

Now, I would expect a half committee of Congressional staffers, many with past training on the IC, to be able to do as well as little old me before they had two of the key interviews on which they rely on.

January 11, 2017: The Democrats Newfound Love for Russian Intelligence Product

September 6, 2017: John Sipher’s Garbage Post Arguing the Steele Dossier Isn’t Garbage

Most of HPSCI’s assessment of “corroboration” reviews generalized items about Putin’s intent. It claims,

The CIA further claimed “limited” intelligence corroboration of Steele’s information, but failed to mention that his dossier was produced after Russian election hacking operations had already been exposed in the media — beginning 4 June 2016, [sic] while Mr. Steele delivered his first report to FBI on 5 July 2016 — and thus any dossier mention of Russian hacking was neither predictive, nor was it unique information that was “corroborated” by intelligence.

“Regurgitated” would have been a more descriptive term to describe the dossier, in that it parroted media or internet stories and pundit comments on Russian hacks of the DNC.

As pertaining to hacking, though — their primary focus — it’s actually not that the dossier parroted things that were public.

It’s that they affirmatively rebutted the most obvious conclusions from the ongoing hack-and-leak. For example, the first and several reports completed after that all suggested that the Kompromat that Russia had on Hillary was decades old material from when she traveled to Russia, not the hack-and-leak campaign rolling out in front of our eyes. A July 26, 2016 report, released after the DNC release and almost a year after the first public attributions of the APT 29 hack of State and DOD to Russia, claimed that Russia wasn’t having much success at hacking Western targets, a claim that anyone briefed on those APT 29 hacks (including the Republicans so taken with the SVR reports stolen in those hacks) would know was laughable. The most incendiary December 13 post attributed the troll campaign to Webzilla, not Yevgeniy Prigozhin. That is, the dossier wasn’t just delayed; it affirmatively contradicted most of the publicly known details about the election interference campaign and even more of the details that the ICA addressed closely. That should have raised concerns from everyone looking closely. It’s not just that the dossier had a lot of shit. It’s that the shit it did have would have led the Democrats to be complacent about the campaign targeting them (another point I made before HPSCI’s big interviews in December 2017).

And that should have raised questions from everyone involved.

HPSCI’s only consistency is playing dumb about Manafort and Deripaska

Which leads me to where this section gets really weird.

Again, the point of this report is to assess whether the ICA claims made in a January 5, 2017 report were backed by sufficient intelligence.

Yet at three different points in this section, HPSCI complains about what happened after the report was complete. They complain about the way Jim Comey briefed the dossier to Trump on January 6, 2017. They claim that including the dossier raised alarmist concerns among senior policy makers — about which Trump complained after the fact. And in a report purporting to review the ICA itself, they complain about what Comey said in a White House visit on February 8, 2017 (which was after the first Igor Danchenko debriefing but a day before it was memorialized).

This is all weird on its face. None of it pertains to the contents of the ICA at all (and to the extent it feeds right wing frothy conspiracy theories, it relies on their demand that ICA authors know what it took HPSCI a year to discover).

But one thing that at least some of these people knew before this time does not appear in the HPSCI. While HPSCI makes much of the fact that (the ICA didn’t mention that) Fusion GPS worked with Natalia Veselnitskaya, they show no concern about the fact that, via a different firm, Steele worked with Oleg Deripaska — and even attempted to collect dirt on Paul Manafort for him starting in March 2016, something addressed in the Danchenko interview. By May 2017, the intelligence community had assessed that Deripaska “was associated” with a Russian intelligence agency. The right wing, including multiple people on HPSCI, staged a panic about Steele’s ties to Deripaska in August 2018 … and then they just dropped it. The December 2019 IG Report included extensive discussion of the degree to which Deripaska influenced Steele’s earlier reporting and might have succeeded in injecting the dossier with disinformation.

Even crazier, with their obsession about how Steele delivered the dossier to the FBI, they ignore how Steele pushed Deripaska’s own complaints to DOJ, all in parallel with his efforts to hand off the dossier. I laid out the double game Deripaska appears to have been playing in early 2020, nine months before this HPSCI Report.

These details become all the more important given the HPSCI Report’s focus on things that happened in late January and February 2017, because Paul Manafort — about whom they play dumb throughout this report — met with a Deripaska deputy just as the dossier was breaking, only to return and advise right wingers to launch precisely the campaign that this HPSCI Report tries to carry out.

In one of HPSCI’s few complaints about the ICA fairly situated on what (or how little) they might know about the dossier by January 5, 2017, HPSCI notes that while the ICA described the complexity of Steele’s claimed network, they didn’t know enough to know whether it was infected by his own fabrication or Russian disinformation.

The ICA also describes dossier information as collected from “a layered network of identified and unidentified subsources” although the ICA did not clarify that FBI and CIA had so few details on the alleged network, that they didn’t know if this material was all or in part fabricated by Mr. Steele, his subsources, or if it was Russian disinformation fed to the subsources.

But by September 2020, HPSCI should have.

Update: Fixed year of DOJ IG Report.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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Trump Keeps Demanding that You Stop Talking about His Jeffrey Epstein Problem

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From the second I saw Trump say, Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?, I knew this scandal would roll out differently. At that point, I understood it only as a matter of attention — and I was right.

“POTUS is clearly furious,” said a person close to the White House, who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to discuss the mood inside the West Wing. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them sort of paralyzed.”

A senior White House official told POLITICO the president is frustrated with his staff’s inability to tamp down conspiracy theories they once spread and by the wall of media coverage that started when Attorney General Pam Bondi released information from the Epstein case that was already in the public domain.

“He feels there are way bigger stories that deserve attention,” the senior White House official said.

Donald Trump survives (and thrives) via two super powers: his ability to command and redirect attention, and his exploitation of polarization to defy actual truth once he has that attention. And, in asking that question, Ae you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein, he expressed that he believed those super powers were failing.

At the time I only understood that his ability to command and redirect attention was failing, but given what has transpired since we can hypothesize about what brought him to this point.

Epstein is different than past scandals because it is so close to a motivating conspiracy of his base, QAnon. A third of his mob is motivated by an equally strong cult belief, and he relies on that mob to control political opinion and wield credible threats against defectors. Meanwhile, his base is suffering from what I’ll call “Justice deprivation,” (which I’ll return to — I’m sure there’s a better term), meaning they believe in him because he continues to stoke their belief he’ll deliver “Justice.” But they’re getting impatient. The John Durham investigation didn’t quench their thirst for vengeance against the Deep State, and now Pam Bondi has been caught stalling on delivering justice to the pedophiles.

And, Ghislaine Maxwell has a credible threat. This doesn’t mean she has proof Trump raped 15-year olds, though we can’t rule it out. Given how things are proceeding, I doubt we’ll ever learn what it is. What matters is the threat was and is serious enough he recognizes he must neutralize it.

But that credible threat meant that two parallel developments — Maxwell’s attempt to cut her 20-year prison sentence and the bumbling efforts from Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino to resolve the Epstein thirst they had stoked — collided in the week before John Sauer had to move forward on defending the prosecution against Maxwell’s appeal. Probably, Bondi’s frantic review of the case files in March was an assessment, as Maxwell was preparing her appeal, of how badly those two risks collided, and (as we’ll see) a creation of a list of names to target.

For a brief moment, the left — which has squandered any effort to be able to command attention, in part because most prefer to yell at Chuck Schumer — managed to piggyback on the right wing mob to be able to command attention and even, in Congress, political risks.

In those weeks, we’ve seen Sauer take an action (the response to her cert petition at SCOTUS) that Maxwell viewed as a threat to her ability to get out of prison. Then, her attorney David Markus publicly conveyed that he believed Donald Trump was reneging on a deal (publicly, that was a reference to the appeal, but this is a world of easy double entendres). Then the initial WSJ story — I can’t prove that it came from Maxwell but everything that happened since is consistent with that and this discussion assumes that’s true — demonstrated to Trump how Maxwell’s threat might play out against the backdrop of his mob’s dissatisfaction with Bondi’s dodge on the Epstein files, which convinced Trump to take steps to address the Maxwell threat, all the while against the backdrop of the second (Iran was the first) defections from his base, as they accused Trump of covering up.

It’s fairly clear the plan was to fire Maurene Comey, freeing up Trump to sell out the victims, create a delay and diversion with the grand jury head fakes, so as to shift Maxwell’s focus on Trump onto everyone else. Markus revealed that she was asked about 100 people in her two-day “proffer,” and the plan is to feed the base with scandals about those 100 people, some of whom will be the most prominent Democrats. That will provide Trump the space and excuse to get Maxwell out of prison.

Meanwhile, the Tulsi Gabbard conspiracy theories met with tremendous success at redirecting the focus, at least of the top trolls, from Epstein to transparently bullshit claims about The Black President. Kate Starbird shows that the Epstein focus tailed off by the end of day on Friday July 18, after Tulsi aired her conspiracy theories.

But those conspiracy theories are already creating their own problems. The John Durham investigation already proved there’s no legal there there. And Tulsi recklessly (but effectively) upped the ante, promising even better results than Trump ever promised Durham would provide. Treason, she said.

Trump is still struggling. Perhaps, most lethally for him, he’s not hiding that he’s trying to command and redirect attention — he has said as much three times now. Spectacle fails when you reveal its strings, and Trump, himself, is disclosing them.

He literally reeled off a list of things he wants journalists to cover other than his own Epstein problems.

What are you hoping Todd Blanche gets out of his meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell?

Well I don’t know about the meeting — I know it’s taking place. And he’s a fantastic man. He’s a great attorney, and people should really focus on how well the country’s doing, or they should focus on the fact that Barack Hussein Obama led a coup, or they should focus on the fact that Larry Summers, from Harvard, that Bill Clinton, who you know very well, and lots of other friends — really close friends of Jeffrey Summers [sic] — should be spoken about, because, you know — Jeffrey Epstein — should be spoken about. And they should speak about them because they don’t talk about them, they talk about me, I have nothing to do with the guy.

[pre-planned exchange about the homeless in which Trump asserts authority to take over DC]

Have you heard about Todd Blanche’s interview with Ghislaine Maxwell? Have you considered clemency for Ghislaine Maxwell?

Well, I don’t want to talk about that. What I do want to say is that Todd is a great attorney. But you ought to be speaking about Larry Summers, you ought to be speaking about some of his friends that are hedge fund guys, they’re all over the place. You ought to be speaking about Bill Clinton who went to the island 28 times. I never went to the island.

Do you maintain you did not write a letter?

I don’t even know what they’re talking about. Now somebody could have written a letter, used my name, but that’s happened a lot. All you have to do is take a look at the dossier, the fake dossier. Everything’s fake with that administration. Everything’s fake with the Democrats. Take a look at what they just found about the dossier. Everything is fake. They’re a bunch of sick people.

[turns back to talk about homeless people]

[Another conversation endorsing genocide of Palestinians]

Would you consider a pardon or a commutation for Ghislaine Maxwell?

It’s something I haven’t thought about.

If [inaudible] recommended it?

I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.

But you wouldn’t rule it out.

But Markus, Maxwell’s attorney, is doing a good job of shifting the attention. After the first proffer, the WSJ magically came to focus on all those other people, some of the very same people Trump would name the next day (again, Markus revealed that Blanche brought in a list of about a hundred names, surely culled from what they saw in the case files; Maxwell is not being asked what happened, she’s being asked what kind of dirt she has on a pre-selected group of people).  And NewsMax and some key influencers are beginning to sell his narrative that Maxwell is the victim. Markus is a formidable lawyer in any context, but he happens to be South Florida’s formidable lawyer, and he knows these players and how they work.

And while Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi are nowhere near as formidable as Markus (indeed, Markus handed Blanche his ass on a cheap plastic plate), they do have the power and the shamelessness to do what needs to get done — the betrayal of victims, the clemency for a monster. Blanche already guaranteed that everything Trump will do going forward, including pardoning a sex trafficker to neutralize the threat she poses to him, will be rubber stamped by a SCOTUS already happy to sanction Trump’s crimes. We can’t probe his motives, even if they’re transparently deprave, SCOTUS already dictated.

That means only political pressure can thwart or impose a cost for Trump’s plan on rewarding a sex trafficker to redirect her weapons.

  • One question is what Maurene Comey does. She has been silent (and, as far as I know, has not been a source for any story). But there are a number of steps she might take that would either clarify how important her own firing was in making this happen or fuel the response.
  • I think Trump has also assumed the victims won’t find a way to speak up. That may well be true — after all everyone else is terrified and they have far less power than all the people cowering from Trump — but it may not be. There are a lot of journalists who have fought to tell their stories, and those stories are powerful.
  • Epstein’s executors are clear they’ll accept subpoenas. And at least for the moment, Democrats have succeeded in forcing Republicans to vote for subpoenas.
  • I’d love to do a campaign asking every Republican to go on the record about whether they would impeach Trump for a Ghislaine Maxwell pardon — but the moment for that may have passed.
  • One reason Deputy Attorneys General don’t meet with sex traffickers is because it makes them a witness. And while I think Blanche may one day claim he is protected by dual privileges — those of a top law enforcement officer and those of the President’s consigliere — that’ll be a legally dodgy claim. He has done plenty, already, to warrant a subpoena for testimony about why he has broken every law enforcement protocol to meet with a sex trafficker.
  • The three judges involved in the grand jury unseal requests seem to smell something is up; Richard Berman, in particular, is acutely aware of how badly the victims have and are being treated. (Note the docket in that case has shifted to non-public filing, which likely means victims have started filing their response to the unsealing request.)
  • Bondi created 1,000 witnesses to what is in the Epstein files, and put everything on a SharePoint server, meaning it may be vulnerable to hacking under the zero day just released, and was vulnerable to Elon’s DOGE boys.
  • NewsMax, which employs Alex Acosta and is front-running the pardon Ghislaine campaign, could be pressured for coddling pedophiles. And for the moment at least, the twin powerhouses of the Trump bubble, are taking different approaches (silence versus complicity) to helping Trump kill this story.
  • And until the far right totally gets on board, it is still possible to keep this swamping the news.

All of which is to say there are other sources of attention and power. Trump has a plan forward and a shit-ton of tools (and an exceedingly competent partner in Markus), but cannot be sure he’ll be able to reclaim that attention.

Still, a number of other things are going on, as Trump’s accelerating sprint to consolidate power.

Again, he is disclosing his strings. You don’t shift attention by telling people to avert their gaze, you entice them elsewhere. First Trump started yelling at his influencers for covering Epstein (most of them complied with his orders, but not all), and then he started giving people a list of things to cover instead: Trump’s claimed successes, his Potemkin trade deals, or the Obama conspiracy theory, or Larry Summers and Bill Clinton. You gotta pick, grandpa. You pick your focus and lead the way, you don’t give a multiple choice test!

The diversion — Tulsi’s conspiracy theory — may create its own problems. NYT reports that Tulsi did that without giving Pam Bondi a heads up (in the same way Bondi staged the first Epstein influencer event).

Ms. Bondi was given little warning the director of national intelligence was about to demand she investigate one of Mr. Trump’s most longstanding grievances: claims without evidence that the Obama administration overstated Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election in order to undermine him.

Ms. Bondi, fresh off a nasty fight with a top F.B.I. official over who was responsible for the political mess around the Epstein case, felt blindsided and annoyed, according to several people familiar with her thinking. They said that in reality, however, Ms. Gabbard was acting as little more than a proxy for a president demanding action on his vengeance agenda.

Ms. Bondi’s staff scrambled for a solution that would satisfy Mr. Trump while not committing the department to a tit-for-tat Obama investigation with unpredictable legal and political consequences.

Ms. Gabbard, standing at the White House briefing room lectern on Wednesday, made a series of provocative claims and pointedly said the onus was now on the Justice Department.

Several hours later, Ms. Bondi’s deputies posted an ambiguous, four-paragraph statement on the department’s website that announced the formation of what they described as a “strike force” to look into the Gabbard accusations.

In several posts, Ben Wittes has unpacked the series of non-announcements that Bondi has made.

So if the two conspired as government officials—as the Fox News article suggests—to do something nefarious to cook intelligence to get Trump, the statute of limitations for that offense, assuming such conduct even maps onto any known criminal offense, would have lapsed long ago. Ditto the statutes governing false statements and perjury. In other words, it’s completely unclear what the Justice Department—so eager to announce the investigation—might actually be investigating.

I can think of only two possible answers to this question.

Third, the first possibility is that some of the investigations of these matters dragged on for years, and some interviews might have taken place late enough that statutes of limitations have not yet run. For example, Comey gave one congressional testimony as late as September 2020, which would leave a few months yet before the statute of limitations on that. Brennan was interviewed by the John Durham investigation in August of the same year. So it’s theoretically possible that the investigation is limited to supposedly false statements made in the context of interviews made within the past five years.

Fourth, the second possibility—maybe more likely—is that the investigation is premised on a fanciful theory that the supposed “conspiracy” continued past the two men’s service in government. If you posit some conspiracy, after all, the statute of limitations runs five years past the end of the conspiracy, not five years after any of the specific acts that make up the conspiracy.

With respect to any supposed conspiracy involving Brennan and Comey to cook the intelligence on Russia to get Trump, we are operating in the land of fantasy. And when exactly does a conspiracy to commit a fantastical act end? In other words, if one predicates an investigation based on nonsense, it is possible to nonsense one’s way back quite a few years using a theory of conspiracy to nonsense.

Fifth, I actually doubt that either of these things is what is really happening here. What I think is happening is what one might call a ghost investigation.

I’d add another several points about evidence:

  • First, DOJ and FBI already conducted assessments about some of this evidence, both as they assessed it in counterintelligence reviews and as part of the John Durham investigation. As I’ve shown, Tulsi’s claims include an SVR document that HPSCI not only selectively cited, but which they had to know had been deemed “objectively false;” revisiting that decision would require, among other things, conceding that Jim Comey intentionally threw the election to Donald Trump in 2016. The Durham investigation showed that to try to make an investigation of these files, you have to fabricate things that aren’t even in the underlying Russian spy reports.
  • Now, think of the witnesses. DOJ can’t pursue this for the same reason it would have been nearly impossible to reopen the Russian investigation; because a credible witness (in that case, Bill Barr) had weighed in definitively. Tulsi’s recent claims conflict with things Kash Patel, Marco Rubio, and John Ratcliffe have had to say, after reviewing the same evidence. As I’ll show, the HPSCI Report right wingers are frothing over actually added an egregious error years after Kash sort of got the same assertion correct.
  • And that would also mean that the FBI and CIA Director would be natural, irreplaceable witnesses. Want to create a shitshow? Invite John Brennan to call Kash Patel as a hostile defense witness to both what happened in 2017 and what has happened more recently.

Will Sommer has been tracking what he calls “hype-debt” among Trump’s rubes.

But as I dove into the MAGA internet to get a sense of whether this distraction was working as intended, I was surprised to discover that not everyone was buying it. Yes, it’s only been a few days. But my sense is that Trump is racking up a sort of hype-debt within the party, as he tries to refocus his base away from one disappointment by setting them up for an even bigger one when Obama fails to face a military tribunal.

Take Liz Wheeler, a conservative pundit who received one of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s fateful Epstein binders back in February, and has since become one of the most vocal critics of Trump’s attempt to shut down questions about Epstein. On Monday, demonstrating why she was trusted to participate in the binder photo-op in the first place, she gushed that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had published “new evidence” of a scheme by senior members of the Obama administration to undermine Trump’s first term. (That was, coincidentally, a day after the infamous Wall Street Journal story on Trump writing a note to Epstein). Gabbard’s moves against Obama, she wrote, marked “the first glimmer of what I would call real justice.”

But even Wheeler couldn’t miss the contradiction here. If Obama and his aides committed treason, why don’t they actually get, y’know, arrested? Can a Trump Justice Department that can’t manage to release the Epstein documents without stepping on a series of rakes really pull off the criminal prosecution of an entire past presidential administration?

Wheeler said the only way to fulfill Trump’s new commitment to his supporters would be actual prosecutions.

Though he was also one of the first to catch NewsMax prepping the way for Maxwell’s clemency.

Meanwhile, Republicans are the only ones who buy this. In Gallup’s latest, Trump has started closing in on his all-time lows — his support immediately after leading an assault on the Capitol — among support from Independents. And that’s as the effects of his tariffs builds.

It seems likely that Trump’s defense attorney will pull of some kind of non-Trump Epstein distraction. What’s not yet clear is how much backlash that will elicit. Or whether Trump will reclaim his ability to grab attention.

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Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

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It’s funny, reading the two rehashes of the 2017 ICA that John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard released in the last weeks.

There are parallels and common judgments between them (probably in part because the CIA one was limited to “CIA materials provided to congressional oversight investigations”). Both say the confidence level for the judgment that Putin “aspired” to help then-candidate Donald Trump win the election was too high. Both say John Brennan big-footed the process in a problematic way. Both complain about the short timeline. Both complain that “the highest classified version of the ICA had been shared with more than 200 US officials;” neither acknowledge that that was neither anticipated nor, presumably, the fault of Obama appointees, who were long-gone by the time Trump’s appointees disseminated it that broadly (and in fact other documents Tulsi released suggest that ICA drafters intentionally planned a less-classified version to be disseminated at that level, to avoid the problem Trump’s appointees complain about). Both complain about how the Steele dossier was added as an appendix, though (as I’ll show in a follow-up) they’re inconsistent about how they claim it was.

But there are differences. the document from Ratcliffe — who released the first of the SRV documents contemporaneously with the HPSCI report that obsessed about them — doesn’t appear to mention them at all.

The two reports treat three pieces of intelligence on which the “aspired” judgment was based differently (the CIA one may not treat one of the HPSCI complaints at all). As I’ll note in my main post on the HPSCI report, CIA treats one document that HPSCI considers problematic as reliable but compartmented in a way that made inclusion problematic.

Perhaps the most interesting detail you get from reading both in tandem pertains to one phrase in a document about which “a senior CIA operations officer observed, ‘We don’t know what was meant by that’ and ‘five people read it five ways,'” basically, about whether that phrase hade been read the correct way. As of a few weeks ago, in Ratcliffe’s report, the CIA was still trying to protect this intelligence, but not Tulsi. She declassified most of four pages of discussion about the phrase, with information about the access — the source was well-established, had authoritative access to something but second-hand access to this information, but for some reason the CIA was not able to clarify what the source meant by the phrase. The HPSCI Report complains that the ICA didn’t note that this person had an “anti-Trump bias” (emphasis original).

And Tulsi declassified what the intelligence said (even though she hadn’t in the less classified version of the ICA she had released a day earlier).

Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails in July] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.

The HPSCI memo goes on to complain that Brennan included this. It invents a number of other readings this could have meant, besides that Putin wanted to help Trump win. Maybe Putin expected Trump to win, in July 2016 when no one else did? Maybe Putin counted on a Trump win at the RNC? They even tried to undermine the intelligence by claiming that all the things Putin did to tamper in the election could have served the other goals he also had.

None of the confirmed activities — leaks, public statements, social media messaging, and traditional propaganda — corroborate the ICA interpretation of the fragment, because these activities were all consistent with Putin’s objectives to undermine faith in US democracy, without regard for candidate Trump’s fate.

Putin approved the DNC leak because he was counting on Trump to win, the fragment said, and HPSCI Republicans want to believe that maybe Putin just wanted to undermine faith in democracy.

Well, anyway, as I said, Ratcliffe didn’t declassify any of that. He did send analysts back to review the underlying intelligence, and here’s what they said.

The DA Review examined the underlying raw intelligence and confirmed that the clause was accurately represented in the serialized report, and that the ICA authors’ interpretation of its meaning was most consistent with the raw intelligence.

And Ratcliffe also backs the quality of the source behind this claim.

The DA Review does not dispute the quality and credibility of the highly classified CIA serialized report that the ICA authors relied on to drive the “aspired” judgment.

So between them, Tulsi and Ratcliffe provided us something genuinely new. According to a reliable but ambiguous intelligence fragment, CIA got intelligence that said Putin approved the DNC leak  “because he was counting on” Trump’s victory.

Update: I’ve fixed the quotation mark in the title: just the “counting on” is a direct quote.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

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I joked the other day that it’s as if Trump offered his cabinet members a free condo for whomever best distracted from his Epstein problem.

Tulsi Gabbard is, thus far, winning the contest for the sheer shamelessness of her ridiculous claims.

She has manufactured claims of sedition out of her conflation — whether deliberate or insanely ignorant — of voting machines and the DNC server, built on top of President Obama’s perfectly reasonable request to document all the ways Russia tampered in the 2016 election. Then, she released a different report — a 2020 GOP HPSCI report complaining about Intelligence Community tradecraft in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. The HPSCI Report not only exhibits all the tradecraft failure it complains about, but it conflicts in some ways with her original propaganda.

In a presser at the White House yesterday (skip ahead to 12:30), Tulsi went one better, presenting the contents of the HPSCI report without context, focusing closely on a section that cites a cherrypicked selection of Russian intelligence reports purportedly (but not certainly) based off documents stolen from Democrats, the State Department, and a think tank.

Tulsi stood at the podium of the White House press room and delivered Russian intelligence, with an occasional “allegedly” thrown in, without explaining clearly that’s what she was doing.

In so doing, the Director of National Intelligence effectively teamed up with Russian spies, parroting analysis those Russian spies did on documents stolen from Hillary and people associated with her, without masking Hillary’s identity as required by intelligence protocol. This is precisely the kind of (then unsubstantiated) abuse that first animated right wing grievance back in 2017, outrage over the possible politicized unmasking of political adversaries, carried out by the head of intelligence from the White House podium.

They have become the monsters they warned about.

The SVR documents

Let me explain the documents. By 2016, there were actually two parallel Russian hacking campaigns targeting Hillary (and others). One, starting in 2016 and conducted by Russia’s military intelligence (GRU, often referred to as APT 28), obtained and caused the dissemination of documents during the election — the hack-and-leak campaign that Trump exploited to win the election. But starting years before that, Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR, often referred to as APT 29) targeted a number of traditional spying targets, including the White House, DOD, and State, some think tanks viewed as adversarial to Russia, and the DNC.

Here’s a report on APT 29’s hacking campaigns published in September 2015, which I wrote about here. Here’s a more recent history that includes those earlier hacks. I’ve been told that the interactions between APT 29 and APT 28 hackers inside Democratic servers was visible, but reluctant. APT 29 had and still has the more skillful hackers.

Unlike GRU, SVR did not use most of the files it stole in a hack-and-leak campaign. Russian spies analyzed the documents and wrote reports on them, like normal spying. But then someone — some other spying service, probably — spied on their spying efforts. And that entity shared what they found, including both the things SVR stole and the reports that Russian spies wrote about those stolen files, with the US Intelligence Community. And starting at least by 2018, right wingers have been obsessed with those stolen files and Russian intelligence reports, using them to feed one after another investigation into Democrats.

This gets a bit confusing, because we’re seeing the results of that obsession out of order. We first saw a right wing campaign based off them when John Ratcliffe, then the Director of National Intelligence, released a report about one particular analytical report, then released background documents; both were used as part of the effort to undermine the Mike Flynn prosecution in advance of the 2020 election. That particular report — allegedly claiming that in July 2016, Hillary endorsed a plan to focus on Trump’s ties to Russia to distract from the Clinton email investigation — served as the animating force for the Durham investigation, though Durham had to fabricate new details in the intelligence to do so. For years, Chuck Grassley has been frothing to release a classified appendix of the 2018 DOJ IG Report on the Clinton email investigation that pertained to the SVR documents, which Pam Bondi released the other day. Yesterday’s propaganda presser was based on the release of a 2020 critique of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment of the 2016 hack (there were earlier versions in which Kash Patel was involved), written by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI).

We’re surely not done. There’s a classified annex to the Durham report in which he tries to justify treating Russian intelligence product as true. And yesterday, Grassley and House Intelligence Chair Rick Crawford asked to get more of the SVR files, this time focused on Barack Obama.

So, these documents were addressed at length by Michael Horowitz (it’s not yet clear how prominently they figure in earlier HPSCI work), then packaged up as part of Trump’s reelection bid in 2020, then further fluffed up by Durham in his failed prosecution effort and, on top of these recent releases, will no doubt feed the frothers indefinitely. But this order matters, because right wingers kept forgetting what they learned in earlier iterations of this obsession.

 The 2018 classified annex

The DOJ IG classified annex considers FBI’s treatment of two kinds of files from that SVR collection: first, report(s) claiming that Loretta Lynch was trying to cover up the Clinton investigation and Jim Comey was trying to exacerbate it (Comey only appears in one), and, also, a set of files that might have raw State Department documents stolen by Russia that could be used to investigate Hillary.

The reports became important to Horowitz’ discussion of the Clinton email investigation because Jim Comey claimed in June 8, 2017 congressional testimony that one reason why he decided to make the prosecutorial decision on the Clinton investigation is because he worried that the two reports on Lynch might leak.

The raw intelligence became a focus because early on, alleged Trump adversary Peter Strzok sought to review the raw collection, a request that ultimately fell through the cracks, which Grassley uses to claim the investigation was not diligent enough.

A several page section of the report describing the collection — eight thumb drives, along with a set of data provided via other means — makes clear that, on top of normal concerns about allowing the FBI to review stolen US person data, the hesitation to access the data arose from the large number of privileged files, from the White House, from State, and from Congress, in there.

  • Thumb drives 1-5: These thumb drives included files stolen from US victims, including the Executive Office of the President, the State Department, and the House of Representatives, probably including a number of unknown US victims. The FBI did analyze these files, which helped them to identify where the Obama ones came from, that the Russians had obtained “advance intelligence about a planned FBI arrest of a Russian citizen,” and network maps of classified US government systems. Two drives, drives 3 and 4, “focused primarily on State Department communications,” as did much of the content of the other thumb drives. The FBI never comprehensively reviewed these files because of concerns about Executive and Congressional privileges tied to the victims. The FBI has queried them, three times:
    • In early 2016, FBI queried the drives using some approved keywords, apparently to understand Russia’s targets.
    • FBI later conducted a second set of limited queries, without reading the actual content. It did, however, create a “word cloud” of what was in the US victim data, which FBI treated as an index.
    • In August 2017, FBI OGC permitted an analyst working with Mueller to query the word cloud index on Clinton and clintonemail.com.
  • Thumb drives 6 and 7: These drives appear to include Russia’s reports about their hacks; victim data was included as attachments. The FBI permitted analysts to review non-victim data for foreign intelligence and evidentiary purposes, but not any content from the Executive Office of the President, State, or Congress.
  • Thumb drive 8: This data was never uploaded until 2018 and by the time of this report (also 2018) had never been reviewed. It was believed to include data redundant to what was on drives 1-5, including privileged material.
  • Post-8 data: This data appears to have come to the FBI via a medium other than a thumb drive. Their source filtered out certain kinds of victim data before passing it on. It also was unlikely to have the privileged sources of information — from EoP, State, and the House of Representatives — that presented concerns about the data on thumb drives 1-5. The FBI was permitted to review this data under the same rules as applied to Thumb drives 6 and 7 — that is, they could review the non-victim information.

Staring in August 2016, Andy McCabe started asking to access all eight drives. While the Obama White House told the FBI in October 2016 that their request for access was overly broad, they never got around to negotiating that access because the FBI was too busy working on the Russian investigation and exploiting Anthony Weiner’s laptop. White House Counsel Neil Eggleston circled back on this issue in his last day on the job, January 19, 2017.

Ironically, the most aggressive attempt to access these files up to the IG Report came from an analyst on the Mueller team — no doubt someone who has subsequently been fired. The IG Report describes that this person likely exceeded search protocols prohibiting searches on victim information, including on Clinton and clintonemail. Now, however, Trump will undoubtedly use Tulsi’s propaganda campaign as an excuse to read emails stolen from Barack Obama, waiving any privilege concerns (indeed, that should be understood as one goal of the task force Bondi set up yesterday, to collude with Russian spies to spy on President Obama).

For the purposes of understanding how Tulsi colluded with Russian spies yesterday, the most important detail from the classified annex is that the FBI didn’t treat the two Loretta Lynch reports as credible — the report describes that FBI considered them “objectively false.”

[W]itnesses told us that the reports were not credible on their face for various reasons, including that they contained information that the FBI knew to be “objectively false.”

One reason they likely believed that is because one of the two Lynch reports said that Comey was deliberately trying to stall the investigation.

Comey is leaning more to the [R]epublicans, and most likely he will be dragging this investigation until the presidential elections; in order to effectively undermine the chances for the [Democratic Party] to win the presidential elections. [brackets original]

It also revealed that the FBI never found the underlying stolen documents on which the reports were purportedly based — at one point, the DOJ IG Report notes that it wasn’t clear “if such communications in fact existed.”

The FBI didn’t believe these documents were credible.

But if you do believe the reports are credible — if you treat the reports as “true” — then it is not just “true” that Jim Comey was stalling the Clinton email investigation to help Republicans, but Russia believed that Comey was stalling the Clinton email investigation to help Republicans win the election.

HPSCI’s Jim Comey problem

The HPSCI report includes these SVR files, years after the FBI determined at least two of them were not credible, as “true” statements of Putin’s belief. I’ll write up the entire report separately; parts of it are quite rigorous and interesting, while the section on the Steele dossier was riddled with errors and this part — the part that relies on these SVR reports — was sort of an exercise in desperation to find as many reasons to discredit the claim that Putin tried to help Trump get elected as possible. This section is the mirror image of what the report alleges John Brennan was engaged in with the 2017 ICA Report, intelligence analysis that came to a conclusion and then found intelligence to back that conclusion. They include the SVR reports to argue that if Putin really wanted Trump to win, he would have released all these reports.

In a page and a half, the HPSCI report cites one after another of these reports.

  • In September 2016, Russian spies claimed that President Obama found Hillary’s health to be “extraordinary alarming.”
  • Russian spies claimed it had communications showing Hillary was suffering from “psycho-social problems” and even (Tulsi parroted there in the White House) “was placed on a regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’.”
  • Russian spies claimed Hillary had Type 2 Diabetes and deep vein thrombosis.
  • The claim — which John Ratcliffe noted could “reflect exaggeration or fabrication” in his report in 2020 — that Hillary had a plan to link Trump and Putin to distract from the Clinton email investigation.
  • Russian spies claimed Hillary traded financial funding for electoral support with religious organizations in post-Soviet countries.
  • US allies in London, Berlin, Paris, and Rome doubted her ability to perform the functions of President.
  • European government experts assessed that Trump’s only chance of winning was allegations about the Clinton Foundation.

The HPSCI Report includes in three bullets the allegations laid out in the two reports described in the IG Report, split up across two pages, as if they represent three reports.

[snip]

Not only do they ignore that the FBI viewed at least some of these reports as “not credible,” nor address the question of whether these reflected real intercepts at all.

But they don’t mention that the first of those two reports (probably the January 2016 one) also claimed that Jim Comey was going to stall the investigation to help Trump win.

If you believe the reports were “true,” then you believe that Jim Comey had a plan to help Trump win — much like what he did do — and that Putin shared that same belief.

It was bad enough that a bunch of right wing Congressmen desperate to create a propaganda document to help Trump get elected in 2020 exhibited such shoddy tradecraft.

But yesterday, the Director of National Intelligence stood at a White House podium and repeated one after another Russian intelligence report about which multiple entities have raised serious questions as to its accuracy.

In the guise of complaining about politicized spies exercising inadequate due diligence, Tulsi Gabbard just parroted these Russian intelligence reports — reports that either rely on intercepts of an American citizen or just make shit up — uncritically.

This was Russian spy product, delivered from the White House, from the head of US intelligence.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

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Yesterday, I wrote about how utterly fucking ridiculous Tulsi Gabbard’s influence operation claiming a Deep State plot against Donald Trump because Barrack Obama knows the difference between a voting machine and the DNC server (which Tulsi claims not to know in her little project).

Her propaganda project is not without benefit. I mean, not only have I called on all the right wing members of Congress who’ve been duped by Tulsi to demand that Pam Bondi fire Kash Patel for covering this all up when he reviewed the same files in 2020. But Tulsi declassified a somewhat classified version of the 2017 ICA (there were two classified versions, a super classified version for President Obama, Trump, and the Gang of Eight, and a less-classified version for other members of Congress — this is the latter). So not only can we see what secrets about Russia’s 2016 interference Director Tulsi wants to keep from us, but we can compare the classified version with the publicly-released version to see what was sensitive in 2017 but no longer is.

There are a number of things that either did not exist in the public version or remain significantly redacted. For example:

  • The classified version includes more discussion of the confidence levels. “We have high confidence in this assessment [that both SVR and GRU hacked political targets], the assessment described, “because it is based on a body of [redacted] intelligence reporting that reinforces and elaborates on publicly available commercial cyber analyses.” Elsewhere such language explains why some agencies were less certain.
  • Speaking of Russian spooks targeting political targets, the classified ICA provided more details on the RNC hacks, which had been reported but never explained in detail. GRU hacked GOP targets in early July 2016, but (it appears) that server hadn’t been used for over six years. But that paragraph immediately precedes one of the only entirely redacted paragraphs in the assessment. A paragraph in a later section describing that “we saw Russian collection on some Republican-affiliated targets,” also includes three redacted lines.
  • There’s a bit more detail on senior Russian officials, such as details about what hacked information was shared as intelligence, rather than used as an information operation.
  • There’s an entire section on Russia’s targeting of state election infrastructure, including details on an Illinois hack that, I had been told by sources, was far more serious than publicly acknowledged. There’s one short paragraph addressing one of the several hacks revealed by Reality Winner. In general, the report was overly optimistic about Russian targeting of voting infrastructure, and simply didn’t imagine that Russia might steal registration data so it could conduct an attack like Cambridge Analytica.
  • There’s a section explaining the ways that the attack could have been worse (though that claim is based, in part, on an assessment that “We did not detect extensive [redacted] influence operations as part of the Kremlin’s campaign.” Perhaps that part of the assessment would change as Robert Mueller investigated.
  • There’s more detail on Russia’s past election interference (this section is worth comparing side by side), along with a map of operations spanning 2000 to 2016 (though the details remain classified). The ICA also predicted (in two still partly redacted paragraphs) that Germany’s fall 2017 election would be the next one targeted; it ended up being France’s May 2017 election.

Those are just interesting details, nothing really that (no matter how much Tulsi misrepresents all this) disrupts years of questions about the attributions.

There are just two passages I’m far more interested in.

In the section on the trolls, in the paragraph before one that addresses Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s role in funding it, there’s both a subheading and the first few lines of that section redacted.

I’m interested in that because, as I’ve gotten further from 2016, I’ve seen more reason to believe that the Russian effort to use trolls to make stuff go viral closely overlapped with the far right effort to do the same.

And finally — unsurprisingly — I’m interested in details about the Guccifer 2.0 attribution that wasn’t in the public report. The italicized language below is new in the classified report.

The Kremlin’s campaign aimed at the US election featured disclosures of data obtained through Russian cyber operations via WikiLeaks, as well as via the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com, which are both likely GRU operations; GRU intrusions into US state electoral infrastructure; and overt propaganda. Russian foreign intelligence collection both informed and enabled the influence campaign, [redacted]

[snip]

Public Disclosures of Russian-Collected Data. We assess the GRU used both the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com operationally to release US [victim] data obtained in GRU cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets. We have high confidence that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks.com published GRU- hacked data, but moderate confidence that they were under direct GRU control [redacted]. We base our judgments on several factors: the information that was disclosed was information we assess the GRU accessed as part of its operations against US political targets; the initial data leak occurred the day after the US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike publicized Russia’s intrusion into the DNC; and signals intelligence placed the operators of Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks.com in Russia. 

Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be an independent Romanian hacker, made multiple contradictory statements and false claims about his identity throughout the election; [redacted] intelligence indicated the persona was controlled from Russia, and press reporting suggests more than one person claiming to be Guccifer 2.0 interacted with journalists, based on [redacted] and interactions with the press.

Content that we assess was taken from [redacted] e-mail accounts targeted in March 2016 by a GRU cyber espionage unit subsequently appeared on DCLeaks.com in June.

On several occasions, the administrators of Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks.com logged in to accounts associated with those personas using a Russia-based mobile broadband provider [redacted] although they generally attempted to obscure the source of their Internet traffic.

Of particular interest, to me especially: the IC was pretty sure that Russia was using Guccifer 2.0 to disseminate the stolen files, but was less sure what the relationship between the persona and the spooks running it was. The passage includes the allegedly accidental log-ins via a Russian provider, which was reported years ago. But in early 2017, anyway, all this was ambiguous.

Given the conspiracy theories Tulsi is spewing, all these questions seem quaint now.

But the ambiguity from the period did carry over for some time later.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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Suspected Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard has released a report of screen caps out of context and one 114-page collection of documents purportedly showing what she claims is a conspiracy against Donald Trump.

It serves its purpose — because a broad swath of very stupid people are currently frothing madly about it on Xitter.

What Tulsi purports to show is that the FBI didn’t back expansive claims of Russian involvement in election interference in September and October 2016, refused to participate in a assessment in December, only for Obama to order a new assessment, after which — Tulsi claims — the assessment changed to reflect more confidence in Putin’s involvement.

In general, Tulsi accomplishes the circus trick of getting stupid people to buy her narrative by conflating whether spooks thought Russia hacked the US voting tabulation infrastructure with Intelligence Community confidence that Russia was involved in the hack of the DNC and DCCC and then involved in the dissemination of files stolen from it.

So:

Voting infrastructure

Hack and leak

Not the same things

Tulsi assumes her rubes won’t notice she’s doing that and — lo and behold!! — she’s right!!

As one example of how transparently shoddy Tulsi’s “work” is, note how she misquotes a story (which she attributes to spooks but which might come from Congress) talking about the larger Russian intelligence operation in 2016, claiming it pertains exclusively to the “U.S. Election Hack.”

Tulsi doesn’t link the underlying story, for good reason, because reading the story gives away her game.

While it does use the word “hack” in the title, it includes two details that undermine Tulsi’s information operation.

U.S. Officials: Putin Personally Involved in U.S. Election Hack

New intelligence shows that Putin became personally involved in the computer breach, two senior U.S. officials say.

Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.

[snip]

The latest intelligence said to show Putin’s involvement goes much further than the information the U.S. was relying on in October, when all 17 intelligence agencies signed onto a statement attributing the Democratic National Committee hack to Russia.

Most importantly, the story describes that the Intelligence Community got new information. Wow! An explanation for why the assessment changed in December 2016!!!! All readily available if you just check Tulsi’s sources!!

Just as importantly, nothing in the article addresses tampering with the voting infrastructure, the topic of almost all the other screen caps in Tulsi’s propaganda, in her effort to conflate the voting infrastructure, the hack and leak, and the larger information operation.

There are a slew of other problems with Tulsi’s book report. It ignores:

  • The Russian investigation into Trump didn’t arise out of this intelligence. It arose out of Mike Flynn’s efforts to undermine the Obama sanctions on Russia in response, and Trump’s efforts to undermine the investigation of Flynn.
  • The Russian investigation discovered abundant new evidence, including proof that Trump’s campaign learned of Russia’s operation in advance. Trump’s Coffee Boy, Campaign Manager, National Security Advisor, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker were all eventually adjudged to have lied to cover up aspects of Trump’s involvement in the Russian investigation. And through their confessions, we learned that Russia dangled an impossibly lucrative real estate deal, told a Trump campaign official and his rat-fucker about their operation, got campaign data and strategy — possibly in exchange for millions of dollars and involvement in a plan to carve of Ukraine — and then undermined Obama’s foreign policy to help Russia.
  • After all these 2016 assessments, the NSA later developed evidence — according to the document Reality Winner leaked — that showed Russia did attempt to and had some success in hacking voting infrastructure.

Which is to say, Tulsi’s entire little book report is unrelated to the Russian investigation into Trump and her claims about hacking the election infrastructure were eventually revised.

But her report is not without interest.

If her story is true — if there is a shred of truth to her claims that Obama tried to alter the intelligence in 2016 — then evidence to that fact was available in 2020, when Kash Patel was reviewing precisely the same intelligence while serving as Ric Grenell’s handler, and that evidence was available from 2019 through 2023, when John Durham reviewed it all and determined that the spooks did nothing wrong.

In other words, if Tulsi’s allegations are true, it means Kash Patel and John Durham are part of the Deep State plot against Donald Trump!!!!

It means Trump’s hand-picked FBI Director was part of a sustained effort to cover-up Obama’s devious intervention in 2016.

If Tulsi’s allegations have any merit, then Pam Bondi must fire Kash Patel and include him, right along with all the nefarious actors Tulsi targets, because Kash covered this up when he could have helped Trump win the 2020 election.

Update: Corrected how long the primary document collection is.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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The IC (with an Assist from Journalism) Liberates the IC’s Debunking of Trump’s Alien Enemies Act

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The two NYT journalists who would be targeted in an investigation of the sources of leaks debunking Donald Trump’s Tren de Aragua Alien Enemies Act invocation have published a memo that further debunks Donald Trump’s Tren de Aragua Alien Enemies Act invocation. Charlie Savage and Julian Barnes published the memo, which Freedom of the Press Foundation liberated via FOIA.

The contents of the memo themselves are newsworthy. Like the initial report from Savage and Barnes and a follow-up about this memo in the WaPo, the memo describes that the Intelligence Community doesn’t think that the Maduro regime directs the actions of TdA.

The Maduro regime generally does not impede illegal armed and criminal groups from operating in Venezuela, but it does combat and seek to contain them when it fears they could destabilize the regime or when corrupt dealssour. Venezuela’ssecurity services lackthe capacity to fully control Venezuelan territory, giving the regime an interest in cooperating with armed groups for insight and control in areas outside the services’ traditional areas of operation. Furthermore, combatting such groups often results in personnel losses, probably encouraging the regime to at times cooperate with some groups instead of contesting them.

Some mid- to low-level Venezuelan officials probably profit from TDA’s illicit activities, according to [(b)(1), (b)(3)] and press reporting. For example, local military officials have alerted other armed and criminal groups conducting aerial drugshipments to Venezuelan Air Force patrols and might have alerted TDA leadership of a planned raid in 2023 against the prison that was its base of operations.

Even the FBI — the single agency of 18 that backed a claim that Maduro directs TdA — only claimed that some officials directed the migrants, and (as NYT also noted) other agencies think that may be based on fabrications.

While FBI analysts agree with the above assessment, they assess some Venezuelan government officials facilitate TDA members’ migration from Venezuela to the United States and use members as proxies in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the United States to advance what they see as the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing governments and undermining public safety in these countries, based on DHS and FBI reporting as of February 2024.

[snip]

In some cases, reporting warns that these sources could also be motivated to fabricate information.

[snip]

Some reports come from people detained for involvement in criminal activity in the United States or for entering the country illegally, which could motivate them to make false allegations about their ties to the Venezuelan regime in an effort to deflect responsibility for their crimes and to lessen any punishment by providing exculpatory or otherwise “valuable” information to US prosecutors.

But I’m just as interested in the significance of a successful FOIA that undercuts investigations into these leaks (and therefore, into the debunking of the core AEA invocation).

The AEA, which Trump secretly invoked on March 14, was used as justification to deport at least two planeloads of mostly Venezuelans on March 15. The NYT published their first story on March 20, as Judge James Boasberg queried whether the government defied his order not to do so. That same day, the government first moved toward invoking State Secrets to cover up the basis for their rendition flights, followed by a declaration from Todd Blanche. NYT published the story in their dead tree version only after Blanche announced an investigation into what seemed to be that leak. As I noted, in one of his first acts as Deputy Attorney General, Blanche was launching a witch hunt into a leak that exposed his actions.

Days after the WaPo followed up on the NYT story reporting the results of this report, Tulsi Gabbard adopted Dick Cheney’s habit of lying about intelligence assessments, accusing those who leaked the true contents of the assessment to be weaponizing intelligence.

I noted that her claims of a classified leak were likely overstated: what WaPo reported went little beyond an answer Gabbard gave to Joaquin Castro in the Global Threats hearing.

Castro: I want to ask about the Alien Enemies Act, real quick, while I have time. The President has used the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority last used to detain German and Japanese nationals during World War II, to summarily deport people accused of being members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. To invoke this law, the President must demonstrate the United States is under invasion by a foreign nation or government. They have alleged that we are under invasion by the Venezuelan government. The idea that we are at war with Venezuela would come as a surprise to most Americans. The unclassified version of the Annual Threat Assessment the Intelligence Community just released makes no mention of any invasion or war that we are fighting with the nation of Venezuela. You would think our nation being at war would merit at least a small reference in this Threat Assessment. Director Ratcliffe, does the Intelligence Community assess that we are currently at war or being invaded by the nation of Venezuela?

Ratcliffe: We have no assessment that says that.

Castro: In invoking the law the President alleged that Venezuela is taking hostile actions at the direction — clandestine or otherwise — of the Maduro regime in Venezuela. Director Gabbard: Does the Intelligence Community assess the Venezuelan government is directing Tred de Aragua’s hostile actions against the United States.

Gabbard: There are varied assessments that came from different Intelligence Community elements. I’ll defer to Director Patel to speak specifically to the FBI assessment.

[Kash moves to speak.]

Castro: But let me ask you. So you’re saying there are conflicting assessments that have come from the IC?

Gabbard: That’s correct.

Castro: Thank you. We’ll take it up in closed session.

Nevertheless, days later, Tulsi announced an investigation into the leaks.

And just days after that, Pam Bondi reversed Merrick Garland’s press protections, describing only the NYT and the WaPo stories to include classified information.

The leaks have not abated since President Trump’s second inauguration,6 including leaks of classified information.7

7 See, e.g., John Hudson & Warren P. Strobel, U.S. intelligence contradicts Trump’s justification for mass deportations, Washington Post (Apr. 17, 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/17/us-intelligence-tren-de-araguadeportations-trump; Charlie Savage & Julian Barnes, Intelligence Assessment Said to Contradict Trump on Venezuelan Gang, New York Times (Mar. 22, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/intelligence-trump-venezuelan-gang-alienenemies.html.

That created the appearance that, like Blanche before them, Tulsi and Bondi were also ratcheting up attacks on the press because the press and its sources called out Trump’s corrupt AEA declaration in real time.

These repeated paranoid leak investigations attempted to squelch public debunkings of Trump’s efforts to use a false claim about TdA to chip away at due process (a project that Stephen Miller has been pursuing for years).

And at a time when Trump’s Administration is falling further behind on FOIA requests, FOPF got near immediate response for its FOIA showing that even if any material in the NYT and WaPo stories was classified, it has since been publicly released. That kind of response only happens when people within an agency want something to be released. And in this case, it means that Tulsi has not sufficiently commandeered ODNI to prevent FOIA professionals to carry out a classification review and release information publicly.

It likely means that the people who leaked these debunkings in the first place have found a way to undercut claims that they committed a crime by doing so. At the very least that will make it hard for the FBI to argue this leak is of sufficient seriousness to obtain warrants and subpoenas targeting journalists. It may even make it impossible for the FBI to claim a crime was committed in the first place, because the FBI will have to prove that the NYT and WaPo stories relied on more than made it into this memo.

And all the while, even as one after another judge — including Trump appointees like Fernando Rodriguez Jr! — rule that the original AEA invocation was unlawful (in Rodriguez’ case, because any claimed invasion from Venezuela does not resemble what Congress would have understood an invasion to be in 1798 when AEA was passed), the IC is finding ways to make clear that Donald Trump knows or should know that the claimed ties between Nicolás Maduro and TdA are false.

Stephen Miller is trying to eliminate due process based on a nesting set of false claims.

And the spooks have, for a third time, exposed the core lie on which that effort builds.

Update: Lauren Harper, who liberated the memo, has posted the letter granting her FOIA. She submitted the FOIA on April 25; she got the memo on May 5.

Update: Judge Alvin Hellerstein also held the AEA invocation to be unlawful, finding there’s no war or invasion. But this may be more pertinent to these times:

The third consideration set out by Mathews, the “Government’s interest,” is more complicated. Drafting complaints with particular allegations against individual aliens, providing aliens with time to contact counsel and file a habeas petition, and preparing for a hearing before a federal judge takes time and manpower. However, it is the nature of due process to cause fiscal and administrative burdens. Rule by the ipse dixit of a President is likely more efficient than the deliberative procedures of a court. But it is what our Constitution, and the rule of law, demand. And due process, once surrendered, is difficult to reinstate.

Update: Citing the memo, Jim Himes and Joaquin Castro call on Tulsi to explain “Director Gabbard should explain why her public descriptions of this intelligence failed to correspond with the IC’s findings.”

Last month, we jointly wrote a classified letter to Director Gabbard asking her to declassify the April 7, 2025 Statement of the Community Memorandum entitled ‘Venezuela: Examining Regime Ties to Tren de Aragua.’ We are pleased that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a redacted declassified copy of that analysis in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. As the now-public document makes clear, the Intelligence Community assesses that the ‘Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA operations in the United States.’ This assessment reinforces the finding of a District Court judge last week that the Administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act with respect to Tren de Aragua was illegal.

Now that the public can read the Intelligence Community’s analysis that the Maduro regime does not direct Tren de Aragua, Director Gabbard should explain why her public descriptions of this intelligence failed to correspond with the IC’s findings. The most basic responsibility of the Director of National Intelligence is to speak truth to power and, where possible, the American people. Misrepresenting intelligence in public causes grave damage to the IC and to national security.”

Update: In another sign that the Spooks are not impressed with their new boss, WSJ reveals that they’re being asked to collect for actions that would support regime change in Greenland and Denbmark.

Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island.

The classified message asked agencies, whose tools include surveillance satellites, communications intercepts and spies on the ground, to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who support U.S. objectives for the island.

The directive is one of the first concrete steps Trump’s administration has taken toward fulfilling the president’s often-stated desire to acquire Greenland.

Tulsi continues to squeal about the Deep State Actors exposing her actions.

In a statement, Gabbard said: “The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of aiding deep state actors who seek to undermine the President by politicizing and leaking classified information. They are breaking the law and undermining our nation’s security and democracy.”

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Tulsi Gabbard’s NIE Lies Make Dick Cheney Look Honest by Comparison

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Yesterday, Tulsi Gabbard posted this tweet.

The last sentence of the tweet, referencing an “assessment that the foreign terrorist organization, Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime,” makes clear it pertains to a National Intelligence Estimate described last week by WaPo (and that Tulsi’s bossy claims about leak investigations pertains to the story itself, which I’ll return to).

As WaPo described it, 17 of 18 intelligence agencies say Tulsi is lying.

According to WaPo, the NIE says that,

although there are some low-level contacts between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua, or TdA, the gang does not operate at the direction of Venezuela’s leader.

[snip]

The finding was nearly unanimous among the U.S. intelligence agencies with the exception of the FBI, which assessed a moderate level of cooperation between the gang and the Venezuelan government, two people familiar with the matter said.

At least as WaPo describes, Tulsi may even be overstating the FBI conclusion that TdA had a moderate level of cooperation with the government, instead spinning that as, “Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime.”

If WaPo’s reporting is accurate — and we can be virtually certain it is — Tulsi is trying to rewrite the NIE to support Trump’s view, all the while screaming about weaponization.

WaPo describes the stakes of this dispute, but not very clearly. Whether TdA operates at the direction of Venezuela is one key prong on which Trump’s bid to deport Venezuelan makeup artists and soccer players with no due process to Nayib Bukele’s concentration camp in El Salvador.

Trump’s manic bid to deport hundreds of migrants to Nayob Bukele’s concentration camp rests on a series of tactics. Many of the tactics were evident in the mad rush last Friday, in the face of a legal injunction prohibiting deportation under the Alien Enemies Act in Southern District of Texas, to instead load a bunch of Venezuelans on planes in Northern District of Texas, from the Bluebonnet Detention Center.

Most of this (the bottom four entries describing how Trump is trying to use AEA deportations) is a bid to use the Alien Enemies Act in a particular way: to bypass deportation proceedings, providing last minute notice (reportedly in English) that guards demand detainees sign, rather than information about the availability of habeas corpus petitions, loading them onto flights where there is not yet an injunction, with demands that men sign documents affirming they are TdA members along the way. Those tactics are what we’re seeing in one frantic legal fight after another.

The Administration seems to want to get the AEA interpreted in this instance to allow virtually no due process — nothing more than Stephen Miller screeching on Fox News that you are TdA, without proof — to deport people who presented in the US, often making asylum claims.

But the larger scheme will only work if courts uphold the AEA in this context, for use in peacetime against a population from one particular home country. Here’s how Trump pitched TdA in the declaration itself.

Tren de Aragua (TdA) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States. TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela, and commits brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking. TdA has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.

TdA is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus. TdA grew significantly while Tareck El Aissami served as governor of Aragua between 2012 and 2017. In 2017, El Aissami was appointed as Vice President of Venezuela. Soon thereafter, the United States Department of the Treasury designated El Aissami as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, 21 U.S.C. 1901 et seq. El Aissami is currently a United States fugitive facing charges arising from his violations of United States sanctions triggered by his Department of the Treasury designation.

Like El Aissami, Nicolas Maduro, who claims to act as Venezuela’s President and asserts control over the security forces and other authorities in Venezuela, also maintains close ties to regime-sponsored narco-terrorists. Maduro leads the regime-sponsored enterprise Cártel de los Soles, which coordinates with and relies on TdA and other organizations to carry out its objective of using illegal narcotics as a weapon to “flood” the United States. In 2020, Maduro and other regime members were charged with narcoterrorism and other crimes in connection with this plot against America.

Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA. The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States. Indeed, in December 2024, INTERPOL Washington confirmed: “Tren de Aragua has emerged as a significant threat to the United States as it infiltrates migration flows from Venezuela.” Evidence irrefutably demonstrates that TdA has invaded the United States and continues to invade, attempt to invade, and threaten to invade the country; perpetrated irregular warfare within the country; and used drug trafficking as a weapon against our citizens. [my emphasis]

Some of this (we’re not at war no matter how inflammatory Trump claims migration is) is not legally apt to the statute. Some of this (the specific ties between Maduro and the gang, including his intent to use the gang as a weapon) is not true.

Which is why Tulsi is attempting to claim it is. Thus the stakes on the NIE. Thus Tulsi’s need to claim the NIE concluded something other than it concluded.

As ACLU is arguing in cases challenging the use of the AEA around the country (in this case, men in NDTX saved from deportation by SCOTUS’ intervention on Saturday), the Trump Administration shouldn’t be able to use the AEA at all in this context, because the US is not at war, and the convoluted assertions Trump made to claim we are — that the US is being invaded by a gang backed by Venezuela — does not hold up.

In a Proclamation signed on March 14 but not made public until March 15 (after the government had already attempted to use it), the President invoked a war power, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (“AEA”), to summarily remove noncitizens from the U.S. and bypass the immigration laws Congress has enacted. See Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act (Mar. 15, 2025) (“Proclamation”).1 The AEA permits the President to invoke the AEA only where the United States is in a “declared war” with a “foreign government or nation” or a ‘foreign government or nation” is threatening to, or has engaged in, an “invasion or predatory incursion” against the “territory of the United States.” The Proclamation targets Venezuelan noncitizens accused of being part of Tren de Aragua (“TdA”), a criminal gang, and claims that the gang is engaged in an “invasion and predatory incursion” within the meaning of the AEA.

[snip]

Petitioners contend that the Proclamation is invalid under the AEA for several reasons. First, the Proclamation fails to the AEA’s statutory predicates because TdA is not a “foreign nation or government,” nor is TdA is engaged in an “invasion” or “predatory incursions” within the meaning of the AEA. Thus, the government’s attempt to summarily remove Venezuelan noncitizens exceeds the wartime authority that Congress delegated in the AEA. Second, the Proclamation violates both the Act and due process by failing to provide notice and a meaningful opportunity for individuals to challenge their designation as alien enemies. Third, the Proclamation violates the process and protections that Congress has prescribed for the removal of noncitizens in the immigration laws, including protection against being sent to a country where they will be tortured.

If ACLU successfully argues that there’s an NIE that shows even the Intelligence Community knows the basis on which Trump declared AEA is false, then it will undermine the entire effort to use AEA to achieve due process-free deportations.

As I said above, we can be pretty sure that Tulsi is lying on Xitter. That’s not just because her Global Threat Assessment, released a week after Trump invoked the AEA, makes no mention of such invasion or even Tren de Agua (which I noted here). But also because because when Joaquin Castro asked her about such assessment, she confessed that there were competing assessments.

Castro: I want to ask about the Alien Enemies Act, real quick, while I have time. The President has used the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority last used to detain German and Japanese nationals during World War II, to summarily deport people accused of being members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. To invoke this law, the President must demonstrate the United States is under invasion by a foreign nation or government. They have alleged that we are under invasion by the Venezuelan government. The idea that we are at war with Venezuela would come as a surprise to most Americans. The unclassified version of the Annual Threat Assessment the Intelligence Community just released makes no mention of any invasion or war that we are fighting with the nation of Venezuela. You would think our nation being at war would merit at least a small reference in this Threat Assessment. Director Ratcliffe, does the Intelligence Community assess that we are currently at war or being invaded by the nation of Venezuela?

Ratcliffe: We have no assessment that says that.

Castro: In invoking the law the President alleged that Venezuela is taking hostile actions at the direction — clandestine or otherwise — of the Maduro regime in Venezuela. Director Gabbard: Does the Intelligence Community assess the Venezuelan government is directing Tred de Aragua’s hostile actions against the United States.

Gabbard: There are varied assessments that came from different Intelligence Community elements. I’ll defer to Director Patel to speak specifically to the FBI assessment.

[Kash moves to speak.]

Castro: But let me ask you. So you’re saying there are conflicting assessments that have come from the IC?

Gabbard: That’s correct.

Castro: Thank you. We’ll take it up in closed session.

For his part, John Ratcliffe admitted that “we” (possibly meaning the CIA) has no assessment that backs Trump’s claim of invasion. The CIA would be one of the 17 agencies that debunked Trump’s claim.

So now that WaPo confirmed what was evident just from this exchange (the WaPo story notes that both Castro and Jim Himes raised the AEA during the hearing) Tulsi is trying to lie about the assessment by claiming this is an illegal leak, precisely the weaponization against which Trump ran.

The weaponization of intelligence to undermine the President’s agenda is an assault on democracy. Those behind this illegal leak of classified intelligence, twisted and manipulated to convey the exact opposite finding, will be held accountable under the full force of the law. Rooting out this politicization of intelligence is exactly what President Trump campaigned on and what Americans overwhelmingly voted for.

Blah blah blah.

Unless Tulsi wants to start going after her former House colleagues, it’s likely there was no classified leak. It goes little beyond what Tulsi herself said in this exchange with Castro, and otherwise relies on named expert sources.

“The idea that Maduro is directing Tren de Aragua members and sending criminals to infiltrate the United States is ludicrous,” said Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

The group, which started as a prison gang in the Venezuelan state of Aragua in 2014, has expanded into a transnational gang that has carried out brazen crimes from Santiago, Chile, to New York City. But it does not operate with a clearly defined hierarchical structure, Ramsey said.

“Tren de Aragua has become more like a brand that any group of carjackers from Miami down to Argentina can invoke to further their criminal activity, but there’s really no clear sense of hierarchy,” he said. “And the reality is that Tren de Aragua has not always gotten along with the Maduro government: We saw just a few years ago, the military in 2023, stormed a prison that Tren de Aragua controlled and allegedly carried out extrajudicial executions.”

And Tulsi is trying to silence experts with unbridled Orwellian claims that up is down — that the single FBI assessment, assessing moderate contacts — says that TdA is acting with Venezuelan support, a claim that even still falls well short of what Trump claimed in his declaration.

Tulsi built her entire career around opposing the wars that Dick Cheney ginned up two decades ago. Now, in Cheneyesque fashion, she’s grotesquely inventing a war that doesn’t exist so she can help Trump destroy the Constitution.

Update: In a CO case granting two detainees a Temporary Restraining Order forbidding their deportation under the AEA, Judge Charlotte Sweeny said this about the AEA:

According to Petitioners, the Proclamation exceeds the President’s “statutory authority in three critical respects.” ECF No. 2 at 11. First, there is no “invasion or predatory incursion.” Id. Second, any purported invasion is not perpetuated by a “foreign government or nation.” Id. And third, there is “no process to contest whether an individual falls within the Proclamation.” Id. Skepticism of the Proclamation’s contrary findings is required, Petitioners urge, to the point of satisfying their first TRO burden. Id.; see also M.G., 117 F.4th at 1238. The Court agrees.

That said, Sweeny’s analysis did not focus on the relationship between Tren de Aragua and the Maduro regime.

Petitioners contend, as with its failures to identify an “invasion” or “predatory incursion,” the Proclamation likewise fails to assert a “foreign nation or government” is “invading the United States.” ECF No. 2 at 14. The Court agrees with Petitioners. The Court discerns little reason to linger on this point, especially where, as Petitioners observe, the Proclamation finds TdA is “closely aligned with [and] infiltrated[] the Maduro regime.” Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua, 90 FR 13033. The Proclamation does not find TdA itself is a foreign nation, country, or government. At bottom, the Proclamation fails to adequately find or assert TdA is a “foreign nation or government,” § 21, sufficient to justify the Act’s invocation. Indeed, if TdA was such a “foreign nation or government,” id., there would be no need for it to “undertak[e] hostile actions . . . at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela,” Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua, 90 FR 13033 (emphasis added).

Rather, in lengthier analysis, she focused on the absence of military invasion. She did not rely on Ratcliffe’s comment, but she could have.

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Stephen Miller’s Presumed Babysitting of JD Vance’s European Animosity … and DOD’s Potential War Crimes

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Tulsi Gabbard’s testimony at the threat hearings was clear: After falsely claiming that fentanyl was the top threat to the United States, she said the second threat was China. That’s important background to the most interesting comment I’ve seen about the chat.

The Trumpsters on the chat were obsessed with making Europe pay for the operation. But — as  Nathalie Tocci noted in this NYT story focused on the Trumpsters’ obsession — the entire conversation ignored the import to China of transit through the Suez Canal.

“It is clear that the trans-Atlantic relationship, as was, is over, and there is, at best, an indifferent disdain,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs, who formerly advised a top E.U. official. “And at worst, and closer to that, there is an active attempt to undermine Europe.”

[snip]

He and others, like Anna Sauerbrey, the foreign editor of Die Zeit, noted that the explicit demand for payment, rather than just political and military support, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, was new. And it ignored the fact that “the U.S. depends on global trade,” she said, and that “France, Britain and the Netherlands have deployed ships to the region” for the same purpose. The Americans, she said, “are constantly overlooking European efforts.”

China, for example, gets most of its oil imports through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and does much of its export trade with Europe through the same sea route. But no one is asking China to pay, Ms. Tocci noted.

In the texts released by Atlantic, there’s actually even more focus on the trade that transits the canal than the original story.

Indeed, it was at the center of debates over whether the strikes should go forward, which decision Tulsi Gabbard claimed had been made long before the chat started, and which debate, in yesterday’s cover story, was hailed as a policy process working.

Eleven minutes after Mike Waltz kicks off the thread with instructions that Joint Staff is sending “a more specific sequence of events in the coming days,” JD Vance piped in to say he thought the strikes were a mistake.

He focused on the fact that (he claimed) just 3% of US trade goes through Bab el-Mandeb, whereas 40% of Europe’s does.

Both Joe Kent (Tulsi’s unconfirmed aide) and John Ratcliffe respond that they could wait; indeed, in an arguably classified text, Ratcliffe says that more time would “be used to identify better starting points for coverage on Houthi leadership.” Kent also offers to provide unclassified details on shipping, perhaps to correct JD’s claim.

Remember, the person most likely to have been the “JG” whom Waltz tried to add to the chat instead of Jeff Goldberg is Jamieson Greer, Trump’s trade representative, who likely would have had the precise details (and also might be sufficiently grown up to point out how stupid this Signal chat was).

Then Pete Hegseth pipes up to second JD’s specific concerns about messaging, including his worry that (ha!) the plans will leak and “we look indecisive.”

Waltz responds to JD’s original point, correcting him about how much US traffic transits Bab el-Mandeb, accounting for the fact that the stuff transiting the canal ends up in trade with the US.

That’s the first 27 minutes of the substantive discussion. Somewhere between 8:32 and 8:42AM, Waltz adds “SM,” believed to be Stephen Miller.

After adding Miller (but without mentioning he added him), Waltz returns to the issue of sea lanes, asserting that unless the US reopens them, they won’t get reopened.

JD suggests that if Hegseth is okay with the strikes, “let’s go.” He suggests Houthi targeting of Saudi oil facilities are one downside risk, not Saudi involvement, which is why the US has often chosen to lead on Houthi strikes.

Then Hegseth agrees that the Europeans are “free-loading It’s PATHETIC,” and says “we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can” reopen the shipping lanes — which may suggest he believes China could do it too.

As Tocci pointed out to NYT, there’s no discussion of asking China to pay for these strikes. No discussion of how doing so for China helps China build its influence in Europe. No discussion at all in how this might affect China.

These boys purportedly intent on confronting China simply don’t consider the policy decision’s affect on China. JD and Whiskey Pete, at least, are interested primarily in hurting Europe.

Another 46 minutes elapse before SM — added after JD was wailing about the Europeans — comments. He offers an interpretation of what Trump said: a green light on the operation, he opines, but the US would harass Egypt and Europe after the fact to extort a payback.

Eleven minutes later, Hegseth — the guy to whom JD appealed on this issue — agreed with SM’s interpretation of the President’s intent.

That settled it. As I noted, SM’s — presumed to be Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy advisor — interpretation of the President’s intent is the sole backup in this now public document that the President authorized the strike at all: “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light.”

And the next thing we know, after Waltz resets how long until this PRA/FRA-covered communications will be destroyed illegally — DOD is flattening the apartment of someone’s girlfriend.

Fist-flag-fire!

By March 17, locals in Sanaa were claiming 53 people had been killed in this and ensuing strikes, including five children.

Even ignoring the foreknowledge of a civilian target, that makes the whole thing legally precarious, because everyone on the list is relying on SM’s interpretation of presidential intent. With the foreknowledge, it puts everyone involved in the strike at much greater legal risk because the legality of it, seemingly a target with significant civilian exposure, is so fragile.

But the other thing it does is show SM — again, believed to be Trump’s top domestic policy advisor — serving as the surrogate for Trump, and doing so in a way designed to shut JD up.

Like wormtongue, his mere gloss of the leader’s intent is treated with uncontested authority.

 

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