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Prosecutorial Discretion in the Age of Shitlords and “Psychological loldongs Terrorism”

I’m working on one more post integrating materials from the Douglass Mackey trial.

But first I want to comment about some investigative and prosecutorial details about the case.

I’ve made a timeline showing what got introduced in the troll chatrooms as evidence, other known activities of Mackey and the cooperating witness Microchip, and investigative details here. The timeline includes the following DM threads that were treated as part of the conspiracy for which Mackey was convicted:

In addition, this exhibit, which was introduced under a different evidentiary rule (largely, but not entirely, Mackey’s comments, rather than those of the conspiracy), consists in part of conversations elsewhere sourced to FedFreeHateChat from earlier in 2015-2016, along with a number of two-person DMs involving Mackey or unindicted co-conspirators 1080p or Microchip.

As you read the threads, remember a few things about them. First, they’ve been extensively sanitized of the racist and misogynist language used in the threads. Anything that wasn’t directly relevant to proving either the means and goals of Mackey’s trolling, a conspiracy between the thread participants, or their intent in sending out false tweets to depress the turnout of Black and Latino Hillary supporters was excluded as prejudicial.

You can read some of what was excluded — and the very important debate about where Mackey’s free speech ended and where an attempt to impair the votes of Black and Latino Hillary supporters began — in these court filings:

  • January 30, 2023: Mackey’s effort to exclude pre-September 2016 language and commentary from when he was banned by Twitter and inflammatory speech
  • January 30, 2023: The government’s effort to get the contents of the four chatrooms, above, admitted
  • February 24, 2023: Mackey’s response to the government’s motion
  • February 24, 2023: The government’s response to Mackey
  • February 28, 2023: The government’s reply to Mackey
  • February 28, 2023: Mackey’s reply
  • March 7, 2023: Mackey letter after meet-and-confer that details objections, revealing content of some excluded files
  • March 7, 2023: Government memo after meet-and-confer
  • March 10, 2023: Judge Nicholas Garaufis order laying out admissible exhibits
  • March 11, 2023: Mackey letter seeking to exclude bigoted speech and FBI agent testimony
  • March 13, 2023: Mackey letter seeking to exclude comment about women voting
  • March 13, 2023: Government letter responding regarding bigoted speech
  • March 19, 2023: Mackey letter objecting to specific inflammatory language and memes showing Trump in violent conquest

The outlines of this dispute will be critical to the inevitable appeal of Mackey’s guilty verdict.

These Twitter DM groups weren’t the only places these trolls organized, as portrayed by trial evidence. After one of Mackey’s bannings, he authenticated his new Twitter ID on Facebook and continued to work with others on Discord. The government did not introduce any of the related threads from TheDonald or 4chan with which — as a tweet from Microchip made clear — their efforts on Twitter were sometimes coordinated.

The exclusion of related 4chan activity is significant. At trial, Mackey took the stand and claimed he had gotten the text-to-vote meme for which he was charged from widely available 4chan threads, not from these DM groups, one of which he did not rejoin after being banned by Twitter on October 5. Mackey similarly claimed not to know the key players in workshopping this meme in the War Room twitter group beyond their user name.

The claim was pretty unconvincing; it may have been an attempt to deny forming a conspiracy with the others, or an effort to protect his online friends.

I’m interested in the picture of the conspiracy provided by these threads for several related reasons.

For starters, I’m interested in the troll — prosecutors referred to the account using a female pronoun — who first created a text-to-vote meme like the one that Mackey was convicted of. On October 27, 2016 on the War Room thread (which Mackey had rejoined after being banned), HalleyBorderCol (HBC) suggested, “let’s depress illegal voter turnout with a nice hoax ;).” Someone using the moniker P0TUSTrump argued they should hold off so the hoax would not get debunked before actually suppressing the vote. HBC responded by addressing him as “Donald” and explaining — using a British spelling for rumor — how rumors work, especially on social media:

people aren’t rational. a significant proportion of people who hear the rumour will NOT hear that the rumour has been debunked.

Then, two days later, HBC posted the first of the vote-by-text (as opposed to vote-by-hashtag) memes using the text number that allowed DOJ to track the reach of those that Mackey would send on November 2.

As far as is public, prosecutors never charged HBC, in spite of her key role in planning a “hoax” to suppress turnout, but perhaps that’s because she lives in a place where they spell “rumor” with a “u.”

In fact, DOJ didn’t even identify HBC as an unindicted co-conspirator in the complaint against Mackey, though it does describe her actions. The complaint names Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet as CC#1 (compare ¶17 of the complaint with this DM), Microchip as CC#2 (compare ¶25 of the complaint with this DM), a troll named NIA4_Trump who got temporarily suspended along with Mackey in November 2016 as CC#3, and a thus far unidentified troll named 1080p who was instrumental in tweaking the memes to more closely mimic Hillary’s graphics as CC#4 (compare ¶22a in the complaint with this DM).

By the time DOJ described the co-conspirators in a footnote to their February 24 filing, however, HBC was first on their list.

As was noted in the government’s initial motion in limine, the government alleges that individuals who posted, shared, or strategized over how to optimize the deceptive images or the messages therein are co-conspirators, and that the statements of those individuals are admissible as co-conspirator statements. These co-conspirators include the Twitter users identified in the Government’s Motion in Limine: @Halleybordercol, @WDFx2EU7, @UnityActivist, @Nia4_Trump, @1080p, @bakedalaska, @jakekass, @jeffytee, @curveme, 794213340545433604 and @Urpochan, the latter of which was described but not specifically identified as a co-conspirator in that submission. The materials provided to defense counsel on September 23, 2023 [sic] include statements from the following additional users which are of a similar character and admissible as co-conspirator statements: @WDFx2EU8, @MrCharlieCoker, @Donnyjbismarck, @unspectateur and 2506288844.

Note this footnote treats a second Microchip account as separate rather than identifying that it knew Microchip was behind both accounts using the same naming convention, “@WDFx2EU#.” This was the period after DOJ had informed Mackey, on February 13, which Twitter handles its cooperating witness had used but before DOJ had publicly revealed that it had a cooperating witness.

When it came to cross-examining Mackey on his claims to know nothing about these people, however, AUSA Erik Paulson prioritized HBC.

Q I’d like to ask you about some of people in that room.

A Okay.

Q Who is HalleyBorderCol?

A That’s someone I just know as HalleyBorderCol. I don’t know anything more about that person.

Q Nothing more?

A Yes.

[snip]

Mr. Mackey, do you remember this page?

A Yes.

Q HalleyBorderCol says: Let’s did depress illegal voter turnout with a nice hoax.

A Yes.

Q POTUSTrump says: I like that idea Haley, but I think we should wait for the day before or the day of, that way they don’t have time to debunk the rumor. Needs to be earlier than that.

The government’s identification of HBC in the complaint, or not, doesn’t matter legally. What mattered legally for the purpose of the trial was that Judge Ann Donnelly ruled the government had presented sufficient evidence of a conspiracy to treat HBC as one for the purposes of hearsay exception rules; Donnelly ruled that all the accounts listed above were.

But DOJ’s decision to charge Mackey alone, and to make Microchip plead guilty after a series of proffers as part of a cooperation agreement, suggests DOJ exercized discretion to treat HBC and a few other key players differently, even while both at trial and in the development of the offending meme she had a larger role.

She certainly had a larger role in the text-to-vote meme itself than Baked Alaska, for example.

Baked Alaska is all over the trolling effort. He congratulates Mackey for being named the 107th most influential political tweeter of 2016, as everyone else did too, in March 2016. He warns against “roast[ing]” Bernie supporters, “cuz the more hatred they have for hillary the more likely they will join us in national or not vote at all,” in the same April 20, 2016 chat where he discusses the “new smart team” Trump has hired. On April 23, 2016, Baked Alaska asked Mackey via DM if he wanted to join the “Trump HQ Slack for more coordinated efforts?”

In May, Mackey asks for his help making #InTrumpsAmerica go viral. Baked Alaska boasts on July 24 that “we are controlling the narrative this is amazing.” In October, Gionet reminds other trolls to “make [minorities] hate hillary.”

At least as exhibited in the trial evidence, Baked Alaska’s sole overt act in the deceptive tweet involves instructing 1080p to “make a text message version of” the Tweet calling to vote remotely (it’s unclear whether Gionet calls 1080p or jeffytee “Gabe”). The tweets for which Mackey was convicted may have been his idea, but others executed the idea.

But it was enough for others to credit him with some responsibility for Trump’s win on November 9, 2016. “Tonight we meme’d reality,” Baked Alaska said after the win.

One more person’s role is of interest. Andrew Auernheimer — better known as Weev — was all over the earlier FedFreeHateChat, which came in for Mackey’s direct comments rather than as statements of co-conspirators. Weev seems to have spent the end of 2015 helping Mackey fine-tune his trolling skills. “Thanks to weev I am i[m]proving my rhetoric,” Mackey said in FFHC on November 19, 2015. “I just hope all this shitlording goes real life.”

Weev’s involvement is of particular interest because he was helping to run the Daily Stormer in pro-Russian territories. He was always one of the most obvious potential ties between Trump’s trolls and Russia. That’s one reason this paragraph, from the government’s motion in limine, reads very differently if you know “the Twitter user” in question is Weev.

On or about December 22, 2015, the defendant communicated with others in a Twitter direct-message group about sharing memes that would suggest certain voters were hiding their desire to vote for the defendant’s preferred Presidential candidate. The defendant stated, “it’s actually a great meme to spread, make all these shitlibs think they’re [sic] friends are secretly voting for Trump.” Several weeks later, on or about January 9, 2016, the defendant and another Twitter user discussed their Twitter methodologies. After the defendant stated that “Images work better than words,” the user stated “we should collaboratively work on a guide / like, step by step, each major aspect of the ideological disruption toolkit . . . ricky you could outline your methods of commentary / we could churn out a book like this, divide profits / and hand people a fucking manual for psychological loldongs terrorism.” The defendant responded “Yes… I think that would be good / I could do another chapter on methodologies from the ads industry– shit like my twitter ads stuff was very much the result of careful targeting, nobody’s managed to replicate it properly since.” Shortly thereafter, the Twitter user stated, “honestly at this point i’ve hand [sic] converted so many shitlibs that like, i am absolutely sure we can get anyone to do or believe anything as long as we come up with the right rhetorical formula and have people actually try to apply it consistently.” The defendant responded, “I think you’re right.”2 These statements, and those like them, are admissible and relevant to show, among other things, that the defendant’s intent in spreading memes was to influence people.

But Weev doesn’t appear, at least under the handle Rabite, after he celebrated the efficacy of the trolling on the day Trump sealed the nomination.

it’s fucking astonishing how much reach our little group here has between us, and it’ll solidify and grow after the general

“This is where it all started,” Mackey responded. But for Weev, that’s where his appearance in the trial evidence, under the moniker Rabite, at least, ended.

Weev’s absence — under his Rabite moniker, anyway — is all the more striking given that per a bench conference at trial, the search warrant specified that the specific meme Mackey ultimately sent out came from The Daily Stormer.

The search warrant also noted that the one that the defendant sent out was available on the Daily Stormer website, the American Nazi newspaper, as early as October 29, which is a couple days before the defendant did.

That is, Weev may have played a direct role in creating the meme in question. But unless he was posting under the moniker 1080p (who may have been referred to as “Gabe” by others), he was not credited with doing so in evidence presented at trial.

That differential treatment — and the changed focus on HBC in the trial as compared to the complaint — is one reason, but in no way the only reason, I’m interested in some other investigative details:

  • Details about Microchip’s discussions with the government
  • The timing of interviews with Hillary Clinton staffers and its disclosure to Mackey
  • The decision not to call an investigative agent to the stand

According to a motion in limine dispute, an FBI agent named Jamie Dvorsky attempted to interview Mackey in Florida after his identity was disclosed in April 2018, which is when the FBI opened the case. Mackey first raised this issue on March 11 after he received materials on potential witnesses.

According to reports of FBI Special Agent Jamie Dvorsky, marked by the government as 3500-JAD-2 and 3500-JAD-17 (submitted under seal herewith), she and another agent traveled to Florida in 2018 and met Mr. Mackey at a Panera Bread in Boynton Beach. Mr. Mackey told her that he would be happy to speak to the agents if they would first contact his attorney, Richard Lubin. Mr. Lubin thereafter contacted Agent Dvorsky and said that Mr. Mackey would “100% cooperate and talk to the FBI.” Thereafter, Mr. Lubin did not contact the FBI nor return multiple calls.

When the government responded two days later, they described planning to call Dvorsky to explain how and when the FBI first opened the investigation.

As discussed with defense counsel, the government is calling Special Agent Dvorsky to testify as to when the government learned that the defendant was the user of the accounts that distributed the deceptive images and the initial investigative steps that were taken in the wake of that revelation. The chronology matters. As noted above, to the extent the defendant claims or suggests that the prosecution was somehow politically motivated, the fact that the government first identified the defendant in 2018 and began its investigation at that point is relevant in that regard. The government does not intend to elicit from Special Agent Dvorsky testimony that the defendant offered to cooperate with the FBI, but never followed through on the offer. Rather, to the extent that Agent Dvorsky will communicate the defendant’s statements at all, her testimony will be limited to the defendant’s telling her that he worked with Paul Nehlen.4 Accordingly, the limited testimony the government does intend to elicit is simply not prejudicial and does not warrant preclusion

They never did call her, though.

The FBI contacted Microchip, now their cooperating witness, around December 17, 2018 about a perceived threat he had made online in July 2018, but that may have been about a different case. Microchip then contacted Baked Alaska to inform him about the FBI visit, suggesting he has or had resilient ties to Baked Alaska.

Megan Rees, the FBI agent who ultimately obtained the arrest affidavit, was one of two FBI agents who visited Microchip’s home in December 2020, this time in conjunction with the Mackey case. When she wrote up that affidavit, she named Microchip, like Baked Alaska and 1080p, only as an unindicted co-conspirator.

But after Microchip saw that complaint, he reached out to the FBI via his lawyer.

Q Sir, my question to you is this: On February 4, 2021, did you reach out to Agent Rees and tell her that you had become aware that the person you knew as Ricky Vaughn had been arrested, and you believed you had information that would be useful to the FBI. Did you say that to Agent Rees?

[snip]

Q My first question is: When you reached out to Agent Rees on February 4, 2021, did you tell her that you had learned the person you knew as Ricky Vaughn had been arrested recently? Did you say that?

A Yes.

Q And in addition, did you tell her that you believed you had information that would be useful to the FBI?

A Correct.

Per his testimony on cross-examination, Microchip made a formal proffer around April 22, 2021.

At it, he claimed that the intent wasn’t so much to dissuade people from voting but just to push out as many messages as possible. He also claimed the chatrooms weren’t all that organized.

Q Sir, I’m going to ask you a question. Forgive the profanity in advance, but have you ever heard the term “shit posting”?

A Yes.

Q Do you recall telling the Government at this meeting that the focus was not on one message, it was on pushing out as many — as much content as possible?

[snip]

Q Do you recall telling the Government at that meeting that the participants in the chats were not as organized as many people believed?

A Yes, I remember saying that.

Q Do you recall telling the Government that there was no grand plan around stopping people from voting?

After several continuances and a revised memory of how organized things were, Microchip pled guilty on April 14, 2022. He had a meeting in advance of the disclosure of a cooperating witness on February 23, 2023. This post describes how Microchip testified to wanting to “infect” everything.

The timing of Microchip’s proffer is important, though, because it might explain any change in focus between the complaint and the evidence as presented at trial. That is, it might explain why prosecutors focused much more closely on HBC than Baked Alaska at trial.

But it also might explain any new investigative direction that DOJ took after first speaking with Microchip.

Mackey’s lawyer, Andrew Frisch (who has also represented VDARE), several times expressed curiosity about why the government used a summary FBI agent largely uninvolved in the case to introduce all the Twitter evidence, rather than putting the FBI agent who led the investigation, Megan Rees, on the stand.

MR. FRISCH: Can I put something on the record, unrelated to our prior conference. I intended at the close of the Government’s place to put a placeholder. But because of the way it worked, the jury was here, I couldn’t do it. I have been concerned as the trial has gone on that no case agent has testified. Maegan Rees didn’t testify, my friend Agent Granberg didn’t testify, and ultimately Agent Dvorsky did not testify. At one time or another. The key agent I’m concerned with is Agent Rees.

[snip]

MR. FRISCH: I’m mostly concerned about why no case agent testified and specifically whether there’s a reason, a bad reason, why Agent Rees’s 3500 has not been provided, obviously apart from when she attended Microchip interviews and things like that. I just wanted to put a placeholder, I’ll discuss it with the Government, I don’t want to hold things up. I wanted to register an objection at my earliest opportunity so if I can come back to it, if necessary.

[snip]

MR. FRISCH: I don’t know what she has, I don’t know what she said, I don’t know what’s in the reports. It’s just in my experience, it’s highly unusual that a trial happens without the case agent testifying, without any case agent testifying.

He’s not wrong, really, to question why the government didn’t use a case agent. Often, the government does so to keep someone who knows information inconvenient to the prosecution off the stand. For example, Durham may have used a paralegal in the Michael Sussmann case because the case agents had discovered some of Durham’s claims about the Alfa Bank anomaly were bullshit by the time of trial. Mueller used an agent focused on the obstruction part of the investigation in the Stone trial, who thereby could honestly say she didn’t know some of what DOJ subsequently discovered about Roger Stone’s actual ties to Russia when asked.

But it’s often (as it was in the Mueller investigation), done to hide parts of an ongoing investigation — something that a movement lawyer would surely have some interest in.

In this case, there are two obvious reasons to keep case agents off the stand.

The first is — as was revealed to Frisch after his opening argument — EDNY had a series of 18 interviews with Hillary’s campaign, between March 2021 and January 2023.

As Frisch laid out in a letter to the judge, after he opened, the government revealed those interviews, which, he claimed, he should have obtained.

The government’s second witness was Jess Morales Rocketto. On March 10, 2023, the Friday before the start of jury selection, the government first identified Ms. Rocketto as a witness. Thereafter, during jury selection, the government disclosed a report of the government’s then-recent interview of Ms. Rocketto, without disclosing any of eighteen reports of the government’s interviews of seventeen other representatives of the Clinton Campaign, conducted between March 2021 and January 2023. Ms. Rocketto testified that she was the Clinton Campaign’s digital organizing director; learned of vote-by-text memes using fake graphics during the final days of the campaign; found the memes’ misappropriation of the Clinton Campaign’s graphics and hashtag “#imwithher” to be such a “big deal” and so “jarring” that “you have to make a decision about what to do about something like this.” T 76, 78, 84-85, 90-92. See T 86 (The Court: “If you can avoid asking like terribly open-ended questions to this witness . . . . she has a lot to say, which is fine, but we’re never going to finish.”). On defense counsel’s subsequent cross-examination of Lloyd Cotler (a representative of the Clinton Campaign called principally to testify to steps to remediate the memes’ reference to a short code), defense counsel confirmed an unelaborated statement in the government’s report of Mr. Cotler’s interview that a Clinton Campaign worker named Amy Karr monitored social media, including 4chan [T 103], on which Mr. Mackey had seen the memes that he then shared.

The following morning, the government provided defense counsel with two reports of its interviews of Ms. Karr. At the lunch break, defense counsel requested that the government provide reports of all the government’s interviews of representatives of the Clinton Campaign. Highlights of the reports, summarized in the draft stipulation, contradicted the testimony and inferences elicited by the government from Ms. Rocketto and Mr. McNees. For example, Alexandria Witt, Senior Social Media Strategist, told the government that she referred vote-by-text memes to executive staff, but the general response was lackluster as though – – directly contradicting the very words used by Ms. Rocketto – – “this was no big deal.” Diana Al Ayoubi-Monett, another Senior Social Medical Strategist, said that she was mocked for taking “text-to-vote” memes seriously. Timothy Lu Hu Ball, a senior security expert, said that senior officials of the Clinton Campaign did not take the vote-by-texts seriously. Ms. Witt and Ms. Karr both were aware of and monitored “shit-posters” on social media supporting Clinton’s opponent. Memes containing misinformation about voting began to appear about three months before Election Day; there was no single influencer behind them; and senor staff, including campaign chair John Podesta, did not take concerns about the memes seriously. According to Matthew Compton, Deputy Digital Director (possibly Ms. Rocketto’s principal underling), the “#imwithher” hashtag had been somewhat commandeered with “unbelievable” amounts of irrelevant information, rendering it not “particularly useful.” Multiple witnesses told the government about records created by the campaign to track misinformation on social media (about which Mr. Mackey had been unaware and never attempted to subpoena or investigate). [my emphasis]

There’s no reason to believe these interviews were primarily pre-trial preparation. As the government explained in a bench conference, the government only handed them over after hearing what Mackey’s defense was in Frisch’s opening.

MR. PAULSEN: Your Honor, part of the reason we provided the 302s we did, is that we heard his opening argument, at the same time everyone did, and he made something like that argument. We turned them over at that point because it seemed like he was interested in that.

But even assuming Frisch’s description is accurate, what the Clinton campaign thought about Mackey’s trolling doesn’t change Mackey’s intent.

Which is what Judge Ann Donnelly ruled in the bench conference: this wasn’t Brady material, and besides, Frisch at that point still had several remedies available to him, such as calling the Hillary intern who identified some of the disinformation targeting Hillary on the dark web much earlier than anyone else.

THE COURT: Let me stop you there. I think I understand what you’re saying.

With respect to the issue — the e-mail telling people they could text to vote was not a big deal to the Clinton campaign. Why is that Brady material what their opinion of it is?

MR. FRISCH: Because they called Ms. Rocketto to essentially testify how horrible this was. How something had to be done right away. How she recognized this as a problem. That it specifically, in her view, was either targeted to or designed to affect or had the affect of effecting Latin American and African American voters. She was a terrific — she’s very charismatic and had a lot to say, that’s fine —

THE COURT: Why is someone —

MR. FRISCH: But I couldn’t cross-examine her with this information.

THE COURT: But you opened on it.

MR. FRISCH: But I didn’t know that the Clinton campaign agreed with my defense.

THE COURT: But who cares what their opinion is. The Clinton campaign can’t testify in court about what they think about something, any more than they can come — you didn’t object to it, she did say something was sneaky, I think I stopped her at some point. A particular person’s opinion of what the case is, I don’t understand how that is Brady material.

[snip]

[I]t’s the Court’s view that it’s not Brady material because it amounts to really, the essence is what the Clinton campaign thought about it, and that’s just not relevant. In fact, their opinion of it is no more valid than their opinion would be about whether Mr. Mackey is guilty or not. That’s not relevant, to the extent that’s the claim.

In his letter demanding an acquittal because of all this, Frisch explained that rather than calling any of these people as witnesses, he drafted a stipulation that the government rejected, which he then just emailed to Chambers.

Defense counsel emailed it to the Court (rather than electronically file it with a letter) when an issue unexpectedly arose early on the morning of the last day of trial about the government’s timely receipt of the draft stipulation; exigencies of the imminent trial day made preparation and filing of a letter impractical. But it would otherwise have been electronically filed to show that Mr. Mackey’s attempt at a mid-trial remedy for the government’s violation of Rule 5(f) and Brady had been rejected (though the government agreed to stipulate to a narrow portion thereof), thereby filling in the record and helping to show the consequent irreparable prejudice.

The letter mostly seems like a bid by a movement lawyer to turn the Mackey prosecution into the second coming of the Durham trial, an opportunity to investigate the victim of a bunch of malicious crimes in the 2016 election, in part to distract from the heinous things that Trump and his allies were doing.

All these interviews took place after the indictment and most presumably took place after Microchip first met with the government in April 2021.

Frisch seems uninterested in the obvious question presented by the revelation of 18 interviews with the Clinton campaign about disinformation targeting her 2016 campaign that went viral after being drafted on the dark web: Why EDNY was conducting these interviews, continuing well after any 5 year statute of limitations would have expired.

I don’t know the answer to that, but I bet the case agents do, which might be a good reason to keep them off the stand.

The other obvious reason to keep case agents off the stand has to do with knowledge of Microchip’s ongoing cooperation, which as the original motion revealing his cooperation describes, is something “beyond the scope” of this case.

In addition, since entering into the cooperation agreement, the CW has provided assistance to the FBI in other criminal investigations beyond the scope of this case. The CW is presently involved in multiple, ongoing investigations and other activities in which he or she is using assumed internet names and “handles” that do not reveal his or her true identity. The CW has not interacted with any witness, subject, or target in these investigations and activities on a face-to-face basis, and the government has no reason to think that the CW’s true identity has been compromised as a result of this work.

There’s no evidence that the ongoing interviews with the Clinton campaign about disinformation the dark web has to do with Microchip’s ongoing cooperation. There’s not even any evidence that the case agents in Mackey’s case are the ones he worked with subsequently; on the stand, he suggested he had not met with Agent Rees since his guilty plea.

Frisch’s job is to claim all this is about Douglass Mackey and it also likely serves his interests to drum up a false scandal about Hillary by publicly releasing these 302s.

But there’s a whole bunch of tangentially related issues that didn’t show up in this trial. There’s a bunch of this that isn’t about Douglass Mackey.

Douglass Mackey’s Criminal Twitter Trolling

For the entire time since MattyDickPics started complaining about the fact he couldn’t see nonconsensual pictures of Hunter Biden’s dick, he and other apologists for disinformation have claimed there was nothing to the effort to suppress the vote using Twitter.

A jury in Brooklyn just decided otherwise. Douglass Mackey — who was indicted for attempting to suppress the Black and Latino vote in 2016 — was found guilty of conspiring to violate his targets’ right to vote.

As proven at trial, between September 2016 and November 2016, Mackey conspired with other influential Twitter users and with members of private online groups to use social media platforms, including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages that encouraged supporters of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to “vote” via text message or social media which, in reality, was legally invalid. For example, on November 1, 2016, in or around the same time that Mackey was sending tweets suggesting the importance of limiting “black turnout,” the defendant tweeted an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign. The ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.” The fine print at the bottom of the deceptive image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.” The tweet included the typed hashtag “#ImWithHer,” a slogan frequently used by Hillary Clinton. On or about and before Election Day 2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and his co-conspirators.

Several hours after tweeting the first image, Mackey tweeted an image depicting a woman seated at a conference room typing a message on her cell phone. This deceptive image was written in Spanish and mimicked a font used by the Clinton campaign in authentic ads. The image also included a copy of the Clinton campaign’s logo and the “ImWithHer” hashtag.

The people with whom Mackey conspired are a collection of leading figures in the (Russian-backed) alt-Right.

I plan to return to this trial in weeks ahead.

But for the moment, this verdict says that all the disinformation that Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk are working to replatform on Twitter has been found to be potentially criminal.

[Some of] Where Trump Wants to Go with the Server in Ukraine Story

As I emphasized in this post, before Trump pushed Volodymyr Zelensky to frame Hunter Biden, he first pressed Ukraine’s president to “get to the bottom” of the “what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine.”

The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you are surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.

Contrary to virtually all the coverage on this, there is reason to believe that Bill Barr can get information from Ukraine that will feed the disinformation about the Russian operation. Trump has obviously been told — and not just by Rudy Giuliani (as Tom Bossert believes) — to ask for this, but some of this is probably part of the disinformation that Russia built in to the operation.

Rudy Giuliani wants to frame Alexandra Chalupa

This morning, Rudy Giuliani explained that he wants to know who in Ukraine provided information damning to Trump during the 2016 campaign.

GIULIANI: I have never peddled it. Have you ever hear me talk about Crowdstrike? I’ve never peddled it. Tom Bossert doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I have never engaged in any theory that the Ukrainians did the hacking. In fact, when this was first presented to me, I pretty clearly understood the Ukrainians didn’t do the hacking, but that doesn’t mean Ukraine didn’t do anything, and this is where Bossert…

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, why does the president keep repeating it?

GIULIANI: Let’s get on to the point…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, this was in the phone call.

GIULIANI: I agree with Bossert on one thing, it’s clear: there’s no evidence the Ukrainians did it. I never pursued any evidence and he’s created a red herring. What the president is talking about is, however, there is a load of evidence that the Ukrainians created false information, that they were asked by the Obama White House to do it in January of 2016, information he’s never bothered to go read. There are affidavits that have been out there for five months that none of you have listened to about how there’s a Ukrainian court finding that a particular individual illegally gave the Clinton campaign information. No one wants to investigate that. Nobody cared about it. It’s a court opinion in the Ukraine. The Ukrainians came to me. I didn’t go to them. The Ukrainians came to me and said…

STEPHANOPOULOS: When did they first come to you?

GIULIANI: November of 2016, they first came to me. And they said, we have shocking evidence that the collusion that they claim happened in Russia, which didn’t happen, happened in the Ukraine, and it happened with Hillary Clinton. George Soros was behind it. George Soros’ company was funding it.

This is an effort to frame Alexandra Chalupa, who while working as a DNC consultant in 2016 raised alarms about Paul Manafort. This is an effort that Trump has pursued since 2017 in part with a story first floated to (!!) Ken Vogel, an effort that key propagandist John Solomon was pursuing in May. Remember, too, that Chalupa was hacked separately in 2016, and believed she was being followed.

Peter Smith’s operation may have asked for help from a hacker in Ukraine

But per the transcript, this is not about Rudy, it’s about Barr. And even leaving Rudy’s antics aside, there is more that Trump may be after.

First, a fairly minor point, but possibly important. According to Charles Johnson, he advised Peter Smith to reach out to Weev for help finding Hillary’s deleted emails.

Johnson said he also suggested that Smith get in touch with Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker who goes by the alias “Weev” and has collaborated with Johnson in the past. Auernheimer—who was released from federal prison in 2014 after having a conviction for fraud and hacking offenses vacated and subsequently moved to Ukraine—declined to say whether Smith contacted him, citing conditions of his employment that bar him from speaking to the press.

At the time (and still, as far as I know), Weev was living in Ukraine. The Mueller Report says that his investigators never found evidence that Smith or Barbara Ledeen (or Erik Prince or Mike Flynn, who were also key players in this effort) ever contacted Russian hackers.

Smith drafted multiple emails stating or intimating that he was in contact with Russian hackers. For example, in one such email, Smith claimed that, in August 2016, KLS Research had organized meetings with parties who had access to the deleted Clinton emails, including parties with “ties and affiliations to Russia.”286 The investigation did not identify evidence that any such meetings occurred. Associates and security experts who worked with Smith on the initiative did not believe that Smith was in contact with Russian hackers and were aware of no such connection.287 The investigation did not establish that Smith was in contact with Russian hackers or that Smith, Ledeen, or other individuals in touch with the Trump Campaign ultimately obtained the deleted Clinton emails.

Weev is a hacker, but not Russian. So if Smith had reached out to Weev — and if Weev had given him any reason for optimism in finding the emails or even the alleged emails that Ledeen obtained — it might explain why Trump would believe there was information in Ukraine that would help him.

CrowdStrike once claimed its certainty on Russian attribution related to a problematic report on Ukraine

But that’s not the CrowdStrike tie.

At least part of the CrowdStrike tie — and what Zelensky actually could feed to Trump — pertains to a report they did in December 2016. They concluded that one of the same tools that was used in the DNC hack had been covertly distributed to Ukrainian artillery units, which (CrowdStrike claimed) led to catastrophic losses in the Ukranian armed forces. When the report came out — amid the December 2016 frenzy as President Obama tried to figure out what to do with Russia given the Trump win — CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch pitched it as further proof that GRU had hacked the DNC. In other words, according to CrowdStrike, their high confidence on the DNC attribution was tied to their analysis of the Ukrainian malware.

In a now deleted post, infosec researcher Jeffrey Carr raised several problems with the CrowdStrike report. He correctly noted that CrowdStrike vastly overstated the losses to the Ukranian troops, which both an outside analyst and then the Ukranian Defense Ministry corrected. CrowdStrike has since updated its report, correcting the claim about Ukrainian losses, but standing by its analysis that GRU planted this malware as a way to target Ukrainian troops.

Carr also claimed to know of two instances — one, another security company, and the other, a Ukrainian hacker — where the tool was found in the wild.

Crowdstrike, along with FireEye and other cybersecurity companies, have long propagated the claim that Fancy Bear and all of its affiliated monikers (APT28, Sednit, Sofacy, Strontium, Tsar Team, Pawn Storm, etc.) were the exclusive developers and users of X-Agent. We now know that is false.

ESET was able to obtain the complete source code for X-Agent (aka Xagent) for the Linux OS with a compilation date of July 2015. [5]

A hacker known as RUH8 aka Sean Townsend with the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance has informed me that he has also obtained the source code for X-Agent Linux. [11]

Carr argued that since CrowdStrike’s attribution of the DNC hack assumed that only GRU had access to that tool, their attribution claim could no longer be trusted. At the time I deemed Carr’s objections to be worthwhile, but not fatal for the CrowdStrike claim. It was, however, damning for CrowdStrike’s public crowing about attribution of the DNC hack.

Since that time, the denialist crowd has elaborated on theories about CrowdStrike, which BuzzFeed gets just parts of here. Something that will be very critical moving forward but which BuzzFeed did not include, is that the president of CrowdStrike, Shawn Henry, is the guy who (while he was still at FBI) ran the FBI informant who infiltrated Anonymous, Sabu. Because the FBI reportedly permitted Sabu to direct Antisec to hack other countries as a false flag, the denialist theory goes, Henry and CrowdStrike must be willing to launch false flags for their existing clients. [See update below, which makes it clear FBI did not direct this.] The reason I say this will be important going forward is that these events are likely being reexamined as we speak in the grand jury that has subpoenaed both Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond.

So Trump has an incentive to damage not just CrowdStrike’s 2016 reports on GRU, but also CrowdStrike generally. In 2017, Ukraine wanted to rebut the CrowdStrike claim because it made it look bad to Ukranian citizens. But if Trump gives Zelensky reason to revisit the issue, they might up the ante, and claim that CrowdStrike’s claims did damage to Ukraine.

I also suspect Trump may have been cued to push the theory that the GRU tool in question may, indeed, have been readily available and could have been used against the DNC by someone else, perhaps trying to frame Russia.

As I’ve noted, the GRU indictment and Mueller Report list 30 other named sources of evidence implicating the GRU in the hack. That list doesn’t include Dutch hackers at AIVD, which provided information (presumably to the Intelligence Community generally, including the FBI). And it doesn’t include NSA, which Bossert suggested today attributed the hack without anything from CrowdStrike. In other words, undermining the CrowdStrike claims would do nothing to undermine the overall attribution to Russia (though it could be useful for Stone if it came out before his November 5 trial, as the four warrants tied to his false statements relied on CrowdStrike). But it would certainly feed the disinformation effort that has already focused on CrowdStrike.

That’s just part of what Trump is after.

Update: Dell Cameron, who’s one of the experts on this topic, says that public accounts significantly overstate how closely Sabu was being handled at this time. Nevertheless, the perception that FBI (and Henry) encouraged Sabu’s attacks is out there and forms a basis for the claim that CrowdStrike would engage in a false flag attack. Here’s the chatlog showing some of this activity. Hammond got to the Brazilian target by himself.

Someone Has Already Been Charged for Most of the Actions the Steele Dossier Attributes to Michael Cohen

Because of a McClatchy story claiming two new details corroborating a Steele dossier claim that Michael Cohen had a meeting with people serving the interests of Putin’s Administration, people have gotten themselves into a tizzy again about what a smoking gun it would be if the allegations in the Steele dossier were proven true.

It’s an utterly bizarre tizzy, both because the allegations in the Steele dossier not only don’t match some more damning allegations Cohen has already pled guilty to, but because Mueller has already charged other people for some of the allegations about Cohen made in the dossier. In other words, the McClatchy story has people excited about the wrong allegations, rather than focusing on the damning things Cohen (and others) have already been charged with.

Indeed, most functional allegations made in the Steele dossier have already been publicly explained in either court filings or sworn testimony. That doesn’t rule out that Cohen had a role in some of them, however. Indeed, one detail from Cohen’s SDNY plea — that among the things Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen for in January 2017 was a $50,000 payment to a tech services company — actually could confirm a detail made in the dossier. But generally, Mueller and other entities have already explained away many of the allegations made against Cohen in the dossier.

I’ve put the substantive claims the Steele dossier made about Cohen below. I’ll take each and show public reporting that explains who did something attributed to Cohen in the dossier.

Cohen met with Russian Presidential Administration Legal Department officials

The central allegation involving Cohen is that he met with people from Putin’s Presidential Administration’s legal department or, in a later version, someone acting on their behalf.

By the time that allegedly happened in August or maybe September, however, Cohen had already established a paper trail with someone more central than some anonymous lawyers. Cohen’s Mueller plea describes Cohen receiving an email on January 20, 2016 from Dmitry Peskov’s personal assistant and shortly thereafter calling her. Somehow Mueller knows that the assistant “asked detailed questions and took notes.” The day after Cohen spoke with the personal assistant, someone from Putin’s office called Felix Sater.

Given that Cohen made reservations to travel to St. Petersburg (for a possible meeting directly with Putin) on June 9, then canceled those reservations on June 14 (after Russia’s role in the DNC hack was made public), those communications about a Trump Tower deal surely tie to the hack-and-leak operation.

It’s certainly possible that, later in the summer (or in the fall, during Cohen’s known trips to London), Cohen would attempt to reschedule that meeting, though the purpose was originally and probably would remain more central to a quid pro quo trading a Trump Tower and election assistance for sanctions relief and policy considerations. But having already exchanged easily collectable communications directly with Peskov’s office (whom the dossier calls “the main protagonist” in the operation), it’s not clear how helpful using Rossotrudnichestvo would be to hide the Trump role. Furthermore, there are other known cut-outs for related matters, including Steele dossier source Sergei Millian and the Agalrovs.

Cohen aimed to contain the Paul Manafort scandal

The three Cohen reports in October all claim that Cohen got involved to tamp down scandals connecting Trump to Russia. That’s not, at all, far-fetched. After all, Cohen was Trump’s fixer and he told a bunch of lies to Congress in an effort to hide Trump’s Moscow Project.

That said, a filing explaining why Mueller might have to mention the Trump campaign in Manafort’s aborted DC trial and a filing in Alex Van der Zwaan’s prosecution show that Manafort and Rick Gates themselves — with the direct involvement of Oleg Deripaska associate Konstantin Kilimnik — worked to contain this scandal.

As Mueller laid out in numerous ways, the Manafort-Gates-Kilimnik team went on a crime spree in the fall trying to cover up their past activities with Russian-backed oligarchs.

Indeed, that a claim that Cohen managed this pushback (and its timing) appeared in the dossier is particularly tantalizing for two reasons. First, one of the things Manafort reportedly lied about after agreeing to cooperate with Mueller pertained a boat trip he took with Tom Barrack; Mueller seems to know that Kilimnik joined the two men. If that happened, then it would show that someone did indeed hold a meeting in August to contain the damage of Manafort’s burgeoning scandals, but that meeting would have been between a key Trump funder, Manafort himself, and someone suspected of ongoing ties with GRU, the agency that conducted the DNC hack.

More intriguing still, as I noted above, Kilimnik was Manafort’s go-between with Oleg Deripaska. That’s interesting because in 2016, Christopher Steele was attempting to convince DOJ’s Bruce Ohr that Deripaska could be a useful source on Russian organized crime. If Steele thought Deripaska would be a useful source for DOJ, he may well have been relying on Deripaska himself. If so, the report that Cohen (who in fact did have communications with Peskov!) was containing the damage of Manafort’s ties to Russian oligarchs might be an attempt to distract from the way that a Russian oligarch was actually working through his handler, Kilimnik, to minimize that damage himself.

Cohen aimed to contain the Carter Page scandal

It likewise seems unlikely that Cohen was the one to try to contain the Carter Page scandal. While he shouldn’t be relied on for anything, several claims in Page’s testimony to HPSCI provide an alternate explanation about who was containing the scandal tied to him.

Page denied ever speaking to Cohen.

But he did describe Keith Kellogg discussing the allegations with him. And he did describe Steve Bannon, both by himself and with the assistance of Trump’s election lawfirm, Jones Day, trying to minimize the Page scandal.

That’s consistent with a number of on-the-record claims from the campaign in the days following Page’s resignation in September. Which is to say, minimizing the Page scandal fell to the campaign itself.

The people who carried out the information operation had been paid by Russia and Trump

The three initial reports on Cohen came, in suspiciously quick succession, in October, after the number of reporters briefed on the Steele dossier started to expand.

The one other report implicating Cohen was the December 13 report, based on intelligence Steele claimed he obtained for “free.”

The report is most notable for the legal battle it caused. The allegations most clearly resemble what Adrian Chen had identified and attributed to the Internet Research Agency year earlier and there had been extensive reporting on it all through the campaign. But instead of blaming Internet Research Agency, the report blames all that on Webzilla. And Webzilla’s owner, Aleksei Gubarev was sufficiently comfortable facing the prospect of discovery to sue BuzzFeed right away (though he lost his lawsuit a few weeks back).

There’s another reference in the report to a long debunked claim made by the Russians — that a Romanian hacker was involved, presumably an allusion to Guccifer 2.0’s half-hearted claim to be Romanian.

Still, much of that last report instead presented the most inflammatory claim in the entire dossier: that Trump’s campaign had helped pay for the information operation targeting Hillary.

On its face, that claim makes zero sense. The scenario as a whole assumes that the hack was done by independent hackers coerced to work for the FSB — perhaps people like Yevgeniy Nikulin, who had already been arrested in Prague by this point. As far as Mueller has shown publicly, however, the information operation was instead done by two entities: Russians in the employ of Putin crony Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency and officers in the employ of Russia’s military intelligence agency, GRU. In indictments of both conspirators, Mueller provided details about how the money was handled.

So we’ve already got explanations for how the information operation was funded: by Prigozhin and the Russian state, using a range of money laundering techniques to hide Russia’s role. We even have evidence that — contrary to the claim about information warriors’ loyalty to Sergei Ivanov — Prighozhin’s employees even sucked up to him in one of their dry runs getting Americans to perform IRL actions.

Cohen arranged deniable cash payments to hackers working in Europe against the Clinton campaign

As noted, the December report involving Cohen made the most incendiary claim of all: that the Trump organization planned to pay for some of the hackers that targeted Hillary.

In spite of the fact that Mueller has already explained how the two main groups of participants in the information operation got funded, this allegation gets more interesting given details laid out in Cohen’s SDNY plea. Several of his SDNY crimes, after all, involving making deniable payments, in that case to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.

That shows Cohen’s modus operandi for paying off Trump’s illicit debts. Mind you, it shows that he didn’t use cash. He laundered the funds using more sophisticated money laundering. But it does show that Cohen was the guy who did that kind of thing.

Which makes this detail included — but not explained — in the same plea document intriguing.

Cohen paid some tech company $50,000 in connection with the campaign.

That’s not a whole lot of money, in any case. And if it went to pay off part of the information operation, it would have to have involved some part of the operation not yet publicly identified. Even the one known instance of Trump supporters reaching out to hackers in Europe — Peter Smith’s reported consultation of Weev — is known to have been paid for by other means (in that case, Smith’s own fundraising).

Still, it’s certainly possible that that $50,000 went to some still unidentified entity that played a role in the information operation that, for some reason, didn’t get paid for by Putin’s cronies or the Russian state.

As I disclosed in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post.


18 October

Speaking separately to the same compatriot in mid-October 2016, a Kremlin insider with direct access to the leadership confirmed that a key role in the secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin was being played by the Republican candidates personal lawyer Michael COHEN. [redacted line]

19 October

1. Speaking in confidence to a longstanding compatriot friend in mid-October 2016, a Kremlin insider highlighted the importance of Republican presidential candidate Donald TRUMP’s lawyer, Michael COHEN, in the ongoing secret liaison relationship between the New York tycoon’s campaign and the Russian leadership. COHEN’s role had grown following the departure of Paul MANNAFORT as campaign manager in August 2016. Prior to that MANNAFORT had led for the TRUMP side.

2. According to the Kremlin insider, COHEN now was heavily engaged in a cover up and damage limitation operation in the attempt to prevent the full details of relationship with Russia being exposed. In pursuit of this aim, COHEN had met secretly with several Russian Presidential Administration (PA) Legal Department officials in an EU country in August 2016. The immediate issues had been to contain further scandals involving MANNAFORT’s commercial and political role in Russia/Ukraine and to limit the damage arising from exposure of former TRUMP foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE’s secret meetings with Russian leadership figures in Moscow the previous month. The overall objective had been to “to sweep it all under the carpet and make sure no connections could be fully established or proven”

3. Things had become even “hotter” since August on the TRUMP-Russia track. According to the Kremlin insider, this had meant that direct contact between the TRUMP team and Russia had been farmed out by the Kremlin to trusted agents of influence working in pro-government policy institutes like that of Law and Comparative Jurisprudence. COHEN however continued to lead for the TRUMP team.

[snip]

The Kremlin insider was unsure of the identities of the PA officials with whom COHEN met secretly in August, or the exact date/s and locations of the meeting/s. There were significant internal security barriers being erected in the PA as the TRUMP issue became more controversial and damaging. However s/he continued to try to obtain these.

20 October

1. Speaking to a compatriot and friend on 19 October 2016, a Kremlin insider provided further details of reported clandestine meeting/s between Republican presidential candidate, Donald lawyer Michael COHEN and Kremlin representatives in August 2016. Although the communication between them had to be cryptic for security reasons, the Kremlin insider clearly indicated to his/her friend that the reported contact/s took place in Prague, Czech Republic.

2. Continuing on this theme, the Kremlin insider highlighted the importance of the Russian parastatal organisation, Rossotrudnichestvo, in this contact between TRUMP campaign representative/3 and Kremlin officials. Rossotrudnichestvo was being used as cover for this relationship and its office in Prague may well have been used to host the COHEN Russian Presidential Administration (PA) meeting/s. It was considered a “plausibly deniable” vehicle for this, whilst remaining entirely under Kremlin control.

3. The Kremlin insider went on to identify leading pro-PUTIN Duma figure, Konstantin KOSACHEV (Head of the Foreign Relations Committee) as an important figure in the TRUMP campaign-Kremlin liaison operation. KOSACHEV, also “plausibly deniable” being part of the Russian legislature rather than executive, had facilitated the contact in Prague and by implication, may have attended the meeting/s with COHEN there in August.

Company Comment

We reported previously, in our Company Intelligence Report 2016/135 of 19 October 2016 from the same source, that COHEN met officials from the PA Legal Department clandestinely in an EU country in August 2016. This was in order to clean up the mess left behind by western media revelations of TRUMP ex-campaign manager corrupt relationship with the former pro-Russian YANUKOVYCH regime in Ukraine and TRUMP foreign policy advisor, Carter secret meetings in Moscow with senior regime figures in July 2016. According to the Kremlin advisor, these meeting/s were originally scheduled for COHEN in Moscow but shifted to what was considered an operationally “soft” EU country when it was judged too compromising for him to travel to the Russian capital.

13 December

1. We reported previously (2016/135 and /136) on secret meeting/s held in Prague, Czech Republic in August 2016 between then Republican presidential candidate Donald TRUMP’s representative, Michael COHEN and his interlocutors from the Kremlin working under cover of Russian ‘NGO’ Rossotrudnichestvo.

2. [two lines redacted] provided further details of these meeting/s and associated anti- CLINTON/Democratic Party operations. COHEN had been accompanied to Prague by 3 colleagues and the timing of the visit was either in the last week of August or the first week of September. One of their main Russian interlocutors was Oleg SOLODUKHIN operating under Rossotrudnichestvo cover. According to [redacted] the agenda comprised questions on how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the CLINTON campaign and various contingencies for covering up these operations and Moscow’s secret liaison with the TRUMP team more generally.

3. [redacted] reported that over the period March-September 2016 a company called XBT/Webzilla and its affiliates had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct “altering operations” against the Democratic Party leadership. Entities linked to one Aleksei GUBAROV were involved and he and another hacking expert, both recruited under duress by the FSB, Seva KAPSUGOVICH, were significant players in this operation. In Prague, COHEN agreed contingency plans for various scenarios to protect the Operation, but in particular what was to be done in the event that Hillary CLINTON won the presidency. It was important in this event that all cash payments owed were made quickly and discreetly and that cyber and other operators were stood down/able to go effectively to ground to cover their traces. (We reported earlier that the involvement of political operatives Paul MANAFORT and Carter PAGE in the secret TRUMP-Kremlin liaison had been exposed in the media in the run-up to Prague and that damage limitation of these also was discussed by COHEN with the Kremlin representatives).

In terms of practical measures to be taken, it was agreed by the two sides in Prague to stand down various “Romanian hackers” (presumably based in their homeland or neighboring eastern Europe) and that other operatives should head for a bolt-hole in Plovdiv, Bulgaria where they should “lay low”. On payments, IVANOV’s associate said that the operatives involved had been paid by both TRUMP’s team and the Kremlin, though their orders and ultimately loyalty lay with IVANOV, as Head of the PA and thus ultimately responsible for the operation, and his designator successor/s after he was dismissed by president PUTIN in connection with the anti-CLINTON operation in mid August.

Offering John Podesta Emails While Selling Deleted Hillary Emails

Back in April 2017, I noted something problematic with Democratic theories about the advance knowledge of Roger Stone — and by association, the Trump camp — of Russia’s hack and leak plans: Democrats have largely focused on Stone’s warning, on August 21, 2016, that “it would soon be the Podesta’s time in the barrel,” arguing it reflected foreknowledge of the October 2016 dump of John Podesta’s emails. Stone has said he was talking about blaming Tony Podesta for his corruption, and while that does appear to be a projection-focused defense of Paul Manafort as his own corruption posed problems for the Trump campaign, none of that explains how Stone implicated John in his brother’s sleaze.

That one comment aside, virtually every time Stone predicted a WikiLeaks October Surprise, he implied it would be Clinton Foundation documents or other ones she deleted from her home server, not Podesta emails. That is, while Stone appears to have known the general timing of the October dump, Stone didn’t predict the Podesta emails. He predicted emails deleted from Hillary’s home server, emails that never got published. Here’s how it looks in a timeline (partly lifted from this CNN timeline).

August 12, 2016: Roger Stone says, “I believe Julian Assange — who I think is a hero, fighting the police state — has all of the emails that Huma and Cheryl Mills, the two Clinton aides thought that they had erased. Now, if there’s nothing damning or problematic in those emails, I assure you the Clintonites wouldn’t have erased them and taken the public heat for doing so. When the case is I don’t think they are erased. I think Assange has them. I know he has them. And I believe he will expose the American people to this information you know in the next 90 days.”

August 15, 2016: Stone tells WorldNetDaily that, “’In the next series of emails Assange plans to release, I have reason to believe the Clinton Foundation scandals will surface to keep Bill and Hillary from returning to the White House,’ … The next batch, Stone said, include Clinton’s communications with State Department aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin.”

August 26, 2016: Stone tells Breitbart Radio that “I’m almost confident Mr. Assange has virtually every one of the emails that the Clinton henchwomen, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, thought that they had deleted, and I suspect that he’s going to drop them at strategic times in the run up to this race.”

August 29, 2016: Stone suggests Clinton Foundation information might lead to prison. “Perhaps he has the smoking gun that will make this handcuff time.”

September 16, 2016: Stone says that “a payload of new documents” that Wikileaks will drop “on a weekly basis fairly soon … will answer the question of exactly what was erased on that email server.”

September 18, 2016 and following: Stone asks Randy Credico to get from Assange any emails pertaining to disrupting a peace deal in Libya, making it clear he believes Assange has emails that WikiLeaks has not yet released.

In a Sept. 18, 2016, message, Mr. Stone urged an acquaintance who knew Mr. Assange to ask the WikiLeaks founder for emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s alleged role in disrupting a purported Libyan peace deal in 2011 when she was secretary of state, referring to her by her initials.

“Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30–particularly on August 20, 2011,” Mr. Stone wrote to Randy Credico, a New York radio personality who had interviewed Mr. Assange several weeks earlier. Mr. Stone, a longtime confidant of Donald Trump, had no formal role in his campaign at the time.

Mr. Credico initially responded to Mr. Stone that what he was requesting would be on WikiLeaks’ website if it existed, according to an email reviewed by the Journal. Mr. Stone, the emails show, replied: “Why do we assume WikiLeaks has released everything they have ???”

In another email, Mr. Credico then asked Mr. Stone to give him a “little bit of time,” saying he thought Mr. Assange might appear on his radio show the next day. A few hours later, Mr. Credico wrote: “That batch probably coming out in the next drop…I can’t ask them favors every other day .I asked one of his lawyers…they have major legal headaches riggt now..relax.”

As I further noted, when WikiLeaks started dumping Podesta emails in October (including excerpts of Hillary’s private speeches), Stone focused more on accusing Bill Clinton of rape, another projection-based defense of Donald Trump (especially in light of the Access Hollywood tape) than he focused on the Podesta emails.

In other words, Stone may not have exhibited foreknowledge of the Podesta dump. By all appearances, he seemed to expect that WikiLeaks would publish emails obtained via the Peter Smith efforts — efforts that involved soliciting Russian hackers for assistance. That actually makes Stone’s foreknowledge more damning, as it suggests he was part of the conspiracy to pay Russian hackers for emails they had purportedly already hacked from Hillary’s server and that he expected WikiLeaks would be an outlet for the emails, as opposed to just learning that Podesta’s emails had been hacked some months after they had been.

It was Guccifer 2.0, not Assange, who claimed anyone had Clinton server documents (including in a tweet responding to my observation he was falsely billing documents as Clinton Foundation ones).

And Guccifer 2.0 was (according to Politico, not WSJ) in the loop of this effort, so may have been trying to pressure WikiLeaks to publish sets of files already sent, as he had tried to do with DCCC files earlier in August.

[Chuck] Johnson said he and [Peter] Smith stayed in touch, discussing “tactics and research” regularly throughout the presidential campaign, and that Smith sought his help tracking down Clinton’s emails. “He wanted me to introduce to him to Bannon, to a few others, and I sort of demurred on some of that,” Johnson said. “I didn’t think his operation was as sophisticated as it needed to be, and I thought it was good to keep the campaign as insulated as possible.”

Instead, Johnson said, he put the word out to a “hidden oppo network” of right-leaning opposition researchers to notify them of the effort. Johnson declined to provide the names of any of the members of this “network,” but he praised Smith’s ambition.

“The magnitude of what he was trying to do was kind of impressive,” Johnson said. “He had people running around Europe, had people talking to Guccifer.” (U.S. intelligence agencies have linked the materials provided by “Guccifer 2.0”—an alias that has taken credit for hacking the Democratic National Committee and communicated with Republican operatives, including Trump confidant Roger Stone—to Russian government hackers.)

Johnson said he also suggested that Smith get in touch with Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker who goes by the alias “Weev” and has collaborated with Johnson in the past. Auernheimer—who was released from federal prison in 2014 after having a conviction for fraud and hacking offenses vacated and subsequently moved to Ukraine—declined to say whether Smith contacted him, citing conditions of his employment that bar him from speaking to the press.

Two interesting issues of timing arise out of that, then.

First, to the extent that Stone’s tweets during the week of October 7 (the ones that exhibited foreknowledge of timing, if not content) predicted the timing of the next leak, they would seem to reflect an expectation that deleted emails were coming, not necessarily that Podesta ones were.

[O]n Saturday October 1 (or early morning on October 2 in GMT; the Twitter times in this post have been calculated off the unix time in the source code), Stone said that on Wednesday (October 5), Hillary Clinton is done.

Fewer of these timelines note that Wikileaks didn’t release anything that Wednesday. It did, however, call out Guccifer 2.0’s purported release of Clinton Foundation documents (though the documents were real, they were almost certainly mislabeled Democratic Party documents) on October 5. The fact that Guccifer 2.0 chose to mislabel those documents is worth further consideration, especially given public focus on the Foundation documents rather than other Democratic ones. I’ll come back to that.

Throughout the week — both before and after the Guccifer 2.0 release — Stone kept tweeting that he trusted the Wikileaks dump was still coming.

Monday, October 3:

Wednesday, October 5 (though this would have been middle of the night ET):

Thursday, October 6 (again, this would have been nighttime ET, after it was clear Wikileaks had not released on Wednesday):

But it also makes the October 11 email — which was shared with still unidentified recipients via foldering, not sent — reported by WSJ the other day all the more interesting. The email seems to suggest that on October 11, the “students” who were really pleased with email releases they had seen so far were talking about the Podesta emails.

“[A]n email in the ‘Robert Tyler’ [foldering] account [showing] Mr. Smith obtained $100,000 from at least four financiers as well as a $50,000 contribution from Mr. Smith himself.” The email was dated October 11, 2016 and has the subject line, “Wire Instructions—Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative.” It came from someone calling himself “ROB,” describing the funding as supporting “the Washington Scholarship Fund for the Russian students.” The email also notes, “The students are very pleased with the email releases they have seen, and are thrilled with their educational advancement opportunities.”

In a follow-up, WSJ confirmed the identities of three of the four alleged donors (they’re still trying to track down the real ID of the fourth).

He reached out to businessmen as financial backers, including Maine real-estate developer Michael Liberty, Florida-based investor John “Jack” Purcell and Chicago financier Patrick Haynes. They were named in an email reviewed by the Journal as among a group of people who pledged to contribute $100,000 to the effort, along with $50,000 of Mr. Smith’s own money.

If the Smith conspirators were referring to the Podesta emails stolen by GRU in the same breath as a funding solicitation for Clinton Foundation ones, it suggests that whoever Smith’s co-conspirators were, as late as October 11, they were referring to the Podesta emails in the same breath as the Clinton server ones they were still hunting for.

As I said in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Chuck Johnson’s Narrowed Scope of What a Russian Is Excludes Known Conspirators in Operation

Michael Tracey has a story that purports to show that the Senate Intelligence Committee, in negotiating voluntary cooperation with Chuck Johnson, is criminalizing being Russian.

The Senate committee probing alleged Russian interference in the U.S. political system has deemed anyone “of Russian nationality or Russian descent” relevant to its investigation, according to a document obtained by TYT.

[snip]

On July 27, 2017, Charles C. Johnson, a controversial right-wing media figure, received a letter from Sens. Burr and Warner requesting that he voluntarily provide materials in his possession that are “relevant” to the committee’s investigation. Relevant materials, the letter went on, would include any records of interactions Johnson had with “Russian persons” who were involved in some capacity in the 2016 U.S. elections.

The committee further requested materials related to “Russian persons” who were involved in some capacity in “activities that related in any way to the political election process in the U.S.” Materials may include “documents, emails, text messages, direct messages, calendar appointments, memoranda, [and] notes,” the letter outlined.

Doss’s statement was in response to a request made by Robert Barnes, an attorney for Johnson, for clarification as to the SSCI’s definition of a “Russian person.”

How the committee expects subjects to go about ascertaining whether a person is of “Russian descent” is unclear. “It does indicate that the committee is throwing a rather broad net,” Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, said. “It is exceptionally broad.” In terms of constitutionality, Turley speculated that “most courts would view that as potentially too broad, but not unlawful.”

Johnson played a key role in several known parts of the election operation. In addition to brokering Dana Rohrabacher’s meeting with Julian Assange, all designed to provide some alternative explanation for the DNC hack, Johnson worked with Peter Smith and Weev to try to find the deleted emails from Hillary’s server.

Johnson said he and Smith stayed in touch, discussing “tactics and research” regularly throughout the presidential campaign, and that Smith sought his help tracking down Clinton’s emails. “He wanted me to introduce to him to Bannon, to a few others, and I sort of demurred on some of that,” Johnson said. “I didn’t think his operation was as sophisticated as it needed to be, and I thought it was good to keep the campaign as insulated as possible.”

Instead, Johnson said, he put the word out to a “hidden oppo network” of right-leaning opposition researchers to notify them of the effort. Johnson declined to provide the names of any of the members of this “network,” but he praised Smith’s ambition.

“The magnitude of what he was trying to do was kind of impressive,” Johnson said. “He had people running around Europe, had people talking to Guccifer.” (U.S. intelligence agencies have linked the materials provided by “Guccifer 2.0”—an alias that has taken credit for hacking the Democratic National Committee and communicated with Republican operatives, including Trump confidant Roger Stone—to Russian government hackers.)

Johnson said he also suggested that Smith get in touch with Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker who goes by the alias “Weev” and has collaborated with Johnson in the past. Auernheimer—who was released from federal prison in 2014 after having a conviction for fraud and hacking offenses vacated and subsequently moved to Ukraine—declined to say whether Smith contacted him, citing conditions of his employment that bar him from speaking to the press.

Tracey’s claims are based on this email (and, clearly, cooperation with Johnson).

Except Tracey (and so presumably Johnson) appear to be misrepresenting what is going on.

When SSCI originally asked for Johnson’s cooperation in July, they asked him to provide communications “with Russian persons, or representatives of Russian government, business, or media interest” relating to the 2016 election and any hack related to it.

And while Tracey calls the December follow-up a “clarification,” Doss clearly considers it a “narrowing” of that July description. So the description Tracey finds so outrageous — people of Russian nationality or descent — appears to be a subset of what might be included in the original request.

Moreover, the narrowing might be really detrimental to SSCI’s ability to learn what Johnson was up to when he was seeking out Russian hackers who might have Hillary’s server. Consider just the examples of Karim Baratov or Ike Kaveladze. Both are likely suspects for involvement in the events of 2016. Baratov — the hacker who recently pled guilty to compromising selected Google and Yandex accounts for FSB — is a Canadian citizen born in Kazakhstan. Kaveladze — who works for Aras Agalarov, has past ties to money laundering, and attended the June 9, 2016 meeting — is an American citizen born in Georgia. Neither is ethnically Russian. So if Johnson had any hypothetical interactions with them, he could cabin off those interactions based on this narrowed definition of what counts as a Russian.

To say nothing of Johnson’s interactions with Assange, who is Australian, yet whose ties to Russia are unclear. Effectively, even if Johnson knew that Assange had coordinated with Russia last year, he wouldn’t have to turn over his communications with him, because he’s not himself Russian.

According to Tracey’s piece, Johnson says he won’t cooperate regardless, in spite of his lawyer’s efforts to narrow the scope of any cooperation.

But I find it interesting that his lawyer attempted to narrow any testimony in a fashion that might hide important parts of Johnson’s actions.

Cambridge Analytica and the Hillary Emails

Update: I made an error in this post: WSJ has made it clear the emails in question were the DNC emails, not the Hillary ones. I’ve deleted the parts that are inaccurate accordingly.

For some time, I have been interested in the many pieces of evidence that, partly as a result of late GOP ratfucker Peter Smith’s efforts, Julian Assange ended up with something approximating Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails. We know Smith alleged Mike Flynn was involved in the effort. Weev and Chuck Johnson were involved. There are reasons to believe Roger Stone was involved in the effort. And there are reasons to believe Guccifer 2.0 was involved in the effort.

Plus, everyone from Stone to Attorney General Sessions (who “did not recall” whether he had spoken to Russians about email in his SJC testimony) seems to be ignoring that part of the scandal in their denials of colluding with Russians.

And now, Cambridge Analytica — the data firm paid for by far right wing oligarch Bob Mercer that played a big role in getting Trump elected — is involved in it.

The DailyBeast reports that Congressional investigators have found an email from CA head Alexander Nix to some unnamed person (Trump’s digital director Brad Parscale was interviewed by HPSCI yesterday) saying he offered to help Assange with the project.

Nix, who heads Cambridge Analytica, told a third party that he reached out to Assange about his firm somehow helping the WikiLeaks editor release Clinton’s missing emails, according to two sources familiar with a congressional investigation into interactions between Trump associates and the Kremlin. Those sources also relayed that, according to Nix’s email, Assange told the Cambridge Analytica CEO that he didn’t want his help, and preferred to do the work on his own.

Assange, who insists he never says anything to compromise sources, released his own statement saying he rejected the help.

After publication, Assange provided this statement to The Daily Beast: ”We can confirm an approach by Cambridge Analytica and can confirm that it was rejected by WikiLeaks.”

Remember, Stone told the Russian hackers he was soliciting that, allegedly because he couldn’t verify the authenticity of any emails obtained from hackers, they should turn them over to Assange. And both the Nix email and the Assange denial seem to admit that WikiLeaks did, indeed, receive at least one set of those emails. Which would explain why Roger Stone was so certain WikiLeaks was going to drop Clinton Foundation emails — not the Podesta ones that Stone showed no interest in — in October of last year. And it would seem to explain why Guccifer 2.0 had the same belief.

That is, there are a whole bunch of dots suggesting WikiLeaks got something approximating Clinton’s emails, and either because they couldn’t be verified, or because his source was too obviously Russian, or some other unknown reason, he decided not to publish.

If that’s right, all these non-denial denials about the operation seem to point to a confluence of interest around this effort that touched pretty much everyone. And involved Russians, their agents, and GOP ratfuckers willfully working together.

Update: The Trump campaign just did some amazing bus under-throwing of CA. Compare that to this November 10 piece attributing their win to CA.