In Attempting To Claim WaPo Doesn’t Chase Rat-Fucks, WaPo Lies about Chasing Rat-Fucks

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I’m the rarity among lefties who supports the decision of Politico, WaPo, and NYT (thus far) to not publish the actual files that a persona suspected to have ties to Iranian hackers sent them. That’s true, partly because I think this hack could be even more dangerous than the one of Hillary. But it’s also true because of the opportunity cost that publishing stolen documents incurs.

I prefer Kamala Harris’ message to remain the affirmative message she’s running on, and to the extent that those outlets are doing reporting like the story further developing the suspected $10 million payment via Egypt to Trump, I’d like them to continue to pursue real reporting, as well.

One of the real impacts of the files Russia hacked in 2016 is that they distracted journalists from harder work, work about what a corrupt man Trump is. Campaign reporters are already distracted too easily by nonsense stuff; they don’t need any further distractions from their day job.

That said, reporters don’t have to publish the actual documents to address something that is clearly newsworthy about the files. As Politico explained, the main thing the persona has sent so far was a draft of the vetting document for JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.

The research dossier was a 271-page document based on publicly available information about Vance’s past record and statements, with some — such as his past criticisms of Trump — identified in the document as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” The person also sent part of a research document about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also a finalist for the vice presidential nomination.

Note, this mirrors one of the first things Guccifer 2.0 released in 2016: Hillary’s oppo dossier on Trump. So in addition to its use of an AOL account, this persona is adopting another of the Russian persona’s tactics.

Again, I’m cool with outlets sitting on the dossier itself. But the content of it is newsworthy. That’s because after JD Vance’s rocky rollout, both donors and Trump himself are asking whether vetters were surprised by Vance’s misogynist public statements.

Over the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has fielded complaints from donors about his running mate, JD Vance, as news coverage exploring Mr. Vance’s past statements unearthed — and then exhaustively critiqued — remarks including a lament that America was run by “childless cat ladies.”

Mr. Trump dismissed out of hand donors’ suggestions that he replace Mr. Vance on the ticket. But Mr. Trump privately asked his advisers whether they had known about Mr. Vance’s comments about childless women before Mr. Trump chose him.

I’d also like to know if Trump’s vetting team knew of the pictures of JD wearing drag while at Yale, which have become the subject of memes on social media.

Whether the dossier was comprehensive matters (particularly given that a law firm also involved in Trump’s criminal defense completed it). It matters, most of all, because Trump has swapped the mediocre Ivanka as his primary familial advisor for the incompetent Don Jr, and the failson had a key role in picking JD.

So it would be newsworthy to reveal the scope and the thoroughness (or not) of the vetting document.

That said, I think every outlet that is sitting on these documents, particularly if they’re withholding details about any oversights in JD’s vetting document, owes the public an explanation of why they’re adopting a double standard as compared to their poor choices from 2016.

WaPo, which is trying to hunker through controversy about Will Lewis’ possible role in covering up Murdoch’s phone hacking,  tried to do that yesterday. Matt Murray boasted that outlets were taking a breath, and then went on to claim that the vetting document isn’t newsworthy because the six-month old vetting document isn’t, “fresh or new enough.”

“This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of The Post. Instead, “all of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”

[snip]

“In the end, it didn’t seem fresh or new enough,” Murray said.

WaPo even attempted to address something virtually all discussions about using rat-fucked documents in the context of the suspected Iranian hack do not: the treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop, the most innocent provenance explanation for which is that, after pursuing a laptop from foreigners with ties to Russian intelligence for a year, Rudy Giuliani received just such a laptop out of the blue from a blind computer repairman.

Here’s what WaPo claims about how reserved news organizations were with the hard drives described as the Hunter Biden laptop.

News organizations have been tested since 2016. Wary of (1) hacked materials since then, many proved reluctant to report on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop out of concerns that they were the result of a hack. As the conservative press latched on to (2) allegedly incriminating emails found on the computer in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign, more mainstream outlets did not join in a 2016-style frenzy over the material, and Facebook and Twitter limited distribution of a New York Post story about the laptop.

An analysis by The Post nearly two years later confirmed the authenticity of many of the emails on the laptop and found no evidence of a hack. [my annotation]

Note the two reasons alluded to in this passage, both of which show up in Murray’s claimed explanation for sitting on the JD Vance dossier. There were two concerns, according to the WaPo:

  1. Was the laptop “hacked”?
  2. Did the “allegedly incriminating emails” prove what the NYPost claimed they did?

Then, in the next paragraph, WaPo addresses just one of those two issues, whether the hard drive copied from a copy of a laptop, was hacked. WaPo claims, falsely, that the linked story describing the results of Jake Williams and Matt Green’s analysis “found no evidence of a hack.”

For starters, that’s a category error. This is a copy of a copy of a laptop, not the laptop itself. What their analysis attempted to assess was the authenticity of the emails on the laptop — but two different security researchers were only able to do so for a fraction of the emails. This analysis made no attempt to assess whether the stuff on the laptop was packaged up from authentic files (or from a combination of authentic and doctored files). Far more importantly, given details of Hunter’s cloud accounts, it did not assess whether people besides Hunter Biden had access his cloud data (evidence at his gun case described that not just his mistress, Zoe Kestan, accessed his cloud data, but his drug dealers accessed at least his bank account).

But it did find that the copy of a copy of a laptop lacked marks of reliability and did include files placed there by someone other than Hunter Biden.

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

[snip]

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

[snip]

“From a forensics standpoint, it’s a disaster,” Williams said. (The Post is paying Williams for the professional services he provided. Green declined payment.)

[snip]

Neither expert reported finding evidence that individual emails or other files had been manipulated by hackers, but neither was able to rule out that possibility.

[snip]

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

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

There are several details, disclosed subsequent to the story, that it lacks: It doesn’t talk about the ways the story John Paul Mac Isaac’s attorney told WaPo conflict with the story JPMI would tell in his book (one very significant conflict pertains to the date when JPMI reached out to the FBI). It doesn’t describe that JPMI himself disavowed some of the content on the Jack Maxey hard drive, the one shared with the WaPo. It doesn’t describe that Hunter has sued Garrett Ziegler and Rudy Giuliani for hacking him (the former survived Ziegler’s motion to dismiss; the latter was dismissed pending the end of Rudy’s bankruptcy; as far as I know, Hunter has not yet renewed the suit against Rudy given the imminent dismissal of Rudy’s bankruptcy). It doesn’t describe that in court filings, Abbe Lowell affirmatively claimed that the data on the laptop itself — not the copy! — had been compromised before being shared with the FBI.

Defense counsel has numerous reasons to believe the data had been altered and compromised before investigators obtained the electronic material from Apple Inc. and The Mac Shop, such that the Special Counsel’s claim that the underlying data is “authentic” (id. at 4) and accurately reflects “defendant’s Apple Macbook Pro and [] hard drive” (id. at 2) is mistaken.

Mr. Biden’s counsel told the Special Counsel on May 10, 2024 it agrees not to challenge the authenticity of the electronic data the Special Counsel intends to use with respect to it being what law enforcement received on December 9, 2019 from John Paul Mac Isaac (owner of The Mac Shop), and from Apple on August 29, 2019 and in a follow-up search on July 10, 2020. (Mot. at n.3.) However, Mr. Biden cannot agree this electronic data is “authentic” as to being his data as he used and stored it prior to Mac Issac obtaining it.

WaPo relies on a two year old story that has been significantly preempted to claim that the copy of the copy of the laptop was not hacked. The story never made such a claim, and the claims it has made have been undermined since.

But there’s an even more telling aspect of WaPo’s self-satisfied claim that reporters gave up their rabid addiction for rat-fuckery after 2016. It doesn’t address whether the laptop subsequently became newsworthy.

There’s good reason for that: Because after the election, WaPo did embrace the laptop, even the doctored one they got from Maxey, as part of a years-long campaign of dick pic sniffing. Their lead dick pic sniffers, Matt Viser and Devlin Barrett, even made shit up when disgruntled IRS agents released details that raised questions about the integrity of the original copy. Since then, prosecutors themselves have described that the extraction of the copy of the laptop they received — the one whence all the data that sloppy reporters call “the laptop” came — is 62% bigger, measured in terms of pages, than the laptop itself. There are potentially innocent explanations for why the hard drive purporting to be a copy of the laptop would not match it, but those explanations would conflict with JPMI’s explanations for how he made the copy. And, scandalously, the FBI never made an index of the laptop, and Judge Maryellen Noreika allowed it to be used in the trial against Hunter without ever even assuring that the forensic reports on the extraction of the two devices matched what got certified to her in a court filing.

And WaPo is not alone in its continuing addiction to relying on a copy of a copy of a laptop with such provenance problems. Just yesterday, NYT’s Ken Vogel did a story that relied on the laptop which basically said, Hunter Biden asked the Commerce Department for help on Burisma but it blew him off (unsurprisingly, Vogel also struggles with the court filings on which he bases his news hook). Four years after Vogel’s chum Rudy Giuliani released the laptop, three weeks after Joe Biden dropped out, NYT is still reporting the absence of news in an 8-year old email as news, precisely the kind of attention suck that rat-fuckers seek when they provide stolen documents to people like Vogel.

Again, in my opinion, WaPo is right not to publish the JD Vance dossier, though that’s different than using it to assess whether there were big gaps in the vetting of Trump’s unpopular running mate.

But WaPo is telling fairy tales about whether mainstream outlets gave up their fondness for rat-fuckery.

They did not. For four years, they have been utterly addicted to the rat-fuckery of the laptop, to the exclusion of reporting on all the details that should raise cautions disclosed since then.

And as such, the decision not to embrace this rat-fuckery, however correct it might be, is a double standard.

The Damaging Precedent of the Julian Assange Espionage Guilty Plea

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All day yesterday and on this appearance on Brad Blog, I emphasized we won’t know how to assess the resolution of the Julian Assange case until we see the Statement of Offense.

At least as incorporated within his plea agreement, that’s now released.

As written, it is an especially damaging precedent. Both in yesterday’s post and with BradBlog, for example, I noted that the role of the alleged hacking the conspiracy is one key thing that distinguished Assange’s actions from what journalists do.

It’s not in the Statement of Facts — not even the attempt alleged in the indictment to help Chelsea Manning crack a password. The Statement of Facts only describes the period from 2009 to 2011, so Assange’s later alleged inclusion in the Lulzsec hacking conspiracy is also not included.

Rather than focusing on the alleged hacking, which always distinguished Assange from journalists, the Statement of Facts focuses on Assange’s disinterest in redacting the names of sources before publishing the documents.

In an August 2010 panel discussion, the Defendant said it was “regrettable” that individuals exposed through his website as having previously met with the United States government “may face some threat as a result.” In the same panel discussion, the Defendant stated that “we [WikiLeaks] are not obligated to protect other people’s sources, military sources or spy organization sources, except from unjust retribution,” adding that, in general, “there are numerous cases where people sell information . . . or frame others or are engaged in genuinely traitorous behavior and actually that is something for the public to know about.”

The primary other thing to implicate Assange in a knowing crime is his statement that,

unless [sources] were “a serving member of the United States military,” those providing classified information would have no legal liability for giving such classified information to him because ‘TOP SECRET’ meant nothing as a matter of law.

Asking sources to violate their non-disclosure agreements, of course, is something national security journalists do all the time.

Compare that to NSD’s press release on the plea, which did focus on the hacking.

As set forth in the public charging documents, Assange actively solicited and recruited people who had access, authorized or otherwise, to classified information and were willing to provide that information to him and WikiLeaks—and also solicited hackers who could obtain unauthorized access to classified information through computer network intrusions. Assange publicly encouraged his prospective recruits to obtain the information he desired by any means necessary, including hacking and theft, and to send that information to Assange at WikiLeaks.

This plea could have been written in a way that limited the damage of the precedent. For reasons we have yet to discover (but which may have been dictated by Assange’s side, not DOJ’s), it was not.

Barry Pollack, Assange’s US criminal defense attorney, is a very good attorney, and this agreement protects Assange very broadly — unsurprisingly, it covers far more serious conduct in 2017.

The United States agrees not to bring any additional charges against the Defendant based upon conduct that occurred prior to the time of this Plea Agreement, unless the Defendant breaches this Plea Agreement.

Mind you, Assange would have been insane to enter into an agreement with anything short of such a provision. But Assange has gotten immunity for years of (more serious) conduct with no admission to it.

There are three concessions to the United States in this plea (aside from resolving a years-long saga without the cost of more appeals and trial). First, Assange had to agree to do what he could to take down the materials in question.

Before his plea is entered in Court, the Defendant shall take all action within his control to cause the return to the United States or the destruction of any such unpublished information in his possession, custody, or that of WikiLeaks or any affiliate of WikiLeaks.

By context, this refers to just materials received from Chelsea Manning. A far more urgent concern for the US would and has been the source code for CIA’s hacking tools. While most of WikiLeaks’ content has long been removed, the stub for Vault 7 remains up at the WikiLeaks site, as well as links to one of the developer’s guides, still showing information treated as classified in the Josh Schulte case.

By entering into this plea, the US government doesn’t have to share any classified discovery with Schulte (or any discovery that might make it easier to sue).

As part of this Plea Agreement, and based upon the concessions of the United States in this Plea Agreement, the Defendant knowingly, willingly, and voluntarily gives up the right to seek any additional discovery. Further, the Defendant knowingly, wittingly, and voluntarily waives all pending requests for discovery.

And finally, he waives any lawsuit against the US for actions taken during the criminal investigation of him.

The Defendant, on behalf of himself and the Releasing Parties, hearby releases and forever discharges all and/or any actions, claims, rights, demands and set-offs, whether in this jurisdiction or any other, and whether in law or equity, that he ever had, may have or hereafter can, shall or may have against the United States arising out of connected with the United States Department of Justice’s criminal investigation, extradition, and/or prosecution of the Defendant.

This is not a surprise, but it is of particular concern here. But this langauge doesn’t exclude lawsuits against the CIA to the extent the CIA’s conduct was dissociated from the criminal investigation. Assange is pursuing actions in Spain against the security guy who surveilled Assange while he was at the Ecuadorian Embassy. While WikiLeaks clearly had non-public information to launch that suit, its claims that this was CIA surveillance, rather than FBI surveillance, has never been convincing.

The US has also invoked State Secrets in a lawsuit brought by WikiLeaks associates against the CIA in SDNY, and resolving this case may make those State Secrets claims easier to sustain (though Judge John Koeltl has not yet dismissed the case). But again, the CIA is the defendant there.

The Breach language, which looks like it was changed after the plea was originally drafted, is quite narrow — it only covers events that lead up to the judge accepting the plea.

It’s over. Both sides lost. Chelsea Manning especially lost, given the additional time she spent in jail resisting a subpoena for testimony that would never be used at trial.

The question remains how much damage this loss for both sides will do in the future.

Julian Assange to Plead to One Count of Espionage Act on Way Back to Australia

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Julian Assange has reached a plea deal.

He’ll plead to one felony count of violating the Espionage Act, a count that combines conspiring to obtain and disclose Secret documents. The Information covers just 2009 to 2011, so leaves out four years of the charged CFAA conspiracy and his far worse conduct after 2015.

He’ll plead guilty on Wednesday morning in the North Marianas Island, on his way back to Australia.

This plea gets Assange little more than a way to avoid US trial (and that’s before we see the Statement of Offense). It still charges a foreigner with violating the Espionage Act, the key thing journalists fought to avoid. It’s not clear if it immunizes anyone else.

DOJ could have built a felony plea around the charged hacking conspiracy, to avoid such problems. But they chose not to.

Update: I’ve corrected the description of the conspiracy, above. The Statement of Offense may do some interesting things in describing how Assange chose to disclose these documents, including mentioning Assange’s preferential sharing of them with Israel Shamir.

The Schulte CIPA Transcripts: Locking up Vault 8

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Perhaps the most interesting thing about the CIPA (Classified Information Procedures Act) transcripts from the Josh Schulte case that Kel McClanahan helped me liberate is that (at least in 2022, when they did a classification review) the CIA treated the moniker “Vault 8” that WikiLeaks gave to the CIA source code releases as still-classified.

When Judge Jesse Furman restated the hypothetical he posed about whether disseminating already-released stolen classified information could itself be a crime, he described the releases to include Vault 7 and Vault 8.

I gave you two hypotheticals. I think one is where a member of the public goes on WikiLeaks today and downloads Vault 7 and Vault 8 and then provides the hard dive with the download to someone who is not authorized to receive NDI, and I posed the question of whether that person would be guilty of violating the Espionage Act and I think your answer was yes. [my emphasis]

There’s actually no unredacted reference to Vault 8 in the released transcripts.

But there are what are almost certainly redacted references to Vault 8.

Here’s how part of the discussion about hypotheticals appears in the May 2 transcript:

It appears likely that Josh Schulte was deliberately using both terms — he started doing so, and much later in the transcript he claimed, falsely, that there was a distinction in the charges against him between the development notes and the source code. The dual references, with repeated mention of Vault 7, followed immediately by a redaction describing the other of plural “disclosures,” appear to stop after page 31, perhaps in response to something one of the prosecutors said.

There’s undoubtedly good reason the government remains coy about the more damaging part of this release.

In a self-serving note sent after it became clear he was a suspect, Schulte himself made a clear distinction between the development notes and the source code, describing that, “These tools are MUCH more valuable [to a hostile country like Russia] undiscovered by the media or the nation that lost them [because] Now, you can secretly trace and discover every operation that nation is conducting.”  The source code provided American adversaries the ability to reverse engineer US spying efforts, and in the process, identify CIA assets.

I have written about how Julian Assange seemed to threaten Don Jr by raising the separately named source code in November 2017.

Schulte’s apparent failed attempt to win the right to discuss the source code releases, in addition to the development note releases, came in the midst of his attempt to get more details from what was likely the ongoing investigation into the aftermath of his leak, including (possibly) how hackers obtained the tools he had leaked. Schulte received that discovery starting in early April, and on April 29, he asked Judge Furman to give him all the details of the ongoing investigation. Throughout his second trial, Schulte seemed focused on using his defense to communicate outward (which is one reason I found Wau Holland’s decision to pay for transcripts so notable). So in the hearing where he was attempting to include Vault 8 among the things he could discuss publicly, he was focused on the ongoing investigation into how hackers had obtained or used these tools.

I have long said that, historically, the files WikiLeaks chose not to release — and, potentially, to selectively share — were far more important than the files they released. The government’s ongoing sensitivity seems to confirm that: The US government has conceded that the development notes from CIA’s hacking tools, which constitutes the bulk of what WikiLeaks released, came from the CIA, but appears not to concede that the hacking source code itself does.

The Cultivation of Don Jr: A Framework to Think of the Russian Attack

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Months ago, I started laying out a framework to provide background to explain how Trump has trained the GOP to hate rule of law, a key part of how he has brought us close to fascism. My weekend post on Bill Barr’s obfuscation about his role in Ukrainian matters (to which there will be a follow-up) started to fill in another of the remaining bullets.

Today, and in parallel, LOLGOP and I will begin to release some podcasts as we explain the important part: how all this brings us to where we are, with both Aileen Cannon and SCOTUS taking active measures [heh] to help Donald Trump avoid accountability.

So I need to explain how I think of the Russian attack.

Generally, people think of the Russian attack in the same way Robert Mueller set up Volume I of his Report:

  • Volume I Section II: [Dead] Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s social media campaign
  • Volume I Section III: GRU’s hack and leak campaign
  • Volume I Section IV: Russian Government contacts to the Trump campaign

Remember, his report was an explanation of prosecutorial decisions. It was only intended to determine whether things were crimes. It only included the prosecutorial decisions that had been concluded by Mueller. So, for example, the report itself didn’t describe the referrals sent to other districts, such as SDNY’s prosecution of Michael Cohen for financial crimes and hush money payments or EDNY’s prosecution of Tom Barrack on foreign agent crimes, which ended in acquittal; it remains unclear how much of these referrals show up in the referral section. Mentions of ongoing investigations, such as into the suspected $10 million payment to Trump from an Egyptian bank or evidence that Roger Stone conspired with Russian in the hack-and-leak, were relegated to the appendix or a footnote.

The SSCI Report instead considered whether these things posed a counterintelligence risk, rather than a crime. As such, they considered a long list of possible compromises, categorized both by people (like Paul Manafort or Maria Butina — the latter of whom was not included in scope of Mueller Report) and events (like the June 9 meeting). Viewed from that framework, having a guy who spent years implementing influence operations for Russian allies Manafort, work for “free” on the campaign looks quite different, like a grave counterintelligence risk to Donald Trump. Great swaths of that report — such as a section on Andrii Telizhenko’s influence operations, which may even have incorporated Bill Barr — remain redacted.

But as this effort to interfere in the US election proceeded, Russia conducted at least two (and, I argue, at least a third) devastating attacks on US intelligence, which had ties to the election year attack itself.

  • The Shadow Brokers release of NSA’s hacking tools, which (I was told but have not reconfirmed) shared one forensic link and has several human infrastructure links to the election attack
  • The Vault 7/Vault 8 release of CIA’s hacking tools, which in implementation continued a pressure campaign by Julian Assange rooted in the election year attack
  • A concerted campaign against the FBI, largely focused but not exclusively reliant on the Steele dossier

The Solar Winds attack, discovered in the last year of Trump’s presidency, could be another such attack, one used by Sidney Powell’s team (including Mike Flynn and Patrick Byrne) in their attack on democratic elections, one that stole Chad Wolf’s emails as he helped Trump discredit election integrity efforts, one Trump is using in his attack on rule of law. The attack was first initiated years earlier, possibly as early as 2016. But so little is known about the attack — aside from that it targeted a number of government agencies and court filing systems — that I will bracket that for now.

This sets up a structure something like this:

What Mueller includes in his contacts with Russia section is possible (and in some cases, definite) attempted recruitment. That kind of thing is a constant.

In advance of the Russian attack, however, Russian entities may have been behind a number of efforts focused on Trump and his associates. Deripaska worked a brutal double game that made it more likely to get Manafort’s cooperation, witting or not. Joseph Mifsud brokered ties to Russian officials for George Papadopoulos — leading to an (aborted) plan to set up a meeting with Putin’s team in London. A former GRU officer and two sanctioned banks got involved in Felix Sater’s pitch of a Trump Tower to Cohen, resulting in Dmitry Peskov collecting proof of Trump’s willingness to work with GRU before the Hillary hack was ever revealed. Someone dangled stolen emails before Roger Stone, ultimately giving him an advance peek — in exchange for what, we don’t know — but Stone started pursuing a pardon for Julian Assange no later than November 15 (and probably as early as October 3).

With the exception of the Manafort pitch (which leveraged his financial desperation), none of those pitches from Russia — whether they were backed by Russian spooks or not — would have required anything more than recklessness and venality from the Trump side. For example, in January, when Cohen called Dmitry Peskov to ask for Putin’s help finalizing the Trump Tower deal, Trump probably doubted he was going to win and there was no reason to be particularly alarmed by the GRU tie; but after the revelation that GRU hacked the DNC, after Trump got the nomination, the existence of the January call became potentially devastating. The Coffee Boy bragged to diplomats from three different countries that Russia was going to attack Hillary, which looked dramatically different when WikiLeaks released the stolen DNC emails (which is when the Australians shared their knowledge of it).

If I’m right that Russia deliberately used some of the same infrastructure in the hack-and-leak and the Shadow Broker operation, it would serve as a stick unveiled at precisely the moment Roger Stone bit on the carrot of advanced access to John Podesta emails, basically tying Stone’s outreach to an attack on the NSA.

Similarly, the unveiling of the Vault 7 release, which WikiLeaks (or an intermediary between Josh Schulte and WikiLeaks) sat on from May 2016 until March 2017, made Stone’s sustained commitment to winning a pardon for Assange all the more damaging. It is unknown whether Russia got an advanced look at those files (which would have provided a way to identify CIA’s assets in Russia), but Assange used a Deripaska-linked attorney to try to negotiate immunity in advance of releasing the files, tying its release to Russia.

Along with Stone, this entire operation came to a focus on Don Jr.

Obviously, there’s the June 9 meeting pitch, which again requires nothing more than recklessness from Don Jr, but which resulted in him receiving a pitch for sanctions relief in exchange for dirt on Hillary. “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Maria Butina similarly tried to pitch Trump’s son.

Don Jr, who joined some of the most rabid Trumpsters in validating the Prigozhin’s trolls, likewise would have represented an overlap between those trolling operations and the ones run by right wing extremists.

At least as interesting is the way Assange repeatedly incorporated Don Jr into his pitch. On September 20, WikiLeaks alerted Don Jr to an anti-Trump campaign and provided a password.

59. On or about September 20, 2016, at approximately 11 :59PM, Target Account 1 sent a private message to a high level individual associated with the Campaign (the “high-level · Campaign individual”). 4 The message stated: “A PAC run anti-Trump site ‘ ‘ is about to launch. The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war·PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘. See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?”

Jr passed it onto the campaign, making it clear he had accessed the site. This was the basis of the (totally appropriate) prosecution declination for Jr. only disclosed after years of FOIA challenge by Jason Leopold.

In October, at a time when WikiLeaks was rebuffing Stone’s outreach, WikiLeaks repeatedly suggested Don Jr push out links (and recommend his father do so too). A figure in the Douglass Mackey DM threads by the name of P0TUSTrump kept pushing those links as if in response.

The day of the election, WikiLeaks pushed Don Jr to convince his dad not to concede.

Hi Don; if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred–as he has implied that he might do. He is also much more likely to keep his base alive and energised this way and if he is going to start a new network, showing how corrupt the old ones are is helpful. The discussion about the rigging can be transformative as it exposes media corruption, primary corruption, PAC corruption etc. We don’t like corruption ither [sic] and our publications are effective at proving that this and other forms of corruption exists.

On December 16, 2016, WikiLeaks pushed Jr to convince his dad to give Assange an Ambassadorship (which would amount to immunity).

Hi Don. Hope you’re doing well! In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to DC “That’s a really smart tough guy and the most famous australian you have! ” or something similar. They won’t do it, but it will send the right signals to Australia, UK + Sweden to start following the law and stop bending it to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons. Background: justice4assange.com

As news of the June 9 meeting broke, WikiLeaks advised Jr to release his emails via WikiLeaks and also advised he reach out to Margaret Kunstler.

When these DMs were released on November 14, 2017, Assange tweeted out a follow-up to the December 2016 one, adding a threat by hashtagging, Vault8, the source code to the CIA files, a single example of which WikiLeaks had just released on November 9, 2017.

I read this as a concerted effort to shift from Stone to Don Jr. Whether Don Jr was actively soliciting this help or not, WikiLeaks made sure to tie Trump’s son to their plight, both publicly and privately.

Whatever else may have gone on between WikiLeaks and the failson, around the time that Mueller’s questions would have alerted Trump that he knew of the pardon pitches, at a time when WikiLeaks’ ties with Russia were under far greater scrutiny, Jr’s buddy Arthur Schwartz went after Cassandra Fairbanks, disabusing her of any hopes Trump would pardon Assange. She ultimately flew off to London to tell him.

None of this says that Don Jr conspired with Russia on the 2016 attack. What is says is that Russian assets systematically viewed him as an idiot that could be and was often useful. And Jr ended up connecting all the through-strands: he bridged the hack-and-leak and social media campaigns with the right wing lists, he reliably got his dad to act on his instructions, and then — as the cost of all this went up — Assange repeatedly targeted Jr as he increased the cost of the hack of the CIA, effectively extorting Jr as he started releasing CIA source code.

Even before I turn to the dossier, viewed this way, the Russian operation in 2016 isn’t so much about getting Trump elected. Rather, it’s about sowing irreparable polarization in the US that deliberately tied Trump’s people to the twin attacks on the Deep State — Shadow Brokers and Vault 7/8.

With little involvement beyond predictable recklessness and venality (and Don Jr’s stupidity), then, Russian assets implicated Trump’s people in attacks on the Deep State that raised the cost of their openness to Russian help in 2016, but which would have made any admissions by Trump all the more costly.

Russia didn’t need cooperation from Trump’s people (though they got it from at least Manafort and Stone and a certain idiot who proved useful). They just needed to make any already improbable conciliation impossible, impossible politically and impossible for a Narcissist like Trump to do. That would practically guarantee that Trump would attack the country to defend himself, his son, his ego.

That, in turn, would make the aftermath of the 2016 attack far more fertile for recruitment, because it would prioritize allegiance to Trump over allegiance to country.

emptywheel Makes CIPA History

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Yesterday, Judge Aileen Cannon issued a surly order, acceding to Jack Smith’s request to protect witnesses. In reversing herself, Cannon scolded Smith for not making a more fulsome case to seal information.

Only now, after failing to meaningfully “raise argument[s] or present evidence that could have been raised” in these responses, Wilchombe, 555 F.3d at 957, the Special Counsel moves for reconsideration and argues, in no uncertain terms, that the Court committed “clear error” by applying an unobjected-to legal standard [ECF Nos. 267, 282]

Ultimately, Cannon argued the 11th Circuit precedent on this — but not on other — types of pretrial motions is undecided.

Having done so, the bottom line is this. The Eleventh Circuit has not specifically addressed the instant question: whether, in a criminal proceeding, the First Amendment qualified right of access attaches to discovery materials referenced or attached in support of a publicly filed Rule 12(b) motion to compel discovery under Rule 16. Nevertheless, the most faithful application of Supreme Court and available Eleventh Circuit authority is that Defendants’ MTC in this case is not subject to a public right of access, whether constitutional or common law in nature, because it is a still, ultimately, a discovery motion as distinct from a substantive pre-trial motion requiring judicial resolution on the merits.

Remember: One reason Trump has these materials to attempt to publicly release is because Smith was more generous in discovery than the rules require. Cannon did not permit Smith to seal information that would otherwise be Jencks, aside from information identifying witnesses.

The Court reaches a different conclusion as to the Special Counsel’s broad-based request to seal the substance of all substantive Jencks statements referenced in and/or attached to the MTC [ECF No. 278 p. 2 (arguing for wholesale sealing of potential witnesses’ statements to avoid “influenc[ing] the testimony of other witnesses or the jury pool”)]. By granting this sweeping and undifferentiated request—which the Special Counsel also raises in seal requests associated with Defendants’ substantive pretrial motions [See ECF No. 348 pp. 6–7]—the Court would be authorizing the categorical sealing of large portions of the record attached in support of critical
pretrial defense motions.

Meanwhile, in SDNY, I won (or rather, Judge Jesse Furman used my intervention (and that of Inner City Press) as an excuse to grant disclosure of something even more rare: Redacted transcripts from the CIPA 6 conference in the Josh Schulte case.

[T]he Court concludes that CIPA overrides any common law right of public access to the transcripts of a closed CIPA Section 6 hearing, at least where, as here, the court determines that the classified information may not be disclosed or used at trial. But the Court concludes that the public has a qualified right of public access to such transcripts under the First Amendment. It follows that the transcripts at issue here, redacted to protect national security or to preserve other higher values, must be unsealed.

As Furman noted, he had already disclosed some of this in a conference on jury instructions; he had distinguished those who disseminated already-released classified information if they knew it was classified (and therefore, by re-disseminating it, would confirm that it was classified) from those who did not have means to know.

I gave you two hypotheticals. I think one is where a member of the public goes on WikiLeaks today and downloads Vault 7 and Vault 8 and then provides the hard dive with the download to someone who is not authorized to receive NDI, and I posed the question of whether that person would be guilty of violating the Espionage Act and I think your answer was yes. That strikes me as a very bold, kind of striking proposition because in that instance, if the person is not in a position to know whether it is actual classified information, actual government information, accurate information, etc., simply providing something that’s already public to another person doesn’t strike me as — I mean, strikes me as, number one, would be sort of surprising if that qualified as a criminal act. But, to the extent that the statute could be construed to [] extend to that act one would think that there might be serious constitutional problems with it.

I also posed the hypothetical of the New York Times is publishing something that appears in the leak and somebody sharing that article in the New York Times with someone else. That would be a crime and there, too, I think you said it might well be violation of the law. I think to the extent that that would extend to the New York Times reporter for reporting on what is in the leak, or to the extent that it would extend to someone who is not in position to know or position to confirm, that raises serious constitutional doubts in my mind. That, to me, is distinguishable from somebody who is in a position to know. I think there is a distinction if that person transmits a New York Times article containing classified information and in that transmission does something that confirms that that information is accurate — right — or reliable or government information, then that’s confirmation, it strikes me, as NDI. But it just strikes me as a very bold and kind of striking proposition to say that somebody, who is not in position to know or does not act in a way that would confirm the authenticity or reliability of that information by sharing a New York Times article, could be violating the Espionage Act. That strikes me as a kind of striking proposition.

So all of which is to say I think I have come around to the view that merely sharing something that is already in the public domain probably can’t support a conviction under this provision except that if the sharing of it provides something new, namely, confirmation that it is reliable, confirmation that it is CIA information, confirmation that it is legitimate bona fide national defense information, then that confirmation is, itself, or can, itself, be NDI. I otherwise
think that we are just in a terrain where, literally, there are hundreds of thousands of people unwittingly violating the Espionage Act by sharing the New York Times report about the WikiLeaks leak.

Furman has given the government an opportunity to further redact the transcripts, but ordered them otherwise released on May 3 — meaning they’d be available before the follow-up hearing in the Assange extradition case, on which — because they pertain to the First Amendment — they may have bearing.

I’m not entirely sure this move is as unprecedented as Furman makes out. Some of the CIPA materials in the Scooter Libby case were released.

But particularly because this may affect the Assange extradition and particularly because the CIPA hearings in the Trump case are sure to be contentious, I would not be surprised if the government appeals this decision.

Thanks, again, to National Security Counselors’ Kel McClanahan to agreeing to argue this for me. You can support them here or here.

Update: Here’s my post explaining the High Court order inviting assurances about Assange’s First Amendment protections. DOJ has 6 more days to issue those assurances.

High Court Decision May Pose New Challenges to Julian Assange Prosecution

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The British High Court today issued a ruling provisionally giving Julian Assange permission to appeal his extradition on three grounds. But before he can do that, the US has an opportunity to give assurances on those grounds to address specific concerns.

The court put everything on hold, then, for 55 days to allow that reassurance process to happen.

We adjourn the renewed application for leave to appeal on grounds iv), v) and ix). The adjournment is for a period of 55 days until 20 May 2024, subject to the following directions:

i) The respondents have permission to file any assurances with the court by 16 April 2024.

ii) In the event that no assurances are filed by then, leave to appeal will be granted on grounds iv), v) and ix).

iii) In the event that assurances are filed by 16 April 2024, the parties have permission to file further written submissions on the issue of leave to appeal, in the light of the assurances, such submissions to be filed by the applicant by 30 April 2024, and by the respondent and the Secretary of State by 14 May 2024.

iv) In the event that assurances are filed by 16 April 2024, we will consider the question of leave to appeal at a hearing on 20 May 2024.

One of those three grounds — that he might become eligible for the death penalty — will be easily dispensed with, as the US easily dispenses with similar concerns in terrorism cases.

When I first read the judgment, I assumed the other two issues would be similarly dispensed with easily (and the judges certainly seem inclined to grant extradition if they get appropriate assurances).

The third ground for appeal, after all, pertains to whether Assange will be treated as a defendant like an American would be. And since the Espionage Act doesn’t allow for content-based defenses, Assange would be no worse situated than any other Espionage Act defendant — arguably including Donald Trump (whose 2010 attacks on Assange were one basis for raising concerns about the death penalty).

But the second basis for appeal may be more tricky for the US to issue assurances.

It has to do with whether the First Amendment gives Assange equal protection to what he’d get under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The judges seem inclined to adopt Baraitser’s analysis that, so long as Assange can rely on the First Amendment, it would (and therefore that if the US says he can do so, the extradition can be approved).

However, we agree with the judge that extradition of the applicant would not involve a flagrant denial of his article 10 rights. In summary, that is because:

i) The First Amendment gives strong protection to freedom of expression, which broadly reflects the protection afforded by article 10 of the Convention. On the assumption that the applicant is permitted to rely on the First Amendment, it is not arguable that extradition will give rise to a real risk of a flagrant denial of his article 10 rights.

ii) Counts 1 to 14 and 18 concern conduct which is contrary to the criminal law and which does not directly concern free expression rights. The prosecution of such conduct does not involve a flagrant denial of article 10 of the Convention.

iii) Counts 15, 16 and 17 concern the publication of the names of human intelligence sources. There is a strong public interest in protecting the identities of human intelligence sources, and no countervailing public interest justification for publication has been identified.

iv) There were strong reasons, as the judge found, to conclude that the applicant’s activities did not accord with the “tenets of responsible journalism”.

But as I noted here, that analysis is fine for the extradition question. It’s fine to rule that Assange would get at least the same protections as he would in Europe.

It’s another thing altogether for use in a US courtroom.

That’s because the First Amendment doesn’t include a balancing test of privacy versus public interest present in the ECHR.

Rather, in language that would apply equally to Assange’s indiscriminate publication of the DNC and Podesta emails (as well as the publication of the Turkish and Saudi emails), Baraitser argued that Assange’s publication in bulk was not protected because it did not and could not properly weigh the risk to others.

This part of the ruling, in particular, would not translate into US law. There is no such privacy balance in the US outside of much weaker defamation laws. And so this part of the ruling does not offer much comfort with regards the existing charges as precedent in the US context.

Whereas in Europe, you have to act like a journalist to get protections as one (which Baraitser said Assange did not, especially not with respect to the three counts of publishing the identities of US and Coalition sources, which had little public interest value to counterweigh the harm he did to those whose names he published), in the US one does not have to adhere to journalistic principles to be protected by the First Amendment.

The US may have real concerns about giving assurances sufficient to meet this particular concern. If they do, Assange would be able to argue that the US was unfairly applying prior restraint to him in a way it doesn’t others — including Cryptome’s John Young, who has repeatedly tried to intervene in Assange’s case in various ways, each time on the basis that he published the State cables without punishment.

All that may be for the best. Faced with such a choice, the US might choose to drop the case entirely (or drop the three most damaging charges, if they are able to do that). I doubt they would drop it entirely, but they could.

They could also pursue the misdemeanor plea the WSJ recently reported, though as reported that seemed like mostly Assange-derived fluff.

Or they could limit the kinds of evidence they use on these charges. One thing that distinguishes Assange from journalists — and from Young — for example, is that prior to publishing all the cables without adequate redaction, he first shared a subset of them with Israel Shamir, who then gave them to (at least) Belarus. At least for the state cables, prosecutors could prove the dissemination charge without relying on publication altogether. Doing so would not only mitigate the damage this precedent would cause, but would get to the real damage that releasing those identities did, willfully giving dictators advance notice to retaliate against US sources before the US could take mitigating measures.

Finally, the might just note that Bartnicki does not apply because Assange allegedly was involved in the theft of the documents in question. Who knows. Depending on what happens with the Project Veritas investigation associated with Ashley Biden’s diary, DOJ might soon have a US citizen being prosecuted in a similar situation.

I imagine the US would have no problem assuring the Brits that Assange would have the same stinky content-based First Amendment rights as other Espionage Act defendants. The question is whether they’d be willing to allow Assange to argue that his prosecution amounted to prior restraint.

Josh Schulte Sentenced to 40 Years

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Aldrich Ames was arrested at the age of 53 in 1994 after 9 years of spying for Russia. He remains imprisoned in Terre Haute to this day — 30 years and counting — at the age of 82. (My math here is all rough.)

Robert Hanssen was arrested in 2001 at the age of 57 after 22 years of spying for Russia. He died last year, at the age of 79, in Florence SuperMax.

After six years in jail — most under Special Administrative Measures sharply limiting his communication — Josh Schulte, aged 35, was sentenced Thursday to 40 years in prison. He will presumably go to either Florence (most likely, because Judge Jesse Furman recommended he should go to someplace close to Lubbock) or Terre Haute.

Since his guidelines sentencing range was life in prison, I’m not sure how much, if any, of his sentence could, hypothetically, be dropped for good behavior.

Furman sentenced him concurrently on his Child Sexual Abuse Material conviction and the Espionage Act charges. Barring any successful appeal, he would be in prison for at least 20 years on top of time served, if he were to get credit for good behavior. That would put him back on the street at age 55, still the prime of his life (says someone in precisely that prime of her life, someone still learning some of the forensic techniques Schulte mastered as a teenager).

But the possibility that Schulte would be released before 2058, when Schulte will be 69, is based on two very big assumptions (on top of my uncertainty about whether he could get time off). First, that Schulte could sustain “good behavior” in prison, when he has failed to do so even while being held under SAMs in New York. Most recently, the government alleges he somehow obtained more CSAM in 2022 while in prison, where he would consume it in his cell after days representing himself in his second trial, the one in which he was convicted of the Espionage Act charges.

Even while Schulte’s family was traveling to attend his trial in 2022, he chose to retreat to his cell to view the child pornography that he had secreted on his prison laptop. (See D.E. 1093-1 at 3-4 (describing examples of times when videos were played).)

And there’s good reason to believe he attempted to — may well have succeeded at — conducting further hacks from prison.

That’s some of what I’ve been pondering since the government first requested that Schulte be treated like four men, including Ames and Hanssen, who gave America’s secrets to Russia rather than giving them to WikiLeaks, as a jury convicted Schulte of doing, by sentencing him to life in prison.

It took years of tradecraft to recruit and cultivate sources like Ames and Hanssen.

Many of the details about what led up to Schulte’s leaks of the CIA’s hacking tools remain unknown — including via what server he shared the files, because WikiLeaks’ submission system could not have accepted them at the time, meaning Schulte necessarily had some kind of contact with WikiLeaks in advance.

But the current story is that Schulte reacted to being disciplined at work fairly directly by stealing and then sharing the CIA hacking tools in one fell swoop. In a matter of days in April and May 2016 (perhaps not coincidentally, the same period when Russian hackers were stealing files from Hillary Clinton’s team), Schulte took steps that burned a significant part of CIA’s capabilities to the ground.

As a result of that reactive decision, Schulte delivered a set of files that would allow their recipients to hunt down CIA’s human sources based off the digital tracks they left in highly inaccessible computers. As I’ve noted, Schulte was well aware of the damage that could do, because he wrote it up in a self-serving narrative after the fact.

I told them the confluence server was the one that seemed to be compromised, and while horrible and damaging at least it wasn’t Stash; At least not at this point–Hopefully they could stop any additional leaks from the network at this point. From the news articles I’ve read, wikileaks claims to have source code, but we don’t know what code or from where. However, at this point, I knew the SOP was a complete stand down on all [redacted] operations. We had no idea what had been leaked, when, for how long, or even who else had seen the materials leaked. Have they been steadily accessing our network every day? Have all our ops been blown since we wrote the first line of code? Perhaps only confluence had been leaked, but the individual(s) responsible are/were planning to exfil the other parts of DEVLAN too? So much still unknown, and with potential (yet unconfirmed) link between wikileaks and Russia–Did the Russians have all the tools? How long? It seems very unlikely that an intelligence service would ever leak a nation’s “cyber weapons” as the media calls them. These tools are MUCH more valuable undiscovered by the media or the nation that lost them. Now, you can secretly trace and discover every operation that nation is conducting. I told them all this was certainly very disturbing and I felt bad for my friends and colleagues at the agency who likely weren’t doing anything and most likely had to completely re-write everything. [my emphasis]

What gets virtually no coverage is that this is precisely what happened: the bulk of the most sensitive files Schulte stole, the source code, has never been publicly accounted for. That’s why I find credible the unsealed and sealed filings submitted with sentencing claiming that Schulte caused what Judge Furman claimed (as reported by Inner City Press) was $300 million in damage and a cascading series of compromises.

Because DOJ couldn’t trade a death sentence in exchange for cooperation about how Schulte did it, as they did with Ames and Hanssen, because digital encryption is much more secure than a dead drop in a Virginia park, it’s not clear whether the government even knows all of it.

I don’t even know what Schulte was trying when he attempted to social engineer me from jail in 2018 — but I have my suspicions.

Later this month, Julian Assange will get a last chance to stave off extradition. I have long suspected if the UK approves the extradition, Russia will attempt to swap Evan Gershkovich for Assange. One way or another, we may learn more about what the US government has learned about the WikiLeaks operation in the 7 years since Schulte was part of one of the most successful, sustained attacks by Russia on the US.

But until then, Schulte will be moving to new long-term accommodations in a highly secure prison.

Claiming Josh Schulte’s Leaks Cost CIA 100s of Millions, DOJ Asks for Life Sentence

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In support of sentencing for Josh Schulte, DOJ submitted an unclassified letter from CIA’s Deputy Director claiming his breach cost the agency hundreds of millions of dollars, a sealed classified filing that must speak to grave harm, and a sealed letter from a CSAM victim.

The how they get to the sentencing recommendation is quite technical (though it involves a terrorism enhancement for using computers to engage in espionage).

The what — a request for a life sentence — is not surprising. The comparison of his crimes to Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames is similary not surprising.

Indeed, it is the proof that Schulte carried out his conduct with the specific intent that his theft would harm the United States that sets his case apart. In virtually all cases identified in the Government’s research in which violations of § 793(b) have been prosecuted, that charge has been paired with violations of 18 U.S.C. § 794, which penalizes the delivery of national defense information to a foreign government with the same intent requirement. That offense does not apply to Schulte’s conduct, because he chose to transmit the Stolen CIA Files to WikiLeaks, rather than directly to a foreign state. But Schulte’s intent to harm the United States, the scope of his theft and disclosure, and the consequences of his conduct, more closely parallels cases prosecuted under § 794 than so-called “leak” cases in which comparatively small amounts of information are shared with media organizations with a misguided sense of the public interest. In such cases, Courts have routinely, albeit gravely, concluded that terms of life imprisonment are the only appropriate sanction for such devastating crimes, notwithstanding the fact that many similarly situated individuals accepted responsibility for their crimes. See, e.g., United States v. Robert Hanssen, 01 Cr. 1088 (E.D. Va. 2002) (life imprisonment for FBI supervisor who pled guilty to selling classified information to Russia); United States v. Aldrich Ames, 94 Cr. 166 (E.D. Va. 1994) (life imprisonment for CIA officer who pled guilty to selling classified information to Russia); United States v. Arthur James Walker, 85 Cr. 92 (E.D. Va. 1985) (life imprisonment for former Navy officer convicted of selling documents for transmission to Russia); United States v. Andrew Daulton Lee, 589 F.2d 980 (9th Cir. 1979) (life imprisonment for contractor convicted of selling classified information regarding CIA project to Russia).

It is, however, fairly sobering.

Don Jr Confesses He and Douglass Mackey Were “Put on Lists” Together

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In an interview of far right troll and now convicted felon Douglass Mackey yesterday, Don Jr confessed that he and Mackey had frequented the same lists back in the day.

DONALD TRUMP JR. (HOST): And with that, guys, joining us now is Doug Mackey. Again, if you guys were in the meme wars, like, early adapters like me back in 2015 and ’16, you’ll know him as Ricky Vaughn. But Doug, for the people watching — and it’s great to have you. You know, I know — we’ve probably gone back and forth on Twitter back in the old days and DMs, and I’m sure we were put on lists way back then. But for the people watching, can you explain what happened here? I mean, you literally ran a Twitter account named Ricky Vaughn. And you got charged for posting a meme. What’s going on?

Later in the interview, Trump Jr. told Mackey that his Ricky Vaughn account was “awesome” and “may be my favorite Twitter account of all time” and “maybe the best of all time.” [my emphasis]

I find that particularly interesting, because there’s a troll in the troll rooms released as part of Mackey’s trial named P0TUS Trump. I’ve always wondered whether it could be Don Jr.

I had that suspicion not just because of the name, but also because P0TUS Trump always seemed even more focused on the WikiLeaks releases than the others. The others were busy conducting far more sophisticated campaigns.

On October 12, 2016, as everyone else was excited that Mackey had been added back to their group after being banned, P0TUS Trump was instead pushing #PodestaEmails3.

An hour later, in a conversation with Mackey co-conspirator MicroChip, he pushed #PodestaEmails4.

The next day, as MicroChip and unindicted co-conspirator HalleyBorderCol were casting doubt on claims that Trump was a rapist, P0TUS Trump again was focused on WikiLeaks.

That monomaniacal focus on WikiLeaks while everyone else was focused on other things came in the days after — according to the SSCI Report — WikiLeaks had DMed Don Jr at his normal Twitter account (for which Mueller obtained.a warrant in October 2017) directly to get him to push hashtags, including pertaining to PodestaEmails4.

(U) WikiLeaks also sought to coordinate its distribution of stolen documents with the Campaign. After Trump proclaimed at an October 10 rally, “I love WikiLeaks” and then posted about it on Twitter,1730 WikiLeaks resumed messaging with Trump Jr. On October 12, it said: “Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us … there’s many great stories the press are missing and we’re sure some of your follows [sic] will find it. btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.”1731 Shortly afterward, Trump tweeted: “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged System!”1732 Two days later, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted the link himself: “For those who have the time to read about all the corruption and hypocrisy all the @wikileaks emails are right here: wlsearch.tk.”1733 Trump Jr. admitted that this may have been in response to the request from WikiLeaks, but also suggested that it could have been part of a general practice of retweeting the WikiLeaks releases when they came out. 1734 [my emphasis]

WikiLeaks remained focused on cultivating Don Jr for at least another year, trying to get him rather than Roger Stone to take the lead on a pardon for Julian Assange, and when that didn’t happen, posting ominous warnings about dropping the source code Josh Schulte had stolen under the Vault 8 label.

And that’s just what’s public.

Imagine if the former President’s failson had a private identity, one playing right along with two men who have been convicted of conspiring to harm the civil rights of Hillary Clinton supporters, the same crime, 18 USC 241, for which Trump now stands accused.

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