This may not be an actual “Wyden siren,” but it still has his name attached to it. What’s being said here isn’t nearly as ominous as this single sentence he sent to CIA leadership earlier this year:
I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities.
Few people are capable of saying so much with so little. This one runs a bit longer, but it has implications that likely run deeper than the surface level issue raised by Wyden and others in a recent letter to Trump’s (satire is dead) Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Here are the details, as reported by Dell Cameron for Wired:
In a letter sent Thursday to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the lawmakers say that because VPNs obscure a user’s true location, and because intelligence agencies presume that communications of unknown origin are foreign, Americans may be inadvertently waiving the privacy protections they’re entitled to under the law.
Several federal agencies, including the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission, have recommended that consumers use VPNs to protect their privacy. But following that advice may inadvertently cost Americans the very protections they’re seeking.
The letter was signed by members of the Democratic Party’s progressive flank: Senators Ron Wyden, Elizabeth Warren, Edward Markey, and Alex Padilla, along with Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Sara Jacobs.
That’s alarming. It’s also a conundrum. VPN use (often required for remote logins to corporate systems) is a great way to secure connections that are otherwise insecure, like those made originating from people’s homes (to log into their work stuff) or utilizing public Wi-Fi. There are also more off-the-book uses, like circumventing regional content limitations or just ensuring your internet activity can’t be tied to your physical location.
The trade-off depends on the threat you’re trying to mitigate. It’s kind of like the trade-off in cell phone security. Using biometrics markers to unlock your phone might be the best option if what you’re mainly concerned with is theft of your device. A thief might be able to guess a password, but they won’t be able to duplicate an iris or a fingerprint.
But if the threat you’re more worried about is this government, you’ll want the passcode. Courts have generally found that fingerprints and eyeballs aren’t “testimonial,” so if you’re worried about being compelled to unlock your device, the Fifth Amendment tends to favor passwords, at least as far as the courts are concerned.
It’s almost the same thing here. VPNs might protect you against garden-variety criminals, but the intentional commingling of origin/destination points by VPNs could turn purely domestic communications into “foreign” communications the NSA can legally intercept (and the FBI, somewhat less-legally can dip into at will).
That’s the substance of the letter sent to Gabbard, in which the legislators ask the DNI to issue public guidance on VPN usage that makes it clear that doing so might subject users to (somewhat inadvertent) domestic surveillance:
Americans reportedly spend billions of dollars each year on commercial VPN services, many of which are offered by foreign-headquartered companies using servers located overseas. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, VPNs have the potential to be vulnerable to surveillance by foreign adversaries. While Americans should be warned of these risks, they should also be told if these VPN services, which are advertised as a privacy protection, including by elements of the federal government, could, in fact, negatively impact their rights against U.S. government surveillance. To that end, we urge you to be more transparent with the American public about whether the use of VPNs can impact their privacy with regard to U.S. government surveillance, and clarify what, if anything, American consumers can do to ensure they receive the privacy protections they are entitled to under the law and Constitution.
I wouldn’t expect a response from ODNI. I mean, I wouldn’t expect one in any case, but I especially don’t expect Tulsi Gabbard to respond to a letter sent by a handful of Democratic Party members.
A warning would be nice, but even an Intelligence Community overseen by competent professionals, rather than loyalists and Fox News commentators would be hard-pressed to present a solution. To be fair, this letter isn’t asking for a fix, but rather telling the Director of National Intelligence to inform the public of the risks of VPN usage, including increasing their odds of being swept up in NSA dragnets.
Certainly the NSA isn’t concerned about “incidental collection.” It’s never been too concerned about its consistent “incidental” collection of US persons’ communications and data in the past and this isn’t going to budge the needle, especially since it means the NSA would have to do more work to filter out domestic communications and the FBI would be less than thrilled with any efforts made to deny it access to communications it doesn’t have the legal right to obtain on its own.
Since the government won’t do this, it’s up to the general public, starting with everyone sharing the contents of this letter with others. VPNs can still offer considerable security benefits. But everyone needs to know that domestic surveillance is one of the possible side effects of utilizing this tech.
The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.
Government officials said the changes could give the intelligence agencies access to a database containing hundreds of millions of documents — from FBI case files and banking records to criminal investigations of labor unions — that touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans.
Administration officials said they are providing the intelligence agencies with more information from investigations by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to combat drug gangs and other transnational criminal groups that the administration has classified as terrorists.
But they have taken these steps with almost no public acknowledgement or notification to Congress. Inside the government, officials said, the process has been marked by a similar lack of transparency, with scant high-level discussion and little debate among government lawyers.
“None of this has been thought through very carefully — which is shocking,” one intelligence official said of the moves to expand information sharing. “There are a lot of privacy concerns out there, and nobody really wants to deal with them.”
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, declined to answer specific questions about the expanded information sharing or the legal basis for it.
Instead, she cited some recent public statements by senior administration officials, including one in which the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, emphasized the importance of “making sure that we have seamless two-way push communications with our law enforcement partners to facilitate that bi-directional sharing of information.”
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, revelations that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had used the CIA to spy on American anti-war and civil rights activists outraged Americans who feared the specter of a secret police. The congressional reforms that followed reinforced the long-standing ban on intelligence agencies gathering information about the domestic activities of U.S. citizens.
Compared with the FBI and other federal law enforcement organizations, the intelligence agencies operate with far greater secrecy and less scrutiny from Congress and the courts. They are generally allowed to collect information on Americans only as part of foreign intelligence investigations. Exemptions must be approved by the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The National Security Agency, for example, can intercept communications between people inside the United States and terror suspects abroad without the probable cause or judicial warrants that are generally required of law enforcement agencies.
Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the expansion of that surveillance authority in the fight against Islamist terrorism has been the subject of often intense debates among the three branches of government.
Word of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the sharing of law enforcement information with the intelligence agencies was met with alarm by advocates for civil liberties protections.
“The Intelligence Community operates with broad authorities, constant secrecy and little-to-no judicial oversight because it is meant to focus on foreign threats,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement to ProPublica.
Giving the intelligence agencies wider access to information on the activities of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime “puts Americans’ freedoms at risk,” the senator added. “The potential for abuse of that information is staggering.”
Most of the current and former officials interviewed for this story would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the matter and because they feared retaliation for criticizing the administration’s approach.
Virtually all those officials said they supported the goal of sharing law enforcement information more effectively, so long as sensitive investigations and citizens’ privacy were protected. But after years in which Republican and Democratic administrations weighed those considerations deliberately — and made little headway with proposed reforms — officials said the Trump administration has pushed ahead with little regard for those concerns.
“There will always be those who simply want to turn on a spigot and comingle all available information, but you can’t just flip a switch — at least not if you want the government to uphold the rule of law,” said Russell Travers, a former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center who served in senior intelligence roles under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The 9/11 attacks — which exposed the CIA’s failure to share intelligence with the FBI even as Al Qaida moved its operatives into the United States — led to a series of reforms intended to transform how the government managed terrorism information.
A centerpiece of that effort was the establishment of the NCTC, as the counterterrorism center is known, to collect and analyze intelligence on foreign terrorist groups. The statutes that established the NCTC explicitly prohibit it from collecting information on domestic terror threats.
National security officials have spent much less time trying to remedy what they have acknowledged are serious deficiencies in the government’s management of intelligence on organized crime groups.
In 2011, President Barack Obama noted those problems in issuing a new national strategy to “build, balance and integrate the tools of American power to combat transnational organized crime.” Although the Obama plan stressed the need for improved information-sharing, it led to only minimal changes.
President Donald Trump has seized on the issue with greater urgency. He has also declared his intention to improve information-sharing across the government, signing an executive order to eliminate “information silos” of unclassified information.
More consequentially, he went on to brand more than a dozen Latin American drug mafias and criminal gangs as terrorist organizations.
The administration has used those designations to justify more extreme measures against the criminal groups. Since last year, it has killed at least 148 suspected drug smugglers with missile strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, steps that many legal experts have denounced as violations of international law.
Some administration officials have argued that the terror designations entitle intelligence agencies to access all law enforcement case files related to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other gangs designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.
The first criterion for those designations is that a group must “be a foreign organization.” Yet unlike Islamist terror groups such as al-Qaida or al-Shabab, Latin drug mafias and criminal gangs like MS-13 have a large and complex presence inside the United States. Their members are much more likely to be U.S. citizens and to live and operate here.
Those steps were seen by some intelligence experts as potentially opening the door for the CIA and other agencies to monitor Americans who support antifa in violation of their free speech rights. The approach also echoed justifications that both Johnson and Nixon used for domestic spying by the CIA: that such investigations were needed to determine whether government critics were being supported by foreign governments.
The wider sharing of law enforcement case files is also being driven by the administration’s abrupt decision to disband the Justice Department office that for decades coordinated the work of different agencies on major drug trafficking and organized crime cases. That office, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, was abruptly shut down on Sept. 30 as the Trump administration was setting up a new network of Homeland Security Task Forces designed by the White House homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller.
The new task forces, which were first described in detail by ProPublica last year, are designed to refocus federal law enforcement agencies on what Miller and other officials have portrayed as an alarming nexus of immigration and transnational crime. The reorganization also gives the White House and the Department of Homeland Security new authority to oversee transnational crime investigations, subordinating the DEA and federal prosecutors, who were central to the previous system.
That reorganization has set off a struggle over the control of OCDETF’s crown jewel, a database of some 770 million records that is the only central, searchable repository of drug trafficking and organized crime case files in the federal government.
Until now, the records of that database, which is called Compass, have only been accessible to investigators under elaborate rules agreed to by the more than 20 agencies that shared their information. The system was widely viewed as cumbersome, but officials said it also encouraged cooperation among the agencies while protecting sensitive case files and U.S. citizens’ privacy.
Although the Homeland Security Task Forces took possession of the Compass system when their leadership moved into OCDETF’s headquarters in suburban Virginia, the administration is still deciding how it will operate that database, officials said.
However, officials said, intelligence agencies and the Defense Department have already taken a series of technical steps to connect their networks to Compass so they can access its information if they are permitted to do so.
The White House press office did not respond to questions about how the government will manage the Compass database and whether it will remain under the control of the Homeland Security Task Forces.
The National Counterterrorism Center, under its new director, Joe Kent, has been notably forceful in seeking to manage the Compass system, several officials said. Kent, a former Army Special Forces and CIA paramilitary officer who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington state, was previously a top aide to the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard.
The FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies have strongly opposed the NCTC effort, the officials said. In internal discussions, they added, the law enforcement agencies have argued that it makes no sense for an intelligence agency to manage sensitive information that comes almost entirely from law enforcement.
“The NCTC has taken a very aggressive stance,” one official said. “They think the agencies should be sharing everything with them, and it should be up to them to decide what is relevant and what U.S. citizen information they shouldn’t keep.”
The FBI declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica. A DEA spokesperson also would not discuss the agency’s actions or views on the wider sharing of its information with the intelligence community. But in a statement the spokesman added, “DEA is committed to working with our IC and law enforcement partners to ensure reliable information-sharing and strong coordination to most effectively target the designated cartels.”
Even with the Trump administration’s expanded definition of what might constitute terrorist activity, the information on terror groups accounts for only a small fraction of the records in the Compass system, current and former officials said.
The records include State Department visa records, some files of U.S. Postal Service inspectors, years of suspicious transaction reports from the Treasury Department and call records from the Bureau of Prisons.
Investigative files of the FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies often include information about witnesses, associates of suspects and others who have never committed any crimes, officials said.
“You have witness information, target information, bank account information,” the former OCDETF director, Thomas Padden, said in an interview. “I can’t think of a dataset that would not be a concern if it were shared without some controls. You need checks and balances, and it’s not clear to me that those are in place.”
Officials familiar with the interagency discussions said NCTC and other intelligence officials have insisted they are interested only in terror-related information and that they have electronic systems that can appropriately filter out information on U.S. persons.
But FBI and other law enforcement agencies have challenged those arguments, officials said, contending that the NCTC proposal would almost inevitably breach privacy laws and imperil sensitive case information without necessarily strengthening the fight against transnational criminals.
Already, NCTC officials have been pressing the FBI and DEA to share all the information they have on the criminal groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, officials said.
The DEA, which had previously earned a reputation for jealously guarding its case files, authorized the transfer of at least some of those files, officials said, adding to pressure on the FBI to do the same.
Administration lawyers have argued that such information sharing is authorized by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the law that reorganized intelligence activities after 9/11. Officials have also cited the 2001 Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement agencies power to obtain financial, communications and other information on a subject they certify as having ties to terrorism.
The central role of the NCTC in collecting and analyzing terrorism information specifically excludes “intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorists and domestic counterterrorism.” But that has not stopped Kent or his boss, intelligence director Gabbard, from stepping over red lines that their predecessors carefully avoided.
In October, Kent drew sharp criticism from the FBI after he examined files from the bureau’s ongoing investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist. That episode was first reported by The New York Times.
Last month, Gabbard appeared to lead a raid at which the FBI seized truckloads of 2020 presidential voting records from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials later said she was sent by Trump but did not oversee the operation.
In years past, officials said, the possibility of crossing long-settled legal boundaries on citizens’ privacy would have precipitated a flurry of high-level meetings, legal opinions and policy memos. But almost none of that internal discussion has taken place, they said.
“We had lengthy interagency meetings that involved lawyers, civil liberties, privacy and operational security types to ensure that we were being good stewards of information and not trampling all over U.S. persons’ privacy rights,” said Travers, the former NCTC director.
When administration officials abruptly moved to close down OCDETF and supplant it with the Homeland Security Task Forces network, they seemed to have little grasp of the complexities of such a transition, several people involved in the process said.
The agencies that contributed records to OCDETF were ordered to sign over their information to the task forces, but they did so without knowing if the system’s new custodians would observe the conditions under which the files were shared.
Nor were they encouraged to ask, officials said.
While both the FBI and DEA have objected to a change in the protocols, officials said smaller agencies that contributed some of their records to the OCDETF system have been “reluctant to push back too hard,” as one of them put it.
The NCTC, which faced budget cuts during the Biden administration, has been among those most eager to service the new Homeland Security Task Forces. To that end, it set up a new fusion center to promote “two-way intelligence sharing of actionable information between the intelligence community and law enforcement,” as Gabbard described it.
The expanded sharing of law enforcement and intelligence information on trafficking groups is also a key goal of the Pentagon’s new Tucson, Arizona-based Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel. In announcing the task force’s creation last month, the U.S. Northern Command said it would work with the Homeland Security Task Forces “to ensure we are sharing all intelligence between our Department of War, law enforcement and Intelligence Community partners.”
In the last months of the Biden administration, a somewhat similar proposal was put forward by the then-DEA administrator, Anne Milgram. That plan involved setting up a pair of centers where DEA, CIA and other agencies would pool information on major Mexican drug trafficking groups.
At the time, one particularly strong objection came from the Defense Department’s counternarcotics and stabilization office, officials said. The sharing of such law enforcement information with the intelligence community, an official there noted, could violate laws prohibiting the CIA from gathering intelligence on Americans inside the United States.
The Pentagon, he warned, would want no part of such a plan.
Earlier this month, the FBI decided it was going to help Donald Trump steal back the election he’s claimed for half-a-decade was stolen from him. The state whose Secretary of State was asked directly by the outgoing president in January 2021 to “find 11,780 votes” was raided by Trump 2.0, who still somehow thinks he can win the election he lost back in 2020.
It’s not just revenge Trump is seeking. He’s also hoping to find anything that will allow him to cast doubt on midterm election results now that it seems entirely possible the GOP might lose its majority in the legislature.
The FBI walked off with tons of stuff after its raid of the Fulton County election hub in Georgia. The raid — which was attended by the current DNI Tulsi Gabbard for no apparent reason — saw the Trump government seize as many 2020 ballots and voter records as possible. The stated reason for this raid was to collect evidence related to two alleged crimes: not retaining election records long enough and attempts to “intimidate voters or procure false votes/false voter registration.”
One of several glaring problems with this raid is the fact that some of the criminal acts alleged have already surpassed the five-year statute of limitations. The rest of the glaring problems are far less subtle. Like Trump using the FBI and DOJ to engage in vindictive prosecution. And the FBI appearing to have deliberately mislead the magistrate judge to get this search warrant approved.
This declaration [PDF] by Ryan Macias, a project manager for the voting system used in Fulton County who also served as the Acting Director of the Voting System Program during the 2020 election, points out multiple flaws in the FBI’s warrant affidavit — all of which it would be safe to assume were deliberate “errors.”
The Affidavit asserts that there were five “deficiencies or defects with the November 3, 2020, election and tabulation of the votes thereof.” The Affidavit concludes that “[i]f these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of” Title 52 U.S.C. §§ 20511 (Criminal Penalties) and 20701 (Retention and Preservation of Records of Elections).
In all five areas identified by Special Agent Evans’ Affidavit, there are a multitude of false or misleading statements and omissions. In fact, there are, as set forth below, over a dozen omissions of critical parts of the reports and related materials that I identified in paragraph 4 above. This is in addition to the absence of any recognition that much of what the Affidavit references as concerning are widely known as benign and common election practices. As noted there, all of thosematerials are publicly available and could have been referenced by Special AgentEvans. Even when Special Agent Evans cites to one of these sources, he repeatedlyomits crucial facts and findings inconsistent with his characterizations. Once thestatements and omissions in the Affidavit are corrected and based on my experienceadministering elections in accordance with the statutes cited in the Affidavit, theAffidavit loses any basis in reality.
The whole thing needs to be read, but here are just a couple of the things we’re going to generously call “errors,” even though they’re really deliberate omissions. The criminal allegations allege ballot images weren’t retained in violation of the law. But, as this declaration points out, the retention of images wasn’t mandated by law in Georgia until 2021, which would be after the 2020 election. If images weren’t retained, it was likely because election staffers obviously didn’t think it was necessary to do so.
Second, the affidavit claims something is shady about the audits performed by county officials, insinuating that this somehow resulted in votes mysteriously swinging the state in Biden’s direction. This declaration states the actual truth: “risk limiting audits” only aid in determining whether or not a recount might be warranted. Only official counts and recounts can actually alter voting results.
Fulton County’s challenge [PDF] of the search contains even more information that indicates the FBI’s search warrant application was crafted to basically trick a judge into authorizing an illegal search (all emphasis in the original):
First, the Fourth Amendment demands “probable cause”—not “possible cause.” The Affidavit fails that constitutional requirement. Despite years of investigations of the 2020 election, the Affidavit does not identify facts that establish probable cause that anyone committed a crime. Instead, FBI Special Agent Evans (the “Affiant”) all but admits that the seizure will yield evidence of a crime only if certain hypotheticals are true. See, e.g., Aff. ¶ 10 (“If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of federal law[.]”); ¶ 85 (“If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, the election records . . . are evidence of violations[.]”). Unsupported by probable cause and dependent on unsubstantiated hypotheticals, Respondent’s seizure violated the Fourth Amendment.
There’s more (emphasis mine):
Second, instead of alleging probable cause to believe a crime has been committed, the Affidavit does nothing more than describe the types of human errors that its own sources confirm occur in almost every election—without any intentional wrongdoing whatsoever. Mislabeling an expected margin of error as “deficiencies” or “defects” cannot establish probable cause, let alone for a seizure of this magnitude.
Third, the Affidavit omits numerous material facts—including from the very reports and publicly-disclosed investigations that the Affiant cites—that confirm the alleged conduct was previously investigated and found to be unintentional. Moreover, the Affidavit not only fails to allege that any particular witness is reliable or credible; it omits discrediting information about those witnesses that was obviously available to the Affiant. These omissions are serious. The ex parte warrant process would be rendered a nullity if the government were permitted to hide material and probative facts that refute probable cause from a magistrate judge and nevertheless retain the fruits of its misconduct.
It then goes on to note that even if the affidavit wasn’t more about what was deliberately left out of it, rather than what Kash Patel’s FBI decided to include, it would still suck, constitutionally-speaking:
Fourth, even if the Affidavit established probable cause, the seizure of original election materials would be unreasonable and in callous disregard of the Fourth Amendment because (1) the statutes of limitation have lapsed on the only crimes under investigation; (2) the warrant violates Georgia’s state sovereignty by effectively enjoining a pending state court proceeding and preventing Georgia from performing its constitutionally-mandated role in administering its elections; and (3) the Respondent improperly used the criminal warrant process to circumvent a pending civil lawsuit in which it requested the same records.
That last sentence is a particularly spicy zinger. It shows the administration will do anything to rack up a few rabble-rousing “victories,” no matter how fleeting or Pyrrhic. This is a fully-cooked collection of gassed-up bigots and conspiracy theorists (or both!) who have managed to turn their extremely online “own the libs” bullshit into a 24/7 attack on the Constitution, the system of checks and balances, and anything else that stands in the way of their autocratic wet dreams.
What’s standing between us and further destruction of the stuff that makes America great is a court system that doesn’t actually seem to know what to do when it has to deal with an entire administration that refuses to play by the rules that have held this nation together for more than two centuries. It’s time for the courts to dig deep and start breaking the glass on every judicial tool labeled “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.” Giving any of these fuckers the benefit of a doubt only allows them to dig in deeper.
Trump’s going to win the election he lost, no matter what he has to do to make that happen. Surrounding himself with a better set of sycophants this time around has really allowed him to gain some ground in his “be the despot you wish to see in the world” efforts.
His top appointees are just as willing to lie, defame, deride, and overstep the long-accepted limitations of their positions as the president himself. Now that Trump has pardoned the people who raided the Capitol on his behalf in January 2021, he’s going after everyone and everything that pissed him off about that particular election cycle.
Trump’s Revenge Time Machine is taking him and his administration back to Georgia to engage in an unprecedented seizure of voting records, as ABC News reports:
Fulton County, Georgia, officials said Wednesday that the FBI seized original 2020 voting records while serving a search warrant at the county’s Elections Hub and Operations Center.
[…]
The search warrant authorized the FBI to search for “All physical ballots from the 2020 General Election,” in addition to tabulator tapes from voting machines and 2020 voter rolls, among other documents, according to a copy of the warrant obtained by ABC affiliate WSB.
The warrant says the material “constitutes evidence of the commission of a criminal offense” and had been “used as the means of committing a criminal offense.” It was signed by Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas.
It’s not surprising that Trump would attempt to extract some sort of penance from Georgia after he failed to convert that state into electoral college votes. The governor of the state, Brian Kemp, did all he could to swing the state back into Trump’s favor post-election, including being sued by the DNC for claiming (with zero facts in evidence) that the Democratic party had “hacked” his state’s voting machines.
Trump kept this issue alive by bringing Heather Honey — a fellow 2020 election denier from Georgia — into the in-group, appointing her to a high-level position in the DHS where she would [vomits] help oversee future election security efforts.
What is surprising is that any judge would sign this warrant. The allegations range from “threadbare” to “hallucinatory.”
Specifically, the warrant listed possible violations of two statutes — one which requires election records to be retained for a certain amount of time, and another which outlines criminal penalties for people, including election officials, who intimidate voters or to knowingly procure false votes or false voter registrations.
Records were seized, which means it’s unlikely records were deleted prematurely. And there’s been nothing shown to this point that any sort of voter intimidation occurred… at least not on the behalf of the Democratic Party.
This appears to be voter intimidation of a different sort. Last month, the DOJ sued Fulton County (where the raid took place) for access to 2020 election records. This followed attempts to hold Trump accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election — acts that included Trump asking the Secretary of State to “find” the votes needed to swing the state, as well as its targeting of Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who brought election interference charges against the then-outgoing Trump.
Accompanying FBI agents on a raid is unprecedented for the chief of U.S. intelligence, whose job is to track threats from foreign adversaries. In her role overseeing the country’s spy agencies, Gabbard is prohibited by law from taking part in domestic law enforcement. Her predecessors took pains to keep their distance from Justice Department cases or partisan politics.
Asked about the rationale for her visit to Georgia, a senior administration official said: “Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure.”
Whatever, “senior administration official.” This is Gabbard hoping to show up on Trump’s radar again, after being sidelined during actual foreign-facing activity, like the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president. Perhaps she’s tired of seeing Kristi Noem flouncing from photo op to photo op as Barbie-in-Chief of the DHS’s invasion of the United States.
I mean…
Two senior officials with knowledge of the matter said Gabbard’s presence in Fulton County was unnecessary and was not requested by the Justice Department.
Yes, it’s another performance from the most performative administration in US history. And it will always play well because people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. The GOP is a flat circle, or perhaps more accurately, a human centipede.
Breaking up this endless cycle of shit ingestion and shit creation are the side effects of this sort of mutual masturbation: the constant shedding of talent from agencies that already don’t have enough of it, thanks to the administration’s constant purging of anyone who’s not MAGA enough.
The special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta field office was forced out this month after questioning the Justice Department’s renewed push to probe Fulton County’s role in the 2020 election, two people familiar with the matter told MS NOW.
Paul Brown was ousted after expressing concerns about the FBI’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s longstanding and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in the county anchored by Atlanta, and for refusing to carry out the searches and seizures of records tied to the 2020 election, according to the sources, who spoke to MS NOW on condition of anonymity.
Remember all the shit we talked about the USSR and its efforts to rid itself of anyone but party loyalists? Well, we’re doing it right here and now, nearly 40 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The GOP says there’s nothing wrong with this as long as it’s the GOP doing it. The MAGA faithful have no problem with this as long as it’s the MAGA front doing it. And the rest of us are expected to live with it, because the opposition party still seems to believe there’s a polite, non-confrontational set of options to be deployed. Let’s hope they’ll realize that’s no longer the case long before they have to issue a strongly-worded social media post about objecting to being first against the wall.
Well, that didn’t last long. Remember back in August when we reported that the UK had supposedly “backed down” from its dangerous demand that Apple create encryption backdoors? Remember how the Trump administration (mainly Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance) went around patting themselves on the back for tough-arming the UK into acquiescence?
At the time, we highlighted that getting the UK to back down was undoubtedly a good thing, but the reporting on it mentioned a “secret deal” which raised a lot of new questions. Apparently, we were right to be concerned. It appears that Gabbard and Vance negotiated a hollow victory that allowed them to get fawning press coverage, while the UK government could still demand encryption backdoors.
It turns out that “backing down” was more like a tactical retreat, because according to a new Financial Times report, British officials are right back at it — this time with an only slightly tweaked but still terrible demand.
The UK government has ordered Apple to allow access to encrypted cloud backups of British users, after a previous attempt to issue a broader demand that included US customers drew a furious backlash from the Trump administration.
The UK Home Office demanded in early September that Apple create a backdoor into users’ cloud storage service, but stipulated that the order appliedonly to British citizens’ data, according to people briefed on the matter.
A previous technical capability notice (TCN) issued in January sought global access to encrypted user data. That move sparked a diplomatic clash between the UK and US governments and threatened to derail the two nations’ efforts to secure a trade agreement.
In February, Apple withdrew its most secure cloud storage service, iCloud Advanced Data Protection, from the UK.
So let’s recap this insanity: Earlier this year, the UK demanded Apple break encryption globally. Apple shut down its Advanced Data Protection service in the UK rather than comply. There was massive pushback, including from the Trump administration. The UK then supposedly “backed down” in what was described as a “mutually beneficial agreement” between the US and UK. Now, just weeks later, they’re back with basically the same demand, just geographically limited.
Which raises the obvious question: what exactly was that “mutually beneficial” deal? Because it’s starting to look suspiciously like the US told the UK “fine, spy on your own people all you want, just leave ours alone.”
And here we are again. Apple is still unable to offer its most secure cloud storage to UK users, and now the UK government is doubling down on making its own citizens less safe. The company’s response remains appropriately defiant:
“Apple is still unable to offer Advanced Data Protection in the United Kingdom to new users,” Apple said on Wednesday. “We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP are not available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy.”
It added: “As we have said many times before, we have never built a back door or master key to any of our products or services and we never will.”
As for all that pressure from Trump administration officials like Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance that supposedly convinced the UK to back down? Well, according to the FT report, that pressure seems to have evaporated:
Members of the US delegation raised the issue of the request to Apple around the time of Trump’s visit, according to two people briefed on the matter. However, two senior British government figures saidthe US administration was no longerleaning on the UK government to rescind the order.
Translation: The US got what it wanted and is now perfectly happy to let the UK spy on British citizens. So much for standing on principle.
Once again, it appears that the Trump administration is happy to sign short-sighted, limited deals that sell out principles in favor of getting headlines that pump up their own efforts misleadingly.
This whole saga perfectly illustrates the fundamental problem with trying to create “limited” backdoors. You can’t create a vulnerability that only works for the “good guys”—any backdoor becomes a vulnerability for everyone. And you certainly can’t create geographically limited encryption weaknesses:
Caroline Wilson Palow, legal director of the campaign group Privacy International, said the new order might be “just as big a threat to worldwide security and privacy” as the old one.
She said: “If Apple breaks end-to-end encryption for the UK, it breaks it for everyone. The resulting vulnerability can be exploited by hostile states, criminals and other bad actors the world over.”
What’s especially frustrating is how this plays out politically. The Trump administration gets to look like the defender of American privacy rights while throwing British users under the bus. The UK government gets to claim it’s only targeting its own citizens (or, rather, not to say anything at all because it gets to hide behind the Investigatory Powers Act gag orders). And Apple gets stuck in the middle, forced to choose between protecting user security and maintaining access to a major market.
The UK’s Investigatory Powers Act continues to be the gift that keeps on giving to authoritarians worldwide. Every time the UK pushes these boundaries, it provides cover for more repressive regimes to make similar demands. “If the UK can demand backdoors, why can’t we?” becomes the rallying cry for authoritarians around the world.
And let’s not forget the forced secrecy component that makes all of this even more insidious. These Technical Capability Notices come with built-in gag orders, so Apple can’t even warn its users directly of what’s happening and that their data might be compromised. It’s surveillance with a side of deception.
The only reason we know about any of this—including the original order earlier this year—is because of leaks to the press.
The UK government’s approach here is particularly cynical. They’re betting that limiting their demand to UK users will reduce international pressure while still giving them the surveillance capabilities they want. And the Trump admin appears to be ignorantly playing along.
Once more for those in the back: there is no such thing as a “limited” encryption backdoor. Any vulnerability introduced into Apple’s systems creates risks for all users, regardless of nationality. The technical architecture doesn’t respect geographic boundaries, and neither will the criminals and hostile actors who inevitably discover and exploit these weaknesses.
This is exactly what we warned would happen when we wrote about that secretive “agreement” in August. Secret deals around fundamental rights are never good news, and this latest development proves why. The UK got what it wanted — permission to spy on its own citizens without international interference.
The only silver lining is that Apple continues to refuse to comply, but that puts the company in an impossible position. How long can they maintain this stance while being locked out of offering their best security features to UK users?
The UK government is making its own citizens less safe while setting a dangerous precedent for authoritarians worldwide. The fact that they’re doing it with apparent US acquiescence just makes it worse.
The UK government has reportedly backed down from its dangerous demand that Apple build encryption backdoors, following pressure from the Trump administration. But the secretive nature of this “mutually beneficial” agreement should make us deeply suspicious about what was actually traded away.
The UK government has backed down on a controversial demand for Apple to build a “back door” into its technology to access private user data following pressure from the Trump administration.
We had written about this—and how dangerous it was—the day the news leaked that the UK had issued such an order. In response, Apple turned off its iCloud encryption in the UK, making everyone way less safe.
Of course, I say “leaked” because the demands to Apple were never officially discussed by the UK government, who hoped to keep this unconscionable attack on everyone’s privacy a total secret. Since then, Apple has been fighting it out (still in secret) in the UK to try to get this order blocked, though it was believed that they only had limited legal routes to stopping it.
But there was widespread condemnation about this move by the UK government, and this is one of those cases where that includes from the Trump administration, who is taking credit for convincing the UK to back down. Of course, the UK is making no comment whatsoever, and the secret nature of the deal—which includes a source saying that the agreement was “mutually beneficial—to the US and the UK should raise some questions:
Gabbard said that over the “past few months,” she had been “working closely with our partners in the UK,” alongside President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, on the agreement.
A source familiar with the discussions told CNN that Gabbard spoke with her counterpart in the UK, Deputy National Security Advisory Matt Collins, a few times about the issue, including once when the UK delegation visited the White House. Vance was also personally involved in reaching a deal, engaging in direct conversations with British government officials to come to what was considered a “mutually beneficial” agreement for both countries, a White House official told CNN.
“This agreement between our two governments maintains each country’s sovereignty while ensuring close cooperation on data,” a White House official said.
Reading between the lines here, it sounds like the US may have threatened to cut off access to some of the intelligence data it collects if the UK went through with the plan.
Of course, it would be more reassuring if the US government itself wasn’t still trying to push through its own attacks on encryption. Federal law enforcement officials, federal elected officials, and state legislators are still pushing efforts to undermine encryption in the US.
So, yes, I’m glad that Gabbard and Vance were able to pressure the UK to drop this completely brain-dead and dangerous idea, but it would be nice if they got their allies in the US government to step down on this issue as well. And, also if they came clear as to what the deal with the UK is regarding “close cooperation on data.”
The broader lesson here is that we should be happy that the UK is backing down, but we shouldn’t celebrate too quickly when governments make these kinds of secretive deals around fundamental rights. Yes, it’s good that the UK backed down from its most aggressive position. But until we know what was traded in return, and until both countries abandon their broader anti-encryption agendas, it’s still unclear if this is a real victory for digital rights or more like a tactical retreat in a much longer war against privacy.
The news org Axios launched in 2017, just as the first Trump administration began, created by some ex-Politico folks, claiming that they would be “an antidote to this madness” and talking about how “the world needed smarter, more efficient coverage” of important news stories.
The reality is that Axios launders rightwing talking points in ugly short form vignettes that not only hide nuance, but reveal how their version of “neutral, objective” coverage actually means normalizing Donald Trump’s madness.
Two recent examples show how this works in practice. Last week, we wrote about how Tulsi Gabbard was trying to mislead the public into believing President Obama had “faked” Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election.
We went into great detail about how she misrepresented documents she had declassified to imply things they did not say. From the documents, it was entirely clear that (as multiple bipartisan research efforts had determined) Russians had tried to influence the election via social media, but had not been able to hack election infrastructure to change votes. Gabbard conflated the two things, using reports of the failure to attack election infrastructure to pretend it meant that there was no intent to influence the election.
So how did Axios cover this story? By focusing on how MAGA folks played their role in buying into Gabbard’s false narrative, talking about how they were calling for Obama’s arrest for treason.
The entire framing of the article is all about people who are believing the misrepresentations Gabbard made, and it literally takes 25 paragraphs (I counted… twice) before they add in a “reality check” admitting that Gabbard is lying:
Meanwhile, Gabbard’s accusation of Obama-era “treason” hinges on a claim that no serious investigation ever made: that Russia hacked and altered vote tallies in 2016.
I fail to see how this is “smarter, more efficient” coverage when it uses Gabbard’s misleading and dangerous framing for the first 24 paragraphs of the article, before adding in the kinda important fact check down towards the end of the article.
Doing it this way reinforces the false MAGA narrative and framing, and leaves people with the impression that there must be some sort of legitimate reason for the accusations.
But the more damning example came the same day. Two of Axios’ founders, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, published a column claiming that Trump was “winning” in his accomplishments while seeming genuinely perplexed why his approval ratings were at historic lows.
The column opens in a hilariously disconnected-from-reality manner:
President Trump, in terms of raw accomplishments, crushed his first six months in historic ways. Massive tax cuts. Record-low border crossings. Surging tariff revenue. Stunning air strikes in Iran. Modest inflation.
Yet poll after poll suggests most Americans aren’t impressed. In fact, they seem tired of all the winning.
This isn’t just bad reporting—it’s active propaganda dressed up as analysis. Here’s how that same paragraph could easily be rewritten by someone whose brain hadn’t been pickled in a MAGA brainwash stew:
President Trump has failed to do basically anything to make American’s lives better, while focusing almost all of his attention on culture war nonsense that decidedly is making lives worse. Massive tax cuts for the wealthy paid for by slashing Medicaid, sending the military in to our cities to silence protestors, kidnapping students and farmworkers, increasing the cost of most goods through foreign import taxes, breaking his promise to avoid costly military entanglements in the Middle East, and generally destroying American good will throughout the globe.
Trump promised a ton of shit he hasn’t accomplished: lower prices on day one. An end to the war in Ukraine. An end to fighting in Israel/Gaza. Oh, and the release of the Epstein files.
This kind of analysis only makes sense if you’ve completely bought into Trump’s own framing of success, and believe that his culture war conspiracy theory claptrap were actual real issues.
The mass deportations his base celebrates for their performative cruelty frequently target asylum seekers who did, in fact, follow the law, not the “criminals” Fox News obsesses over. The fact that Trump shipped many of them to foreign gulags without any due process seems to have escaped VandeHei’s and Allen’s notice. The tariffs that supposedly brought money into US coffers did so by raising taxes on everyday items—because, contrary to Trump’s claims, American consumers pay those tariffs.
Yes, he cut taxes. But mainly for the extremely wealthy, while stripping Medicaid from those who need it most.
And that doesn’t even touch on how he destroyed things like funding for cancer research, has made public health in the US a joke leading to a revival of measles, how he is pardoning criminals, and much, much more.
This is the Axios formula: adopt Trump/MAGA framing wholesale, present it as “neutral” analysis, then act bewildered when Americans reject policies that a cowed Congress rubber-stamped. They’re grading on a curve with a rubric set by the MAGA faithful.
Judd Legum, over at Popular Information, calls out how Axios has “rebranded conservative ideology as objectivity” and it’s quite true. Legum documents how VandeHei and Allen repeatedly invoke “neutrality” and “objectivity” while pushing transparently MAGA-friendly analysis.
Indeed, VandeHei and Allen have political opinions and express them publicly. VandeHei simply redefines his right-wing ideology as patriotism. “The American miracle rests on untamed democracy, the animal spirits of capitalism, the magic of unrestrained innovation, and the soft power of a vigilant and vibrant free press,” VandeHeiwrotein a December 2, 2024, Axios column. “I’m a believer in — and beneficiary of — all four.”
On January 20, 2025, the day Trump was inaugurated for the second time, VandeHei and Allenwrote, “Think of the U.S. government as a once-dominant, lean, high-flying company that grew too big, too bloated, too bureaucratic, too unimaginative.” The piece says Trump has a vision to remake government that “binds Trump with leading innovators.” The pair wrote that an “optimistic scenario” is that the second Trump presidency could “jar lawmakers and the public into realizing how a slow, bloated, bureaucratic government handcuffs and hurts America in the vital race for AI, new energy sources, space and overall growth.” They stated it is “correct” to believe “America’s government is so vast, so complex, so indebted that it makes fast, smart growth exponentially more complicated.”
VandeHei and Allen then outlined a plan for fixing the federal government’s problems — “cut workforce,” “cut costs,” “break stuff,” and “ignore the whiners.” While this is presented as a common-sense approach that a CEO would take, it essentially parrots the plans from the early days of the Trump administration.
Legum further notes that the “Trump is winning” article incredibly only quotes (anonymously, of course) from Trump insiders:
Notably, in the piece, Allen and VandeHei cite conversations with “Trump advisers,” “a longtime Trump aide,” and “Trump aides” concerning Trump’s record over the first six months. There is no mention of views expressed by Trump’s critics or even anyone not working for Trump.
The old “liberal mainstream media” narrative was always mostly bullshit—most mainstream outlets bent over backwards to seem “balanced,” even to the point of platforming the most disingenuous nonsense peddlers. But now we’re seeing the real thing: a media ecosystem where rightwing and MAGA-friendly outlets dominate the conversation.
Fox News dominates cable news by far. Tons of people get their news from blatantly pro-Trump right-wing podcasters. There are tons of openly pro-MAGA news organizations out there. And even the supposed “liberal” mainstream media seems to bend over backwards to normalize Trumpism and MAGA nonsense. The NY Times and the Washington Post go out of their way to de-crazify anything Trump does. ABC and CBS have both paid Trump bribes and promised to be more MAGA-friendly. Same with Facebook and Twitter on the social media side.
Into this landscape steps Axios, insisting it’s the grown-up in the room. When Legum pressed them on their obvious bias, they offered this laughable response:
Axios provides essential clinical reporting drawn from conversations with top leaders and experts. The analysis — never opinion — in these columns reflects that, and we stand by our journalism.
Call it what it is: stenography masquerading as journalism. Taking insider talking points and presenting them as “clinical reporting” isn’t analysis—it’s propaganda with better fonts.
Axios represents everything wrong with how media has responded to Trump: the pretense of objectivity while actively normalizing authoritarianism, the elevation of access over accuracy, and the complete abdication of journalism’s fundamental responsibility to challenge power rather than fluff its ego.
In the end, there’s nothing “neutral” about laundering fascist talking points through slick presentation and insider access. That’s not journalism—it’s complicity.
I’ve been warning people since the beginning of the year to expect the Trump regime to use the Twitter Files playbook on the US government and now we’re seeing exactly that play out. Trump is facing a bunch of pushback over the Jeffrey Epstein nonsense, so he needed some big new distraction quickly. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard stepped up Friday with a supposed bombshell, claiming to have discovered that the Obama administration concocted false intelligence reports that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election.
This is deliberate disinformation using the exact same Twitter Files playbook. The pattern is always identical: release narrow technical documents that most people won’t understand, surround them with inflammatory innuendo, then hand them off to gullible rubes like Matt Taibbi who will falsely claim the biggest scandal in history just dropped.
The “Russia Hoax” claim has been a central argument among Trump supporters for years, but it’s based on ever-shifting definitions. To understand why Gabbard’s latest “revelation” is manufactured bullshit, you need to understand what actually happened with Russian interference in 2016.
Here’s what actually happened: Russia absolutely tried to influence the 2016 election, primarily to sow chaos and division in the US. This generally involved supporting Trump (who brought more chaos) and attacking Hillary Clinton (whom Putin despised from her time as Secretary of State). This basic fact has been confirmed over and over again by multiple investigations (including those led by Republicans).
There was some overly hyped nonsense regarding Russia “colluding” (not a technical term) with the Trump campaign and then some unsubstantiated rumors from the Steele Dossier that appear unlikely to be true.
And then you have a bunch of extreme cultish partisans on both sides of the aisle who claimed too much. Some Democrats were way too credulous in believing that Russia worked hand-in-hand with Trump and did way more than they actually did. They were too quick to assume the worst at every turn with no proof. And they—not unlike QAnon folks—kept expecting some big bombshell to drop from something like the Mueller report.
The reality was much more mundane. Russia did seek to influence the election through various means, though it’s not really clear they had all that much success. MAGA folks have turned this into the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” claiming that because the most extreme versions of the narrative (“collusion” “pee tape”) didn’t bear out, it means that Russia was wholly uninvolved.
But that’s nonsense.
It is widely confirmed across multiple research reports from multiple sources, including one led by Republicans in the Senate that, yes, absolutely, Russia sought to influence the election in favor of Donald Trump. The Senate Intelligence Committee in 2019 (during the Trump admin when Republicans had the majority in the Senate) confirmed that Russia used social media to “sow societal discord and influence the outcome of the 2016 election.” That was a report led by Senator Richard Burr. A follow-up effort led by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio showed the same thing. There wasn’t “collusion” (a term that has no legal meaning here) but there was plenty to be concerned about. Here’s Rubio’s own quote:
We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.
What the Committee did find however is very troubling.We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.
The report also noted that:
Paul Manafort’s presence on the Trump Campaign and proximity to then-Candidate Trumpcreated opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential informationon, the Trump Campaign.
Remember: this was a bipartisan, Republican-led effort, released during Trump’s presidency, led by Marco Rubio. The conclusion is unambiguous: Russia tried to influence the 2016 election.
That’s all an awful lot of prelude, but it’s important to know about in order to understand what has happened recently. As detailed earlier this month at Lawfare, the CIA released an “internal tradecraft review” analyzing the intelligence community assessment that was released in early January of 2017, exploring one single line in that initial report. The report included a line saying the intelligence community believed, with high confidence, that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”
The original report attributed the “high confidence” in this particular claim to the CIA and FBI, while noting the NSA had “moderate confidence” in that claim. The new “tradecraft review” simply analyzes whether or not the CIA should have had “high confidence” in that claim and ends by saying that because of the word “aspire” and the evidence the CIA had on hand, it maybe should have said it had “moderate” confidence rather than high.
This is… not that big a deal. Basically, they’re saying that the CIA said it was slightly more confident than it actually was about Putin’s intent to help Trump. But it never denies that the assessment was still that Putin wanted to help Trump, as multiple other reports have said.
That takes us to Friday’s “revelation.” What Gabbard actually revealed was an intelligence assessment in December of 2016 that said that Russia was unsuccessful in one narrow thing: hacking into US voting infrastructure to change votes.
The key line:
We assess that foreign adversaries did not use cyber attacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome this year.
That is referencing one thing and one thing only: Were they able to successfully hack into election infrastructure and change results. Answer? No, they were not. This is also… not new. Multiple other investigations found the same thing: that, for all its faults (and it has faults!), the US voting infrastructure held up nicely in 2016 (and in 2020). That doesn’t mean Russia didn’t try to hack into these things. There are plenty of reports detailing how they succeeded in targeting state and local election officials as well as voting tech companies. But no evidence that any of that resulted in changed votes.
And that’s all this “bombshell” is really saying: that there was no evidence of the election infrastructure failing. Trump won in 2016 not because someone hacked voting machines. That’s it.
Here’s where the deliberate disinformation kicks in. Gabbard and the MAGA crew are claiming this proves Russia did absolutely nothing to influence the election, and that Obama cooked up a fake story between December 2016 and January 2017. On top of that, she claims this is so egregious that she’s referring Obama and his team for possible prosecution.
This is spectacularly stupid for multiple reasons. The original report was narrowly focused on one thing that was widely known: no successful hack impacted the actual election. But it’s being used to pretend it proves that the Russians didn’t try to influence the election at all—a thing we already knew they absolutely did, as confirmed by multiple investigative reports, including the Republican-led Senate reports quoted above.
The second part of the nonsense is that Gabbard then misrepresents Obama’s request to the intelligence agency, following that initial assessment, to write an analysis about Russian attempts to influence the election as a whole. That is, having seen the narrow report about a lack of success in hacking in to change votes, the request was a broader look at the many ways which Russia simply tried to influence the election, which is something entirely different than hacking voting infrastructure.
These two things are not in conflict at all, but Gabbard presents them as though they are. It’s like saying a doctor’s report that “no broken bones detected” contradicts a later assessment about “possible muscle strain”—when they’re examining completely different types of injuries. Even worse, Gabbard and MAGA world’s freakout is like saying the doctor who said “no broken bones, but can we run an analysis of muscle strain” was thereby trying to cover up the lack of broken bones by asking for a report on the muscle strain. It’s stupid beyond belief.
This is the Twitter Files playbook all over again.
Take some internal docs and release them, but surrounded by a bunch of innuendo and exaggerated claims.
Hand those documents to very stupid or very motivated (or both!) people who will falsely claim that the limited statement in those docs means the much broader thing that is in the innuendo.
Voila! A wholly manufactured story.
And into the void leaps one of the same useful idiots: Matt Taibbi. On the same day that walking First Amendment violator Donald Trump was directly trying to silence negative stories about himself, Matt Taibbi was claiming that Gabbard’s release was the biggest story in ages, and way more of a scandal than literally anything Donald Trump has done.
That’s Taibbi (who regularly makes embarrassingly stupid mistakes) claiming that the “corruption” here “dwarfs the worst Trump scandals.” He further claims “It’s unprecedented. It’s now in writing that the whole Trump-Russia thing was invented.”
Except, to anyone who can actually comprehend what words mean, this is not true at all. It confirms two things we knew already: (1) Russia was unsuccessful in its attempts to literally hack the voting machines used in the election, and (2) Russia still very much sought to influence the election.
This is the same sort of shit they did with the Twitter Files, which revealed the kinds of challenging internal debates over how to operationalize trust & safety policies on edge cases, which Taibbi falsely turned into a giant scandal he still doesn’t understand to this day (because there was literally nothing scandalous in it).
But, of course, the Trump-supporting media (as they did with the Twitter files) is running with the innuendo. Fox News is claiming this is proof that “Obama and cronies created the Trump-Russia hoax.”
Breitbart is calling it a “treasonous” plot to “frame Trump” and says it “makes Watergate look like amateur hour.”
This hysterical reaction is based on completely misrepresenting what the documents say. Obama wasn’t told there were no Russian interference attempts. He was told they didn’t successfully hack voting machines. That’s it.
And the research assessment that came a month later wasn’t in conflict with that. It noted (correctly as confirmed multiple times since) that the Russians absolutely tried to influence the election, which is not the same thing as hacking voting machines.
All that other stuff, including their desire to impact the election, their use of social media to do so, their connections to people in Trump’s orbit, and even their attempts at hacking voting systems, has all been confirmed. It’s not something that Obama had them make up. Even the CIA’s attempt to lower its own confidence on Putin’s intent earlier this month didn’t disagree with the fact that he did seek to interfere, even if he wasn’t that successful.
And, of course, thanks to Trump v. the United States, even if Obama had done something wrong here (and he clearly did not), Donald Trump’s Supreme Court made it clear that the President is immune for official acts, of which asking the intel community for an assessment is assuredly exactly that.
Unfortunately, even the mainstream media is reflecting Gabbard’s false framing, talking about how she called for Obama to be prosecuted over this, and burying the fact that it’s based on a deliberate misreading of what the documents show.
Meanwhile, Taibbi (who still isn’t criticizing Trump for his myriad attacks on press freedom) is literally claiming that Obama could end up in prison for this thing that the documents in front of him don’t show, no matter how often Taibbi claims otherwise (and apparently, Taibbi also seems wholly unaware of Trump v. US).
The irony here is staggering. While Trump is actively threatening journalists and media companies—behavior Taibbi’s crowd used to call authoritarian—Taibbi is fantasizing about imprisoning Obama over documents that any idiot can see don’t support his claims.
This is the Twitter Files playbook all over again and it’s designed to create exactly this kind of confusion. Gabbard knew that releasing these narrow technical documents with inflammatory framing would generate exactly the headlines we’re seeing. The goal isn’t truth—it’s providing Trump with a distraction from the Epstein stories and giving his base a new grievance narrative to obsess over.
For years going forward, due to useful idiots like Matt Taibbi, we’ll be hearing nonsense from otherwise smart people believing that it was revealed that Obama had the intelligence community come up with a fake report that the Russians tried to help Trump.
Which he did not—and it’s something we need to be clear about.
All of the evidence shows that Russia absolutely sought to sow discord, including helping Donald Trump in 2016. It was almost certainly less successful than many people believed, and it was clearly unsuccessful in actually changing votes in the infrastructure.
But President Obama being accurately told two separate things in two consecutive months—(1) that the Russians didn’t succeed in hacking votes and (2) that they did want to influence the election through any means they could find—does not, in any way, suggest that Obama cooked up evidence of the latter.
In the Trump administration, every political appointee is now their own personal Richard Nixon. Simply being some of the most powerful people in the world is never enough for Trump and those in his inner circle. If you can’t demand complete loyalty from everyone you oversee, than what is even the point of ascending to power?
Trump’s first term as president involved the same ridiculous demands for abject loyalty, as well as the ridiculous assumption that subjecting dozens, if not hundreds, of federal employees to (objectively unreliable) polygraph tests would somehow shut down the steady flow of embarrassing leaks.
It didn’t work last time. And since it didn’t, the new Trump administration does what it always does when it has bad ideas: doubles down. The eminently under-qualified head of the FBI, Kash Patel, is using federal money and resources to seek out insider threats. But these “threats” don’t actually put the FBI in any danger. The only thing possibly being threatened is Patel’s self-image.
Since Kash Patel took office as the director of the F.B.I., the bureau has significantly stepped up the use of the lie-detector test, at times subjecting personnel to a question as specific as whether they have cast aspersions on Mr. Patel himself.
In interviews and polygraph tests, the F.B.I. has asked senior employees whether they have said anything negative about Mr. Patel, according to two people with knowledge of the questions and others familiar with similar accounts. In one instance, officials were forced to take a polygraph as the agency sought to determine who disclosed to the news media that Mr. Patel had demanded a service weapon, an unusual request given that he is not an agent. The number of officials asked to take a polygraph is in the dozens, several people familiar with the matter said, though it is unclear how many have specifically been asked about Mr. Patel.
It’s not just about Patel. Sources report being questioned about things they may have said about Patel’s even-more-unqualified deputy director, Dan Bongino. None of this has anything to do with preventing employees from leaking information that might undermine ongoing investigations. All of this serves a single purpose: the expelling of agents and officials who raise legitimate concerns about FBI directives, as well as the man sitting on top of this whole paranoid mess, Donald Trump.
The FBI is now bleeding talent thanks to Patel’s efforts and general lack of competent leadership.
Top agents in about 40 percent of the field offices have either retired, been ousted or moved into different jobs, according to people familiar with the matter and an estimate by The New York Times, which began tracking the turnover once the new administration arrived.
And, like Nixon himself, Patel has compiled an “enemies” list. Fortunately for Patel, nearly none of the people on his list are still employed by the federal government, which means he can focus on people who say mean stuff about him or Dan Bongino or otherwise undermine his authority by raising questions about his actions or directives.
Patel isn’t alone in his paranoiac behavior. Tulsi Gabbard, who’s even more unqualified for her position than Patel, is in the process of aiming the Intelligence Community’s surveillance tech at any IC employee who doesn’t appear to be an unquestioning drone who spends their free time going MAGA on main.
Gabbard, according to The Washington Post, has “expressed a desire to gain access to emails and chat logs of the largest U.S. spy agencies with the aim of using artificial intelligence tools to ferret out what the administration deems as efforts to undermine its agenda.” In other words, Gabbard is threatening to endanger the careers of loyal intelligence officers by asking an AI if any of them aren’t fully on board with the MAGA cause. She has created a team within her office with the anodyne name of the “Director’s Initiatives Group,” which will collect large amounts of data from across 18 different agencies and run them through AI tools to see whether anyone is engaging in “weaponization” of intelligence. This is a flatly ridiculous, and extremely dangerous, idea.
Even before you get to the point that AI is going to be given the job of spy hunting, you have to wonder why someone who holds the title of “Director of National Intelligence” would think tearing down silo walls and providing a cross-agency blend of internal communications for AI to trawl through would be a good idea. It’s certainly a self-serving idea, which is the sort of thing MAGA officials constantly conflate with “good.”
While this effort may eventually find some people to fire for not being loyal enough (including the false positives who will be considered acceptable collateral damage), it will create an extremely tempting and useful target for malicious state-sponsored hackers. Those who target foreign government agencies to exfiltrate useful information are always thrilled when someone does some of the compilation work for them.
And while Gabbard (and to a lesser extent, Patel) are making America less secure with their efforts, the stuff they should be paying attention to (actual insider threats, terrorists, criminal cartels, state-sponsored hackers) will be ignored… or, at the very least, starved of resources just to ensure this squad of Nixons won’t be kicked around by those in their employ.
The useful lie that alleged Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members are engaging in coordinated violence inside the United States at the direction of the Venezuelan government has been debunked so often it’s hardly worth rehashing. Oddly enough, the debunking has come from the federal government, rather than investigative journalists or transparency groups or any of the usual suspects.
Intelligence assessments performed by intelligence agencies have found no definitive link between TdA gang members and the Venezuelan government. This is bullshit the Trump administration relies on to prop up its Alien Enemies Act declarations, which are being made for the sole purpose of denying due process to migrants the US government is deporting to literally any country that will take them.
This bullshit relies on further bullshit: the so-called “gang assessment” scorecards are being tallied up by people whose ongoing income relies on them declaring as many migrants to be TdA gang members as possible. Ex-cops working for privately-run detention centers, federal officers seeking to meet nearly impossible demands for daily expulsions, and hateful bigots in positions of power who prefer quantity to quality when it comes to ridding the nation of people who might not vote for them in upcoming elections.
With the lie now exposed multiple times, the ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) is seeking to reclaim control of the narrative. That has led to a top advisor to DNI Tulsi Gabbard telling the DNI rank-and-file that facts don’t actually matter here. What matters is how the administration feels about the people it wants to deport.
In the email, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by a second source, Gabbard’s acting chief of staff Joe Kent asked for a “rethink” of an intelligence assessment contradicting the administration’s argument that Venezuela is responsible for the U.S. activities of Tren de Aragua gang members.
“I would like to understand how any IC (intelligence community) element arrived at the conclusion that the Venezuelan government doesn’t support and did not orchestrate TDA operating in the U.S.,” Kent said in the email, referring to Tren de Aragua.
Actually, Kent doesn’t want to “understand” how the IC arrived at the conclusion that TdA is not being directed by the Venezuelan government. What he really wants is for the IC to ignore the facts it has gathered and just work backwards from Trump’s AEA-enabling assumptions.
“When Biden announced that the border was open I think we let a quest for … direct links between the Venezuelan government and TDA obstruct basic common sense,” he wrote, adding that the National Intelligence Council needed to start “looking at getting a new assessment written on TDA and their relationship with the government of Venezuela that reflects basic common sense.”
Common sense would, of course, be what has already happened: a reliance on established facts and inferences drawn from a wide swath of intelligence community reporting. Common sense in Kent’s hands means something else: rewriting reports to align with the administration’s preferred fiction. And, of course, Kent none-too-subtly suggests that those adhering to facts will seem to be aligning themselves with ex-president Biden, which isn’t the sort of thing you want to do if you value your IC job.
There’s more to this than just working backwards from a false assumption to generate semi-plausible “intelligence” that supports the president’s mass ejection desires. Kent also wants to make sure those at the top still have the plausible deniability to avoid being trapped by tough questions like “why are you lying?” or “why does this sound like it was rewritten simply because it didn’t agree with DOJ and DHS allegations and assertions?”
In subsequent emails with ODNI officials, Kent also said that Gabbard needs to be “protected” in the rewriting process, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The New York Times late Tuesday reported that in one email, Kent ordered analysts to “do some rewriting” of the assessment and more analytical work so that “this document is not used against” Gabbard or Trump.
Sure, this form of intelligence isn’t the same sort intelligence that separates the smart people from the stupid. But for intelligence (of this sort) to be useful, it has to be factual, rather than merely reflective of current administration vibes. This is a key member of the ODNI telling everyone to not only be stupider, but to throw themselves under the bus if need be to protect Gabbard and Trump from any blowback.
This is undeniably ugly. Sadly, it’s just more of the same from Trump’s enablers — people who clearly prefer to serve an autocrat rather than the nation they’re selling out to keep themselves in the good graces of a moody, would-be tyrant who’s just going to fire them the moment they cease to be useful and/or when he forgets who they are. I’d call it shameful but that would assume a capacity to feel shame. Even if their consciences are empty husks, that doesn’t mean they can’t be held accountable for their actions. Hopefully, this nation will remain intact long enough to see that happen.
