Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

American History and Black History Cannot Be Separated

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

The words do not have to be perfect.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Come on, man.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Second rate reporter says what?

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

You are here: Home / Past Elections / 2020 Elections / The Presidency of the United States Has Been Penetrated By Russian Intelligence: The US Intelligence Community Determined That Rudy Giuliani Was the Target of Russian Intelligence To Use Him To Influence The President & the President Was Informed of That Finding In December 2019!

The Presidency of the United States Has Been Penetrated By Russian Intelligence: The US Intelligence Community Determined That Rudy Giuliani Was the Target of Russian Intelligence To Use Him To Influence The President & the President Was Informed of That Finding In December 2019!

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Rudy Giuliani: a noun, a verb, a useless idiot!

At 7:15 PM tonight, The Washington Post reported (emphasis mine):

U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter.

The warnings were based on multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence during a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was gathering information that he thought would expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The intelligence raised concerns that Giuliani was being used to feed Russian misinformation to the president, the former officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and conversations.

The warnings to the White House, which have not been previously reported, led national security adviser Robert O’Brien to caution Trump in a private conversation that any information Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia, one of the former officials said.

The message was, “Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine,” this person said. Officials wanted “to protect the president from coming out and saying something stupid,” particularly since he was facing impeachment over his own efforts to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into investigating the Bidens.

But O’Brien emerged from the meeting uncertain whether he had gotten through to the president. Trump had “shrugged his shoulders” at O’Brien’s warning, the former official said, and dismissed concern about his lawyer’s activities by saying, “That’s Rudy.”

Giuliani visited the White House on Dec. 13, shortly after the House Judiciary Committee voted to proceed with articles of impeachment, and he met with Trump at the president’s resort in Florida eight days later.

Officials’ warnings about Giuliani underscore the concern in the U.S. intelligence community that Russia not only is seeking to reprise the disinformation campaign it waged in 2016, but also may now be aided, unwittingly or otherwise, by individuals close to the president. Those warnings have gained fresh urgency in recent days. The information that Giuliani sought in Ukraine is similar to what is contained in emails and other correspondence published this week by the New York Post, which the paper said came from the laptop of Hunter Biden and were provided by Giuliani and Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former top political adviser at the White House.

The Washington Post was unable to verify the authenticity of the alleged communications, which concern Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China.

The former officials said Giuliani was not a target of U.S. surveillance while in Ukraine but was dealing with suspected Russian assets who were, leading to the capture of some of his communications.

Much more at the link!

I’ve been waiting to post on Giuliani’s latest disinformation and agitprop attempt because it was clear something else was going to break. As I tracked the reporting and looked at the materials, I thought it was simply going to be the shifting stories by both the computer repair store owner and Giuliani. Such as Rudy producing paperwork earlier today with Hunter Biden’s signature indicating that if the laptop or laptops were not picked up within 90 days, then they were forfeit to the repair store because he realized the initial story of how he came into possession of the laptops, laptop, and/or hard drive implicated the computer repair story owner and Giuliani in a number of potential crimes.

Or that Rudy was shopping pdfs with metadata indicating that they were created in September and October 2019 months after the laptop or laptops or hard drive were dropped off for repair, not actual emails with the email metadata, but pdfs of emails that he was promoting in October 2019 that have the same disinformation and agitprop just like he supposedly recovered from the abandoned laptop, laptops, and/or hard drives.

Or the fact that they can’t keep the story straight on it being three laptops or a laptop and a hard drive.

Or maybe that someone fed the chan/reddit boards several days ago that this story was coming and did so to signal to the white supremacists and neo-NAZIs by including “88”* in the nym the person was using.

It has been clear for a long time that Rudy was being used by Russian intelligence officers and assets. I’ve written an entire series of posts delineating this in excruciating details over the past year. But what we did not know, though it was a logical suspicion to have, that the US Intelligence Community had signals intelligence (SIGINT) from communications intercepts of Russian assets that clearly indicated this unfortunate reality. We also did not know that they had done their jobs and pushed their assessment up the chain to the Assistant to the President for National Security (AP-NSA) O’Brien, that O’Brien had briefed the President, and that the President blew him off!

We also did not know that the US Intelligence Community had assessed, had briefed up the chain to O’Brien, and that O’Brien then briefed the President to warn him off of Giuliani and the disinformation and agitprop Rudy was pushing as the centerpiece of the President’s defense in his impeachment trial in the Senate! This was, of course part of the plan to turn both chambers of the US Congress into an information laundry for the Russian disinformation and agitprop Rudy was being used to promote, which was then repeated during the hearings Senators Johnson and Grassley held this past August and September.

Giuliani is the poster child for MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. Giuliani has been caught on voicemails by reporters, voicemails that resulted from butt dialing on one phone while talking on another because he’s an OPSEC and INFOSEC disaster, seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in payoffs for providing various undisclosed services for Deity knows whom. So that checks the Money box. His enormous self regard and desire to be relevant and in the spotlight and important is legendary and checks the Ego box. And these together, combined with his terrible Operational Security and Information Security practices make him a collection target for anyone and everyone trying to collect information on the President, check the Compromise box. Given his well documented infidelities, it would not surprise me at all to find out that there is other compromising material on him out there. No one should be shocked to have their suspicions about Giuliani formally confirmed by the US Intelligence Community.

The result of Giuliani’s stupidity and gullibility and outsized belief that he’s some sort of genius high speed, low drag intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement operator is that he has compromised the President of the United States. He has allowed the Russians to penetrate, via a human asset close to the President, the presidency of the United States. During World War II, the USSR was able to penetrate the presidency of the United States by getting people close to FDR – Harry Dexter White, an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and confidant of FDR’s and Laughlin Currie, a friend and legal advisor to FDR – to steal national secrets and pass them along. Their successor agencies in today’s Russia have found their modern Laughlin Currie in Rudy Giuliani, a friend and legal advisor to the current President of the United States.

We are off the looking glass and through the map!

Updated at 9:35 PM EDT

That didn’t take long and it is exactly what I expected was going to happen. Rudy has finally gotten himself into some serious trouble!

Open thread!

* 88 is widely used by white supremacists and neo-NAZIs as code for Heil Hitler as H is the 8th letter of the alphabet. So 88 is HH is Heil Hitler.

Reader Interactions

198Comments

  1. 1.

    A Ghost to Most

    So not news. Still homicidal rage inducing.

    Nick Jack Pappas on the Twitters:

    Savannah Guthrie: “You’re not like someone’s crazy uncle…”

    Mary Trump: “I beg to differ.”

  4. 4.

    Gin & Tonic

    Really good summary here, thanks. I’m not going to repeat comments I’ve made before about Rudy’s trip(s) to Kyiv, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the Ukrainian SBU has a transcript of every word he uttered while in-country.

  5. 5.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Spanky: The news part is the USIC observed what was going on, wrote it up, pushed it up, and the President was briefed on it. That Giuliani is compromised is not the news. That the President blew off the information he was briefed on that Giuliani is compromised is also not the news. Though it is important to have those two things confirmed.

  7. 7.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Gin & Tonic: The Ukrainian SBU, the Russian SVR and GRU, Estonian, Latvian, and Finnish intelligence. The German BND. The Mossad. MI6. Etc, etc, etc.

  8. 8.

    Mary G

    Do you think that Twitter’s decision to shut this crap down is going to help, or will it just go around the right wing ecosphere where everyone will believe it’s the Deep State censorship?

    And why would they use such an incompetent dingbat with such an unbelievable story?

  9. 9.

    Lacuna Synechdoche

    WaPo via Adam Silverman @ Top:

    The message was, “Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine,” this person said. Officials wanted “to protect the president from coming out and saying something stupid …”

    Talk about a hopeless cause. May as well ask the sea to stop waving.

    O’Brien emerged from the meeting uncertain whether he had gotten through to the president. Trump had “shrugged his shoulders” at O’Brien’s warning, the former official said, and dismissed concern about his lawyer’s activities by saying, “That’s Rudy.”

    Well, that didn’t take long. See what I mean?

  10. 10.

    Spanky

    @Adam L Silverman: That isn’t news to anyone who’s been watching how Trump does his “president” thing. And it shouldn’t be news to anyone who knows how intelligence is collected. That, I suppose, isn’t as large a number as I’d like.

  12. 12.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    I look forward to Trump and Giuliani dancing to the music of the Village People when they’re both in prison cells where they belong.

  13. 13.

    cain

    Aided and abetted by the republican party .. federal charges should be filed if they kept mum when this was going down

  14. 14.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Anonymous At Work: We really don’t do or handle counterintelligence and counter-subversion well. And this includes not having much in the way of either stopping it or prosecuting those involved in it.

    That said, I cannot state strongly enough just how dangerous this news is.

  16. 16.

    Keith P.

    It’s wild that they’re flipping out so hard over the story not being covered enough to their liking.  People literally knew what Giuliani was doing when he was doing it – he had to cancel one Ukrainian trip after word of it blew up before he went there.  Not to mention, two of his associates were very publicly arrested and indicted last year and rolled over on Rudy.  So Rudy finally puts the story out, sloppy as one would expect from a habitual butt-dialer, and his friends gripe because no one is biting on it.

  17. 17.

    boatboy_srq

    So, if “88” is Hitler, doesn’t that make Lord Dampnut, at “45”, only slightly more than half the fascist?

  18. 18.

    Jay C

    @Mary G:

    I’m gonna (regretfully) go with “not going to help”:  the intelligence-community warning(s)/advice(s) Adam outlines here ought to (in a sane world) utterly discredit Rudy Giuliani and every bit of “scandal” he purports to have uncovered. But unfortunately, we don’t live in that world (yet), and it’s way more likely that the GOP politicos and RW media types who are obsessing over this nonsense have so much invested in trying to slag Joe Biden (and, in their fantasies, derail his campaign) will probably just shrug off the IC revelations as “Russia Hoax” or whatever, and go right on whining about Twitter “censorship” in a desperate attempt to change the subject.

  20. 20.

    Mike E

    Rachel Maddow is slaying iDJT…she is debunking every single claim he made tonight. I want to take a shower after just hearing about all these lies enumerated through her reporting

  21. 21.

    boatboy_srq

    You have to believe that the Reichwing thinks the Left are all supercriminals only because the Reichwing is so thoroughly inept at lawbreaking.

  23. 23.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mary G: I understand why Twitter and Facebook did what they did. They got used, or in the latter’s case actively allowed themselves to be manipulated and abused by Trumpworld and the Russians in 2016.

    What actual effect it has, I have no idea. I don’t think it was really going to change the fact that those in MAGA, QAnon, and the Fox News/conservative news information ecosystems were going to mainline this stuff while everyone else recognized it for just how bad this attempt by Giuliani is.

  26. 26.

    different-church-lady

    I’m quite positive I can’t take any more of this.

    (DCL, +who th fuck knows…)

  27. 27.

    Humanities Prof

    Is there any relationship between the timing of this story’s release and Giuliani’s disinformation dump in the New York Post yesterday?  This WaPo story feels a bit like it was designed to stomp on the Post‘s account.

  29. 29.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Humanities Prof: I would place good money on someone senior on the career side of the intel community having provided this information to Dawsey either late last night or early this morning.

  32. 32.

    Adam L Silverman

    The plot thins!

  38. 38.

    Jeffro

    I appreciate the seriousness here, Adam, but this is the crew that was working (through cut-outs) to sabotage Secretary Clinton and the DNC via Russian-hacked/timely-leaked emails, that’s financially dependent upon Putin and his buddies, that has been doing Putin’s bidding for the past four years, etc etc etc.

    Rudy being compromised is not really a surprise here, nor is is surprising that he fed Russian misinformation directly to trumpov, nor that trumpov blew off the IC’s concerns about this.

    I mean, I’ve basically considered trumpov a mostly-unwitting-but-sometimes-‘witting’-as-hell Russian asset since 2015 (in terms of my awareness of the DJT/Russia relationship – I know full well that relationship goes much further back).  Let’s just win the election and let Biden’s DOJ prosecute everyone who sold out their country during the (gag) trumpov Years.

  41. 41.

    ThresherK

    Radio geek trivia time:

    We say “73” when we mean “best wishes”. It’s a shibboleth of sorts, and it’s used like “good bye” in real life.

    For more intimate relations, “88” means “hugs and kisses”. It’s a code used to send when passing messages between, say, a husband in the service and his wife at home. Or between married couples when they’re both hams (yes, there are some).

    And now 88’s been ruined. Ugh.

  43. 43.

    Jeffro

    @boatboy_srq:You have to believe that the Reichwing thinks the Left are all supercriminals only because the Reichwing is so thoroughly inept at lawbreaking.

    “How come WE keep getting busted but THEY never do, huh huh huh?”

    Beware children!  Down that path of bad reasoning, lack of self-awareness, and inability to conclude the obvious lies…’Q’…

    LOL

  45. 45.

    Jeffro

    @Adam L Silverman: when even some at Fox can recognize right off the bat that reporting on this is going to blow up in their faces…probably not the most well thought-out scheme…

  48. 48.

    Adam L Silverman

    @debbie: It wasn’t a far fall. He took credit for going after the Italian mob in NY, but that was actually either done outside SDNY (Mueller led the Gambino take down from main Justice in DC) or by junior/career people in SDNY and Giuliani took credit for the work. Comey worked on those cases and it was Comey who coined the phrase, as a result of Giuliani taking credit for things he hadn’t done, that the most dangerous place to be was between Rudy and a microphone. Giuliani also allowed the Russian mob, as it moved further into New York City, basically take out the remaining powers in the Italian mob and then took credit for the fall of the Italian mob. Also, his uncle was a member of one of the five families.

    As mayor of NY he was a terrible, erratic authoritarian. The only reason he is remembered fondly is for his response to 9-11, which was also a disaster. He put the emergency command center in the Twin Towers basement, after it had already been bombed once, and that famous picture of him pointing on 9-11 is actually a picture of him pointing to where the towers were and repeatedly stating he had to go to the “secure” command center there because it would be safe while his aides explained to him that the command center was gone. He then turned and walked away from lower Manhattan in an attempt to finds a safe place to hide.

  54. 54.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @boatboy_srq:

    So, if “88” is Hitler, doesn’t that make Lord Dampnut, at “45”, only slightly more than half the fascist?

    So in the alpha-numeric equivalent, 45 = DE, as in DEranged, DEmented, DEpraved, DEplorable, DEbauched, and DEfinitely DElusional!

  57. 57.

    Jay C

    So, Mr. Silverman:

    One question I noticed wasn’t wasn’t addressed in your OP, but immediately popped into my head: Do you think Rudy Giuliani knew (suspected, even?) that he was being played by foreign intelligence assets, or was he just chumped, in his zeal to prove his usefulness by uncovering “dirt” to help out his Boss in the WH?

    Asshole authoritarian (and hugely overrated Mayor) as he is, Rudy was never thought of as stupid – my, how times have changed!

  59. 59.

    ThresherK

    @Ridnik Chrome: Neat to know.

    Somewhere I picked up the idea that Kiichiro Toyoda’s company was named “Toyota” because that took eight brush-strokes to write, and eight is a lucky number. (Wikipedia agrees with me, as much as that’s official.)

  60. 60.

    Adam L Silverman

    @JPL: The news media is NY City centric, he had good, as in effective, PR people working for him (Cough, Rick Wilson, Cough). So…

  64. 64.

    Robmassing

    That Bertrand tweet is terrible. It should say “highly suspect emails that attempt to inflict political wounds on Biden.” The way she describes it centers the emails, doesn’t question their authenticity, and just mentions “foreign intelligence operation” at the end

  65. 65.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Jay C: I sort of dealt with it in the final paragraph. He didn’t think he’d been duped because he thinks he is actually good at this. He’s convinced he’s a nat-sec, diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement genius. That he’s an operator’s operator.

  66. 66.

    sdhays

    @Adam L Silverman: Wow. I knew about the scandalous decision to put the command center in the Twin Towers, but I didn’t know that he was stupidly and pathetically thrashing around for his own safety while it was collapsing. It certainly that fits much better with the man we non-New Yorkers have come to know over the years since 9/11.

  67. 67.

    Ken

    @Adam L Silverman: Published by NBC while Trump was doing his townhall Q&A televised… thing, after he badmouthed them earlier today.  I guess they don’t think revenge is best served cold.

  68. 68.

    Ken

    @Adam L Silverman: He’s convinced he’s a nat-sec, diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement genius. That he’s an operator’s operator.

    I’m so proud that I remembered M-I-C-E from the last time you discussed it, and knew which applied here.

  71. 71.

    Jeffro

    @Adam L Silverman:Comey worked on those cases and it was Comey who coined the phrase, as a result of Giuliani taking credit for things he hadn’t done, that the most dangerous place to be was between Rudy and a microphone.

    So between Comey (for the cases and comment, and subsequent defiance of trumpov) and Biden’s “noun, verb, 9/11” against Rudy G…kind of an unholy alliance here between trumpov and Rudy G against their enemies.

  72. 72.

    jl

    @sanjeevs:

    ” Rudy’s daughter endorsed Joe Biden today. ”

    Will explaining what is going on with Giuliani be part of that effort? I think it may be relevant. World historical Dunning-Kruger mark (the carny’s dream), drunk and doped, crazy, senile, desperate crook, what, or what combination?

  74. 74.

    Goku (Amerikan Baka)

    And the best bit of news I saw today about this stupid LaptopGate, is that the laptop was manufactured on April 18th 2019 while the documents said that the same laptop was given to the computer repair shop on like April 12th, 2019! This nothingburger fell apart in less than a day and Rudy’s going to face legal consequences because of it!

  76. 76.

    Adam L Silverman

    @sdhays: The only reason I know is I listened to an interview with the photographer, who did not work for Giuliani, several years after he took the picture. He explained what was going on, that because he had a fairly tight shot on Rudy, and because most Americans couldn’t tell where anything in Manhattan is based on the limited geographic clues visible in the picture, it was easy for Rudy and his people to spin the image.

  82. 82.

    A Ghost to Most

    So, who here thought Savannah Guthrie would take shitgibbon apart, and leave him a sweaty pile of goo?

    I didn’t, but apparently she did.

  83. 83.

    TriassicSands

    We can dispense with the virtually endless list of reasons why Trump has to go and the necessity of his departure can be more than adequately justified by one reason: Trump has to go because he is so completely dishonest that nothing he or his underlings say can be believed. That poisons everything.

    for exampke, there is growing concern that many people who are not anti-vaxxers may refuse to receive a COVID-19 vaccination because it has been obvious since the creation of “Operation Warp Speed” that the goal for Trump was always “speed,” and never a “safe and effective” vaccine. What mattered to Trump was getting it out there, whatever “it” was. As usual, science is at odds with Trump. Now, with less than three weeks to go, the goal of having something, anything, to boast about before the election appears highly unlikely. Once Trump had claimed success and reaped the votes that “triumph” would have given him, it wouldn’t have matter whether the approved vaccine was either safe or effective. By the time that became clear, it would be too late.

    No sane person thinks Trump cares about the pandemic or the health and well-being of the people. No sane person would take Trump’s word on anything, much less the safety and effectiveness of a vaccine that has been developed with constant pressure from Trump to cut corners. In short, no sane person, whether an American citizen or a foreign leader, would believe Trump about anything in the absence of incontrovertible, truly independent proof.

    That is the only reason anyone should need to vote against Trump.

    Rudy Giuliani is just one small part of the most all-encompassing lie-producing machine ever assembled in American politics. Joe McCarthy was a piker compared with Trump and his machine.

    He must go.

  84. 84.

    Goku (Amerikan Baka)

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Oh, my mistake then. Still, obviously there’s no way those documents could’ve been on that laptop since the hard drive the docs claim they were on was manufactured several days afterwards. It’s a huge glaring hole in the story

  87. 87.

    Kropacetic

    @Ken: I’m so proud that I remembered M-I-C-E from the last time you discussed it, and knew which applied here.

    Ooh, I don’t.  What is that?

  89. 89.

    Jeffro

    @A Ghost to Most: I’m watching short clips via Twitter (praise be its name, LOL) and she really took him to the woodshed on his most crazy shit early in the hour.  QAnon, the ‘Seal Team 6 retweet’ thing, etc.

    She did all right.  But whew, those were NOT ‘undecided’ voters in the audience, that’s for sure.

  91. 91.

    Humanities Prof

    @Kropacetic: Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego

    Slogan among people who are cultivating human assets in spycraft (or trying to watch out for the same).

  92. 92.

    Jeffro

    @Adam L Silverman: I keep visualizing it as poles (like magnetic poles)…primarily one pole, that pulls in damaged and corrupt people into trumpov’s orbit and gets them all scheming, stupidly, about how they’re going to get revenge/get rich/make America whiter and more religious/etc.

    Maybe not a pole so much as a sewer drain, I dunno.

    trumpov has been the willing instrument of a lot of dark, corrupt, un-American (both domestic and foreign) forces, that’s for sure.

  93. 93.

    ballerat

    Officials wanted “to protect the president from coming out and saying something stupid,”

    Whelp, that was a fool’s errand…

  101. 101.

    A Ghost to Most

    @Jeffro: All the people who raised hell about NBC hosting him should just settle down. It was a setup, and he came off badly, a sweaty mess.

  102. 102.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @different-church-lady: It’s gonna be Rudy’s turn in the barrel soon…

    Screw “barrel**,” it ought to be Ghouliani’s turn to occupy the trunk of a Coupe de Ville sedately settling to the bottom of the East River. Crudy is an ongoing embarrassment (che vergogna!) to the descendants of every Italian who crossed the Pond from  Columbus on.

    **and yes I am aware of the joke – I even have floating around here a paperback thriller entitled Your Day In The Barrel.

  103. 103.

    trnc

    @Lacuna Synechdoche: Trump had “shrugged his shoulders” at O’Brien’s warning, the former official said, and dismissed concern about his lawyer’s activities by saying, “That’s Rudy.”

    “Doing exactly what I asked him to do,” he continued.

  104. 104.

    Goku (Amerikan Baka)

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Here’s sub thread to that thread:

    Mr. Spock
    @americanlife85

    6h

    Replying to

    @spdustin

    No, you just mixed in info that was not there. How do you know My Passport Pro belongs to the shop owner and not Biden? Can you verify? If not, you are fake news.

    David R. Neff
    @DavidRNeff

    5h

    Because it was manufactured 6 days AFTER the laptop was dropped off.

    Mr. Spock

    @americanlife85

    5h

    This is another fiction. The serial does not reveal the manufacturing date, only the warranty. The warranty date depends on how/when you register your hard drive. The hard drive is not listed on the official warranty policy https://support-en.wd.com/app/Warranty_Policy…

    Yes,You can check the expiration

  106. 106.

    different-church-lady

    @A Ghost to Most: I kinda thought it could happen , but I never did put down my marker.

    i did say that Trump’s worse move was being himself on TV, so it’s not at all surprising.

  107. 107.

    Humanities Prof

    @NotMax: I am not 100% sure this is actually true, but I have heard this referred to as “acronymphomania.”

    I really hope this IS true….

  110. 110.

    Ken

    So to “never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel”, we should add “never badmouth a television network four hours before your scheduled appearance”.

  111. 111.

    NotMax

    @Jeffro

    But whew, those were NOT ‘undecided’ voters in the audience, that’s for sure.

    “I’m an undecided independent voter and my question is why you haven’t ordered federal marshals to arrest Crooked Hillary?”

    //

  112. 112.

    Goku (Amerikan Baka)

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Also:

    Timo Sinnemäki
    @tpsinnem

    14h

    Replying to
    @spdustin

    The bill is just for ‘Labor’, and as I replied to another tweet in this thread, the laptop actually seems to have had removable internal storage, and even if it didn’t, your representation of what the damage scenario is ‘likely’ to have been is speculative.

    Sebastian Rako
    @sebastianrako

    6h

    All Macbook Pro since 2016 (except the entry level for a while) are soldered NAND No removable drive.

    Timo Sinnemäki
    @tpsinnem

    6h

    I don’t claim to have knowledge of my own either way, but this site claims that Mid-2017 non-touch-bar models have removable drives *contrary to documentation*: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/

  114. 114.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    But O’Brien emerged from the meeting uncertain whether he had gotten through to the president. Trump had “shrugged his shoulders” at O’Brien’s warning, the former official said, and dismissed concern about his lawyer’s activities by saying, “That’s Rudy.

    I am begining to suspect the problem with Trump and company is they are so caught up with the reality TV shows that they don’t get the Presidency isn’t some weird ass LARP and deadly serious.

  117. 117.

    trnc

    @Jay C: Do you think Rudy Giuliani knew (suspected, even?) that he was being played by foreign intelligence assets, or was he just chumped, in his zeal to prove his usefulness by uncovering “dirt” to help out his Boss in the WH?

    Sounds a lot like DT’s early 2017 Oval Office meeting with the Russians where he gave up an Israeli intel op and burned an agent to impress Vlad.

  123. 123.

    The Pale Scot

    Target of a Russian Intelligence To Use Him To Influence The President

    Or

    Target of a Russian Intelligence Operation To Use Him To Influence The President & the President Was Informed of That Finding In December 2019!

  125. 125.

    Kropacetic

    @dmsilev:‘Mr. Rogers is a bad thing’ is one of those innovations we’ve come to expect from the Trump campaign.

    All this talk about neighbors and community and respect; great for a kids’ television show, dangerously naive for a President…

  126. 126.

    Kattails

    According to Kilgore Trout’s twitter feed, it appears that they had this thing in mothballs for some time, the paper published PDFs of the emails prepared by a third party  over a year ago, the timestamp is Sat. Sept. 28 2019. During the time period when the laptop was supposedly being repaired.

  128. 128.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    The result of Giuliani’s stupidity and gullibility and outsized belief that he’s some sort of genius high speed, low drag intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement operator is that he has compromised the President of the United States. He has allowed the Russians to penetrate, via a human asset close to the President, the presidency of the United States.

    I have a semi-serious, semi-rhetorical question.

    Do we have any actual evidence that nothing really happened at Junior’s “If it’s what you say, I love it” Russian meeting at Trump tower?

    Yes, I know, we have sworn statements from people with huge amounts of legal exposure, all saying nothing happened. While that means there’s no evidence of wrongdoing, i don’t count those statements as meaningful, because they’re exactly what would be said by people with something to hide (though I grant, they *could* also be true).

    It doesn’t matter (to me) that they have matching stories; first thing I’d do if I was running that operation would be to coach  them with a safe story, so I can’t imagine Russian intelligence operatives couldn’t think of that (or something better). (NB: I have *no* experience in intelligence matters – just enough common sense to know “their stories had better match, closely enough, to avoid suspicion.”)

    I can also easily imagine a skilled operator might come up with “One of you – how about you, Mr. Kushner?  – text about how this is a waste of time, all about Russian adoptions. Now, here’s how we’re going to use secure, encrypted, untraceable, communications going forward.”

    This is what’s bothered me about this administration from the getgo. If the Republicans loved their country, they should have said “anyone so boneheaded as to fall for such obvious bait *can’t* be given security clearance. He actually REPLIED, *affirmatively*.”

    So, yeah, so now, we know the Russians reached a human asset close to the President, but geez, unless there’s a lot more that I *don’t* know, it seems like we all (including Republicans) should have been worried, suspecting it was already true.

    When word came out the Kushner was willing to go into the Russian embassy thinking he didn’t need any oversight or assistance, that completely blew my mind, because how you described Rudy is *precisely* how I thought of Kushner, and again, couldn’t figure out how *anyone* could not care about it.  Even if they thought Kushner’s motives were pure as the driven snow – and I doubt they’re dumb enough to think that – it still shows stupidity on such a high level that you’d have to demand that he can’t get clearance, for fear of what a moron like that would do with classified information.

  129. 129.

    Gravenstone

    @dmsilev: Well, you would expect a Republican toadie to sneer and be dismissive of someone who was inherently kind and welcoming. Can’t be having any of that behavior now, can we?

  130. 130.

    dmsilev

    Biden 2020: What if politics could feel like this, rather than [changes channel to the Trump townhall] like that?— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 16, 2020

    We did end up having a debate of sorts tonight.

  131. 131.

    Ken

    @Kattails: Also from Kilgore Trout:

    it will never sink in for the trump campaign that they just let their guy walk into a textbook A-B experiment

    He also has an image comparing flipping between the debates to flipping between Mister Rogers and Silence of the Lambs (the “it puts the lotion on its skin” scene).

  132. 132.

    Oklahomo

    @ThresherK:  The number 14 is also important to them because of the 14 words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Sometimes you’ll see 1488 used.

  134. 134.

    Kattails

    @Ken: Some fun comments in the KT thread.  Not being a masochist, however, I never watched Silence of the Lambs. I just don’t do horror….

  141. 141.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Kattails: Yes, I made that point in the original post. But thank you for that link, I was looking for it while drafting the post and couldn’t find it.

  142. 142.

    Adam L Silverman

    @LongHairedWeirdo: To answer your question, my understanding is no. Apparently Jr.’s answers were squirelly enough that Mueller considered referring him for prosecution, but ultimately chose not too.

  143. 143.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Ken: It’s even better if you watch the two with the sound off. The visual cues being given off by the President and VP Biden and those of the people asking them questions tells you everything you need to know.

  146. 146.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    Trump would have been better served by accepting the virtual debate. Suicide bombers have hurt themselves less than this…

    — Evan Siegfried (@evansiegfried) October 16, 2020

  148. 148.

    Kattails

    @Adam L Silverman: Yes, you did, and it got lost in the stuff bouncing around in my head, sorry.  I was actually thinking about the myriad ways this is dangerous, as per your comment at #14. That the President of the US is just a lazy SOB who can’t be bothered to think about this? That he knew already and approved? That this also means he ignores other vital data? That he’ll use disinformation to his advantage and use it to incite outrage against his opponents? That it makes him a useful asset to US enemies? Let me count the ways.

  149. 149.

    Dan B

    @Adam L Silverman: My guess is that Schlapp is a believer in niceness and reason = weakness.  She conflates rage with strength.

    We realize that rage = cowardly bully fallback tactic.

  150. 150.

    West of the Rockies

    Wasn’t it reported that the computer in question had been purchased the day before it was taken in for repairs?

    So we’re to believe Hunter Biden gets this computer, loads it with super secret files, breaks it, and takes it for repairs to some random strip mall shop guy, THEN doesn’t bother to pick it up 90 days later.  I call malarkey.  That’s Jacob Wohl-level stupid chicanery.

  151. 151.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Goku (Amerikan Baka): I’m not a tech person, but I have a MacBook Pro I bought in 2014 to replace the one I bought in 2008 when I got back from Iraq. It does not have a removable hard drive. I think what the original tweeter is surmising is reasonable. Especially given that neither Giuliani nor the computer repair shop owner can get their stories straight on what was actually dropped off for repair: one laptop, three laptops, or a laptop and an external hard drive. Also, there’s an Apple Store in Christiana Mall in Newark, DE, which is about a 15 minute drive from Wilmington. That was the first thing I double checked yesterday. Where were the Apple Stores in relation to Wilmington.

  154. 154.

    Sebastian

    @MobiusKlein:

    Umlaute are at the end of the Alphabet, not adjacent to their root letter. Ä is short for ae, ö for oe, and ü for ue.

    The eighth letter is the H.

  155. 155.

    TS (the original)

    I’m still fuming about Feinstein and Graham.  The SCOTUS  hearing was an absolute failure & there she was hugging Lindsey Graham.

    I’m not allowed to hug my granddaughter.

  156. 156.

    Jeffro

    @David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: yeah, maybe not quite.

    trumpistas got to see their guy without seeing the contrast (plus bonus arguing with the Fake News Media!)

    Biden voters got what they expected and are voting for.

    I doubt it will move anyone much, but the only way tonight mattered is if and when mainstream outlets report the president*s support of QAnon and his retweeting of that crazy Seal Team 6 shit.  Other than that…total wash (which benefits Biden, 18 days out)

  157. 157.

    Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    they don’t get the Presidency isn’t some weird ass LARP and deadly serious.

    That’s Republicans in general.  They vote for the person they most want to see on TV for four years, and they don’t think about the fact that the Presidency is an actual job.

    Sarah Palin reeked of reality show the day she made her first speech accepting the position as McCain’s running mate, a dozen years ago.  And now here we are.  I hate to think where we’ll be in another dozen years.

  159. 159.

    Kropacetic

    The Post said the shop owner, who has been identified as Mac Isaac

    So I guess we know whose shop not to go to if we value our privacy, jeez…

  160. 160.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @TS (the original): been off-line most of the day and just saw that

    among other things, she’s pushing 90 and hugging a guy who was refusing to take a Covid test a week ago…

  161. 161.

    SFBayAreaGal

    They keep using October Suprise on Biden. I do not think it means what they think it means.

    I couldn’t resist.

  162. 162.

    Jeffro

    Btw minor note but props to Biden & Co for having Uncle Joe continue to answer questions until the cows came home, AFTER his already-longer-than-trumpov’s-town-hall concluded.

    Stamina, Joe haz it!

  167. 167.

    Sebastian

    @Goku (Amerikan Baka):

    That was the WD external harddrive and that warranty bit is misleading. The warranty does not start at date of manufacturing but on date of sale.

    The external hard drive was purchased on that day. It’s all bullshit, no repair-shop would go to Best Buy or Target but buy them from their supplier. Why buy retail? It’s just laughable.

  169. 169.

    Matt McIrvin

    @dmsilev: Not an innovation. Contempt for Fred Rogers (who was, incidentally, a Republican himself, though of a kind that I suppose doesn’t exist any more) is something that pops up in the conservative opinion world every few years and whoever does it immediately gets smacked down.

    The complaint is usually that Mr. Rogers always told kids he liked them just the way they were, “just for being you”, which held terrible moral hazard because it was unearned! Of course, if these people ever actually watched the show they would have known that Mr. Rogers also constantly expressed the importance of hard work to accomplish anything–he had a whole song about it. But I think they found the notion of unconditional liking of strangers threatening.

  171. 171.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Brian Williams and Bob Woodward discussing trump’s theory of how  he trump won the 2016 election in the last week of the campaign, by doing many rallies

    waiting for one of them to mention James Comey (segment over, no Comey)

    amazing how dull and pedestrian Woodward is on TV, given his prominence and reputation and professional longevity

  172. 172.

    Patricia Kayden

    From the clips I've seen of tonight's #TrumpTownHall, I was TOTALLY wrong about Savannah Guthrie…holy shit.She did better a better job with trump than I think I've seen ANYONE do. No wonder MAGAts are mad.?— BrooklynDad_Defiant! (@mmpadellan) October 16, 2020

  174. 174.

    Rokka

    @Adam L Silverman: If you bought a new Mac Book Pro in 2014, then it’s a Retina Display model. From EveryMac: “Officially, it is not possible for an end user to upgrade the storage in any Retina Display MacBook Pro model after purchase. However, the SSD is installed as a removable module in all of these notebooks, but different lines use different types of proprietary “blade” SSD modules and it is particularly important to identify the MacBook Pro and the SSD precisely as a result”

  175. 175.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Rokka: Ok. My understanding is that the modules are basically integral. As in the SSDs are integral to the blades. But, again, I’m not a tech person, I’ve never had a problem with my MacBook Pro requiring repair, and if I did, I know better than to try to do it myself. I’d take it to the Apple Store.

  176. 176.

    brantl

    @Adam L Silverman:  However, the SSD is installed as a removable module in all of these notebooks, but different lines use different types of proprietary “blade” SSD modules and it is particularly important to identify the MacBook Pro and the SSD precisely as a result”

     

    It’s removable.

  177. 177.

    dirge

    @Bill: 23rd floor of World Trade Center 7

    And if I recall correctly, the 24th floor was diesel fuel reserves for the emergency generators.  If it was anyone other than Guiliani, you’d have to figure that’s some sort of so clever it’s dumb evidence destruction scheme.  But it is, so quite possibly just straight up stupidity.

  178. 178.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Adam L Silverman: I am hard were tech and work on laptops, but not Macs. Taking an SSD out is trival job. three screws to remove a pannel and then unplug it. If the Apple SSD that sounds a bit over the top that Joe’s computer repair shop can pull it out and get it to run.  Russian intelligence is another matter.

  180. 180.

    Sebastian

    @Rokka:

    All Macbook Pros with TouchBar have NAND directly soldered to board, that is all MBP after 2016 with exception of the non-TouchBar low end base model which has a 2.5” SAS SSD.

     

    It’s irrelevant though. We already knew that Rudy was coming up with some Wohlian bullshit and now he has. Why we are giving this credibility (and I am guilty as everyone else) escapes me.

  181. 181.

    piratedan

    @Sebastian: I dunno, they have such a great track record for truthiness, I mean you have to completely consider the remote possibility that maybe, just maybe, this time they aren’t lying… (narrator: yes they’re lying, what are you a moron?)

  182. 182.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    Will Stancil @whstancil

    Siena/NYT polls suggests Graham has polled significantly better as he’s gotten the opportunity to preside over cordial, collegial confirmation hearings. If it’s tight, Feinstein’s praise and (literal) embrace of Graham might just cost Harrison the race.

    https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1316820676917907457

    Fuck that clueless, worthless pathetic excuse for a US senator Diane Feinstein.  May she rot in Hell.

  184. 184.

    Origuy

    @MobiusKlein: This chart of the German Alphabet has F as the 8th letter, but who am I to judge?

    Whoever came up with 88 for HH must not be counting ä and ß.

  187. 187.

    Origuy

    @Sebastian: In the chart linked to by MoebiusKlein, esset and the umlauted vowels were interspersed with the other letters. A little googling indicates that the order of the alphabet is somewhat controversial, and there is no consensus. I don’t remember what I was taught in German class.

  189. 189.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Gretchen: There a several reasons you might want to take your mac to a 3rd party repair place than Apple.  As I noted above, Apple is more likely to swap out the machine for a referb with your data going byebye and it can be much, much cheaper if you don’t have AppleCare.

    Forgetting to leave your name and phone number, well that’s odd, isn’t it.

  190. 190.

    eddie blake

    @Adam L Silverman:

    umm.. i know you totally know your stuff, but the emergency response bunker in the world trade center wasn’t in the basement. giuliani was dumber than most think. his team wanted the cc across the river, in brooklyn- you know, not in the building that was bombed once before and had a giant target on it.

    i’m pretty sure giuliani put the fucking thing on the 23rd floor. he wanted an easy walk from city hall, and its auxiliary fuel tanks for the backup power systems contributed to the conflagration.

    major oopsie on his part.

  192. 192.

    NotMax

    @eddie blake

    Simpler than that. Eliminated the inconvenience of the alternative meaning his chippy schlepping to Brooklyn.

    The mayor was so personally focused on the siting and construction of the bunker that the city administrator who oversaw it testified in a subsequent lawsuit that “very senior officials,” specifically including Giuliani, “were involved,” which he said was a major difference between this and other projects. Giuliani’s office had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. Source

    ;)

  193. 193.

    eddie blake

    @NotMax:

    TIL.

    i’m not too shocked, though, this is the guy who announced he was ditching his wife on the tv before telling her about it.

  194. 194.

    droog

    What kind of recovery IT expert runs a shop without CCTV at the counter?

    Given the security concerns associated with data retrieval and the vendor’s expertise with computers it would be stupid to think that they don’t have CCTV in their shop. So it should be quite easy to establish who dropped the laptops. And the FBI would almost certainly be smart enough to seize the tapes/drives as part of their investigation and to build a case.

    Liberate the tapes!

  196. 196.

    J R in WV

    @ThresherK:

    Radio geek trivia time:

    We say “73” when we mean “best wishes”. It’s a shibboleth of sorts, and it’s used like “good bye” in real life.

    In the news biz, it was a traditional thing to put:

    — 30 —

    at the bottom of a story, to indicate that the receiver of the news had in fact gotten the whole piece, with no “other half” lost on the wire somewhere.

    Which was way more common back in the era of dedicated phone lines transmitting data at 60 characters a minute, which was high-speed data transmission back in the 1970s and ’80s

  197. 197.

    Chris Johnson

    The result of Giuliani’s stupidity and gullibility and outsized belief that he’s some sort of genius high speed, low drag intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement operator is that he has compromised the President of the United States.

    No, I think you have that backwards. Trump compromised Giuliani. It’s possible that, way long ago, Epstein compromised Trump, but I think Trump’s attempts at real estate deals with Russians would’ve been enough by themselves.

    Trump started out compromised, a LONG time ago.

  198. 198.

    J R in WV

    At long last, I want to pick a bone on the title for this post.

    The Russians penetrated the Oval Office on the afternoon of January 20th, 2017, and they didn’t need Rudy G to help with that. Don’t we all acknowledge that Trump has been owned and operated by Russian GRU since the lat 1980s?

    Well, I suppose the actual Oval Office may not have been penetrated exactly on Jan 20th, since Trump didn’t start to work at being President on the first day. Hell, he may not have started to work at being President even yet today! But he does spend time in the Oval Office, and we could probably discover what day it was he first went in there, which would be when the Russians first penetrated the Oval Office.

    So. Anyways, that means the title is inaccurate by months and years. Trump was the penetrator who first penetrated the highest levels of US security. Rudy is a subsequent minor clown, distracting people from the reality that Trump is a Russian Stooge.

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