As of 8:00 PM EST/3:00 AM local time in Ukraine, about 2/3rds of Ukraine is under air raid alert. And drone alerts are up for almost all of northern Ukraine.
Following on the beginning of last night’s update, it didn’t take long for another shoe to drop.
SCOOP: Kash Patel took $25,000 from a production company with ties to Russia propaganda activity to appear in an anti-FBI docuseries. He did not respond to questions about this.
www.motherjones.com/politics/202…
— David Corn (@davidcorn.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 4:36 PM
From Mother Jones:
Last year, Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur whom Donald Trump has nominated to head the FBI, received $25,000 from a Russia-linked production company to participate in a documentary in which he assailed the FBI and called for closing its headquarters.
In November, Tucker Carlson’s online network released a six-part series called All the President’s Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump that purported to chronicle the familiar MAGA conspiracy theory that a Deep State plotted against Donald Trump while he was a presidential candidate in 2016 and when he was president. The fourth episode focused on Patel and his years-long crusade to depict the Trump-Russia scandal—Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s efforts to cover up its existence—as nothing but a total hoax orchestrated by nefarious Democrats and rogue government operatives.
In this film—which credits Patel as an executive producer—he offers a blistering attack on the FBI. He calls it a “corrupt” enterprise and claims it has been on the Democratic Party’s “payroll.” He says, “I’m the guy that’s going to tell you they need major reforms. I’m going to tell you to shut down the FBI headquarters building and open it up as a museum of the Deep State the next day. Seriously, you need 50 guys in Washington running the FBI.” He pushes the false claim that the FBI launched its Russia investigation in 2016 on the basis of the infamous and unconfirmed Steele memos. And he insists that the FBI and the rest of the US intelligence community that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election “knew it didn’t exist.” He also asserts that “globalists” have been working with Al Qaeda to make a profit.
The series was produced for Carlson, who is featured in the final episode, by Global Tree Pictures, a Los Angeles-based firm run by Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker Igor Lopatonok. He and Russian-born film director Vera Tomilova, the chief financial officer of Global Tree Pictures, who holds a US green card, are listed in the film’s credits as its producers. Global Tree raised the financing for the series, according to a contract filed in Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy proceedings. (Giuliani also starred in the documentary.)
Lopatonok has ties to Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts.
In recent years, he has helped lead a Kremlin-financed effort to persuade Westerners to move to Russia. In 2023, he chaired a competition dubbed “To Russia With Love” that invited bloggers to produce content that would show the “most appealing side of Russia” and encourage people to emigrate there. This project was funded by the Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives, a state entity that Putin created in 2021 to “support projects in the field of culture, art and the creative industries.”
One of Lopatonok’s colleagues in this project was John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida, who received political asylum in Russia and who has been a key player in Russia’s disinformation operations against the West. In May, the New York Times reported, “Dougan has built an ever-growing network of more than 160 fake websites that mimic news outlets in the United States, Britain and France.” Dougan was listed on material as a member of the “Expert Council” of the “To Russia with Love” project and as a “mentor” for the winners.
Much more at the link.
Remember: money, ideology, compromise, ego. We’ve got money, ideology, and ego at play here.
And here we have money, ideology, and ego:
The firm was part of “the com,” aka 764, aka a CSAM (and other assorted cybercrimes) network
— Meredith Rose (@mrose.ink) February 8, 2025 at 9:05 AM
From Krebs on Security:
Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.
Wired first reported on Feb. 2 that one of the technologists on Musk’s crew is a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the nickname “Big Balls” online. One of the companies Coristine founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, was set up in 2021, when he would have been around 16 years old.
“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”
On May 11, 2024, Rivage posted on a Discord channel for a DDoS protection service that is chiefly marketed to members of The Com. Rivage expressed frustration with his time spent on Com-based communities, suggesting that its profitability had been oversold.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of money to be made in the com,” Rivage lamented. “I’m not buying Heztner [servers] to set up some com VPN.”
Rivage largely stopped posting messages on Com channels after that. Wired reports that Coristine subsequently spent three months last summer working at Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup.
The trouble with all this is that even if someone sincerely intends to exit The Com after years of consorting with cybercriminals, they are often still subject to personal attacks, harassment and hacking long after they have left the scene.
That’s because a huge part of Com culture involves harassing, swatting and hacking other members of the community. These internecine attacks are often for financial gain, but just as frequently they are perpetrated by cybercrime groups to exact retribution from or assert dominance over rival gangs.
Experts say it is extremely difficult for former members of violent street gangs to gain a security clearance needed to view sensitive or classified information held by the U.S. government. That’s because ex-gang members are highly susceptible to extortion and coercion from current members of the same gang, and that alone presents an unacceptable security risk for intelligence agencies.
And make no mistake: The Com is the English-language cybercriminal hacking equivalent of a violent street gang. KrebsOnSecurity has published numerous stories detailing how feuds within the community periodically spill over into real-world violence.
When Coristine’s name surfaced in Wired‘s report this week, members of The Com immediately took notice. In the following segment from a February 5, 2025 chat in a Com-affiliated hosting provider, members criticized Rivage’s skills, and discussed harassing his family and notifying authorities about incriminating accusations that may or may not be true.
Much, much, much more after the link.
764 (previously CVLT and a subgroup of “the com“)[1][2][3][4] is a decentralized and transnational sextortion network with alleged ideological ties to the Order of Nine Angles, a right-wing Satanist terror network.[5] It is classified as a terror network by the U.S. Department of Justice, and is considered by the FBI as a “tier one” terrorist threat.[6] The RCMP also classifies 764 as an “ideological violent extremist network”, and it has been characterized as a “satanic neo-nazi cult” by multiple sources.[7][8][9][10] The network is most present on Discord and Telegram and usually targets children ages 8 to 17, particularly marginalized children or those suffering from mental health challenges.[11][12][13] 764 was founded in 2021 by Bradley Cadenhead, a teenager from Stephenville, Texas; the group derives its name from the town’s ZIP code.[14][1][15]
Victims are forced to commit recorded acts of self-harm to disseminate internally or share on social media platforms.[16][5] They are often asked to carve names on their skin as “cutsigns”, a form of branding to show their subjugation to the group.[10][17][12] They are given the end goal of committing suicide on livestream for the network’s entertainment or for the perpetrator’s own sense of fame within the network.[18][19]
Europol is chasing them. So is Canada. The US is, how long that lasts is anybody’s guess. This makes what Musk and his minions radically worse.
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 1,080: That Didn’t Take LongPost + Comments (13)
