Looks like it’s time for some nice, clean commenting real estate. Since it’s too soon to have a political discussion of firearms, here’s Jethro Tull singing about them in a bonus track from 1982’s Broadsword and the Beast.
Open thread!
by Adam L Silverman| 112 Comments
This post is in: America, Ammosexuals, Domestic Politics, Gun nuts, Music, Open Threads, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America
Looks like it’s time for some nice, clean commenting real estate. Since it’s too soon to have a political discussion of firearms, here’s Jethro Tull singing about them in a bonus track from 1982’s Broadsword and the Beast.
Open thread!
by Adam L Silverman| 228 Comments
This post is in: America, Ammosexuals, Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Popular Culture, Silverman on Security
A short while ago a gunman entered the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas and opened fire. Preliminary reports are that there are multiple fatalities and casualties. The FBI is on the scene. And after a short pursuit the shooter was shot and killed by law enforcement.
The Wilson County sheriff confirmed there's been 'multiple casualties and fatalities'. https://t.co/CkHzEY8VbF
— KENS 5 (@KENS5) November 5, 2017
BREAKING: Man who opened fire in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, now dead & no more active threat, police say https://t.co/YfTGybV8N5
— KSAT 12 (@ksatnews) November 5, 2017
Right now there’s no word on motive or much else other than the most basic details. Sutherland Springs is a small town southeast of San Antonio and San Antonia news media is scrambling to get on scene and get more and hopefully more accurate information.
@zhedrickTV my colleague just arrived on scene. We are both working to get more information about church shooting
— Renee Santos (@RSantosTV) November 5, 2017
We have crews in town and more headed that way https://t.co/k7mvSl7Xhs
— Garrett Brnger (@BrngerReports) November 5, 2017
As with all these types of events, the information bouncing around on 24/7 news, as well as social media is preliminary and is likely to be revised over the next 36 to 48 hours.
Stay frosty!
Update at 2:58 PM
MSNBC is reporting at least 15 dead.
Update at 3:oo PM
And now we’ve got a shooting in front of a church in Fresno, CA.
While on my way to church shooting here in Texas, I'm seeing reports of shooting outside church in my hometown of Fresno,California #prayers
— Renee Santos (@RSantosTV) November 5, 2017
From The Fresno Bee:
A woman was gunned down and her companion was wounded in the parking lot of St. Alphonsus Church in southwest Fresno Sunday, and police were in a standoff several blocks away with someone believed to be the gunman.
Dispatch reports said the shooter got out of a vehicle, fired at the two, and got back in the car and fled.
According to dispatch and eyewitness reports, there were two victims, a woman and a man, who were shot in a small blue Toyota at the church on Kearney Boulevard, west of Fresno Street.
The shooting happened in a back parking lot of the church. Witnesses reported three gunshots were fired.
Mass Murder by Mass Shooting at Texas ChurchPost + Comments (228)
by Adam L Silverman| 131 Comments
This post is in: 2020 Elections, America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election 2017, Election 2018, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America, Silverman on Security, Not Normal
You guys.
Something. Is. Afoot.
And I don;t know what it is yet.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) November 2, 2017
Wilson is referring to this news from the NY Times:
Robert Mercer, a billionaire investor who is a big backer of many conservative causes and a patron of the former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, is stepping down as co-chief executive of Renaissance Technologies, the giant hedge fund.
Mr. Mercer sent a letter to investors and pension advisers on Thursday morning in which he said he would step down. A copy of the letter was reviewed by The New York Times.
The one-paragraph letter to investors did not give a reason for Mr. Mercer’s decision. Mr. Mercer’s involvement in conservative politics became a lightning rod for criticism during and after the presidential election.
But in a letter to the employees of the hedge fund, with the subject line “past, present, and future,” Mr. Mercer acknowledged the public scrutiny he has faced since Mr. Trump’s election.
Here’s the link to Mercer’s letter. And here are three of the more interesting items in the letter that Rick Wilson is responding to.
The press has also intimated that my politics marches in lockstep with Steve Bannon’s. I have great respect for Mr. Bannon, and from time to time I do discuss politics with him. However, I make my own decisions with respect to whom I support politically. Those decisions do not always align with Mr. Bannon’s.
Without individuals thinking for themselves, society as a whole will struggle to distinguish the signal of truth from the correlated noise of conformity. I supported Milo Yiannopoulos in the hope and expectation that his expression of views contrary to the social mainstream and his spotlighting of the hypocrisy of those who would close down free speech in the name of political correctness would promote the type of open debate and freedom of thought that is being throttled on many American college campuses today. But in my opinion, actions of and statements by Mr. Yiannopoulos have caused pain and divisiveness undermining the open and productive discourse that I had hoped to facilitate. I was mistaken to have supported him, and for several weeks have been in the process of severing all ties with him.
For personal reasons, I have also decided to sell my stake in Breitbart News to my daughters.
What remains to be seen is whether he’s actually making a break with Bannon and Breitbart or this is all for show and he’ll still be involved behind the scenes with his daughter fronting things. As for Milo, provided Mercer actually carries through on pulling his support, he just lost his sugar daddy and now has no source of income or funding. As Buzzfeed recently reported, everything Milo is doing is being paid for by the Mercers.
This is Weird: Robert Mercer Makes a MovePost + Comments (131)
by Adam L Silverman| 221 Comments
This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America, Silverman on Security, Not Normal
When I drafted my earlier post today I removed a couple of sentences because I thought I was ahead of myself in my assessment. Specifically I deleted that “anyone who has ties to Assange are now facing scrutiny from the Special Prosecutor’s investigation. This includes Congressman Rohrbacher, Nigel Farage, Roger Stone, etc, and those tied to them, such as Steve Bannon, Chuck Johnson, Milo Yiannopoulos, etc.”
The Guardian has now reported that my initial instincts were correct:
Sources with knowledge of the investigation said the former Ukip leader had raised the interest of FBI investigators because of his relationships with individuals connected to both the Trump campaign and Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder whom Farage visited in March.
“One of the things the intelligence investigators have been looking at is points of contact and persons involved,” one source said. “If you triangulate Russia, WikiLeaks, Assange and Trump associates the person who comes up with the most hits is Nigel Farage.
“He’s right in the middle of these relationships. He turns up over and over again. There’s a lot of attention being paid to him.”
The source mentioned Farage’s links with Roger Stone, Trump’s long-time political adviser who has admitted being in contact with Guccifer 2.0, a hacker whom US intelligence agencies believe to be a Kremlin agent.
But Farage’s relationships with people close to the US president began years earlier. Farage first met Steve Bannon, Trump’s strategist and former campaign chief executive, in the summer of 2012, when Bannon, who was interested in rightwing movements in Europe, invited the then Ukip leader to spend a few days in New York and Washington, according to an account in the New Yorker magazine.
There Farage was introduced to, among others, the staff of the then senator Jeff Sessions, who is now the US attorney general. Speaking of his longtime admiration for Bannon, Farage told the New Yorker last year: “I have got a very, very high regard for that man’s brain.”
While these connections in the neo-nationalist and neo-fascist right are not surprising, they are good examples of network based targeting. The same type of social network analyses that were exploited to great effect in warping the US elections in 2016 are now being used to investigate and ultimately to prosecute those who targeted the US and the election. There’s an entire network of alt-righters, neo-NAZIs, white supremacists, neo-nationalists, neo-fascists, etc orbiting around these big names. Each and every one of those folks, from the Rage Furby to the Mandrill Mentality to Halfbaked Alaska to Ensign Urinalysis to the Stupidest Man on the Internet and the Twink for Trump should consider hiring good lawyers. The small fry are going to get quickly cooked in order to get to the big fish.
by Adam L Silverman| 265 Comments
This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America, Silverman on Security, Midnight Confessions, Not Normal
I just want to take a moment and focus on the Papadopolous confession that John highlighted earlier. Specifically this part from the Statement of the Offense:
Defendant PAPADOPOULOS acknowledged that the professor had told him about the Russians possessing “dirt” on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” but stated multiple times that he learned that information prior to joining the Campaign. In truth and in fact, however, defendant PAPADOPOULOS learned he would be an advisor to the Campaign in early March, and met the professor on or about March 14, 2016; the professor only took interest in defendant PAPADOPOULOS because of his status with the Campaign; and the professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS about the “thousands of emails” on or about April 26, 2016, when defendant PAPADOPOULOS had been a foreign policy adviser to the Campaign for over a month.
The DNC, DSCC, and DCCC hacks, as well as the spear phishing hack on John Podesta all took place before the Russians used the foreign professor as a dangle to hook first Papadopolous and then, hopefully, the Trump campaign. Similar language was used in the approach by the Agalarovs and Veselnitskaya in June 2016 to Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort.
While the Papadopolous approach in the spring and the Donald Trump Jr approach in the summer did not, as far as we know, lead to a transfer of any of this materials to the Trump campaign, those emails and hacked documents still were made public. They were specifically made public by Wikileaks/Julian Assange. While Assange has consistently denied that he works for, is involved with, and/or received the stolen documents from Russian sources (intel and/or organized crime), what little fig leaf of cover his denials provides is fast disintegrating. At this point Assange’s disingenuous denials, and those of his supporters, are almost completely pointless.
Even more interesting is that this is at least the third, if not the fourth, attempt by the Russians to use a nebulously defined emails that incriminate or have dirt on Secretary Clinton to approach the Trump campaign. Papadopolous, based on the statement of offenses, seems to be the first in chronological order (that we currently know of). Peter Smith, who claimed to be in contact with LTG (ret) Flynn, was the second. Donald Trump Jr, along with Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, would seem to be the third based on the approach from the Agalarovs, via Goldstone, on behalf of Veselnetskiya in June 2016. The possible fourth would be Roger Stone based on his October 2016 Twitter statement that John Podesta would soon have time in the barrel.
And it is the nebulous definition of what is meant by emails on the Russian side that is important. As far as anyone knows the only emails and documents that the Russians got were whatever they hacked from the DNC, DSCC, DCCC, as well as spear phished from John Podesta’s email account. None of these are the work emails that either the DOJ was reviewing as part of a dispute between the State Department and the US Intelligence Community over what needed to be up classified or declassified in regard to FOIA requests. Nor were they the 30,000 or so emails that had been deemed to not be work related and therefore not turned over to the State Department for archiving pursuant to Federal records laws. The Russians, however, had determined that dangling the notion that they had Secretary Clinton’s actual emails and that they could make them available was the best bait to fish with. This wasn’t hard to figure out. The President and his surrogates on the campaign trail were bellowing about it at rallies. Everyone at FOX News but Shep Smith and Chris Wallace were constantly ranting and raving about it. As was everyone on talk radio and on the right wing news/commentary parts of the Internet and social media.
Apparently the NY Times has been right all along; this is all about Secretary Clinton’s emails. That the Trump campaign wanted them and that the Russians had determined the Trump campaign would be willing to deal to get them. Tells you something about what Putin thinks of the President and the people around him. And what he thinks he could get from the President.
This is going to be important too, once people start focusing on it:
um, possible BFD alert https://t.co/e25HqhpEuu pic.twitter.com/UwfzpSK7vL
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) October 30, 2017
by Adam L Silverman| 124 Comments
This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America, Silverman on Security, Not Normal
Throughout the comments since last night’s breaking news regarding Robert Mueller’s Special Prosecutor’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections there is a lot of confusion and speculation, informed and uninformed, about what is actually going on. I wanted to make what I think is an important, but often forgotten point: Mueller’s investigation is rooted in/an outgrowth of a joint counterintelligence investigation.
Joint Publication 2-01/Joint and National Support to Military Operations defines counterintelligence as:
Counterintelligence (CI) uses collection techniques that are similar to HUMINT, but CI targets those entities that are targeting friendly forces, a more narrow focus than HUMINT. Nonetheless, exploitation of data collected by CI assets can yield information critical to I&W and force protection. Service component CI elements conduct CI collection using liaison; elicitation; passive collection; review of open sources; military CI collections; and screening, interviews, and debriefing of displaced persons, defectors, refugees, and US persons with access to information of CI interest. Additionally, law enforcement information and suspicious activity reports are important sources of information that need to be processed, exploited, and fused with other CI sources. Processing of CI information primarily involves report preparation by collection activities at both the joint force and component levels. At the joint force level, this processing may also be accomplished within the J-2X*.
For more detailed information regarding CI processing, exploitation, and reporting, see JP 2-01.2, Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Support to Joint Operations.
Lawfare has an excellent two part run down of counterintelligence in regard to Mueller’s mandate as the special prosecutor by Aditya Bamzai. Professor Bamzai explains in part one:
Counterintelligence investigations are different from criminal investigations in several ways. For one thing, the goal of a counterintelligence investigation may be different from, and perhaps broader than, a criminal investigation. A criminal investigation would ordinarily pursue allegations of criminal conduct. A counterintelligence investigation, by contrast, may pursue allegations of “coordination” between U.S. persons and foreign hackers that may be unseemly and problematic if true, but potentially not criminal—such as, to use Professor Kent’s example, the possibility that a person within the United States coordinated to distribute material previously hacked by agents of a foreign government. As the Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations explain, the FBI is “not limited to ‘investigation’ in a narrow sense, such as solving particular cases,” but may also collect information to support “broader analytic and intelligence purposes.” In the case of the FBI, the line between counterintelligence and criminal investigations may not be a bright one. “In many cases,” as the Guidelines put it, “a single [FBI] investigation will be supportable as an exercise of a number of these authorities—i.e., as an investigation of a federal crime or crimes, as an investigation of a threat to the national security, and/or as a collection of foreign intelligence”—because the FBI has a role in enforcing both criminal law and “in collecting foreign intelligence as a member agency of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”
There’s a lot more at the link, but this, I think, is one of the most important portions for everyone to get their heads around. Mueller inherited the joint counterintelligence investigation that had begun during the summer of 2016 into Russian active measures and interference in the 2016 election. This means that Mueller and his team in the Special Prosecutor’s office have access to the full range of US, allied, and partner intelligence and counterintelligence related to the issues he’s investigating. It is this material that forms the bases of FISA warrant requests, not political oppo research like Fusion GPS’s Steele dossier.
In seeking to bring charges, which are not always the focus or outcome of a counterintelligence investigation, Mueller has to navigate from the world of intelligence and counterintelligence, from the classified world of need to know and special access programs to information that can be brought before a grand jury. This means that while Mueller, his team in the Special Prosecutor’s office, and those on the joint counterintelligence task force he inherited know the full depth, breadth, and scope of what happened, how it happened, why it happened, where it happened, and who it happened to it doesn’t mean he can just curate that into a compelling narrative and bring it to the grand jury. Like everyone else with a clearance and access he has to protect not just the information, but the sources and methods that were utilized to get the information. This means that whatever information he brings to the grand juries he has access to, and whatever charges he brings, are going to have to fit within the body of Federal criminal law.
As a result there is a lot of speculation that what he’s doing looks like a white collar investigation and prosecution or one of organized crime. And this may be true as far as appearances go. But it is true in that he and his team have to find evidence that can be presented to the grand jury and then utilized in a trial to prosecute those who are the target of his inquiries and the joint counterintelligence task force. We may never see a charge of espionage, because while it certainly happened with the hacking of Podesta’s emails, the DNC, the DSCC, and the DCCC, as well as similar hacking of GOP organizations and officials, Mueller may not be able to make that case without divulging sources and methods. Instead he’s got to find another way to get at those who engaged in these activities through more mundane charges. Hence all the speculation about leveraging Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN), as well as other investigations into financial and business irregularities into Manafort, Flynn, etc. What we’re going to see play out in public – as a result of indictments and prosecutions – is really just a bit of what has actually happened and what Mueller and his team know. In this case the meme is very, very accurate.
* The J-2X is the staff element of the intelligence directorate of a joint staff that combines and represents the principal authority for counterintelligence and human intelligence support. See also counterintelligence; human intelligence. (JP 2-01.2) Adam here: J stands for Joint, 2 is the numerical code for the intelligence section in a US military unit, and the X here is referring to the counterintel and human intel personnel.
Just a Quick Note on the Mueller InvestigationPost + Comments (124)
by Adam L Silverman| 296 Comments
This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America, Silverman on Security, Not Normal
CNN has the details (h/t Thru the Looking Glass):
Washington (CNN)A federal grand jury in Washington, DC, on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources briefed on the matter.
The charges are still sealed under orders from a federal judge. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, the sources said. It is unclear what the charges are.
A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.
Under the regulations governing special counsel investigations, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has oversight over the Russia investigation, would have been made aware of any charges before they were taken before the grand jury for approval, according to people familiar with the matter.
On Friday, top lawyers who are helping to lead the Mueller probe, including veteran prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, were seen entering the court room at the DC federal court where the grand jury meets to hear testimony in the Russia investigation.
Reporters present saw a flurry of activity at the grand jury room, but officials made no announcements.
Friday Night News Dump: Mueller Has a Sealed IndictmentPost + Comments (296)