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Christopher Wray Is Reportedly Preparing a Nasty Surprise for Donald Trump and Kash Patel

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:37:16 -0500

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Ousted Syrian President Assad granted asylum in Moscow, Russian media says

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Patel knows FBI's dirty secrets

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 10:57:31 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from The Washington Times stories: Higher Ground.

OPINION:

Democrats were so committed to the FBI and its cherished Russian dossier in 2017 that they vouched for its author, Christopher Steele, quoted it at hearings and saw it as a sure way to bring down new President Donald Trump.

But then Kash Patel crashed their party.

Mr. Patel, as senior counsel and overseer of spook programs, was a critical figure in then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’ investigation of the FBI’s drive to entrap Mr. Trump in a Russia election conspiracy.

In January 2018, the Republican released the bombshell Nunes memo. It exposed for the first time how the FBI took Mr. Steele’s unreliable gossip and cited it to back up its court affidavits. The FBI corrupted what was supposed to be a fact-based judicial process under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on an American’s communications — in this case, those of Trump volunteer Carter Page.

Worse, Mr. Patel discovered that the senior FBI leaders at the time, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, never told the court that the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic Party funded and trafficked the dossier.

The Patel-driven Nunes memo brought howls of protest from Democrats and the aligned news media.

But a year later, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz released his damning report that corroborated Mr. Patel’s work. He concluded that the FBI concealed facts, lied and rigged the affidavits.

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff tried to counter Nunes-Patel with his own memo. It proved laughably wrong.

If the Senate confirms Mr. Patel’s appointment, he will become the protagonist in a streaming TV original series. The whistleblower who exposed the FBI arrives triumphant as its top cop.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, who will either resign or be fired, never came to grips with what he inherited in August 2017: a scandal-marred front office that needed shaking up. A place that embraced a hoax to bring down a president. Instead, Mr. Wray’s FBI continued to do the Democrats’ bidding by putting parents under surveillance, targeting pro-lifers and whistleblowers and raiding Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.

In the meantime, FBI agents did the Black Lives Matter kneel in public and put out inaccurate crime statistics.

Mr. Patel’s congressional investigation, over 60 interviews and thousands of pages of documents provided him with a unique view of how the once-august bureau operates.

Mr. Patel’s federal resume includes stints as a Department of Justice prosecutor, senior intelligence and Pentagon official and Trump White House National Security Council staffer.

He told his story in a 2023 book, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy,” which displays a dramatic cover photo of Mr. Patel exiting Mr. Trump’s Marine One.

The book begins innocently enough.

“I’m just a guy from Queens and Long Island with the same story as so many others,” he writes. “I didn’t have some special upbringing or education. My parents aren’t rich or famous. They’re just a couple of working-class immigrants from India.”

But he quickly gets to the point.

“The Nunes Memo and [House committee] documents later revealed that the Deep State conducted an unprecedented spying operation against the Trump campaign in an apparent effort to tarnish Trump’s reputation and derail his election,” he writes.

He adds, “The FBI knew about Steele’s bias and that the Clinton campaign and the [Democratic National Committee] had paid for the dossier at the time they submitted their FISA warrant application to spy on Carter Page, but they never told the FISA judge either of these facts, as was required by law.”

As the 2016 election approached, the FBI realized it had nothing to leak after opening the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Mr. Trump that summer.

“In my opinion,” Mr. Patel writes, “the FBI agents behind Crossfire Hurricane must have been getting nervous as the 2016 campaign came to a close. They launched a FISA warrant based on the Democrat Steele Dossier, sicced an FBI informant on a Trump campaign official, doctored evidence, hid exculpatory information, spied on the Trump campaign, and buttressed their case with drunken tavern talk. Yet despite all that, the FBI’s investigation was coming up with nothing. Nobody in the Trump campaign was found coordinating with the Russians.”

The “drunken tavern talk” refers to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer telling a Department of State official that he shared a drink with Trump volunteer George Papadopoulos, who supposedly said something incriminating about Russia, which he later denied.

This hearsay tidbit was enough for the aforementioned Mr. McCabe, who was then FBI deputy director.

In a list of egregious FBI acts later documented by special counsel John Durham, his report singled out this McCabe gambit as one of the worst.

On July 31, 2016, a momentous date in sordid FBI history, Mr. McCabe ordered Mr. Strzok to open a full investigation of Trump world immediately, the Durham report states. (A week later, Mr. Strzok texted his girlfriend that “we’ll stop” Mr. Trump from becoming president.)

“The matter was opened as a full investigation without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information,” Mr. Durham said. “Further, the FBI did so without any significant review of its own intelligence databases, collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence entities, interviews of witnesses essential to understand the raw information it had received or using any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence.”

When hearing of Mr. Patel’s nomination, Mr. McCabe rushed to his employer, CNN, to express his disgust at Mr. Trump’s choice, which he described as horrible, unthinkable and conniving.

Stay tuned. 2025 will be a lot like 2017.

• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.

New York police investigate bullet casing inscriptions in killing of insurance executive

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 11:11:37 -0500

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Syria launches counterattacks against insurgents as Iran's top diplomat meets with Assad

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 15:14:26 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from PBS NewsHour - The Latest.

Syrian Spy Chief Allegedly Plotting Coup as Syria Faces Unrest? – Sri Lanka Guardian

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 19:29:18 -0500

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Armed rebels occupy centre of Aleppo, Syria's largest city

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 15:21:21 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from World News | Euronews RSS.

Thousands of insurgents also fanned out across Aleppo in vehicles with improvised armour and pickups, a day after they entered the city.

The insurgents faced little resistance from government troops during the shock offensive, according to residents and fighters.

Witnesses said two airstrikes on the city's edge late on Friday targeted insurgent reinforcements and hit near residential areas. A war monitor said 20 fighters were killed.

Syria's armed forces said in a statement on Saturday that to absorb the large attack on Aleppo and save lives, it has redeployed and is preparing for a counter-attack. The statement acknowledged that insurgents entered large parts of the city but said they have not established bases or checkpoints.

Insurgents were filmed outside police headquarters, in the city centre, and outside the Aleppo Citadel. They tore down posters of Syrian President Bashar Assad, stepping on some and burning others.

The surprise takeover is a huge setback for Assad, who managed to regain total control of the city in 2016, after expelling insurgents and thousands of civilians from its eastern neighbourhoods following a gruelling military campaign in which his forces were backed by Russia, Iran and its allied groups.

Aleppo has not been attacked by opposition forces since then. The 2016 battle for Aleppo was a turning point in the war between Syrian government forces and rebel fighters after 2011 protests against Assad’s rule turned into an all-out war.

At that time Russian warplanes had repeatedly launched deadly airstrikes, helping Assad regain control.

Friday's push into Aleppo followed weeks of low-level violence, including government attacks on opposition-held areas. Turkey, which has backed opposition groups, failed in its efforts to prevent the government attacks, which were seen as a violation of a 2019 agreement sponsored by Russia, Turkey and Iran to freeze the line of the conflict.

The offensive came as Iran-linked groups, primarily Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has backed Syrian government forces since 2015, have been preoccupied with their own battles at home. A ceasefire in Hezbollah’s two-month war with Israel took effect Wednesday, the day the Syrian opposition factions announced their offensive. Israel has also escalated its attacks against Hezbollah and Iran-linked targets in Syria during the last 70 days.

A witness in Aleppo said government troops remained in the city's airport and at a military academy but most of the forces have already filed out of the city from the south. Syrian Kurdish forces remained in two neighbourhoods.

The redeployment “is a temporary measure and (the military central command and armed forces) will work to guarantee the security and peace of all our people in Aleppo,” the military statement said.

Speaking from the heart of the city in Saadallah Aljabri square, opposition fighter Mohammad Al Abdo, said it was his first time back in Aleppo in 13 years, when his older brother was killed at the start of the war.

“God willing, the rest of Aleppo province will be liberated" from government forces, he said.

There was light traffic in the city centre on Saturday. Opposition fighters fired in the air in celebration but there was no sign of clashes or government troops presence.

Abdulkafi Alhamdo, an teacher who fled Aleppo in 2016 and returned Friday night after hearing the insurgents were inside, described “mixed feelings of pain, sadness and old memories."

“As I entered Aleppo, I kept telling myself this is impossible! How did this happen?” He said he strolled through the city at night, visiting the citadel, where the insurgents raised their flags, a major square and the university of Aleppo, as well as the last spot he was in before he was forced to leave for the countryside.

“I walked in (the empty) streets of Aleppo, shouting, ‘People, people of Aleppo. We are your sons,’” Alhamdo told The Associated Press in a series of messages.

The insurgents launched their shock offensive in the Aleppo and Idlib countryside on Wednesday and wrestled control of dozens of villages and towns before entering Aleppo on Friday.

Schools and government offices were closed on Saturday as most people stayed indoors, according to Sham FM radio, a pro-government station. Witnesses said the insurgents deployed security forces around the city to prevent any acts of violence or looting.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the city's airport has been shut and all flights suspended. On Friday, Aleppo's two key public hospitals were reportedly full of patients while many private facilities closed, OCHA said.

In social media posts, the insurgents were pictured outside of Aleppo Citadel, the medieval palace in the old city centre, and one of the largest in the world. In cellphone videos, they recorded themselves having conversations with residents they visited at home, seeking to reassure them they will cause no harm.

The Syrian Kurdish-led administration in the country's east said nearly 3,000 people, most of them students, had arrived in their areas after fleeing the fighting in Aleppo, which has a sizeable Kurdish population.

State media reported that a number of “terrorists," including sleeper cells, infiltrated parts of the city. Government troops chased them and arrested a number who posed for pictures near city landmarks, state media said.

On a state TV morning show Saturday, commentators said army reinforcements and Russia’s assistance will repel the “terrorist groups,” blaming Turkey for supporting the insurgents’ push into Aleppo and Idlib provinces.

Russia’s state news agency Tass quoted Oleg Ignasyuk, a Russian Defence Ministry official coordinating in Syria, as saying that Russian warplanes targeted and killed 200 militants who launched the offensive in the northwest on Friday. It provided no further details.

Netanyahu holds assessment on Syria as jihadists enter Aleppo in lightning assault

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 06:39:07 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from The Times of Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a special security discussion Friday evening with the heads of the defense establishment to discuss new internal fighting in Syria and the ceasefire in Lebanon that halted more than 13 months of fighting with Hezbollah.

Syrian rebel jihadists opposed to President Bashar Assad launched a surprise offensive through government-held towns in recent days. The opposition fighters, led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, launched an incursion on Wednesday into a dozen towns and villages in the northern province of Aleppo.

On Friday they said they’d reached the center of the city of Aleppo itself, as they pressed their lightning offensive against forces of the Iranian- and Russian-backed government. Assad and his allies Russia, Iran and regional Shi’ite militias had retaken all of Aleppo city in late 2016, with insurgents agreeing to withdraw after months of bombardment and siege in a battle that turned the tide against the opposition.

Channel 12 news reported that Jerusalem was concerned about the potential spillover ramifications of chaotic developments in Syria, as well as the possibility of unspecified Syrian strategic weapons falling into the wrong hands.

An unnamed Israeli official told Ynet: “This is something we need to closely monitor and see how it develops.”

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They added, “It doesn’t necessarily affect us, especially not in the short term, but any erosion of stability in a neighboring country could also impact us. It seems here that there are also opportunities for change.”

The fighting is some of the deadliest in years, with 255 people killed, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Most of the dead have been combatants, but the toll also includes 24 civilians, most killed in Russian air strikes.

SOHR, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria and is of unclear funding, has been accused in the past of inflating regime losses.

Fighters enter the village of Talhiyah, located east of the northwestern Syrian city of Idlib near the Taftanaz military airport, after the area was taken over by jihadists and their Turkish-backed allies in the latest battles with government forces in the northern Syrian Aleppo province, on November 29, 2024. (Omar Haj Kadour/AFP)

Rebel commander in the Jaish al-Izza rebel brigade Mustafa Abdul Jaber said the speedy advance was due to insufficient Iran-backed manpower in the broader province. Iran’s allies in the region have suffered a series of blows at the hands of Israel as the Gaza war expanded to the Middle East.

Opposition sources in touch with Turkish intelligence said Turkey had given a green light to the offensive. But Turkish foreign ministry spokesperson Oncu Keceli said Turkey sought to avoid greater instability in the region and had warned that recent attacks undermined de-escalation agreements.

The attack was the biggest since March 2020, when Russia and Turkey agreed to a deal to de-escalate the conflict.

Syrian state television denied rebels had reached Aleppo and said Russia was providing Syria’s military with air support.

The Syrian military said it continued to confront the attack, saying in a statement it had inflicted heavy losses on the insurgents in the countryside of Aleppo and Idlib.

David Carden, UN Deputy Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Syria Crisis, said: “We’re deeply alarmed by the situation unfolding in northwest Syria.”

“Relentless attacks over the past three days have claimed the lives of at least 27 civilians, including children as young as eight years old,” he told Reuters. “Civilians and civilian infrastructure are not targets and must be protected under International Humanitarian Law.”

Syrian state news agency SANA said four civilians including two students were killed on Friday in Aleppo by insurgent shelling of university student dormitories. It was not clear if they were among the 27 dead reported by the UN official.

Russian and Syrian warplanes bombed the area near the border with Turkey on Thursday to try to push back the insurgent offensive.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow regarded the rebel attack as a violation of Syria’s sovereignty and wanted the authorities to act fast to regain control.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said “more than 14,000 people –- nearly half are children — have been displaced” by the violence.

Fighters set alight a picture of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in front of a building that was seized by jihadists in the area of Zarbah on November 29, 2024, as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) jihadists and allied groups continue their offensive in Syria’s northern Aleppo province against government forces (Aaref Watad/AFP)

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi pledged “continued support for the government, nation and army of Syria,” in a phone call with his Syrian counterpart Bassam al-Sabbagh, according to a statement.

The Idlib area has been subject to a Turkish- and Russian-brokered truce since 2020. The ceasefire has been repeatedly violated but had largely held.

An AFP correspondent in the rebel enclave saw jihadists advancing in tanks as intense exchanges of fire took place in an area just seven kilometers (a little over four miles) from Aleppo. AFP images showed abandoned army tanks and other military vehicles.

Fighters seize a Syrian army tank on the international M5 highway in the area of Zarbah which was taken over by anti-government factions, on November 29, 2024 (Rami al SAYED / AFP)

The correspondent said the jihadists and their Turkey-backed allies took orders from a joint operations command.

Analyst Nick Heras, of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, said the fighters were “trying to preempt the possibility of a Syrian military campaign in the region of Aleppo.” According to Heras, the Syrian government and its key backer Russia had been preparing for such a campaign.

Russia intervened in Syria in 2015, turning the tide of the civil war that broke out four years earlier in favor of the government, whose forces at the time had lost control of most of the country.

Other interests are also at stake.

As well as Russia, Syrian President Assad has been propped up by Iran and allied groups, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Iran-backed militias have a heavy presence in the Aleppo region after providing crucial ground support to the army in its recapture of rebel-held areas of the city in 2016.

Heras said anti-government forces are “in a better position to take and seize villages than Russian-backed Syrian government forces, while the Iranians are focused on Lebanon.”

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

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Trump’s counter terror pick Sebastian Gorka is a ‘conman’ who needs FBI background check, Bolton says

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 07:26:18 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

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When Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton appeared on CNN Friday night, he didn’t hold back when commenting on Trump’s pick for his counterterrorism director.

“Sebastian Gorka is a con man,” Bolton told host Kaitlan Collins.

“He needs a full-field FBI background investigation about his educational claims and things like that,” he added. “I think he is a perfect example of somebody who owes his position purely to Donald Trump, he doesn’t display loyalty, he displays fealty, and that’s what Trump wants.”

Boltson said Trump “doesn’t want Gorka’s opinions.”

“He wants Gorka to say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and I am fully confident that’s exactly what will happen, no matter what it is Trump says,” Bolton argued.

To hear Trump put it, Gorka has been a “tireless advocate for the America First Agenda and the MAGA Movement” since 2015, according to the president-elect’s announcement on Friday.

Gorka, who was born in the UK to Hungarian parents, is “a legal immigrant” with “more than 30 years of National Security experience,” Trump said.

What Trump neglected to mention was that Gorka was pushed out of his White House role as a strategist to the president in his first administration.

Divisive and combative as he staunchly defended Trump, Gorka was one of the main backers of the then-president’s ban on refugees and people from several Muslim-majority countries.

Gorka’s views on Islam have been a source of controversy — specifically, comments he has made about violence being an intrinsic part of the Islamic faith. His academic credentials have also been questioned, as Bolton suggested on CNN.

“Obviously he’s not the expert he claims to be — obviously,” Hungarian newspaper editor Gabor Horvath told NBC News in 2017.

“He got his master’s degree and his PhD from the Corvinus University in Hungary. The Corvinus University is not a center for national security studies, certainly not internationally recognized studies of this kind,” he added.

An op-ed inThe New York Times once referred to him as “The Islamophobic Huckster in the White House.”

Trump’s then-White House chief of staff John Kelly reportedly pulled Gorka’s security clearance when he was on vacation, making it impossible for him to do his job, HuffPost noted at the time.

This time around, Trump has suggested sidestepping the background check process usually conducted by the FBI to get his nominees and appointees into their expected roles.

Gorka has dismissed the threat of white nationalism, and instead argued that Islamist extremists constituted the biggest threat to the US.

His supposed ties to the Nazi-connected Hungarian political group Vitezi Rend have also worried some during his first short stint in the White House. The group collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War and reformed following the end of the country’s Communist government in 1989, according to HuffPost.

Jewish outlet The Forward reported in March 2017 that Gorka was a member of the group. Gorka wore the group’s insignia at Trump’s first inaugural ball, later saying that the medals he wore belonged to his father, who was handed them as “a declaration for his resistance to [Communist] dictatorship,” Gorka told Breitbart, one of his former employers.

Before coming to the US in 2008, Gorka moved to Hungary in 1992 and worked for the country’s Ministry of Defense before becoming an adviser to Prime Minister Viktor Orban in 1998.

Gorka ran for mayor in the small town of Piliscsaba in 2006, coming in third place. Several members of the community told NBC News that he was a member of Vitezi Rend; one of the group’s leaders told CNN that the organization was never connected to the Nazis and that Gorka was not a pledged member.

Gorka became a US citizen in 2012, which made it possible for him to work for the federal government.

He lasted about eight months in the White House before he was forced to leave. He claimed he resigned, a version of events disputed by the Trump White House.

“Sebastian Gorka did not resign, but I can confirm he no longer works at the White House,” a White House official told several news outlets at the time.

After his departure, Gorka became a political and counterterrorism commentator on right-wing media, with his own radio show and frequent appearances on Fox News and Newsmax.

The 54-year-old pugilist is well-known for his aggressiveness towards the press, often telling reporters to “take a long jump off a short pier,” as Politico noted.

“I wouldn’t have him in any US government,” Bolton told CNN.

“Fortunately, it’s not the highest position he had been mentioned for,” he added. “But I don’t think it’s going to bode well for counterterrorism efforts when the [National Security Council’s] senior director is somebody like that. ... But the questions of who are the deputy secretaries, who are the undersecretaries, and so on, is also going to tell us a lot about who’s actually running the government.”

Cheers, mate: Musk helped Trump but how will Trump help Musk?

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 04:41:28 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

Elon Musk spent more than $100 million to help Donald Trump win the US presidential election. The billionaire will likely earn a lot more from the result – but how?

Last week, during a gathering – undoubtedly a celebration – at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s so-called Winter White House, someone shouted: “Where is the George Soros of the right?”

Soros, 94, is, of course, the bogeyman for the nationalist movements worldwide because he has long supported progressive and liberal political causes with billions of his own dollars.

So when Musk eagerly raised his hand – he has basically lived in Mar-a-Lago since Trump’s victory in the presidential election – nobody was really surprised. After all, the owner of SpaceX, Tesla, X, and other firms has helped US rightwingers quite a lot.

Musk bought Twitter, renamed it to X, and turned the platform into a right-wing echo chamber – others are allowed in, of course, but just to be constantly harassed and trolled.

Plus, the world’s richest individual then wholeheartedly endorsed Trump’s campaign, spending more than $100 million and saying that the Republican candidate must win because “civilization as we know it is on the line.”

Here’s where the analogy can be ended, though. Whereas Soros only has a net worth of $6.7 billion and has already donated more than $32 billion to his Open Society Foundations, Musk now stands to make much more money than he has given to Trump.

How exactly? In numerous ways, actually. And here’s our attempt to explain how Musk – who will also co-lead a new commission called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – will become even richer and more influential.

SpaceX the big winner

This week, Trump joined Musk in Texas to watch a successful test launch of SpaceX’s Starship rocket. That wasn’t an accident – SpaceX benefits from billions of dollars in US government contracts (nearly $20 billion since 2008), and is poised to secure more.

Musk’s company is already a major provider of launches to the International Space Station, also surpassing Boeing as NASA’s second most utilized contractor.

Now, SpaceX stands to receive billions more. Precisely Starship is how NASA intends to land astronauts on the moon for the first time in more than half a century. For the first two human landings under the Artemis program, SpaceX has been awarded more than $4 billion.

Besides, Musk simply loves the idea of a new NASA mission to Mars. Since the agency is reportedly considering dropping its own Space Launch System rocket program under the Trump administration and relying more on the private sector, SpaceX would probably be trusted with the task.

Musk recently posted on X: “Vote for @realDonaldTrump if you want humanity to make it to Mars!”

And indeed, Trump – as vain as he’s proven to be – represents the hope for the next big leap for SpaceX. It was Trump who created the US Space Force in 2019 so he could send federal dollars in the direction of Musk’s company after expanding the Space Force’s budget.

Finally, Trump is, of course, anti-regulation, and so is Musk. He’s publicly said that the requirements of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are slowing Starship’s progress.

The FAA has proposed fines of $633,000 against SpaceX for violating regulations in launches of its Falcon 9 rocket.

Musk criticized the FAA in a series of X posts, saying that the agency is “smothering the national space program” and accused it of “improper, politically-motivated behavior.” However, the FAA’s administrator, Michael Whitaker, has always stressed that SpaceX needs to “operate at the highest level of safety.”

Tesla in the best possible position now

Just so it happens, the “first buddy” is in charge of another company which has regular skirmishes with the regulators – Tesla. To be more specific, the (in)famous electric vehicle company doesn’t really make safe cars, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

In mid-October, right before the presidential election, the agency opened a new investigation into Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system after getting a fresh batch of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.

Before that, there was a three-year investigation into the company’s less-sophisticated Autopilot system. Regulators found 467 crashes involving Autopilot, resulting in 54 injuries and 14 deaths.

It would seem that the NHTSA doesn’t believe the hype around Tesla’s vehicles such as Cybercabs and Robovans, and is keen to ensure that the company doesn’t lie about their features in public statements. It has also forced Tesla to do recalls it didn’t want.

Naturally, then, any cuts to the agency’s funding or staffing could help Musk’s EV firm. In a sign of what might be in store for the NHTSA, Musk recently said on X: “We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good.”

Auto safety advocates are obviously worried that the DOGE co-chaired by Musk could propose draconian cuts at NHTSA – along the lines of what he did at Twitter after purchasing the platform.

Musk could try to slow or stop NHTSA investigations, and to hell with conflicts of interest or the fact that Tesla actually benefits from government tax incentives.

To be fair, Musk is now saying that the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV buyers should be eliminated. But this would even help Tesla as other automakers would probably cut back their expansion plans for the EV market and thus reinforce Tesla’s dominance.

During a Tesla earnings call in October, Musk also called for a “federal approval process for autonomous vehicles.” This would speed up approval of driverless cars by two or three years, analysts say.

“The future is autonomous electric vehicles. Nonautonomous gasoline vehicles will be like riding a horse and using a foot bone. It's not that there are no horses. Yes, there are some but they're unusual. They're niche,” said Musk.

The market is reacting. Between Trump’s victory on November 5th and the close of trading last Friday, Tesla’s stock price went from $251.50 to $320.72.

According to Tesla’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Musk owns about 715 million shares. It means that the value of his stake has risen by almost $50 billion – that’s more than Musk paid for Twitter in 2022 ($44 billion).

Add to that the possibility that Trump’s administration will impose tariffs on imports from China, and it becomes clear that Tesla might also be protected from cheap – and high-quality – Chinese EVs.

When your middle name is Annoying

Even Dogecoin, the meme-based cryptocurrency, heavily promoted by Musk in recent years, has been benefitting from Trump’s triumph.

Since November 5th, its value has more than doubled – that’s a much bigger jump than what bitcoin has enjoyed. As a trolling exercise, Dogecoin might actually prove to be quite valuable.

X, the home of trolling, though, is bound for even greater success. The platform has lost most of its worth since Musk bought and began playing with it, but with Elon now playing “co-president,” scrutiny from federal regulators, worried about consumer data abuse, might go away.

Musk is on the inside and hard at work promoting his ideas of colonizing Mars and changing life on Earth. But it can be only a matter of time until he’s on the outside looking in.

Plus, major advertisers, having boycotted X over the network allowing weird content to appear next to their products and lifting suspensions of some of the most odious people on the platform, now seem to be slinking back.

A recent report from Adweek said that Comcast, Disney, IBM, and many other companies are returning to X because they obviously see that spending on the platform might be good for business.

For big businesses, it’s important to get in Musk’s good books and, by extension, those of Trump, ruthless logic dictates. Money indeed speaks volumes, especially if you want to stay out of the crosshairs of a certain someone – and who knows, X might still become profitable.

For years, Musk, Trump, and their allies have claimed that social media companies, especially ones owned by Meta, were illegally biased against them in a giant conspiracy. Oh, the irony – that’s all gone now.

“Musk has openly used his platform to boost Trump, attack his opponents, and shape the political narrative. The collusion between government and big tech is no longer a conspiracy theory – it’s out in the open,” Mike Masnick, founder and editor of Techdirt, wrote this week.

So far, it looks like Musk is more engaged with whatever is going on around Trump than most expected. He’s changed his X bio which now says: “The people voted for major government reform.”

But it’s not really fair to call Trump’s victory resounding as some do because not even 50% of voters cast their ballot in support of him on November 5th. Over 151 million Americans voted, but nearly 100 million, even though they were eligible, didn’t bother.

So if Musk thinks his ideas will be almost universally supported, he might be wrong. Besides, even though Trump seems to admire him so far, many of the President-elect’s allies do not – actually, a growing number of them think Elon’s utterly insufferable.

One source told Politico: “Elon is getting a little big for his britches.” Another remarked to NBC: “He’s trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him. And the President is indebted to no one.”

For now, Musk is on the inside and hard at work promoting his ideas of colonizing Mars and changing life on Earth. But it can be only a matter of time until he’s on the outside looking in – and that would definitely be very, very interesting.

Billionaire, gay, former Democrat donor: Meet Scott Bessent, Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 08:33:27 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

Key Square Group founder Scott Bessent speaks at a campaign event for Republican presidential nominee and former US President Donald Trump in Asheville, North Carolina, US on August 14, 2024. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake/File Photo

US President-elect Donald Trump on Friday (November 23) picked hedge fund billionaire Scott Bessent as his pick for Secretary of the Treasury. If confirmed by the Senate, Bessent would be the first openly gay Treasury secretary.

In a statement posted on social media, Trump said, “Scott is widely respected as one of the World’s foremost International Investors and Geopolitical and Economic Strategists… Scott’s story is that of the American Dream… Together, we will Make America Rich Again, Prosperous Again, Affordable Again, and most importantly, Great Again”.

What is the role of Treasury secretary?

As the administration’s top economic official, the Treasury secretary is responsible for formulating and recommending domestic and international financial, economic, and tax policy.

They also participate in conceptualising fiscal policies that are significant for the country’s economy, and managing the public debt.

The Treasury secretary leads the Treasury Department, which oversees national banks, printing and minting all paper currency and coins, collecting taxes, enforcing tax and financial laws, and prosecuting tax evaders and financial criminals. They also serve on the President’s National Economic Council.

Who is Scott Bessent?

Bessent, a Yale graduate, is the CEO and Chief Investment Officer of New York-based hedge fund Key Square Capital Management. “He has also taught at Yale University, offering classes on economic booms and busts in the 20th century and the history of hedge funds”, according to a report by CBS News.

Notably, before becoming a fervent Trump supporter and his adviser, he donated to various Democratic initiatives in the early 2000s, including Al Gore’s presidential run. Bessent had also financially supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In 2011, he was recruited by George Soros — a billionaire Democrat donor — to be the chief investment officer of his $30 billion Soros Fund Management. In fact, in 2015, Bessent took a $2 billion investment from Soros to start his Key Square fund.

How will Bessent lead the US Treasury?

If confirmed, Bessent is expected to immediately extend the provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which Trump signed into law during his first term — reports suggest that the costs of the various tax cuts range between $6 trillion and $10 trillion over 10 years.

In his recent interviews, Bessent has defended tariffs, which are on the top of Trump’s protectionist agenda, saying opposition to them is rooted in political ideology and not “considered economic thought”, according to a report by the BBC.

“But he has also characterised Trump’s support for such border taxes as a negotiating tool, suggesting the president-elect isn’t necessarily committed to aggressively raising duties. That stance makes him more moderate than others whose names were floated for the treasury role,” the report said.

Bessent has advised Trump to formulate a “3-3-3” policy, which includes slashing the budget deficit to 3% of GDP by 2028, pushing GDP growth to 3% through deregulation and extracting an extra 3 million barrels of oil each day, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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Bessent has also supported Trump’s embrace of the crypto industry and is expected to help the president-elect realise his goal of establishing the US as the “crypto capital of the planet”.

Diageo Claims Diddy Gave The Company An Ultimatum To Give Him $100M Or He Would ‘Publicly Accuse’ Them Of Racism - AfroTech

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 09:15:55 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from AfroTech.

As AFROTECH previously reported, Combs sued Diageo as he believed the company was not providing DeLeón the same thought and care as its other tequila brands, including George Clooney’s Casamigos, which Diageo purchased for $1 billion in 2017.

He continued, “So there was no plan for us to be successful. It was no equal treatment. The other brands, they had agave planted, they had no agave planted for me.”

According to court documents shared with AFROTECH, Diageo suggests that they have provided substantial support for DeLeón, while Diddy has significantly failed to uphold his end of the joint venture (JV).

“Diageo has disproportionately supported and grown the DeLeón brand despite the Combs Parties’ repeated failures to live up to their own commitments and their repudiation of their bargained–for role as true equity partners,” court papers read. “That is why CWS will not prevail on the sole breach of contract claim brought here: it is contrary to every fact about the parties’ actual performance of their contractual obligations.”

Diageo also cites Diddy’s lack of equity in the partnership as a result of his failures “to take on any of the risks, burdens, and responsibilities that come with being a true equity owner and partner.”

It was expected that Combs would provide marketing, advertising, and promotional services.

Diageo also addressed Combs accusation of racial discrimination. He had mentioned that the liquor company wanted to box him in the “colored section” and only had plans to distribute his products in Black neighborhoods.

Diageo states the allegations are untrue and has countered his claims. The company claims the mogul “asked to be paid millions of dollars more under threat of publicly accusing Diageo of racism” and once demanded $100 million in the wake of COVID-19.

“In May 2021, following Diageo’s public commitment of $100 million to help with COVID recovery for the hospitality sector and underprivileged communities, Mr. Combs demanded that Diageo pay him $100 million and threatened then to ‘reach out to every news outlet’ to ‘burn the house down’ and cause maximum damage to Diageo and the DeLeón brand, by making public accusations of racism if Diageo refused to write the check,” an excerpt from the court filing read.

Furthermore, the company does acknowledge the disruption of DeLeón supply and states it was a result of the effects of the pandemic.

“Following the July 2020 reset, Mr. Combs and CWS nonetheless periodically accused Diageo of racism, citing supply disruption issues and occasional ‘stock-outs’ of DeLeón products as evidence of supposedly discriminatory treatment,” the company stated. “These disingenuous accusations ignored the incontrovertible fact that the COVID pandemic was impacting every part of the supply chain; indeed, the pandemic negatively affected supply for all of Diageo’s tequilas, as well as for its other brands and products.”

In response, Diddy’s attorney, John C. Hueston, shared the following statement with AFROTECH: “Diageo claims its executives were available to hear all of Mr. Combs concerns about race and diversity issues. The sad truth is that they never truly listened to what Mr. Combs was saying and brushed them off as threats and demands for money. If they had actually taken the time to comprehend his concerns, and lived up to the agreements they signed, we wouldn’t be in court today.”

The Hill

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 10:33:00 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from The Hill News.

Former FBI Special Agent Daniel Brunner said if President-elect Trump chooses loyalist and former Trump administration aide Kash Patel to lead the FBI, it would do “massive damage” to the agency.

“Putting someone like Kash Patel in the position of director of the FBI is, I believe, extremely, extremely dangerous because … his resume isn’t traditional,” Brunner said Sunday on CNN.

Brunner later added that Patel “has no experience leading an organization, no less a Cub Scout pack.”

Reports have surfaced that Trump is eyeing Patel for the position and may fire current FBI Director Christopher Wray after the president-elect takes power.

Patel, who was the chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, has defended Trump and testified on behalf of the president-elect against states that were considering taking him off the ballot due to Jan. 6.

Patel works as an adviser to Trump for national security issues and as a board member for Trump’s media company.

In the interview Sunday, Brunner noted that Patel “clearly stated” he wants to seek revenge on those who investigated Trump and his allies.

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“He will conduct a massive amount of damage to the interior of the FBI,” he said.

Brunner noted there will be hundreds of employees who are “unjustly fired.” Patel’s potential appointment would mean he’s in charge of “tens of thousands” of employees, including special agents, analysts and “everyone that is enforcing the law” federally.

“So, I think he’ll be very, very dangerous,” Brunner added.

The Hill has reached out to the Trump transition team for comment.

Counterintelligence expert Kash Patel, close to Trump under consideration to head FBI - Yes Punjab News

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:01:09 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Yes Punjab News.

New York, Nov 17 2024-

Counterintelligence expert Kash Patel, who is close to US President-Elect Donald Trump, is reportedly under consideration for appointment to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after having been passed over for the leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

If he gets the job, he will likely be the highest-ranking Indian American in the administration even though it is not a Cabinet post and no names from the community have emerged as of Saturday for the remaining Cabinet-level jobs.

Media reports say that several Trump loyalists are pushing the appointment of Patel, who has called for “drastic measures” to reshape the FBI.

Patel had close ties with Trump who considered him one of his policy specialists, and they both share the view that Trump had won the 2020 election but was unlawfully deprived of the presidency and that there should be retribution for those they consider responsible.

During his campaign, Trump endorsed Patel’s proposals to reshape government in his book, ‘Government of Gangsters’, a title that reflects both their views that a cabal of “Deep State” operatives was running the country behind the scenes.

Patel had served as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism (CT) at the National Security Council (NSC), before becoming the chief of staff to the then Acting Secretary of Defence Christopher Miller, his final job in the first Trump administration.

His appointment to head the FBI, the powerful domestic intelligence service, is by no means certain as there are others in the running and opposition to him from the more establishment types in the Republican party and government.

Nearing the end of his first term, Trump had sought to appoint Patel as the deputy director of the CIA, but was foiled by opposition from the then-head, Gina Haspel.

The then-Attorney General William Barr also shot down a proposal to appoint him as the Deputy Director of the FBI.

Christopher Wray, who Trump appointed to a ten-year term as the FBI Director in 2017 and who was retained by President Joe Biden, will have to be fired or voluntarily resign for Trump to nominate a new head.

The job required confirmation by the Senate.

Patel started off as a public defender – the government-paid lawyer for poor defendants – and made his jump to the prosecution side as a trial attorney for the Justice Department’s National Security Division which handles terrorism-related cases, and as the liaison to the military’s Joint Special Operations Command.

According to a Defence Department biography, Patel worked with the command “to conduct collaborative global targeting operations against high-value terrorism targets” and oversaw the elimination of Islamic State terror group’s and al-Qaeda’s leaders.

That helped him build his expertise on terrorism and led to his next career move as the national security advisor to the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

His work there to unravel the claims of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump, and on the FBI’s questionable wiretaps of Trump’s campaign staff drew the attention of the White House and Trump’s allies.

He joined the White House as the Senior Director for Counterterrorism in the National Security Council with also the rank of Deputy Special Assistant to the President.

Trump expanded it, placing Patel among his “top Ukraine policy specialists.”

Politico reported that according to former White House sources Patel had direct access to Trump, to the chagrin of other officials.

He rapidly rose to become a principal deputy to Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, with his next stop at the Defence Department.

Patel, who uses an abbreviated version of his first name Kashyap, is the son of Gujaratis who came to the US from East Africa, and in his book, he speaks of a deep connection to India.

Patel’s view of the government establishment, like Trump’s, is coloured deeply by distrust and suspicions that it has its own agenda and is loyal to external forces.

He was a firm believer that Trump had won the 2020 election and supported Trump’s calls for retribution.

He said in a podcast interview, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media” responsible for what he asserted was rigging the election.

About the FBI, he wrote in his book that it “has become so thoroughly compromised that it will remain a threat to the people unless drastic measures are taken.” (Agency)

Bombshell House Committee Report on DEI, The FBI, and National Security

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 05:08:44 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

Donald Trump Has 'Obligations' to Those Who Brought Him to Power—Putin Ally

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 06:38:53 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

A Vladimir Putin aide has warned Donald Trump that he is "obliged" to fulfill promises he made during his presidential campaign to bring peace to Ukraine.

The President-elect said repeatedly during his campaign to secure his return to the White House that he would put a stop to the more than two and a half years of war in Ukraine "within 24 hours."

And Nikolai Patrushev, part of the Russian president's inner circle and former Secretary of the Security Council, told the Russian newspaper Kommersant that Trump was duty-bound to act on his words.

Patrushev said: "To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.

"During the preelection period, he made many statements to attract voters to his side, who ultimately voted against the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current U.S. presidential administration.

"But the election campaign is over, and in January 2025, it will be time for the specific actions of the elected president. It is known that election promises in the United States can often diverge from subsequent actions."

Newsweek has contacted Trump's team for comment.

Patrushev was answering a question about whether the new U.S. administration amounted to "positive changes from Russia's point of view."

He went on to say that Putin gave a speech, at the Valdai Forum, an international conference held in Russia, last Thursday, which "sent a kind of greeting to Washington when there is a shift change there."

Patrushev also said that Putin called Trump "a man" after seeing his response to the assassination attempt on him in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. This "coming from Putin is high praise," Patrushev added.

But he went on to add that relations between Russia and the Western world could also go in the opposite direction, if the U.S. and the U.K. "consider sabotage on Nord Stream as one of many methods of advancing their economic interests," for example.

Patrushev said the U.S. and the U.K. were behind the September 2022 attacks on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, which are still shrouded in mystery—and were planning others.

The U.S. Department of State has denied these accusations, telling Newsweek they are "completely and utterly false."

A spokesperson also said they would not speculate about how the next administration will deal with the war in Ukraine.

Similarly, the U.K. Foreign Office said it "condemns acts of sabotage on critical national infrastructure and takes the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines seriously."

A spokesperson added: "It would be wrong to speculate on any policy decisions that the incoming administration of President-elect Trump may make. We have welcomed sustained bipartisan US support for Ukraine, which has been absolutely key in the international effort."

A Swedish investigation found evidence of sabotage on the pipelines between Russia and Germany. Moscow had initially accused the U.S. but probes by Sweden and Denmark were closed in February 2024 without identifying those responsible, although a German investigation is ongoing.

German authorities had reportedly issued a European arrest warrant in June for a Ukrainian national suspected of sabotaging the pipeline along with two others, using a yacht called Andromeda.

But Patrushev believes that the Ukrainian Navy has "neither the equipment nor the trained specialists to carry out a deep-sea terrorist attack" and said that "only special forces units of NATO countries could carry out sabotage of this scale."

He said that in the future, new infrastructure, including marine fiber-optic cables that provide connectivity around the world, could come under attack." The move would have the goal of sowing "chaos" in the global energy market, "including by destabilizing maritime transportation."

Patrushev is considered one of the key drivers of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and served as secretary of Russia's Security Council before being moved to the position of Putin aide. He is also chairman of Russia's maritime board.

Update 11/13/24, 11:20 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from the U.S. State Department and the U.K. Foreign Office.

Opinion | Why Trump Wants Hegseth at Defense

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 05:46:12 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

He seems to want a culture warrior to take on the military brass. There are bigger security issues.

Fundamentals of open-source intelligence for journalists

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 16:21:24 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) – the gathering and analysis of publicly available information found on social media, and in databases and government records – can be invaluable in situations when information is sparse, controlled or censored. Journalists today leverage OSINT to expose corruption, investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity, and hold governments and other powerful actors to account.

The investigative journalism group Bellingcat has pioneered the use of OSINT in its cutting-edge reporting over the years. The outlet’s journalists have used OSINT to uncover Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of Malaysian Flight MH17 over Ukraine, provide critical evidence of the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons against civilians, and revealed the massacre of civilians by Cameroonian soldiers in 2020, among other investigations.

“We've uncovered and verified lots of potential war crimes, [...] spy networks, state-backed assassination teams, the movements and activities of drug cartel leaders, [...] and sanctions breaches by the likes of Russia, Iran and many, many more,” said Bellingcat’s lead editor, Eoghan Macguire, during a recent IJNet Crisis Reporting Forum session.

Macguire outlined how Bellingcat has used OSINT to support its investigations across Africa, and he provided key tools and resources for journalists interested in using OSINT in their own investigative reporting.

Using OSINT to identify war crimes

In his presentation, Macguire detailed how his team investigated alleged war crimes in Ethiopia's Tigray region during the Tigray war, which lasted from November 2020 until November 2022. During what was a civil war, the Ethiopian government and its allies fought against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

Bellingcat reporters began their investigation in March 2021 when graphic videos purportedly depicting the execution of civilians by Ethiopian soldiers surfaced on social media. “Even though these were tough videos to watch, they contained clues that allowed us to verify crucial details,” said Macguire.

Bellingcat investigators analyzed the shadows cast in the footage to deduce the time of day the videos were filmed, and the team used PeakVisor, an app originally designed for mountaineers, to determine the location where the videos were filmed.

An alternative to Google Maps, which offers only limited detail in rural areas, explained Macguire, PeakVisor provided valuable topographic information that Bellingcat’s journalists could identify in the videos, such as ridges and plateaus. They then compared these features against satellite imagery from Google Earth to identify the location of the massacre: a village known as Mahbere Dego in the Tigray region.

To identify the perpetrators of the massacre, Bellingcat examined the language spoken in the videos and the uniforms being worn. “Using independent translators, we established that the soldiers were speaking Amharic, indicating they were not from the Tigray region,” Macguire said. This led to the conclusion that they were likely members of the Ethiopian military.

Ultimately, in collaboration with Newsy and BBC Africa Eye, Bellingcat reported that the executions were carried out by Ethiopian forces. "It was important information to put out," MacGuire stressed, noting that other major news organizations including CNN later corroborated their results using similar methods.

Tools of the trade

Crucially, many of the tools employed in the investigation, including Google Earth, Natural Earth, and PeakVisor, were free. “You don’t have to be a tech wizard or spend lots of money to conduct open-source investigations,” Macguire noted. “With simple online tools, we were able to do something really powerful.”

In another example, Bellingcat utilized open-source software to track and document the movement of ships to shed light on illicit grain trade originating from the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. The investigation highlighted how one ship, the Zafar, engaged in ship-to-ship transfers of grain at sea, obscuring the origins of the sanctioned grain, and later integrated the grain into the global market.

Using satellite imagery collected by Planet Labs and ship tracking data from Lloyd's List Intelligence, Bellingcat reconstructed the journey of the Zafar from Crimea, where it was observed loading grain into silos with its Automatic Identification System (AIS) — a system that is required to be turned on to identify a vessel — turned off. The ship later activated its AIS en route to Yemen, where it transitioned through a U.N. inspection point in Djibouti without being flagged as evading sanctions.

“Satellite imagery provided a different story from what conventional ship tracking revealed,” said Macguire. The investigation raised critical questions about the efficacy of sanctions and U.N. inspections, and ignited concerns about lack of oversight by U.N. officials of sanction-evading vessels.

The future of OSINT

The potential of open-source data extends beyond journalism; it has implications in legal settings, too, including being used as evidence in international courts.

As the field matures, however, it faces unique challenges — developments in social media, AI, and disinformation, to name a few. “Social media platforms, once goldmines for information, have become more difficult to navigate,” Macguire observed. He highlighted, in particular, recent changes to platforms like X, which once offered a wealth of information as users regularly posted on the platform, but has seen its use decline after being acquired by Elon Musk.

Emerging technologies like AI, meanwhile, present both opportunities and threats. Although tools developed to analyze large amounts of data — for example, satellite image datasets — can enhance investigative capabilities, AI’s ability to generate deceptive content also poses challenges. “As AI improves, distinguishing between authentic and fabricated images may become increasingly complex,” Macguire warned.

Bellingcat encourages journalists and researchers to collaborate when utilizing OSINT data, sharing their findings and methodologies. As the outlet continues to refine its techniques and adapt to a shifting media landscape, it remains committed to transparency. “The results you can get [from OSINT] can be really, really important,” Macguire said.

OSINT resources

Macguire offered several tools and resources for journalists interested in OSINT. Here are a few:

Open-source community

Bellingcat’s Discord allows members to engage, learn and collaborate with fellow OSINT investigators. Beginners and experts alike are welcome.

How a Trump presidency could lead to a purge at the Pentagon

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 15:56:30 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

Summary

During campaign, Trump vowed to purge military of 'woke' generals
Former generals and defense secretaries are among Trump's fiercest critics
Trump will prioritize loyalty during his second term, U.S. officials say

WASHINGTON, Nov 10 (Reuters) - During his campaign for re-election, Donald Trump vowed to purge the military of so-called "woke" generals. Now that he is president-elect, the question in the halls of the Pentagon is whether he would go much further.

Trump is expected to have a far darker view of his military leaders in his second term, after facing Pentagon resistance over everything from his skepticism toward NATO to his readiness to deploy troops to quell protests on U.S. streets.

Trump's former U.S. generals and defense secretaries are among his fiercest critics, some branding him a fascist and declaring him unfit for office. Angered, Trump has suggested that his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, could be executed for treason.

Current and former U.S. officials say Trump will prioritize loyalty in his second term and root out military officers and career civil servants he perceives to be disloyal.

"He will destroy the Department of Defense, frankly. He will go in and he will dismiss generals who stand up for the Constitution," said Jack Reed, the Democrat who leads the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Culture war issues could be one trigger for firings. Trump was asked by Fox News in June whether he would fire generals described as "woke," a term for those focused on racial and social justice but which is used by conservatives to disparage progressive policies.

"I would fire them. You can't have (a) woke military," Trump said.

Some current and former officials fear Trump's team could target the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, a widely respected former fighter pilot and military commander who steers clear of politics.

The four-star general, who is Black, issued a video message about discrimination in the ranks in the days after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, and has been a voice in favor of diversity in the U.S. military.

Asked for comment, Brown's spokesperson, Navy Captain Jereal Dorsey, said: "The chairman along with all of the service members in our armed forces remain focused on the security and defense of our nation and will continue to do so, ensuring a smooth transition to the new administration of President-elect Trump."

Trump's vice president-elect, J.D. Vance, voted as a senator last year against confirming Brown to become the top U.S. military officer, and has been a critic of perceived resistance to Trump's orders within the Pentagon.

"If the people in your own government aren't obeying you, you have got to get rid of them and replace them with people who are responsive to what the president's trying to do," Vance said in an interview with Tucker Carlson before the election.

During the campaign, Trump pledged to restore the name of a Confederate general to a major U.S. military base, reversing a change made after Floyd's killing.

Trump's strongest anti-woke messaging during the campaign took aim at transgender troops. Trump has previously banned transgender service members and posted a

campaign ad, opens new tab

on X portraying them as weak, with the vow that "WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!"

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

'LAWFUL ORDERS'

Trump has suggested the U.S. military could play an important role in many of his policy priorities, from tapping National Guard and possibly active-duty troops to help carry out a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants to even deploying them to address domestic unrest.

Such proposals alarm military experts, who say deploying the military on American streets could not only violate laws but turn much of the American population against the still widely respected U.S. armed forces.

In a message to the forces after Trump's election win, outgoing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged the results of the election and stressed the military would obey "all lawful orders" from its civilian leaders.

But some experts caution that Trump has wide latitude to interpret the law and U.S. troops cannot disobey legal orders they consider to be morally wrong.

"There is a widespread public misperception that the military can choose not to obey immoral orders. And that's actually not true," said Kori Schake of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Schake warned that a second Trump term could see high-level firings as he pushes ahead with controversial policies.

"I think there will be an enormous chaos premium in a second Trump term, both because of the policies he will attempt to enact and the people he will put in place to enact them in terms of appointments," she said.

One U.S. military official downplayed such concerns, saying on condition of anonymity that creating chaos within the U.S. military's chain of command would create political backlash and be unnecessary for Trump to accomplish his goals.

"What these guys will find out is that military officers are generally focused on warfighting and not politics," the military official said.

"I feel they'll be satisfied of that - or at least they should be."

HOLLOW OUT CIVILIAN RANKS?

Career civil servants at the Pentagon could be subjected to loyalty tests, current and former officials say. Trump allies have publicly embraced using executive orders and rule changes to replace thousands of civil servants with conservative allies.

A senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters there was increasing concern within the Pentagon that Trump would purge career civilian employees from the department.

"I'm deeply concerned about their ranks," the official said, adding that several colleagues had expressed concern about the future of their jobs.

Career civil servants are among the nearly 950,000 non-uniformed employees who work within the U.S. military and in many cases have years of specialized experience.

Trump vowed during the campaign to give himself the power to gut the federal workforce across the government.

During his first administration, some of Trump's controversial suggestions to advisers, such as potentially firing missiles into Mexico to destroy drug labs, never became policy in part because of pushback from officials at the Pentagon.

"This will be 2016 on steroids and the fear is that he will hollow out the ranks and expertise in a way that will do irreparable damage to the Pentagon," the official said.

Get weekly news and analysis on the U.S. elections and how it matters to the world with the newsletter On the Campaign Trail. Sign up here.

Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Don Durfee and Daniel Wallis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

The 'Trumpian revolution': what will Trump do (and how) once back in power

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 09:58:40 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from News.

Updated

The election winner has five objectives: abandon Ukraine, lower taxes for the wealthy, fill the Administration with his loyalists, increase tariffs, and deport 11.5 million migrants

One of the differences between Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and the subsequent ones, especially this one that has just ended, is the complete disappearance of the president-elect's worker-oriented rhetoric. In 2016, he said he would end the carried interest that allows billionaires in private equity funds to pay only a 20% tax rate on their financial investments, claimed that hedge fund managers "are like committing murders and getting away with it" (on August 23, 2015), and to justify his attacks on Barack Obama, he multiplied the U.S. unemployment rate by 10, from 4% to 40%.

These redistributive plans were nothing but electoral rhetoric from a candidate who stated that "we cannot afford" to raise the federal minimum wage, which has been frozen since 2009. In fact, Trump appointed those same financiers he abhorred to his cabinet, including "the king of foreclosures" (Steve Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary) and "the king of bankruptcies" (Wilbur Ross, Commerce Secretary).

In this 2024 campaign, Trump's program has been more elusive. His objectives are five: isolationism, which includes abandoning Ukraine; tax cuts for higher incomes and companies; taking over the Public Administration by his loyalists; tariffs; and deportation of 11.5 million undocumented immigrants.

The first three parts of that triad are more likely to be carried out, the fourth is in an intermediate situation, and the fifth presents more difficulties.

Trump can reach an agreement with Russia, which would impose on Ukraine, for that country to cede Crimea and all the territories that Putin's forces have occupied in the wars of 2015 and the one that began in 2022. Certainly, with a Republican Senate, it seems almost impossible for the U.S. to approve more military aid to Kiev, so Trump and Putin will have an excellent bargaining chip over Ukraine. But it would be enough for Putin and Trump to sign it for it to take effect. In addition, Trump can easily veto Ukraine's entry into NATO, and exert enough pressure on the EU so that it, showing its traditional ability to yield, prolongs the accession negotiations of Kiev.

Such an agreement would not be ratified by the Senate, as Republicans are far from having the 60 votes needed for approval in that chamber of 100 seats. But that is not a problem in itself. Also, there is an important issue: Trump does not like having to negotiate with Congress. He prefers to operate through executive orders, which reinforce his image of authority, even though they can be overturned by his successors.

Tax cuts may be a done deal. Senate Republicans would approve them, perhaps only for a limited period. And even if Democrats were to gain control of the House of Representatives, their majority would be so slim that Trump would have no trouble convincing them to approve, if not all of his tax plans, at least the majority of them.

This would mean extending the income tax cuts approved in Trump's first term in 2017, which were set to expire in 2025. It is a tax cut that benefits higher incomes, further contributing to increasing the U.S. public deficit, which reached 7% of GDP this year. As for the Corporate Tax, the president-elect wants to lower it to 15% from the current 21%, where he himself set it after reducing it from a maximum rate of 39% in 2017 to 15%. That is the reason for the stock market rise this Wednesday, as the money that companies save on federal taxes will go towards dividends and share buybacks, increasing their value. Additionally, it will also increase the deficit.

To control the Public Administration, Trump only needs to issue a similar order to the one he launched in October 2020 - too late, as he lost the elections the following month - with the so-called Schedule F, which created a new category of officials who transitioned from technical roles to political positions of trust. This rule would increase the current number of political positions in the federal government from 4,000 to 30,000 and would be a decisive step in the politicization of the Administration following a model akin to Erdogan or Orban.

The issue of tariffs is more complicated. To raise them, as Trump proposes (20% with the entire planet Earth and 70% with China and 76% with Mexico), he needs Congress's favorable vote. Such a steep increase is unlikely to be approved. However, he can use accusations of illegal trade practices or national security defense to raise tariffs in specific areas, from Spanish table olives to Chinese microprocessors, as he did in his first term.

Finally, there is the deportation of immigrants. Once again, it seems unlikely that Congress will approve additional funding, among other reasons because it would devastate the U.S. economy. But Trump can redirect funds from other Defense allocations, claiming that the country is being invaded. In any case, he cannot deport 11.5 million undocumented individuals simply because there would be no one to work in construction, clean floors, pick fruit, or cook in restaurants, including, according to many reports, those at his own Bedminster golf club near New York.

The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 17:09:43 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from The New Yorker.

The Intelligence Community Campus-Bethesda, a vast office complex covered in vertical panels of maroon siding and mirrored glass, sits on a cliff overlooking the Potomac, surrounded by a forty-acre lawn and a tall wrought-iron fence. Roughly three thousand employees of various United States spy agencies work there. About two dozen of them are assigned to the Foreign Malign Influence Center—the command hub of the battle to protect the Presidential election from manipulation by foreign powers. The center, which opened in 2022, is responsible for deciphering, and defeating, surreptitious efforts to rig or tilt the American vote. The October before an election is the busy season.

Jessica Brandt, a forty-year-old newcomer to the intelligence world, is the center’s first director. Before her appointment, last year, she’d spent her career writing research papers at Washington think tanks, most recently on “digital authoritarianism”—the way dictators use technology to control or manipulate people, at home and abroad. At a thirty-seat conference table in the center, we talked about her move from theory to practice. Now that Brandt has access to classified intelligence, she knows as much as anyone about how foreign powers are trying to tamper with American elections. But she has also experienced firsthand how the polarization of U.S. politics is making it harder to protect the fairness and credibility of the vote. These days, a warning from the U.S. intelligence agencies is no longer accepted at face value. It’s immediately spun for partisan advantage.

Intelligence officials use the term “election interference” to describe attacks on the actual mechanics of vote counting. This is now considered an extremely slight risk. The hodgepodge of state voting systems makes a mass hacking impossible, and recent security upgrades have insured the preservation of paper backups for almost every ballot. The more realistic danger is what officials call “malign foreign influence”: hacks and leaks, bots and trolls, hidden payments and targeted attack ads. Adversaries can use these underhanded tactics to twist public opinion, discredit the vote, and sway its outcome. The center’s job is to mitigate the effects of such machinations, and one of its main tools is forewarning voters through public bulletins.

Yet ever since July 28, 2016, when the director of the C.I.A. began briefing President Barack Obama on the Kremlin’s plot to help elect Donald Trump, it has been agonizingly clear that government alarms about hidden meddling by foreign hands might themselves be perceived as tainting the electoral process. Obama decided not to alert the public before Election Day about the full extent of the Russian conspiracy to assist Trump, fearing that such a disclosure would look like a thumb on the scale in favor of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and potentially undermine her widely expected victory.

That, it turned out, was the wrong worry. When the Kremlin brazenly pulled off another hack-and-leak operation the next year, in Europe, France’s response provided an instructive contrast. The Russians had stolen gigabytes of e-mails and other data from the Presidential campaign of Emmanuel Macron. But, before the day of the vote, credibly nonpartisan government agencies informed citizens of a foreign cyberattack; an electoral commission instructed news organizations not to report on the leaked material. David Salvo, the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, at the German Marshall Fund, told me that the French government’s action, and the public’s trusting response, was “the best-case scenario.”

The U.S. intelligence agencies, though, waited until two months after Trump won the 2016 election to lay out the sweeping scale of the Russian operation. Instead of averting a partisan battle, the delay ignited one. Democrats argued that the Kremlin’s support rendered Trump an illegitimate leader; Trump and his allies claimed that the intelligence agencies were part of a deep-state conspiracy against him. Seven years later, the fight continues.

Now another U.S. Presidential election may hinge on tens of thousands of votes across a handful of states. Almost any illicit advantage could arguably decide the outcome (and cast doubt on the results), making the race a prime opportunity for foreign meddling. Indeed, intelligence officials and tech-company analysts say that more foreign spies than ever are getting into the game. Clint Watts, the manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, told me that the Kremlin’s success in 2016 “convinced almost every authoritarian nation that they needed to jump into this.” And the biggest players, Russia and Iran, are working even harder at election influence than they did in 2016 or 2020. Yet the government’s warnings about foreign schemes are frequently undercut by the efforts of both Democrats and Republicans to weaponize such intelligence. In 2024, Democrats have railed about Vladimir Putin “rooting for” Trump, while Republicans have insisted that Biden-appointed intelligence officials are underplaying Iran’s schemes to defeat the former President—including by plotting his assassination. Representative Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee—and who recently put out a statement under the headline “Is the Biden-Harris Administration Colluding with Iran?”—told me, “You don’t hear a lot from the Administration about the malign influence of Iran in hacking the Trump campaign and attempting to kill Donald Trump.” According to people involved in a recent classified briefing on election security, the two sides of the House Intelligence Committee got into a shouting match over the relative scale of the threats.

Brandt told me wearily that she’d heard “the critiques,” and insisted that the center nevertheless stayed focussed on building “the most accurate threat picture we can.” But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an expert on public opinion at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a book documenting the effects of the Kremlin’s influence operation in 2016, told me that, with so much partisan noise threatening to drown out the center’s warnings, “our system is still defective.”

A parliamentary election in Slovakia last September marked the advent of a new era in election chicanery. A pro-Russia faction promising to end support for Ukraine was locked in a tight race against a Western-friendly party, Progressive Slovakia. Three days before the vote, an anonymous Instagram account uploaded a recording of the voice of Progressive Slovakia’s leader, Michal Šimečka, describing a “secret plan” to curb alcoholism: raising the price of beer “by seventy per cent to a hundred per cent.” As that recording raced across Slovakian social media, a second one appeared to catch Šimečka conspiring with one of the country’s best-known investigative journalists, Monika Tódová. “Again, will someone walk in and insert the ballots directly?” Tódová’s voice asked.

Šimečka: “This has been taken care of already.”

Tódová: “All right, then. What about me? Is it true that ‘by coincidence’ I will win some kind of valuable prize?”

Šimečka and Tódová called the recordings fraudulent. But while tech-company fact checkers were struggling to determine their authenticity, the Slovakian media entered a legally required forty-eight-hour news blackout before the vote. By the time the recordings were debunked as A.I.-generated deepfakes, the pro-Russia party had won a narrow victory.

The impact of the deepfakes is difficult to quantify. Their exposure did not stop an ally of the pro-Russia party from winning the Presidency the following year. Yet the Slovakian election put Washington on guard that A.I. could blur the boundaries of political reality as never before. This year, U.S. intelligence agencies said that China was probably behind videos of A.I.-generated Taiwanese newscasters reading aloud from a made-up book containing made-up scandals about Taiwan’s President. Brandt, of the Foreign Malign Influence Center, told me that deepfakes “can come in thirty-six thousand flavors,” so teams of forensics experts from throughout the government had conducted a “summer of exercises,” rehearsing plans to quickly evaluate the authenticity and origin of inflammatory material that might surface in the final days of an American Presidential campaign.

In a one-page “election security update” issued in September, the intelligence agencies declared that various foreign adversaries had already posted numerous deepfakes on the Internet. Russia had deployed the most, spreading “conspiratorial narratives” and amplifying “divisive U.S. issues such as immigration” in order to help Trump and hurt the Democrats. Iran had used A.I. “to help generate social media posts and write inauthentic news articles” about everything from the Presidential race to the Israel-Palestine conflict. China was “using A.I. in broader influence operations” but “not for any specific operations targeting U.S. election outcomes.”

Intelligence officials said that, so far, foreign adversaries’ A.I. trickery was “a malign influence accelerant” but not “revolutionary,” in part because those countries had not yet caught up with Silicon Valley in their use of the technology. The report noted that one of Russia’s most widely circulated fakes—a video of a woman in a wheelchair claiming that Kamala Harris had disabled her in a hit-and-run accident—had actually been staged the old-fashioned way, with real actors.

Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me, “A.I. is the dog that hasn’t barked—yet.” Warner, whose committee compiled a thirteen-hundred-page report on the Russian intervention in the 2016 election, believes that the U.S. is less prepared than ever to fend off foreign influence schemes. Major social-media companies, he told me, have slackened their crackdowns on misinformation—partly because of lawsuits claiming that the platforms’ coöperation with the government threatens free speech. Then, there’s the matter of who is in charge: Elon Musk has taken over Twitter (now X), and TikTok is owned by the Chinese. Moreover, Warner told me, political polarization has made voters increasingly credulous about fake claims that reinforce their instincts—whether the subject is a stolen election or the Vance family couch.

Voters have a limited number of ways to learn about the illicit attempts of foreign powers to manipulate them. One way is for private companies—Microsoft is currently the most active—to publish research about suspicious social-media content or cybercrimes that appear to be state-sponsored. Brandt described such civilian-identified plots as “caught in the wild.” But private companies can never speak with the authority of the government, and, without subpoenas or spies, they also lack the same breadth of information. Watts, a former F.B.I. special agent, told me that the government is “the ultimate source of confirmation on attribution and actors.” A deepfake that Microsoft spots “may be the tip of the iceberg,” he continued, and U.S. intelligence officials “can understand it at a much deeper level.” Then, there is what he called “a chicken-and-egg problem” facing private companies. The government asks them to shut their platforms to malicious foreign trolls, but the companies “are waiting for the state to tell them who those accounts are.”

Criminal prosecutions are another way that covert foreign plots targeting an election can be exposed. Since the appointment of the special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Kremlin’s gambit in 2016, federal indictments have consistently provided the most detailed, and therefore potent, accounts of such influence operations. This past summer, news reports about a hacking of the e-mail accounts of Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser, evidently prompted prosecutors in Washington, D.C., to file an indictment against three Iranians. They were charged with dozens of hacking attacks during a five-year period, almost all of them against Americans involved in national security or foreign affairs. The U.S. government had been watching these Iranians for at least four years; the indictment cites evidence that, in each of those years, two of the operatives repeatedly visited a Tehran address linked to the crimes. On June 27, 2024, according to the indictment, the Iranians e-mailed two Biden campaign officials a stolen copy of materials that Trump had used to prepare for that night’s Presidential debate. (The Iranians presciently warned that, if Biden lost the debate, the Democrats “will have to replace” him.) There’s no evidence, however, that the recipients read the e-mails; Biden flailed in any case. A subsequent attempt to give journalists stolen vetting materials about Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, also found no takers. The Times reported its editors had concluded that “publication was likely to serve the interests of the attackers.”

Other legal findings, also unsealed in September, described a sweeping Russian operation that was years in the making. An affidavit by an F.B.I. investigator quoted notes from meetings held at the Kremlin by a top aide to Putin as early as April, 2022. The aide had hired three Russian contractors to conduct a covert online propaganda campaign to weaken global support for Ukraine’s attempt to repel Russia’s invasion. In 2023, one of the contractors submitted a more detailed proposal, called the Good Old U.S.A. Project, to sway the 2024 election in America. The proposal asserted that an isolationist view of the Ukraine war had become a “centerpiece” of the Presidential race; Russia must therefore “put a maximum effort to ensure that the Republican point of view (first and foremost the opinion of Trump’s supporters) wins over the U.S. public opinion.” (The names of the parties and candidates were redacted in the filing.) The proposal’s authors saw an opportunity in “the high level of polarization of American society,” which had created an “information situation” that “differs dramatically from that in all other Western countries.”

The Good Old U.S.A. Project envisaged setting up hundreds of fake online accounts, including eighteen seemingly apolitical “sleeper” groups on multiple social-media platforms across six swing states; “at the right moment,” they would “distribute bogus stories disguised as newsworthy events.” (Kremlin documents included in the filing describe Twitter as the most hospitable “mass platform,” although a partially redacted sentence suggests that the Russians liked Trump’s Truth Social even more.) To avoid detection, the Russians planned to disseminate misinformation by inserting comments or replies into authentic message threads; these comments would include links directing users to sites showcasing more elaborate propaganda. The Russians also set out to secretly promote real American influencers who supported “ending the war in Ukraine” and were “ready to get involved in the promotion of the project narratives.”

In March, two of the Russian contractors were sanctioned by the Treasury Department for their role in the operation. In July, U.S. prosecutors, after receiving a tip from another government agency, seized nearly a thousand X accounts allegedly tied to a Russian “bot farm” that used A.I. “to create fictitious social media profiles,” evidently as part of the same scheme. Finally, in September, the government shut down thirty-two Web sites that disguised Kremlin propaganda as content from news organizations such as Fox News and the Washington Post. At the same time, prosecutors charged two Russian spies with conspiring to pay ten million dollars to a group of conservative American influencers. Although the unsealed indictment redacted the names, other details indicated that the Russians worked through a Nashville startup called Tenet Media. According to the indictment, in recent months the Russians had posted nearly nine hundred video clips of their own propaganda directly to Tenet social-media feeds. Until the indictment was unsealed, American viewers had no way of knowing that the Kremlin was behind this.

But U.S. intelligence agencies definitely did, just as they plainly knew about the disguised Web sites. Details from the indictments make clear that federal prosecutors were aware of the underlying schemes for months or longer before informing voters. Of course, educating voters about foreign plots is not the primary responsibility of law enforcement, which moves at its own methodical pace. Subpoenas must be obtained to legally acquire information that other agencies might have learned through spycraft; it takes time to squeeze conspirators to testify against one another, and to lock down conclusive evidence before unsealing charges. Law-enforcement agencies may also want to delay an indictment so that they can arrest suspects before they can flee—although, in the recent election-influence cases, the three Iranians and two Russians indicted were already far out of reach.

Prosecutors also work under their own deadlines. Justice Department policy precludes the agency from taking any public actions in the sixty days before an election which might affect the outcome—including filing indictments that expose a foreign adversary’s backing of a candidate. Prosecutors appear to have kept working on the Russia indictments in secrecy as long as they could. They were unsealed on September 4th, on the eve of the sixty-day deadline. Still, Brandt told me that, whatever the timing constraints, the Justice Department can “go much farther than we can” when releasing information. “That is how you end up making public multiple internal Russian planning documents, which is something the intelligence community could never release.”

For voters, the Russia and Iran indictments also raise questions about what else the government knows. Both filings offer keyhole views of major influence operations that surely were not limited to a few inconsequential hacks and to the staff of a small Tennessee media company. Watts, of Microsoft, told me that the government is cracking down on covert Russian influence operations more aggressively than it did before the 2020 election, when there were no such indictments; prosecutors have gone after a “sizable chunk of the Russian efforts we have noted.” But he said that law enforcement had not yet taken any visible action against two other Russian online networks that Microsoft had spotted meddling in the election. The company calls those two networks Storm-1516 (which pushed the staged video falsely accusing Harris of a hit-and-run) and Storm-1679 (which pushed a viral video showing a fake New York billboard that hyped false claims about Harris).

Representative Jim Himes, of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told me he was “quite certain” that the foreign corruption of Tenet Media was not an isolated incident: “We are going to find out there are other cases where some cutout says, ‘Hey, I’ve got five million dollars for you to promote that Fauci is a Bolshevik,’ or whatever, and the answer is ‘Yeah, give me that five million!’ ”

Hearing directly from the U.S. intelligence agencies is the third way Americans can learn about foreign efforts to manipulate our elections. This election season, the Foreign Malign Influence Center has scheduled periodic “updates” to address the torrent of questions from journalists about such plots. For the spy services, one official told me, this level of public disclosure “is like standing there naked compared to what we have done in the past.” The agencies, always zealous about protecting their sources and methods, prefer to talk as little as possible, and as vaguely as possible. The resulting updates, typically about five hundred words each, are exasperatingly abstract. Speaking as the “intelligence community,” or I.C., an update from early October noted:

A range of foreign actors continue to try to influence U.S. elections as we approach November. These activities include broad efforts aimed at undermining trust in U.S. democratic processes and exacerbating divisions in our society, while also seeking to shape voter preferences toward specific candidates. Our assessments about the activities and goals of Russia, Iran, and China are unchanged from earlier election security updates. On the presidential race, the IC continues to assess that Russia prefers the Former President and Iran prefers the Vice President; China is not seeking to influence the Presidential election.

The center also holds hour-long conference c

Which October surprise actually mattered in this election?

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 14:13:48 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Daily Kos.

We have finally reached Election Day 2024. October alone seems to have lasted roughly 1,000 days. But what was the vaunted “October surprise,” that news event that may have changed the election’s result?

It’s hard to say when the single most outrageous political candidate of the modern era is running for office. Still, let’s look at what the events that most influenced this race.

Trump chickens out of “60 Minutes” interview

After attacking Vice President Kamala Harris and saying she was too afraid and not mentally competent enough to do sit-down interviews, Donald Trump ran faster than a chicken at a fox’s dinner table from a “60 Minutes” interview. Harris did the interview and nailed it. How badly scared was Trump? Almost a month later, he sued CBS for $10 billion, saying the editing of Harris’ interview amounts to “election interference.”

The Madison Square Garden rally

Nothing encapsulated the MAGA movement quite like the bigotry on display at Trump’s Bund-style rally in New York City’s famous Madison Square Garden. At the event, far-right comedian Tony Hinchcliffe hurled racist “jokes” about Blacks and Latinos, at one point referring to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”

The blowback from the event has lasted, insulting an entire block of voters. The hateful display was so beyond the pale that even some Republican racists, like Florida Sen. Rick Scott, distanced themselves from the event.

Trump says a well-known critic of his should face a firing squad

This past Thursday, when former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, a major Trump critic, came up during a Q&A with former Fox New host Tucker Carlson, Trump said, “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her where the rifle’s standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about—you know when the guns are trained on her face.”

This indefensible statement was made worse when Trump surrogates attempted … to defend it. (They did very poorly, to say the least.)

Trump’s “enemy from within” statement

During a mid-October interview, Trump said that the people he considers the “enemy from within” are more dangerous than foreign adversaries in Russia and China, and he would consider deploying federal military forces against them. It was such a frightening statement that Fox News attempted to whitewash during its interview with Harris by trying to pass off a separate clip as the original statement.

Trump wished he had Nazi generals

On Oct. 22, The Atlantic published an article in which sources told a story of Trump admiring Adolf Hitler’s generals, saying, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. … People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” This article, along with one in The New York Times, also featured retired Gen. John Kelly, the longest-serving chief of staff in Trump’s White House, spoke about Trump’s admiration for dictators and correctly said Trump met the definition of a fascist.

Trump reminds everyone he is garbage

This one is multipronged.

First, in an attempt to distract from his racist Madison Square Garden rally, Trump staged a media stunt where he struggled to open the door of a garbage truck before taking questions and pictures while sitting in the passenger seat.

But also, despite the impending election, Trump and the GOP struggled to hide their misogyny. Whether it was the fury with which conservatives responded to the suggestion that a woman might have her own opinions of Trump as president, or Trump telling women he would “protect” them “whether the women like it or not,” Trump and his party could not stop themselves from proving, time and again, how little they think of women and women’s rights.

Maybe there is no one surprise, and maybe with someone like Trump one can never be surprised at how monstrously low he can sink.

If I missed any, please feel free to throw them in the comment thread below!

Joe Biden’s Vengeance: Democrats Descend Into Civil War

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 09:21:22 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from The Daily Beast Latest Articles.

What Trump’s return means for Armenia and the South Caucasus

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 08:05:16 -0500

Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

Donald Trump's return to the White House as the 47th president of the United States comes at a critical time for the South Caucasus region, as Georgia remains highly polarised after the controversial re-election of the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party, and as Armenia and Azerbaijan seek to finalise a historic peace deal.

Trump's victory has raised both hopes and concerns in Yerevan. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was quick to congratulate Trump on his victory, expressing his hope to “work together” on the strategic partnership between the two countries, but many in the region are worried that the transition of power in Washington could significantly decrease US involvement in the ongoing peace process with Azerbaijan.

Pashinyan’s extensive message to Trump, however, was notably positive and optimistic. Pashinyan emphasised the “unprecedented” improvement in the two countries' relations in the past years, hoping that the trend will continue under Trump’s presidency. Pashinyan praised Trump personally, saying that he is confident that Trump’s "rich experience, knowledge and abilities will best serve to ensure the well-being of the American people, promote the interests of the United States, and strengthen the global role of the United States".

The timing of the elections is particularly crucial for Armenia, as Joe Biden's administration has become increasingly involved in the process in the past year. The improvement that Pashinyan mentioned in US-Armenian relations in the “past years” took place during the Biden presidency, with the two countries' relations switching to “strategic partnership” from “strategic dialogue” earlier this year.

Trump’s election campaign did explicitly mention Armenia, as the US-based diaspora were potential voters. His promises regarding Armenia were direct and populistic, pledging to "protect persecuted Christians, work to stop violence and ethnic cleansing, and establish peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan".

US-Armenian community leaders did not support any candidate, unlike previous years, explaining their neutrality by the lack of clarity on the issues regarding Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict from the presidential candidates. The leaders of the nationalist Hay Dat committee, however, remained hopeful that they could possibly advocate for sanctions against Azerbaijan, the release of Armenian prisoners.

In the election, Trump’s opponent Democrat Kamala Harris won 54% of the votes in California, where most Armenian-Americans live, including in Los Angeles, which has over 150,000 Armenian residents.

Trump’s promises for Armenia were seen as empty by many in Yerevan, as the Trump administration was in power during the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, with no particular focus on the region and little to no action during the war that ended with a devastating defeat for Armenia.

Some see Trump’s comeback as a chance for Azerbaijan to minimise Western involvement in the Caucasus and achieve a deal with Armenia with maximum benefits for Azerbaijan. Russia, which has been backing Azerbaijan in recent years, also has warned against a “hasty” peace deal, complaining about the US government’s increased desire to finalise the deal before Biden’s departure.

Trump's return could also complicate Armenia's regional relationships. His potentially more constructive approach toward Moscow might ease some regional tensions, but his harder stance on Iran – one of Armenia's crucial neighbours and economic partners – could create new challenges. Trump's strong pro-Israel position and potential alignment with Azerbaijan in anti-Iranian initiatives might further complicate regional dynamics for Armenia. In the meantime, any potential Russia-US rapprochement would further complicate Armenia’s foreign policy shift towards the West and the European Union.

Michael Novakhov - SharedNewsLinks

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