“The press hasn’t solved any of this...If the GRU dumped the Biden campaign’s binder of opposition research on Kamala Harris right now, every[one] would race to publish it...[I]f you reset the players and the facts of 2016, I’m willing to bet it plays out exactly the same way.”
Some (not all) coverage of foreign-sourced political information has been disappointing.

Think of this from a CI perspective:

Parse every small detail of what the information actually says and doesn’t say (does it say someone actually met, or that an offer to meet occurred?).
Look for verifiable specifics (can the events be confirmed, or are the allegations unprovable, something known to only one or two people?)

Look for evidence of manipulation — in the information itself, in metadata, on the medium the information was carried or transferred on.
Assess the info’s physical form (is it a full copy of an email or document, or a screenshot? How did you get it? How did the source get it?).

Vet the source's bona fides. What are their motivations and sources? What have they said or done before? Consider you’re being played.
Be wary of otherwise plausible explanations for non-answers: the fewer things that can be answered, the greater the concern.

Don’t rush to tweet — your first tweet will get the most RTs. No subsequent clarification is going to get that shot back.
The pernicious difference between 2016 and 2020 — and why we’re worse off now — is we have Congressmen and a president actively advancing false narratives based on Russian disinformation.

Call that out for what it is — that shouldn’t be hard, our USIC is already saying it.

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More from @petestrzok

28 Sep
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

This is a roadmap of some of the ways Trump is compromised. In the hands of a hostile intel service, these millions of dollars represent coercive leverage over @realDonaldTrump as a result of undisclosed foreign financial deals while he was President.
“[I]n his first two years in the White House, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million…some came from licensing deals in countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders or thorny geopolitics…$3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey.”
“[T]he most profitable Miss Universe during Mr. Trump’s time as co-owner…generated…$2.3 million — made possible, at least in part, by the Agalarov family, who would later help set up the infamous 2016 meeting between Trump campaign officials seeking “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton…”
Read 5 tweets
19 Aug
1/ Today’s bipartisan SSCI report - and each Republican Senator signatory - conclusively debunk Barr’s mendacious assertions that the FBI’s investigations were based on “a very thin, slender reed,” which “should have been obvious to anyone, that there was nothing there.”
2/ These senators describe at enormous length the counterintelligence nightmare we at the FBI confronted in the @realDonaldTrump campaign in 2016. In so doing, they validate the premise.
3/ While criticizing some of the FBI’s investigation, the report overwhelmingly verifies on a bipartisan basis that this was no witch hunt; it was not, as Barr has called it, “political spying”; and it was in no sense a hoax.
Read 8 tweets

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