2.In July of 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan tells Twitter executive Yoel Roth to expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), the inter-agency group that deals with cyber threats.
3.The questionnaire authors seem displeased with Twitter for implying, in a July 20th “DHS/ODNI/FBI/Industry briefing,” that “you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.”
4.One would think that would be good news. The agencies seemed to feel otherwise.
5.Chan underscored this: “There was quite a bit of discussion within the USIC to get clarifications from your company,” he wrote, referring to the United States Intelligence Community.
6.The task force demanded to know how Twitter came to its unpopular conclusion. Oddly, it included a bibliography of public sources - including a Wall Street Journal article - attesting to the prevalence of foreign threats, as if to show Twitter they got it wrong.
7.Roth, receiving the questions, circulated them with other company executives, and complained that he was “frankly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we'd get from a congressional committee than the Bureau.”
8.He added he was not “comfortable with the Bureau (and by extension the IC) demanding written answers.” The idea of the FBI acting as conduit for the Intelligence Community is interesting, given that many agencies are barred from domestic operations.
9.He then sent another note internally, saying the premise of the questions was “flawed,” because “we've been clear that official state propaganda is definitely a thing on Twitter.” Note the italics for emphasis.
10.Roth suggested they “get on the phone with Elvis ASAP and try to straighten this out,” to disabuse the agencies of any notion that state propaganda is not a “thing” on Twitter.
11.This exchange is odd among other things because some of the “bibliography” materials cited by the FITF are sourced to intelligence officials, who in turn cited the public sources.
12.The FBI responded to Friday’s report by saying it “regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.”
13.That may be true, but we haven’t seen that in the documents to date. Instead, we’ve mostly seen requests for moderation involving low-follower accounts belonging to ordinary Americans – and Billy Baldwin.
14.Watch@bariweiss and @ShellenbergerMD for more from the Twitter Files.
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There are obviously multiple levels to the story described in the declassified Durham report, but there's no version of it that isn't damning for the FBI, CIA, and Hillary Clinton.
Even if the foreign intercepts about a "plan" to vilify Trump are incorrect or overstated, they were taken seriously by the intelligence agencies - who went on to conceal their existence while professing to objctively analyze Trump-Russia connections.
"FULLY ALERTED"
Durham explains the FBI “was fully alerted to the possibility that at least some of the information it was receiving about the Trump campaign might have its origin either with the Clinton campaign or its supporters, or... the product of Russian disinformation."
On December 9th, 2016, @BarackObama ordered a new Intelligence Community Assessment to find out: "what happened" that election year?
News outlets within hours leaked the answer: Vladimir Putin "aspired" to help Donald Trump, for whom he had a "clear preference."
The report released today, which was conducted eight years ago and has been locked at Langley ever since, reveals that conclusion was based on just four pieces of evidence:
1. TWITTER FILES EXTRA: Special "Eight Years of Smears" Edition
The Ugly Subtext to the Gabbard, Patel, and Kennedy Confirmation Hearings
2. Last week's hearings involving Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Kash Patel were linked.
The nominees were denounced as proxies for Russia by the same source, exposed as a fraud in the Twitter Files.
3. Senate interrogators from both parties, from Mark Warner to Adam Schiff to James Lankford to Richard Blumenthal, were also involved in those episodes.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, a Barack Obama appointee, conducted an extensive investigation of the issuance of four FISA warrants that required an in-depth review of the Steele dossier: justice.gov/storage/120919…
"CORROBORATED LIMITED INFORMATION... MUCH OF THAT WAS PUBLICLY AVAILABLE."
There is NOT ONE piece of original reporting in the Steele dossier that turned out to be true. The only "confirmed" details were from prior public news reports, and even got some of those wrong...
PEE TAPE: "JUST TALK" OVER "BEERS" AND IN "JEST"
Horowitz noted the sources of Steele's spiciest revelations, like the "pee tape," were tracked down and stunned they'd been taken seriously. They laughed the story off as "just talk" told over "beers" in "jest":
On the new piece about Jeffrey Sachs and “Shock Therapy”:
I see people already suggesting this story is propaganda that paints Putin’s Russia as a victim. That’s not what this account says at all (cont’d)
The victims here are the Russian and American people, not the governments. After the Cold War we had a historic opportunity. Instead of making Russia a quasi-partner like Japan or Germany, we went the other way:
The result was economic disaster in Russia (which Westerners bailed out btw), which thanks to help from U.S. ended up ruled by rapacious oligarchs. Anti-US sentiment exploded during my time there.
When I first started covering policing I was taken aback by the complexity. Post-Broken Windows, big cities essentially gave up on high-end enforcement and used tactics closer to commercial fishing: sweep up everyone on small offenses, throw back some innocents.
The infamous 2015 Mike Bloomberg address to the Aspen Institute confirmed that NY busted young black men on drug offenses with the aim of pre-empting a statistical probability of them committing more serious crimes like murder - Minority Report stuff