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Michael Weiss

@michaeldweiss

Sep 20

Steve Witkoff's Public Financial Disclosure form, which he filed late, is unsigned by any ethics official. It also falsely states Witkoff held no federal position before June of this year. He did not divest from relevant assets before he started his diplomatic job, as he was supposed to. And note the company at the heart of the big @nytimes investigation into his questionable business dealings with the Emiratis concerning World Liberty Financial, "a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps." On page 23 of Witkoff's disclosure, World Liberty Financial is given with no value listed. nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/…

Why is this document unsigned or certified by any government ethics official? Does this mean that no one has actually conducted the conflict of interest assessment and associated divestitures normally required before an official can start the job?

Why does it only cover the period from 6/30 through now? Where is the disclosure for January through the end of June?

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Michael Weiss

@michaeldweiss

Aug 24

Elbridge Colby has hindered Ukraine's ability to defend itself at least four times since he joined the Pentagon. The most recent example: wsj.com/politics/natio…

Earlier this month: edition.cnn.com/2025/08/08/pol…

Frrom July: apnews.com/article/ukrain…

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Michael Weiss

@michaeldweiss

Jul 26

Quite a lot of revisionism now. But Miller helped lead the CIA team and is a registered Republican. Note, too, the self-evident conclusion that it was not possible to determine the full impact of the influence operation on American voters. Intel practitioners were a lot more careful and judicious than cable news pundits in 2016-2017. nbcnews.com/politics/natio…

One of the sleights of hand Gabbard, et al. are pulling is to conflate in the popular imagination the compromise of “election infrastructure” and vote altering with the hack-and-leak operation targeting the DNC, DCCC and Podesta. The latter was ratified in Mueller’s grand jury indictments of the dozen GRU officers from Units 26165/74455. The former was never alleged in any ICA, although the Senate Intel Committee investigation, overseen by Marco Rubio, noted Russian attempts to “probe” election infrastructure and some successful efforts to exfiltrate voter data from multiple states, albeit without any impact on the election outcome itself. Case in point:

Note ODNI's rendering of the highlighted text. Someone reading only that rendering might reasonably conclude the Russians didn't use any cyber means at all to meddle in the 2016 election -- unless that someone were provided a specific definition of what was being downplayed here. The PDB's highlighted text provides that definition: "manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure." Literally the next sentence attests to Russia "probably" using cyber means to hack into campaign party servers -- which it did, and then leaked such data via Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks, with the intent of influence the American electorate.

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Michael Weiss

@michaeldweiss

Jun 3

Darren Beattie, the MAGA appointee who dismantled the State Department’s counter-disinformation program, “is married to a woman whose uncle has taken several roles in Russian politics and once received a personal ‘thank you’ message from Vladimir Putin.” archive.ph/Q818Z

You really cannot make this up: “The funny thing is just about every Western institution would improve in quality if it were directly infiltrated and controlled by Putin,” [Beattie] wrote in September 2021.

“Beattie has deleted disparaging tweets about Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, having previously claimed his now-boss attended ‘gay foam parties.’” Cc: @SecRubio

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Michael Weiss

@michaeldweiss

May 9

Nice story in @DelfiEE on how Russia paid young "protestors" 1,000 rubles (10 euros) each to stand outside eleven embassies of EU nations in Moscow before the May 9th parade: delfi.ee/artikkel/12037…

Payments were likely made with mobile app transfer on-site after the event. A list of those who responded to calls in chat groups was compiled so that the police would know whom not to detain. Screenshots not in the article below but shown to me demonstrate this fee-for-service arrangement:

Despite many central streets in Moscow being closed due to preparations for May 9th, participants were able to move freely from one embassy to another. How do you like that?

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Michael Weiss

@michaeldweiss

Apr 21

I've been emphasizing lately the unintended consequences of Trump's headlong embrace of Russia -- consequences not wholly undesirable for Russia. While it's wonderful for Moscow to see an American president so eager to realign with Russia's strategic interests, and so keen to denigrate and alienate American allies in that re-alignment, smarter figures in the Kremlin realize the hazards of such an embarrassment of riches. A helpful constant in this administration's rush to give Putin everything all at once is that the worst capitulationist ideas are being stress-tested in the media and in the GOP almost as soon as they're invented -- and often *before* the Trump administration has agreed on whether or not they're feasible. One of ideas these is that the U.S. will recognize Crimea as Russian territory.

As you might expect, this was Steve Witkoff's proposal, which is to say it was Vladimir Putin's. Dim Philby isn't so much an envoy as an unblinking relay of Putin's maximalist demands, all of which he presents to Trump as eminently reasonable, if not accomplished facts. (Recall Witkoff's lie that Russia was in full control of the Ukrainian regions it "annexed," regions Witkoff doesn't know the names of, when it is in full control of none of them.) The "Krym Nash" brain fart, I'm told, happened without any inter-agency coordination or buy-in from the principals, least of all Marco Rubio, who is at odds with Witkoff on this and on much else, regardless of the flattering tweets he is obliged to post about his scandalous colleague. Now notice this little nuance in the WSJ story cited above:

"Senior State Department official," indeed. You can almost hear the whirr of the backpedal in that paragraph. Giving up Crimea in a de facto or de jure capacity is a non-starter for Ukraine, as any junior State Department official can tell you. Zelensky could never sell it domestically even if he wanted to (and he doesn't) because the the political blowback would be severe and almost certainly unite opposition to both the policy and his presidency in a way that would make the resistance he experienced over the Steinmeier Formula look coy. (This might even result in a far more nationalistic and hawkish political figure to emerge as frontrunner for the Ukrainian presidency; exactly the opposite of what the Putin-Vance-Carlson triumvirate has been angling for.)

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