THREAD: Today marks the 22nd anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Throughout the day, I’ll be chronologically tweeting quotes from my book THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY: An Oral History of 9/11, following Americans as they experience that day.... amazon.com/Only-Plane-Sky… Sunny Mindel, Communications Director for the Mayor of the City of New York, Rudy Giuliani: "On September 11th, I was facing what I thought would be an easy day."

THREAD: The GOP knows it no longer can win free & fair national elections, and it’s doing everything it can to lock in its ability to rule as a minority.

It's a coordinated effort with 12 unique strategies I outline here in my new newsletter: .... doomsdayscenario.co/p/minority-rul… The American system has been based on majority rule with protection for the rights of the minority—today, we’re seeing something more like the opposite. Here's how I think about the key parts of the GOP’s big-picture strategy to undermine American democracy...:

THREAD: I just published the first half of my inaugural newsletter essay, looking at America's failure of imagination and the GOP plot to enshrine minority rule in America. You can read the essay and sign up for the newsletter here: doomsdayscenario.co/p/the-coordina… 1) I've been playing around with this piece for nearly a year now and it captures my big-picture thoughts about how we're underestimating the risks to American democracy over the years ahead....

THREAD: In @SenatorLeahy's new memoir, there's a wild story in it that I haven't ever seen before—a rare glimpse into the shadowy way that the intel agencies interact with Members of Congress. It feels ripped from a political thriller movie...: phoenixbooks.biz/book/978198215… 1) In the midst of the Iraq War debate, Leahy was one of the few Senators pushing back against the Bush admin race to war and the threats of WMDs. He'd been reading the classified intel that the Bush admin was providing to Congress and had real doubts that it justified war....

THREAD: As we near Sunday's 21st anniversary of 9/11, I wanted to share the podcast I did last year about the lingering questions of that tragic day.

What happened on Sept 11 and how it changed our world remains the most important story of the modern age.... The history we've come to tell of that day is incomplete—and sometimes wrong. "Long Shadow" examines the enduring mysteries that still surround 9/11 and it's a different history than you likely remember—but one that will help you make sense of the world the attacks left behind.…

SHORT THREAD here on something I haven't seen someone else comment on: The strangest document in this photo, the orange bordered "Secret//SCI" one in the foreground. "Secret//SCI" is an incredibly rare marking....

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1564835976987525123

1) I checked today with three officials who have worked at the absolute highest levels of the US intelligence community and two of them had *NEVER* seen such a marked document in their careers.

"SCI" material is usually so sensitive that it is almost always "Top Secret"....

THREAD: Last night's report the FBI was looking for 'nuclear documents' could mean a couple different things—but there are some clues in the wider reporting that might help narrow it down. I wrote a book on nuclear war plans, so buckle up, here we go…. amazon.com/Raven-Rock-Gov… 1) The US has, broadly speaking, four different categories of files that would count as 'nuclear documents,' each of which has some unique classification peculiarities, and all of which exist at the so-called "Above Top Secret" level because a simple TS clearance isn't enough....

THREAD: “What’s the difference between this and Watergate?” Donald Trump raged in a statement Monday night after FBI agents.

Well, as a Watergate and FBI historian, four things stand out to me: 1) The idea the FBI launched a raid on a former president would have been approved and monitored at the highest level of the Justice Department; hard to even imagine how high the bar of probable cause must've been for the Bureau to initiate such a politically sensitive search....

THREAD: Three years ago—long before the Big Lie, the 2020 election, and Tucker Carlson going full white nationalist—I wrote that Fox News had become a threat to our national security. wired.com/story/fox-news… 1. Amid a weekend where we mark one million Americans dead from Covid—at least 300,000 died unnecessarily because Fox helped spread lies and misinformation—and the tragedy in Buffalo, it's worth reiterating just how dangerous Fox has become....

.@aviswanatha speaks with Matt Olsen of @TheJusticeDept at #verify2022 about government surveillance: Olsen responds to the report that the FBI searched its special surveillance database 3.4 million times last year, the first time it’s ever released that number; says 1.9 million of those queries related to a *single* Russian cyber threat and a search for victims. #verify2022

It’s wild to me that one political party has all but abandoned democracy and been overtaken by wild conspiracy theories and the media is still covering the fall midterm elections like, “LOL. The GOP will win in a landslide because gas prices are up and there are CRT kids books.” This week’s media coverage was just so disheartening. There’s only one political party seriously participating in the world and US democracy right now and the lazy media is still “both-sides-ing” everything because they can’t admit what’s actually happening.

Today, March 11th, is the two-year anniversary of the day that everything changed for the US. I wrote a @WIRED oral history about recalling this day in 2020—from the stock market collapse to the NBA to Trump's address to Tom Hanks. It's a wild trip: bit.ly/2XR7OZZ @WIRED That Wed. morning in 2020, the number of "novel" coronavirus cases in the US crossed the 1,000 mark, up 10-fold from the prior week. Only 29 Americans had died. But that day the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic. Every hour seemed to bring major new developments...

It’s amazing how much wealth Russia oligarchs have hidden in plain sight that the east just turned a blind-eye towards.

https://twitter.com/learmonth/status/1501171802126618625

All of the Russian oligarch sanctioning is more fodder for my thesis that so much of the last decades disasters would have been prevented by stronger, diligent prosecution of white collar crimes.

SHORT THREAD: I've had a couple people for my #GMGReads recommendations on Putin, Russia, and the current geopolitics of eastern Europe. Here are the best relevant books I've ever come across: 1) IRON CURTAIN bookshop.org/books/iron-cur… and RED FAMINE, both by @anneapplebaum, are probably the two definitive works on the important-to-understand historic evils of the Soviet Union in Ukraine and Eastern Europe more broadly:
bookshop.org/books/red-fami…

SHORT THREAD: As you've probably seen me mention, my next book WATERGATE: A NEW HISTORY comes out next week. I've been asked a lot why tackle such a seemingly well-known subject—but the truth is you only *think* you know the Watergate story.... amazon.com/Watergate-Hist… 1) I've spent the last few years diving into this chapter, the full story of Watergate is much wilder, weirder, and zany than the gauzy Technicolor version of "All The President's Men" that we're used to—the heroes aren't who you think they are, and neither are the villains....

2021 READING THREAD: Before this holiday weekend ends, here's my list of my favorite #GMGReads from the past year. This was one of the worst years of reading, with most of my reading time going to "work" books & research, but I managed to squeeze at least 12 excellent books.... I read almost no fiction this year, beyond a few Gerald Seymour thrillers and Rex Stout mysteries, and so my list is all nonfiction—the common theme ends up being history and reportage that surprised and impressed me. In no particular order, here they are:

THREAD: Excited to launch this new @Scribd Original out into the world today. It's is my first foray as a writer into fiction—or, really, what we're calling "speculative nonfiction." DRAGONFIRE is based on a real-life terror threat in the tense days after 9/11....

https://twitter.com/Scribd/status/1463553689038245895

1) I reported on this incident in my FBI history THE THREAT MATRIX and have always been fascinated by it, partly because we still don't really know what happened. Here's what we do know:

And so the long-awaited storm of stories for Facebook begin: nytimes.com/2021/10/22/tec… And this one:

https://twitter.com/brandyzadrozny/status/1451682387197407239

I can’t believe how bad the media’s coverage of this week’s legislative agenda is. Total, contextless focus on cost without any meaningful coverage of what the bills would do and what policies are included. Let’s debate the policy, not the dollars. There are dumbs ways to spend $3T (hi Pentagon budget!) and ways that will transform lives, enable innovation, and unlock economic success and equity. So which America do we want to be? Focus the debate on that question, not some random meaningless dollar amount.

THREAD: Today marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Throughout the day, I’ll be chronologically tweeting quotes from my book THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY: An Oral History of 9/11, following Americans as they experience that day.... garrettgraff.com/books/the-only… We’re also collecting stories from the #my911story hashtag, as people share their own experiences of that day. I’ll be sharing selected tweets and others’ stories throughout the day.

THREAD: The first episodes of my 9/11 podcast LONG SHADOW are out now. My goal with this eight-episode series is to try to tell the story of that day for a new generation as well as make sense of some of the questions that linger: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lon… In some ways, this podcast from @longlead and @goatrodeo, is the culmination of all the reporting and writing I've done on 9/11 and its aftermath over two decades—including five books where that tragic day serves as the hinge of modern history.