Weaky Leaks

In the context of Politico, New York Times, and Washington Post being in receipt of what may be an Iran-hacked file of possibly derogatory information about Senator JD Vance and keeping it secret from the public, a lot of folks are finding themselves vaguely remembering the Russian-hacked file of possibly derogatory information on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stolen from campaign manager John Podesta in 2016, which WikiLeaks published on October 7 2016, shortly (I'm talking about minutes, at most a couple of hours) after the revelation of the Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape in which he revealed his penchant for grabbing pussy and how when you're a star they let you do it.

"What was in those emails?" somebody wondered, unable to come up with anything other than the idea of Podesta sharing a risotto recipe. "Was it really damaging?" I think it was, in fact, but in a very carefully targeted way, at students, through the Trump campaign's Facebook operation (whether or not it was helped out by the Russians, or Cambridge Analytica, or whatever), aimed especially at persuading students of a leftish persuasion in Michigan and Wisconsin not to vote.

Anyhow, I thought I'd re-up my piece, from October 10 2016, on how it went down.

The Lincoln cabinet as pictured by the pro-slavery press in 1864; drawing by John Cameron, via Wikipedia.

When WikiLeaks sends out a new document dump on a Friday evening, also known as the "death slot" because it's where you make a news release when you're hoping nobody will read it, that could be a sign that the organization doesn't have a lot of confidence in the news value of the material.

That seems to be the case with this latest dump released Friday night (shortly after the Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing video, I think), featuring emails presumably hacked by Russian intelligence personnel and associated with John Podesta, chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign (and not, contrary to Julian Assange, in "control" of the Podesta Group lobbying firm, which he co-founded with his brother Tony in 1988 but hasn't been involved in for years). There isn't a whole lot of thereness there.

The centerpiece of the thing is a document apparently collated by or under the direction of Tony Carrk, research director of Hillary For America, in 2015 during the Democratic primary campaign, consisting of passages from some of those 2013 paid speeches of which the transcripts have never been released, though the Sanders forces kept demanding it. The excerpts flag moments that might look to the left opposition like evidence that she's in cahoots with the forces of corporate evil: telling the banksters, in particular, what she really thinks while publicly telling all us liberals she's one of us, so it looks as if the campaign gathered them as part of the process, maybe, of deciding whether to release them or not—how damaging would it be? Or maybe of preparing for the storm that would follow after they were released; each passage contains some phrase or clause that could be pulled out of the context to make it seem as if she was revealing some horrible secret plan to her audience, and there's a helpful headline telling the reader how opponents will read it (could be the headlines were supplied by the hackers, though):

Grand Collusion

Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim in Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937), via NYTimes.

There's so much going on on all Trump fronts at the moment it's almost unbearable trying to pick a subject, but this thing from Michael Isikoff at Yahoo looks to me like the smokingest gun ever, maybe not that smoking, in the Trump-Russia matter, and I don't think it's been getting enough attention—that the Seth Rich Deep State conspiracy murder theory was originally concocted by Russian intelligence:

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read as a real intelligence report —about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016, according to the U.S. federal prosecutor who was in charge of the Rich case. That was just three days after Rich, 27, was killed in what police believed was a botched robbery while walking home to his group house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., about 30 blocks north of the Capitol.

and offering a conspiracy theory to account for the crime, claiming

Non-Hot Take

Quito, via National Geographic.

One thing I think everybody needs to note about the Assange story is that at this point it's not about the United States, not about Sweden, not about WikiLeaks—not driven by the preoccupations of these people we think about when we think about Julian Assange. It's really, at the moment, an Ecuador story.

That is: the previous president, hero of free speech Rafael Correa*, left his chosen successor, the less heroic Lenín Boltaire Moreno (yes, he's named after the Bolshevik leader, as well as Voltaire, only his parents spelled the latter wrong), with a problem in the country's London embassy in the form of Assange squatting there, failing to clean the bathroom or change the kitty litter, while avoiding extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted on rape charges, and from where he claimed he would be extradited to the US and buried like the Man in the Iron Mask. Moreno has been trying to get rid of this national embarrassment since he took office almost two years ago (one of the things that has enraged his former patron Correa), and he's finally succeeded, and that is the story, and it's not even all that interesting.


*Some Ecuadoreans have an alternative view on Correa's commitment to free speech:

Correa had a poor record on free speech at home. In 2011, he closed a string of radio and television stations in a bid to silence critics. According to Human Rights Watch, five journalists were jailed for “disrespecting” the government between 2008 and 2011.

Got paranoia? Manafort and Assange

Photo via The Mermaid's Tale.

This Guardian story, on Paul Manafort's previously unreported visits to Julian Assange's quarters in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, has colossal implications for my understanding of the whole history of Russia's engagement in the Trump campaign:

Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.

In March 2016, to be precise, at some point in the sequence in which

Aha

Image via Oprah!

Very glad to hear Paul Manafort and his confederate Rick Gates have been busted for some of their many crimes against the people of the United States, and I'm not going to lie, it was bigger than I was expecting, but it's this morning's other Trumprussia story that really makes my heart beat faster, because it's really Trumprussia, and it looks like my story, the one I've been constructing, developing in an extremely major way, in the guilty plea of George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who kept trying to set up meetings between Russian officials and the campaign: pleaded guilty on October 5, we learn today, to lying in an interview with the FBI in January, and what he lied about was a meeting with a "Russian professor":

A “statement of the offense” document released by the special counsel’s office states that “on or about March 31, 2016,” Papadopoulos attended a national security meeting with Trump and other advisers, at which Papadopoulos stated that he “could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin”.

Papadopoulos told investigators as part of the plea that he befriended a London-based professor with “substantial connections” to Russian government officials after he became an adviser to the campaign.

Papadopoulos initially told investigators that he met the professor before joining the campaign.

The professor was not named in court documents but is described as a person with close connections to the Kremlin who told Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails”.

Thanks for clarifying

From Segundo de Chomón, Voyage sur Jupiter (1909). Via rebloggy.

Have you been bemused by this new preoccupation on the part of the Trumpies and the WikiLeaks and some of the irredentist Berners, zooming in on the CIA's apparent ability, as revealed in the latest document dump, to make an electronic intrusion into your digital porn stash look as if you were being intruded upon by Russians?

Russia said they hacked nothing. Assange said Russia didn't provide the emails. Now we learn CIA can make a hack "look" like Russia.

— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) March 7, 2017

Not that I doubt the CIA might well be able to do something like that for some particular purpose, but I think these guys are telling a story they don't quite mean to tell about the 2016 election.

Where it was actually CIA spooks who stole all those emails from the Democratic National Committee and turned them over to the WikiLeaks, making it look—not necessarily to the savvy hands of WikiLeaks, but to some future American investigators, I guess—as if they were agents of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, so that when Hillary Clinton inevitably lost the election, the CIA and the other 16 intelligence agencies trying to understand what had happened would think the Russians were to blame! Instead of figuring out that they'd done it themselves.

Of course they wouldn't suspect themselves, because they had no idea they were determined to defeat Hillary Clinton and put Donald Trump into the White House—everybody kept telling them it was the other way around. Nurse, they're having a narratological emergency on the fifth floor, for God's sake get me some continuity!

I'm glad Trump and WikiLeaks have been able to straighten us out on this, though, and expose the CIA for the terrible thing that they've done, if that's what happened, or I would be glad, if I felt a little more straightened out than I do.

More on the CIA dump in this useful piece from Zeynep Tufekci (the revelations aren't that big, and the main thing techies learn is that Signal and WhatsApp are rather stronger against hacking than was realized).

WeakyLeaks

In the context of Politico, New York Times, and Washington Post being in receipt of what may be an Iran-hacked file of possibly derogatory information about Senator JD Vance and keeping it secret from the public, a lot of folks are finding themselves vaguely remembering the Russian-hacked file of possibly derogatory information on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stolen from campaign manager John Podesta in 2016, which WikiLeaks published on October 7 2016, shortly (I'm talking about minutes, at most a couple of hours) after the revelation of the Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape in which he revealed his penchant for grabbing pussy and how when you're a star they let you do it.

"What was in those emails?" somebody wondered, unable to come up with anything other than the idea of Podesta sharing a risotto recipe. "Was it really damaging?" 

I think it was, in fact, but in a very carefully targeted way, at students, through the Trump campaign's Facebook operation (whether or not it was helped out by the Russians, or Cambridge Analytica, or whatever), aimed especially at persuading students of a leftish persuasion in Michigan and Wisconsin not to vote.

Anyhow, I thought I'd re-up my piece, from October 10 2016, on how it went down.

The Lincoln cabinet as pictured by the pro-slavery press in 1864; drawing by John Cameron, via Wikipedia.

When WikiLeaks sends out a new document dump on a Friday evening, also known as the "death slot" because it's where you make a news release when you're hoping nobody will read it, that could be a sign that the organization doesn't have a lot of confidence in the news value of the material.

That seems to be the case with this latest dump released Friday night (shortly after the Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing video, I think), featuring emails presumably hacked by Russian intelligence personnel and associated with John Podesta, chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign (and not, contrary to Julian Assange, in "control" of the Podesta Group lobbying firm, which he co-founded with his brother Tony in 1988 but hasn't been involved in for years). There isn't a whole lot of thereness there.

The centerpiece of the thing is a document apparently collated by or under the direction of Tony Carrk, research director of Hillary For America, in 2015 during the Democratic primary campaign, consisting of passages from some of those 2013 paid speeches of which the transcripts have never been released, though the Sanders forces kept demanding it. The excerpts flag moments that might look to the left opposition like evidence that she's in cahoots with the forces of corporate evil: telling the banksters, in particular, what she really thinks while publicly telling all us liberals she's one of us, so it looks as if the campaign gathered them as part of the process, maybe, of deciding whether to release them or not—how damaging would it be? Or maybe of preparing for the storm that would follow after they were released; each passage contains some phrase or clause that could be pulled out of the context to make it seem as if she was revealing some horrible secret plan to her audience, and there's a helpful headline telling the reader how opponents will read it (could be the headlines were supplied by the hackers, though):

SIX MILLION DOLLARS!

Retro beer ad, from Barcelona.

Really mystified for hours by this:

How the US drove Syria into civil war (note date) http://t.co/xs9Jhn9Jwj
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 18, 2013

I looked at the Wapo article (noting date) and found that it was about the third Manning document dump, the one with all the US state department cables, and US funding of anti-Assad Syrian exile forces, and I'm thinking what does that have to do with the civil war? The article was published in April 2011, just a month after the beginning of large-

Hoist on their own canard

It's a sign that you're getting a little too concerned with secrecy when you start hiding things from yourself. From Politico via Jesselyn Radack at Kos:

At a hearing last month, prosecutors in the case against Pfc. Bradley Manning noted that they didn't receive [important emails from the judge and defense] but could not explain why. Chief prosecutor Capt. Ashden Fein said at a hearing Thursday that the messages had been "blocked by a spam filter for security." However, it fell to defense attorney David Coombs to explain precisely why the e-mails about evidence issues in the Manning case never made it.

"Apparently, they were blocked because the word 'WikiLeaks' was somewhere in the e-mail," Coombs said.

Because they didn't get the emails, they didn't turn over documents to the defense that they were supposed to turn over, or explain why they didn't want to turn them over. The fail is bad enough, according to Radack, that Coombs feels entitled to move for dismissal of all the charges.

From The City of Secrets: Nashville's Temple Code Unveiled.

Stratfor the memories

Clown Bluey entree.

Kos exploded around lunchtime yesterday with news from the WikiLeaks dump of internal mails from the global strategies espionage firm/paranoid travel magazine Stratfor, and the revelation that Israel had destroyed all of Iran's putative nuclear weapons facilities sometime late last year. It was wonderful watching how the wisdom of crowds works—by the time I was done with lunch just about the whole mob of us had come to realize that the story was just idle gossip and [jump]