Foreign Influence and a Mayor

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are prominent influencers.

Brittny Mejia and Rebecca Ellis at LAT:

Eileen Wang, an Arcadia city leader facing charges of acting as an illegal foreign agent of China, resigned Monday after reaching an agreement to resolve the federal case.

Wang, who served as mayor of the San Gabriel Valley suburb, entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors over charges that she acted under the control of the People’s Republic of China to promote propaganda in the U.S. between 2020 and 2022, according to court filings.

Wang, who was previously elected to the City Council in November 2022, stepped down as mayor on Monday hours after the plea agreement was unsealed. Arcadia officials and Wang’s attorneys said the conduct described by federal authorities occurred before Wang was elected.

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From late 2020 through at least 2022, Wang worked with Yaoning “Mike” Sun, her former fiance, to run a website called U.S. News Center that branded itself as a news source for Chinese Americans, according to the plea agreement unsealed Monday. Both Wang and Sun “executed directives” from Chinese government officials, posting requested articles and reporting back with screenshots showing how many people viewed the stories, the agreement says.

On June 10, 2021, the agreement says, Wang received a message from a government official about “China’s Stance on the Xinjiang Issue,” which included a link to a letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times from the consul general of the People’s Republic of China in Los Angeles. The consul general had been responding to a Times editorial supporting a boycott of products made with cotton produced in the Xinjiang region of China.

At the time, news reports were highlighting the Chinese government‘s campaign of incarceration, persecution and “reeducation” of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang province.

“There is no genocide in Xinjiang; there is no such thing as ‘forced labor’ in any production activity, including cotton production. Spreading such rumor is to defame China, destroy Xinjiang’s safety and stability,” read the message from the Chinese government official, according to the plea agreement.

Minutes after receiving the link, Wang posted the article on her website and responded to the Chinese government official with a link to the article on her website, according to the court filing.

“So fast, thank you everyone,” the government official responded, the court records show.

Prosecutors also say Wang edited articles at the request of officials and shared information showing the reach of the posts.

“Thank you leader,” she wrote on Aug. 20, 2021, after being complimented for a post that was viewed more than 15,000 times, according to the plea agreement.

Goodbye, CIA World Factbook

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.  The Trump administration has killed off or limited access to many such resources, including now the CIA World Factbook. 

 David A. Graham at The Atlantic:

Memories are now the only place the World Factbook resides. In a post online yesterday, the agency noted that the site “has sunset,” though it provided no explanation for why. (The agency did not immediately reply to my inquiry about why, nor has it replied to other outlets.) The Associated Press noted that the move “follows a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end programs that don’t advance the agency’s core missions.”

The demise of the World Factbook is part of a broad war on information being waged by the Trump administration. This is different from the administration’s assault on truth, in which the president and the White House lie prolifically or deny reality. This is something more fundamental: It’s a series of steps that by design or in effect block access to data, and in doing so erode the concept of a shared frame for all Americans. “Though the World Factbook is gone, in the spirit of its global reach and legacy, we hope you will stay curious about the world and find ways to explore it … in person or virtually,” the CIA wrote in the valedictory post. Left unsaid: You’re on your own to figure it out now.

If the World Factbook was indeed shut down because it didn’t meet Ratcliffe’s standard for core CIA functions, that reflects the Trump administration’s impoverished view of the government’s role. The World Factbook was a public service that helped Americans and others around the globe be informed, created a positive association with a shadowy agency, and spread U.S. soft power by providing a useful service free to all. I’ve been unable to determine how much it cost the government to maintain, but there’s no reason to think it would be substantive.

 

America Is Vulnerable

Many posts have analyzed how foreign influence and intelligence operations.

R.M. Schneiderman and Derek Owen at The Bulwark:

American security experts fear that growing networks of foreign spies, combined with new technology, represent an unprecedented threat—one the FBI, the primary agency tasked with thwarting hostile foreign intelligence services, may struggle to address.

“Look at what the Ukrainians are doing with drones and AI against Russia,” says national-security analyst Paul Joyal. “I know our adversaries are watching.”

Yet as these dangers have mounted, the White House has proposed slashing the FBI’s budget by more than $500 million and has shifted the bureau’s priorities away from combating spies and other forms of foreign influence. Under Director Kash Patel, the FBI has moved people and power out of the bureau’s headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington and into the heartland. He reassigned nearly a quarter of all agents to a job that’s never been part of the FBI’s purview, immigration enforcement, according to data obtained from the bureau by Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat. Counterintelligence specialists with deep expertise in countries like China, Russia, and Iran are now regularly working immigration cases on a rotating basis, according to former agents who recently left the bureau. The FBI has also limited investigations of crimes like violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), allowing foreign spies greater room to maneuver.

The end result of these changes, former senior FBI officials maintain, is that America is extremely vulnerable—not just to an attack, but to an unprecedented level of foreign espionage.

“It’s a disaster,” says Robert Anderson, the head of FBI counterintelligence from 2012 to 2014. “I’m rooting for everybody because we’re all Americans, [but] Patel needs to wake up.”

Presidential Power to Use Military Overseas

Many posts have discussed war powers and the US military.

Brian Finucane at Just Security:

On Sept. 2nd, the Trump administration announced what it described as a “lethal strike” against an alleged drug smuggling vessel in the Caribbean. In a post on social media accompanied with a video of the strike, President Donald Trump stated that the attack was “against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” Trump also noted that Tren de Aragua had previously been designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). The social media post also asserted that the strike had occurred in international waters and killed “11 terrorists.”

Although the facts are still emerging, the Trump administration’s extraordinary lethal attack on this purported smuggling vessel – and its vow that the strike was a start of a campaign – raise a number of significant potential legal issues. And even apart from these legal concerns, the strike constitutes a deeply troubling gratuitous use of the military that resulted in the unnecessary killing of 11 individuals.

In 2019, Navy SEALs were on a secret, possibly illegal mission to plant a listening device on the dictator of North Korea. Dave Philipps and Matthew Cole at NYT:

The mission had the potential to provide the United States with a stream of valuable intelligence. But it meant putting American commandos on North Korean soil — a move that, if detected, not only could sink negotiations but also could lead to a hostage crisis or an escalating conflict with a nuclear-armed foe.

It was so risky that it required the president’s direct approval.

For the operation, the military chose SEAL Team 6’s Red Squadron — the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden. The SEALs rehearsed for months, aware that every move needed to be perfect. But when they reached what they thought was a deserted shore that night, wearing black wet suits and night-vision goggles, the mission swiftly unraveled.

A North Korean boat appeared out of the dark. Flashlights from the bow swept over the water. Fearing that they had been spotted, the SEALs opened fire. Within seconds, everyone on the North Korean boat was dead.

The SEALs retreated into the sea without planting the listening device.

The 2019 operation has never been publicly acknowledged, or even hinted at, by the United States or North Korea. The details remain classified and are being reported here for the first time. The Trump administration did not notify key members of Congress who oversee intelligence operations, before or after the mission. The lack of notification may have violated the law.

...

In 2019, Mr. Trump was making a personalized overture to Mr. Kim, in search of a breakthrough that had eluded prior presidents. But those talks collapsed, and North Korea’s nuclear program accelerated. The U.S. government estimates that North Korea now has roughly 50 nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach the West Coast. Mr. Kim has pledged to keep expanding his nuclear program “exponentially” to deter what he calls U.S. provocations

Charlie Savage at NYT:

Should the intelligence committees have been told?

That turns in part on whether the operation was undertaken under military legal authorities, found in Title 10 of the United States Code, or under intelligence authorities, found in Title 50.

A major difference is that Title 50 allows so-called covert operations, in which the United States government intends to conceal its role and deny any involvement if something comes to light. Typically those are conducted by the C.I.A., but sometimes military forces are temporarily put under C.I.A. control to carry out covert activities.

If the government is going to carry out a covert activity, Title 50 generally requires presidents to first make a written “finding” and inform the intelligence committees within 48 hours. Another part of the statute requires notice of “any significant undertaking pursuant to a previously approved finding,” but does not specify a deadline.

Other provisions in Title 50 require the executive branch to provide reports to the intelligence committees that keep them “fully and currently informed” about all intelligence activities — whether covert or not, and including any “significant failures” — no matter which agency or department conducts them.

Fewer But Less Qualified Agents

Devlin Barrett and Adam Goldman at NYT:

The Trump administration is preparing to lower the recruitment standards for F.B.I. agents, eliciting alarm from many agents who worry that the move will undermine the agency’s primary mission of conducting complex investigations and tracking threats to national security.

Under a plan pushed by the director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, the F.B.I. will start welcoming new classes of recruits who will receive less training and no longer be required to have a college degree, according to people familiar with the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it.

The shift comes as the agency anticipates losing more than 5,000 employees by September, largely as a result of agents, analysts and others taking severance or early retirement packages offered by the Trump administration to try to reduce the budget.

Instead of spending about 18 weeks training at the academy in Quantico, Va., the group of agents, tentatively scheduled to start in October, will receive eight weeks, according to the people. And the agents will no longer need to fulfill a longstanding requisite for joining the bureau: a bachelor’s degree.

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Current and former agents said they worried that the changes would transform the bureau from an investigative agency focused on national security into something more akin to a federal police force. One of Mr. Patel’s favorite sayings is “let good cops be cops,” which grates on many agents who privately point out that they are not, in fact, cops.

Sources and Methods

Warren P. Strobel at WP:

The Trump administration pushed to unveil a highly classified document on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election after an intense behind-the-scenes struggle over secrecy, which ended in late July when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a minimally redacted version of the report, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Gabbard, with the blessing of President Donald Trump, overrode arguments from the CIA and other intelligence agencies that more of the document should remain classified to obscure U.S. spy agencies’ sources and methods, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others interviewed for this report, because of the matter’s sensitivity.

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The document that Gabbard ordered released on July 23 is a 46-page report stemming from a review begun in 2017 by majority Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. It takes issue with U.S. intelligence agencies’ finding earlier that year that Russian President Vladimir Putin developed a preference for Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton and aspired to help him win the election.

Multiple independent reviews, including an exhaustive bipartisan probe by the Senate Intelligence Committee, have found that Putin intervened in part to help Trump. Two former CIA officials who led the intelligence agencies’ assessment told The Washington Post they stood by their sourcing and analysis.

The House report is the most sensitive document the Trump administration has yet released, and details of how its publication occurred have not been previously reported.

The document contains multiple references to CIA human sources reporting on Putin’s plans. Such sources are among the agency’s most closely guarded secrets. After the report was completed in 2020, it was considered so sensitive that it remained in storage at the CIA rather than on Capitol Hill.

Democratic lawmakers and former U.S. intelligence officials have objected to how the Trump administration released the report, saying it could imperil future intelligence-gathering on threats against the United States.

“I almost felt like I was going to get in trouble for having read that document,” Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior CIA and White House official, told the podcast “SpyTalk.” “Sources and methods could be easily inferred in almost every instance. … I don’t know if I’ve seen a document of that sensitivity so lightly redacted.”

DNI Makes False Claims About Russian Interference

 Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are prominent influencers.

BYRON TAU and ERIC TUCKER at AP:

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this month declassified material she claimed proved a “treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration in 2016 to politicize U.S. intelligence in service of casting doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.

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CLAIM: “The intelligence community had one assessment: that Russia did not have the intent and capability to try to impact the outcome of the U.S. election leading up to Election Day. The same assessment was made after the election.” — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday.

The documents Gabbard released do not support her claim. She cites a handful of emails from 2016 in which officials conclude Russia had no intention of manipulating the U.S. vote count through cyberattacks on voting systems.

President Barack Obama’s administration never alleged voting infrastructure was tampered with. Rather, officials have said, Russian operatives hacked emails of prominent Democrats that were subsequently released through WikiLeaks and launched a covert social media campaign to sow discord and inflame U.S. public opinion. More than two dozen Russians were indicted in 2018 in connection with those efforts.

Republican-led investigations in Congress have affirmed that conclusion, and the emails that Gabbard released do not contradict that finding.

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CLAIM: “There was a shift, a 180-degree shift, from the intelligence community’s assessment leading up to the election to the one that President Obama directed be produced after Donald Trump won the election that completely contradicted those assessments that had come previously.” — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday.

There was no shift.

The emails Gabbard released show that a Department of Homeland Security official in August 2016 told then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper there was “no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count.”

The public assessment the Obama administration made public in January 2017 reached the same conclusion: “DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”

ODNI Misleads About Russian Influence Operations

 Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are  prominent influencers.

Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration attempting to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said the information she was releasing showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr. Trump.

Democrats denounced the effort as politically motivated, error-ridden and in contradiction with previous reviews of the assessment.

Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Ms. Gabbard’s accusation of treason “baseless.”

Intelligence agencies and Senate investigators spent years reviewing the work, and concluded that during the 2016 election, the Russians conducted probing operations of election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes. While they extracted voter registration data in Illinois and Arizona, and probed in other states, there was no evidence that Moscow’s hackers attempted to actually change votes.

The Obama administration assessment never contended that Russian hackers manipulated votes. 

Russia also conducted influence operations to change public opinion. That included using fake social media posts to sow division among Americans and leaking documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee to denigrate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Multiple reviews, including a Republican-led Senate report, backed the findings of American spy agencies in late 2016 that Russia was trying to influence the election by damaging Ms. Clinton’s campaign and bolstering Mr. Trump.

Among the Republican senators on the Intelligence Committee that produced the various reports on Russian influence operations was Marco Rubio of Florida, now the secretary of state.

The new report by Ms. Gabbard’s staff conflates those two activities by the Russians and tries to suggest that the Obama administration forced the intelligence community to alter its conclusions.

"There's a Flip Side to That Coin."

 A number of posts have discussed "Miles' Law," that is, where you stand depends on where you sit.  Attitudes toward procedures and institutions depend on whether you control them.  At Axios, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write:

Through silence or vocal support, House and Senate Republicans are backing an extraordinary set of new precedents for presidential power they may come to regret if and when Democrats seize those same powers.

Here are 10 new precedents, all set with minimal GOP dissent: 

1. Presidents can limit the classified information they share with lawmakers after bombing a foreign country without the approval of Congress.
2.  Presidents can usurp Congress's power to levy tariffs, provided they declare a national emergency.
3. Presidents can unilaterally freeze spending approved by Congress, and dismantle or fire the heads of independent agencies established by law.
4. Presidents can take control of a state's National Guard, even if the governor opposes it, and occupy the state for as long as said president wants.
5. Presidents can accept gifts from foreign nations, as large as a $200 million plane, even if it's unclear whether said president gets to keep the plane at the end of the term.
6. Presidents can actively profit from their time in office, including creating new currencies structured to allow foreign nationals to invest anonymously, benefiting said president.
7. Presidents can try to browbeat the Federal Reserve into cutting interest rates, including by floating replacements for the Fed chair before their term is up.
8. Presidents can direct the Justice Department to prosecute their political opponents and punish critics. These punishments can include stripping Secret Service protections, suing them and threatening imprisonment.
9. Presidents can punish media companies, law firms and universities that don't share their viewpoints or values.
10. Presidents can aggressively pardon supporters, including those who made large political donations as part of their bid for freedom. The strength of the case in said pardons is irrelevant.

Between the lines: Friday's Supreme Court ruling limiting nationwide injunctions — a decision widely celebrated by Republicans — underscores the risks of partisan precedent-setting.Conservatives sped to the courts to block many of President Biden's signature policies — and succeeded.

And since losing control of the Senate, Democrats have gone quiet on abolishing the filibuster. 

For decades, Democrats said that the term "states' rights" was coded racism -- until they used the term in defense of same-sex marriage.

Federal Hiring in 2025

Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

Brian Schwartz and Josh Dawsey at WSJ:

Since Trump’s victory in November, Trump’s team has rejected hundreds of applicants that it felt won’t be loyal enough to Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. The hiring scrutiny has applied to a range of jobs across agencies and seniority levels: more than in Trump’s first term, a White House signoff has been required on lower-level cabinet appointees, people with knowledge of the interviews said. And unlike the 2017 White House, a team on the transition vetted thousands of employees before Trump took office.

Applicants were asked if they ever made comments critical of Trump, worked for a politician who disliked Trump or supported causes or politicians not aligned with the president, according to a person with direct involvement in the vetting operation. Some questions aim to gauge an applicant’s support for the president by asking how long the applicant has backed Trump, the person said, and determine whether the candidate had given to any politicians or supported any causes that aren’t aligned with Trump.

Of particular interest to the vetting team is whether hires made any comments criticizing Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and his false claims that the election was stolen, the person said.

Potential hires have also been pressed about their policy views, sometimes on subjects that are unrelated to the jobs for which they are applying, some of the people said. They have been asked questions about their views on tariffs, whether Ukraine deserves more or less U.S. aid and whether the U.S. should be a member of NATO. The questions are intended to measure whether a job candidate’s worldviews match up with Trump’s, the people said.

Ellen Nakashima and Warren P. Strobel at WP:

Candidates for top national security positions in the Trump administration have faced questions that appear designed to determine whether they have embraced the president’s false claims about the outcome of the 2020 election and its aftermath, according to people familiar with cases of such screening.

The questions asked of several current and former officials up for top intelligence agency and law enforcement posts revolved around two events that have become President Donald Trump’s litmus test to distinguish friend from foe: the result of the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, according to the people, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

These people said that two individuals, both former officials who were being considered for positions within the intelligence community, were asked to give “yes” or “no” responses to the questions: Was Jan. 6 “an inside job?” And was the 2020 presidential election “stolen?”

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One former senior intelligence official said that attesting to something you know to be untrue — as in the assertion that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election — would violate the ethos of an intelligence officer. “I don’t understand how somebody could [answer untruthfully] and do their job,” said the former official.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ― George Orwell, 1984

 

Presidential Transition Act

 CRS:

The PTA authorizes the GSA administrator to provide each apparent successful candidate with certain facilities, funds, and services to prepare for future duties, including those that were available to them as eligible candidates.

Additional resources available after the election include, for example: • payment of transition office staff, • payment for services of experts or consultants, • payment of certain travel expenses and subsistence allowances, and • the use of government aircraft for transition purposes on a reimbursable basis. The PTA authorizes the funding for incoming orientation activities for intended nominees for department heads and other key leadership positions. It also provides for preparation of a detailed classified, compartmented summary of national security threats, major military or covert operations, and pending decisions on possible uses of military force. This summary is to be conveyed to the apparent successful candidate for President as soon as possible after the general election

More Russian Disinformation

 Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are  prominent influencers.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken:

In addition to imposing sanctions, visa restrictions, and other measures, the State Department also designated the Russian state-funded and directed media company Rossiya Segodnya and five of its subsidiaries, including RT, under the Foreign Missions Act. As a result, these actors are now required to notify the State Department of all personnel working in the United States as well as their property.

We took these steps based on our conclusion that Rossiya Segodnya and these five subsidiaries are no longer merely firehoses of Russian Government propaganda and disinformation; they are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.

Today, we’re announcing that these Kremlin-backed media outlets are not only playing this covert influence role to undermine democracy in the United States, but also to meddle in the sovereign affairs of countries around the world. Thanks to new information – much of which originates from RT employees – we know that RT possess cyber capabilities and engaged in covert information and influence operations and military procurement. As part of RT’s expanded capabilities, the Russian Government embedded within RT a unit with cyber operational capabilities and ties to Russian intelligence. RT’s leadership had direct, witting knowledge of this enterprise.

Russian Government actors incorporated the cyber capabilities of this unit within RT in the spring of 2023, which is focused primarily on covert influence operations around the world. Under the cover of RT, information produced through this unit flows to Russian intelligence services, Russian media outlets, Russian mercenary groups, and other state and proxy arms of the Russian Government. One of its projects is a large, online crowdfunding program in Russia, operating within RT and through social media channels, to provide support and military equipment – supplies, weaponry – to Russian military units in Ukraine. This includes sniper rifles, suppressors, body armor, night vision equipment, drones, radio equipment, personal weapon sites, diesel generators.

While the crowdfunding campaign is out in the open, what’s hidden is that this program is administered by the leaders of RT. Last week, our government revealed how RT launders information operations through unwitting Americans to covertly disseminate Kremlin-produced content and messaging to the American public. Today, we’re exposing how Russia deploys similar tactics around the world.I

Matt Bernardini at The Guardian:

Amid the recent crackdown on Russian influence in American media, a group of former Trump advisers and operatives have quietly helped build a pro-Russian website that frequently spreads debunked conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine, election fraud and vaccines.

Working alongside contributors for Kremlin state media, the former Donald Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos, his wife, Simona Mangiante, and others have become editorial board members of the website Intelligencer, which is increasingly becoming a source of news for those in the rightwing ecosystem.

The growth of the website, which has not been reported on before, comes at a time when the US is seeking to crack down on Russian influence ahead of the 2024 election. Recently, the justice department charged two members of RT (formerly known as Russia Today) with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and money laundering for payments they allegedly made to “recruit unwitting American influencers”. It also placed sanctions on RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, and nine other employees.

Axis of Disinformation

 Justin Green at Axios:

An axis of disinformation — ranging from hackers to fake websites to a dose of AI — has emerged ahead of November, with the U.S. government stepping up its warnings on foreign election interference.

Why it matters: Three of America's most potent adversaries — Russia, China and Iran — make the list.

1) Russia paid nearly $10 million to hire U.S. influencers — some with millions of followers — to "amplify divisions in the United States," the Justice Department said in an indictment today.The Justice Department seized 32 domains, some including "cybersquatted" sites publishing disinformation meant to resemble legitimate news outlets, like the Washington Post and Fox News, reports Axios' Avery Lotz.

2) China is leveraging a campaign called "Spamouflage" — using fake or hacked accounts posing as American citizens — to spread anti-Western sentiment ahead of the election, according to a report out yesterday by intelligence company Graphika.Some of the most recent political content was "almost certainly AI-generated," per the report.
China is more focused on influencing U.S. policy on Taiwan and undermining confidence in U.S. democracy than on helping any particular candidates, analysts told AP.

3) Iran has emerged as a player in its own right in the disinformation universe.

• It has already hacked individuals associated with the Trump campaign and attempted similar attacks on the Biden and Harris campaigns.
• Iran's government and Revolutionary Guards Corps are pushing the disinformation effort, the N.Y. Times reported today.
• Iranian operatives also posed as students and gave financial help during the U.S. protests this year against the Israel-Gaza war, the Times reports, citing U.S. intelligence assessments.

Russian Interference 2024

 Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are  prominent influencers.

Influence Operation Relied on Influencers, AI-Generated Content, Paid Social Media Advertisements, and Social Media Accounts to Drive Internet Traffic to Cybersquatted and Other Domains

Note: View the affidavit here.

The Justice Department today announced the ongoing seizure of 32 internet domains used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns colloquially referred to as “Doppelganger,” in violation of U.S. money laundering and criminal trademark laws. As alleged in an unsealed affidavit, the Russian companies Social Design Agency (SDA), Structura National Technology (Structura), and ANO Dialog, operating under the direction and control of the Russian Presidential Administration, and in particular First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Sergei Vladilenovich Kiriyenko, used these domains, among others, to covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections, including the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election.

In conjunction with the domain seizures, the U.S. Treasury Department announced the designation of 10 individuals and two entities as part of a coordinated response to Russia’s malign influence efforts targeting the 2024 U.S. presidential election. This announcement follows the designation of actors involved in Doppelganger announced by the Treasury Department in March.

Iranian Influence and Gaza Protests

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy.

Statement from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines on Recent Iranian Influence Efforts

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines today released the following statement:

“The Intelligence Community recognizes the importance of informing the public of foreign efforts to influence our democratic processes and, consequently, leading into the Presidential and congressional elections this year, we are launching today the first of what will be regular updates regarding such threats.

Our updates can be expected to cover a range of foreign maign activities and election security threats, as you will see in today’s update. In particular, I would like to take this opportunity to draw your attention to concerning Iranian activity.

As I noted in testimony to the Congress in May, Iran is becoming increasingly aggressive in their foreign influence efforts, seeking to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions, as we have seen them do in the past, including in prior election cycles. They continue to adapt their cyber and influence activities, using social media platforms and issuing threats. It is likely they will continue to rely on their intelligence services in these efforts, as well as Iran-based online influencers, to promote their narratives.

In recent weeks, Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza, using a playbook we’ve seen other actors use over the years. We have observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.

I want to be clear that I know Americans who participate in protests are, in good faith, expressing their views on the conflict in Gaza – this intelligence does not indicate otherwise. Moreover, the freedom to express diverse views, when done peacefully, is essential to our democracy, but it is also important to warn of foreign actors who seek to exploit our debate for their own purposes.

Furthermore, Americans who are being targeted by this Iranian campaign may not be aware that they are interacting with or receiving support from a foreign government. We urge all Americans to remain vigilant as they engage online with accounts and actors they do not personally know.”

The Terrorist Threat

 Graham Allison and Michael Morrell at Foreign Affairs:

Testifying in December to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, [FBI Director Christopher] Wray said, “When I sat here last year, I walked through how we were already in a heightened threat environment.” Yet after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, “we’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole nother level,” he added. In speaking about those threats, Wray has repeatedly drawn attention to security gaps at the United States’ southern border, where thousands of people each week enter the country undetected.

Wray is not the only senior official issuing warnings. Since he became commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) in 2022, General Erik Kurilla has been pointing out the worrying capabilities of the terrorist groups his forces are fighting in the Middle East and South Asia. These include al Qaeda, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), and especially Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), the ISIS affiliate that operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Christine Abizaid, the outgoing director of the National Counterterrorism Center, described “an elevated global threat environment” while speaking at a conference in Doha last month. And in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee just last week, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, speaking about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States, said that the “threat level . . . has gone up enormously.”

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Observable trends add weight to these officials’ concerns. Most important is the growing number of both successful and foiled attacks. According to the Global Terrorism Index, deaths from terrorism increased by 22 percent from 2022 to 2023. This year has already seen the two large ISIS-K attacks in Iran and Russia. And were it not for the outstanding work of German intelligence and police, the list of successful acts of terrorism in the past few months would have been longer. German authorities arrested foreign nationals who were allegedly planning attacks on the Cologne Cathedral late last year and the Swedish parliament building in Stockholm in March.

Foiled plots inside the United States should be the ultimate wake-up call. In April 2022, the Justice Department charged an Iranian government official based in Tehran with attempting to hire a hit man to assassinate former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton. The following month, the FBI reported that it had thwarted the plans of an Iraqi national living in Ohio to smuggle four people across the southern border to assassinate former President George W. Bush. Most recently, the FBI—as part of the Biden administration’s effort to convince Congress to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—shared declassified intelligence with Politico showing that the agency had stopped a plot to attack critical infrastructure in the United States last fall. According to the FBI, the organizer inside the United States was in regular contact with a foreign terrorist group, had identified specific targets, and had made sufficient preparations to put the plan into motion.

Russian Influence Operations in the US

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are  prominent influencers.

Alex Finley. former CIA officer, writes at TNR:

Last year, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed that politicians in Germany, Italy, and Cyprus were paid by Russian operatives to introduce legislation literally written by Russian intelligence officers. The OCCRP also uncovered examples of parliamentary staff members, party activists, and members of think tanks publishing articles in European press outlets under their name, while the articles were actually written by Russian handlers. One activist from Austria even complained to his handler about the quality of one article that had been coordinated with the Kremlin. “I am not a robot,” he said. Nevertheless, he published the article under his name in a Swiss media outlet.

It is naïve to think the same pattern does not exist in the United States, given the ample evidence of coordinated pro-Russian talking points from several Republican politicians. Just this week, Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke to Steve Bannon about Ukraine’s persecution of Christians, which is a Kremlin talking point aimed at boosting the pro-Moscow wing of Ukraine’s Orthodox Church. The U.S. should be spending money on the border with Mexico, not on Ukraine aid? That’s a Kremlin talking point. Russia invaded Ukraine to defend itself against an expanding NATO? That’s a Kremlin talking point. Call for a cease-fire, and give Russia Crimea and eastern Ukraine? That’s a Kremlin talking point.

While we cannot say for sure if any Republican officials are on the Russian payroll in ways similar to their European counterparts, we can be sure that they’ve been approached. As the director of national intelligence wrote in 2021, Russian intelligence operatives and their proxies “sought to use prominent US persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to US officials and audiences. These Russian proxies met with and provided materials to Trump administration-linked US persons to advocate for formal investigations; hired a US firm to petition US officials; and attempted to make contact with several senior US officials. They also made contact with established US media figures.”

The Sit Room

 

Special Access Programs

Former CIA chief of staff Larry Pfeiffer at The Bulwark:

According to the indictment against Trump, eight of the TOP SECRET documents may have had information about or derived from so-called Special Access Programs (SAPs). The sensitivity of these documents was so great that prosecutors were obliged to redact even the codewords on the documents. The implication is that even publicly acknowledging the codenames of these projects, without discussing their operations at all, was deemed a great security risk.

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SAPs have three protection levels—acknowledged, unacknowledged, and waived. Acknowledged SAPs are ones whose existence is openly recognized and whose purpose may be identified publicly. Details of acknowledged SAPs remain classified and access protected by designated codewords. Presidential travel activities are often cited as examples—everyone knows the president travels, and often it’s public long in advance that the president will be in a certain place at a certain time: a U.N. meeting, a party convention, a State of the Union address, etc. What’s secret are the details of how the president will get to and from the events and how the Secret Service will protect him. Funding for acknowledged SAPs is generally unclassified.

Unacknowledged SAPs are those whose existence and purpose require greater protection. All information is classified, and funding is classified, unacknowledged, and not directly linked to the program. Under extremely limited circumstances, the normal reporting requirements of an unacknowledged SAP can be “waived” by the Secretary of Defense. Congressional oversight in those cases would be limited to oral notifications to the chair, ranking members, and staff directors of the respective appropriations and armed services committees.

To recap, of the 31 documents former President Trump is being charged with inappropriately storing at his resort hotel, eight may have contained information about or derived from our government’s most sensitive activities. In the wrong hands, the exposure of that information could risk the lives of U.S. and allied military and intelligence personnel, and foreign intelligence sources and their families—not to mention American civilians.

Jack Smith Statement

Special Counsel Jack Smith Delivers Statement
Washington, DC ~
Friday, June 9, 2023

Good afternoon. Today, an indictment was unsealed charging Donald J. Trump with felony violations of our national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

This indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida, and I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.

The men and women of the United States intelligence community and our armed forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people. Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.

Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice. And our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone. Applying those laws. Collecting facts. That’s what determines the outcome of an investigation. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The prosecutors in my office are among the most talented and experienced in the Department of Justice. They have investigated this case hewing to the highest ethical standards. And they will continue to do so as this case proceeds.

It’s very important for me to note that the defendants in this case must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. To that end, my office will seek a speedy trial in this matter. Consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused. We very much look forward to presenting our case to a jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida.

In conclusion. I would like to thank the dedicated public servants of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with whom my office is conducting this investigation and who worked tirelessly every day upholding the rule of law in our country. I’m deeply proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. Thank you very much.