Majorityrights News > Category: Espionage

Luke Ford, “New Yorker: ‘Birth of a White Supremacist – Mike Enoch’s transformation from leftist contrarian to nationalist shock jock”, 9 Oct 2017 by Luke Ford

I have many Jewish friends who find gentile nationalisms, particularly white nationalism, terrifying.

Nationalism means that you are devoted to your people. Jews are devoted to their people. Why shouldn’t goyim be devoted to their people?

To me, it’s not scary that there are white supremacists. There’s no inherent connection between that ideology and violence, any more than there is an inherent connection between Christian supremacism, Jewish supremacism, Islamic supremacism, black supremacism, etc, and violence.

It’s not scary when people hate your group. At one time or another, I’ve felt fleeting hatred for almost every group I’ve known (though I do not remember feeling that way about Jews).

Genocide happens when there is a dramatic clash of interests. Just because someone hates Jews or blacks or Christians is not a reliable predictor that the person is going to become violent.

Negative feelings about Jews are called anti-Semitism yet the Jewish Bible is filled with negative sentiments about Jews and Jews still regard the book as holy.

Just as I don’t hate any particular group of people, I don’t hate the MSM. They’re probably my primary source of information about the world. I take into account their biases and read them anyway.

The New Yorker, for example, publishes this interesting and valuable profile of Mike Enoch:

This summer, after a loose coalition of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Confederate apologists announced that they would hold a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, promotional flyers began to circulate on the Internet. The flyers included a list of names: the self-proclaimed thought leaders who planned to speak at the rally, arranged, Coachella-like, in order of prominence. At the top of the list was Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right” almost a decade ago, and who has been so successful at making himself the poster boy of the movement that he was once sucker punched while standing on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C. Farther down the list were Jason Kessler, the Charlottesville resident who organized the rally; Matthew Heimbach, who has been called “the affable, youthful face of hate in America”; and Christopher Cantwell, who would later star in a Vice documentary about Charlottesville, unpacking a small arsenal of guns and saying, among other things, “We’re not nonviolent—we’ll fucking kill these people if we have to.”

The second person listed on the flyers, immediately below Spencer, was a white-nationalist shock jock named Mike Enoch. The name might have been unfamiliar to most Americans, but, to an inner cadre of Web-fluent neo-fascists, Enoch is an influential and divisive figure. In May, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted, “Hate him or love him—Mike Enoch is someone to pay close attention to.” Just three years ago, Enoch could be heard mocking Spencer (“talks like a fag”) and Cantwell (“a dickhead turtle”), criticizing their ideologies as too extreme. But that was before his radicalization was complete. These days, Enoch routinely refers to African-Americans as “animals” and “savages,” and expresses “skepticism” about how many Jews died in the Holocaust. Apart from interviews with Spencer and Cantwell, who are now his close friends and ideological allies, he largely eschews attention from the media. He prefers to speak—voluminously, articulately, and with an uncanny lack of emotion—on his own podcast, “The Daily Shoah.” (The title, a pun about the Holocaust by way of Comedy Central, reflects the overall tone of the show.) “The Daily Shoah” is the most popular of more than two dozen podcasts on the Right Stuff, a Web site that Enoch founded in 2012. Once an obscure blog about “post-libertarian” politics, the site is now a breeding ground for some of the most florid racism on the Internet. One of its pages is set up to accept donations, in dollars or bitcoins; another is devoted to “fashy memes,” songs and images that extol fascism in an antic, joking-but-not-joking tone. The podcasts—meandering, amateurish talk shows hosted by bilious young men who make Rush Limbaugh sound like Mr. Rogers—are not available on iTunes, Spotify, or any other major platform, and yet collectively they draw tens of thousands of listeners a week.

The Charlottesville rally, on August 12th, immediately erupted in violence, and the police shut it down before any of the speakers could take the stage. A few of them reconvened in a park two miles away. Enoch, surrounded by small concentric circles of reporters, protesters, and counterprotesters, stood on a wooden riser in the shade of a dogwood tree. A tall, stout man with a husky voice and a grim, downturned mouth, he wore aviator sunglasses, a slight beard, and the unofficial uniform of the day: khakis and a white polo shirt. “We’re here to talk about white genocide, the deliberate and intentional displacement of the white race,” he said. “Have we heard this conspiracy theory of white privilege? This is a concept that was brought to us by Jewish intellectuals, to undermine our confidence in ourselves.” He finished his remarks and introduced the next speaker, David Duke. An hour later, James Alex Fields, Jr., wearing khakis and a white polo, drove a car into a crowd of people, killing Heather Heyer, a local counterprotester.

Enoch’s father, who is also named Mike, spent that Saturday at home. He lives in an upper-middle-class New Jersey suburb that is often listed among the most progressive towns in the country. “I made breakfast, and at some point I mowed the lawn,” he said recently. “Then, as I do every day, I sat down to read the New York Times.” He saw a photograph of a torch-wielding mob taken in Charlottesville the previous night. “I looked at the picture for a while, and I couldn’t find Mike anywhere,” he said. He scrutinized other photos online, and still didn’t see his son. “I said, ‘Thank God,’ and I went about my day.”

On Sunday, after he got home from church, he saw that a relative had e-mailed him a YouTube link. He clicked on it: his son and David Duke, standing shoulder to shoulder. “It turned my stomach,” he said. “Until that moment, I had imagined that, whatever had caused him to go down this path, it could somehow be reversed, and he could come home again.”

Most of the bloggers and commenters on the Right Stuff use pseudonyms—Sneering Imperialist, Toilet Law, Ebolamericana, Death. “Mike Enoch” is a pseudonym, too. Over the years, on “The Daily Shoah,” he occasionally dropped hints about his identity, though he was careful not to reveal too much. He said that he lived with his wife in New York City—“which narrows it down to me and eight million other people”—and that he worked at a “normie” day job, which he would surely lose if his employers ever learned about his alter ego. As a child, he had attended church camps and public schools, where he’d been “programmed” to believe in universalism and equality. Most members of his immediate family were still “shitlibs”—committed liberals who had not yet seen the error of their ways.

In January, a group of anti-fascist activists dug up his personal information and released it against his will—an Internet-specific form of retribution known as doxing. Mike Enoch was actually Michael Enoch Isaac Peinovich, a thirty-nine-year-old computer programmer who worked at an e-publishing company and lived on the Upper East Side. As predicted, he lost his job. Someone printed out color photographs of his face and pasted them to telephone poles on the corner of Eighty-second Street and York Avenue: “Say Hi to Your Neo-Nazi Neighbor, Mike Peinovich!” The dox revealed that he had an older sister, a social worker who treated traumatized children, and an adopted younger brother, who was biracial and cognitively impaired. Perhaps most baffling of all, Mike’s wife, who was also identified in the dox, turned out to be Jewish.

At first, Enoch tried to insist that he wasn’t Peinovich, but he soon put up a post on the Right Stuff confirming his identity: “I won’t even bother denying it.” On white-nationalist message boards, including the Right Stuff itself, a few commenters accused Enoch of being “controlled opposition,” or demanded that he divorce his wife. (“I can’t believe all you fags still support this Jew fucker!”) Some held out for more information (“How Jewish? Because if 1/4 or less, I don’t give a shit”); others changed the subject (“I’m more disappointed by how fat he is than anything”).

A few days later on “The Daily Shoah,” Enoch and his co-hosts read dozens of notes from listeners who were remaining loyal to the podcast, some of whom had donated money to Enoch in his time of need. “My heart goes out to his wife,” one fan, a long-distance trucker, wrote. “If she is married to Mike, she must be a good individual.”

“That is a really nice thing to say,” Enoch said. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.” He didn’t mention that his wife had gone to stay with her mother in the Midwest.

Also included in the dox were two e-mail addresses, both purportedly belonging to Enoch. In general, I am opposed to doxing—I worry about vigilante mobs, false positives, slippery slopes—but not opposed enough, apparently, to overcome my curiosity. I e-mailed both addresses.

Enoch responded right away. He said that he didn’t want to talk—“I have a platform to tell my story that is bigger than yours”—and yet, every time I sent another e-mail, he sent one back. I made no secret of the fact that I found his views repugnant, but I added, truthfully, that I wanted to know how he’d ended up in this predicament and what he planned to do next. At one point, I wrote him a long note trying to persuade him to talk to me. His entire response was “You seem kinda mad.” We went back and forth for a while, but I had no real success in drawing him out, and eventually we both lost interest.

He later read our full exchange on “The Daily Shoah.” To his credit, he didn’t edit his responses to make them sound smarter, but he didn’t have to. According to the rules of online debate in the Right Stuff’s “Essential T.R.S. Troll Guide,” which I hadn’t read at the time, Enoch had won our exchange by default, because he had written fewer words and maintained his ironic detachment, whereas I had committed the greatest possible faux pas: letting myself be “triggered” into displaying emotion. After the podcast aired, a few of Enoch’s fans sent me nasty messages on Twitter. I figured that was the end of it.

Then I heard back from the other e-mail address. “I am not the Mike Peinovich to whom you addressed this email, but I am his father,” it read. “Until two days ago, I was totally unaware of his ‘alt-right’ activities. . . . I am struggling to understand how Mike E. (which is what we call him to distinguish him from me and my father who was also Mike Peinovich) could have said, posted or tweeted the things that are attributed to him.”

I called Mike, Sr., and we talked for a long time. It was the week of Donald Trump’s Inauguration, and he spoke in the tone that a lot of liberals were using then—weary and a bit dazed, as if struggling to shake a bad dream. “We tried to give our kids good values,” he said. “Mike E. went to good schools, and he loved being part of his church youth group. We knew that he was an outspoken Trump supporter, and he was very much the only one in the family, so we agreed, at a certain point, not to talk about politics.” He had listened to the podcast for long enough to recognize his son’s voice and profane sense of humor, but lasted only a few minutes before turning it off.

Four days after the rally in Charlottesville, I went to meet Mike, Sr., and his wife, Billie, in New Jersey. They live in an Arts and Crafts house on a tree-lined block near the center of town. Mike, Sr., answered the door. He was taller and thinner than his son, with silver hair and rimless glasses, but I saw the resemblance right away: the square jaw, the downturned mouth.

Billie and Mike are retired, and they spend several months a year travelling. They gave me a tour of the house, pointing out items they’d collected: Persian rugs, Mexican pottery, a floor-mounted globe. Mike was once a professor of Old English at the University of Pennsylvania, and his study contains several dictionaries and translations of “Beowulf,” along with contemporary books such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me.” We sat in armchairs in the living room, and he talked at length about his ancestors. “My grandfather helped drive the K.K.K. out of North Dakota,” he said. “My other grandfather came from Yugoslavia, fleeing religious persecution.”

I find less than 5% of the articled above unfair. Overall, it is an important read. It is a compelling read. It is a great read. My hats off to the author and to the people who participated in the profile. I sense that the author was generally fair and honest.

As an Orthodox Jew, I don’t lose any sleep over Mike Enoch and company. I don’t fear that they’re going to carry out mass violence. So far, the Alt Right has been a non-violent movement, as George Hawley notes in his new book. Rather than fearing the Alt Right, I think it is more important to understand the Alt Right and that requires not just articles about them by hostile parties such as the author above, but also by reading the best Alt Right intellectuals such as Richard Spencer, Kevin MacDonald, Gregory Hood, Greg Johnson, Andrew Joyce, etc.

I feel drawn to write about outlaws. In some ways, members of the Alt Right remind me of pornographers. Outwardly, most pornographers proclaim they have no interest in talking to the MSM and yet most yearn to talk for hours to reporters. They want to be listened to by people in prestigious positions and they want to be acknowledged in mainstream outlets. Most Alt Righters are the same way. Most proclaim they never talk to the press, but as the Mike Enoch example shows, once you get them going, they’ll talk to you for hours. They’ll spill their guts. They’ll even shed tears over broken family relationships.

If I were (((Luke Ford))) I would not be too worried about Mike Enoch (or those in his orbit) either.

Related:

TRS founder Michael ‘Enoch’ Peinovich was exposed as being a Russian Jew.

Next-level TRS: Michael ‘Enoch’ Peinovich is actually Michael ‘Enoch’ ENOCKSON Peinovich-Sippel.

(((Mike Peinovich, the “Serbian”))) who hates Albanians and thinks they should have been genocided.

The Mainichi, “Reports: Google uncovers ads by Russian operatives”, 9 Oct 2017:

NEW YORK (AP)—Russian operatives likely spent tens of thousands of dollars on ads across Google products, including YouTube and Google search, according to reports.

Accounts connected with the Russian government spent $4,700 on search and display ads, while another $53,000 was spent on ads with political material that were purchased from Russian territory, from Russian internet addresses, or with Russian currency, The New York Times reported . The Times cited an unnamed person familiar with the ongoing inquiry by the search giant.

The Washington Post earlier reported that the technology behemoth uncovered the Russian-backed disinformation campaign as it considers whether to testify before Congress next month, also citing anonymous sources familiar with the investigation. Social media companies Facebook and Twitter have already agreed to testify.

The reports said the company discovered the Russian presence by analyzing information shared by Twitter and Facebook, as well its own research and tips from outside researchers.

In a statement, Google said it has a “set of strict ads policies including limits on political ad targeting and prohibitions on targeting based on race and religion.”

“We are taking a deeper look to investigate attempts to abuse our systems, working with researchers and other companies, and will provide assistance to ongoing inquiries,” the statement continued.

Facebook recently shared about 3,000 Russian-backed ads with Congress.

The lack of turn out from Milwaukee voters is suspicious.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin directed a disinformation campaign aimed at helping Donald Trump win the presidential election.

“Conservative” talk-show hosts Charilie Sykes and John Ziegler talk about their disillusionment with Trump and his supporters; how his campaign was facilitated by the influx of conspiratorial and other fringe right influences, particularly when the Drudge Report started linking to and thus mainstreaming and “normalizing” Alex Jones.

Active Measures is suspected of having had a significant impact on the Milwaukee area of Wisconsin in terms of voter turn out.

ABC.Net.Au, “Twitter shuts down 201 accounts linked to Russian propaganda operatives who posted to Facebook”, 29 Sept 2017:

Twitter has shut down hundreds of accounts that were tied to the same Russian operatives who posted thousands of political ads to Facebook during the 2016 US election.

The company said it found 22 accounts which were directly linked to the 450 Facebook accounts, found earlier this month.

It also found a further 179 accounts related or linked to those Twitter accounts.

None of these accounts had been registered as advertisers, and all of them had already been or were immediately suspended, most for violating spam rules.

Twitter said Russian media outlet RT — which has strong links to the Kremlin — spent at least $274,100 on advertisements on the platform in 2016.

The three accounts — @RT_com, @RT_America, and @ActualidadRT — also promoted 1,823 tweets the company says “definitely or potentially targeted” the US market.

Those ad buys alone topped the $100,000 that Facebook had linked to a Russian propaganda operation, a revelation that prompted calls from some Democrats for new disclosure rules for online political ads.

Although Twitter’s disclosures in briefings to US congressional staff and a public blog post were its most detailed to date on the issue, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee called the company’s statements “deeply disappointing”.

Senator Mark Warner, whose panel is investigating alleged Russian interference in the election, said Twitter officials had not answered many questions about the Russian use of the platform and that it was still subject to foreign manipulation.

Twitter has been criticised as being too lax in policing fake or abusive accounts.

Technology companies including Twitter, Facebook and Google were asked by intelligence committees earlier this week to testify at a public hearing on November 1 about alleged Russian interference.

The pressure on the companies reflects growing concern among politicians in both parties that social networks may have played a key role in Moscow’s attempts to spread disinformation and propaganda to sow political discord in the United States and help elect President Donald Trump.

Moscow denies any such activity and Mr Trump has denied any talk of collusion.

In front of building at 55 Savushkina Street in St Petersburg, Russia, where the Kremlin has a workforce of hundreds patrolling the internet as trolls. Youtube video

ABC.Net.Au, “Inside Russia’s Troll Factory: Controlling debate and stifling dissent in internet forums and social media”, 12 Aug 2015 -

Inside an anonymous building in St Petersburg, the Kremlin commands a workforce of hundreds that patrol the internet as trolls — assuming false identities online.

Their task is to control debate and stifle dissent in forums and on social media.

The department at the centre of this effort is officially known as the Internet Research Agency.

But its reputation has earned it another name by which it is widely known: the Troll Factory.

Andrei Soshnikov is the investigative journalist who has led the efforts to expose the Troll Factory.

“Generally, they produce lies in a 24-hour regime, seven days a week,” said Andrei Soshnikov, the investigative journalist who has led the efforts to expose the Troll Factory.

“In the morning, in the day, at night, something going on in world, or in Russia or St Petersburg, you will always find the comments from the Troll Factory.”

Soshnikov started monitoring the activities at the Internet Research Agency a few years ago, not long after he graduated from journalism school.

After his first reports were published, he hit the jackpot.

He was contacted by activist Luda Savchuk, who had been hired to work as a troll.

“I spent two months there,” Ms Savchuk told 7.30.

Photo: Luda Savchuck said she accepts the consequences that come with shining the light on Russia’s trolls. (7.30)

“I saw that this is really a big factory to produce paid comments, posts, pictures, video, any content we face on the internet is produced there.

“There are four floors there, very many departments dealing with social networks, LiveJournal (the popular Russian online forum), YouTube, forums with the websites of different cities.”

Working together, Ms Savchuk and Soshnikov published details of the Troll Factory’s operations.

At least 300 employees are believed to work in the building.

Ms Savchuk managed to capture the only video ever filmed inside — a few shaky seconds of trolls at work.

Ms Savchuk managed to capture the only video ever filmed inside — a few shaky seconds of trolls at work.

“News is sent to your computer with instructions about how it should be presented,” she said.

“It is not just objective information that is required, but in which tone it should be presented, to which conclusion one should drive a reader.”

When opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot dead within sight of the Kremlin in March, suspicion immediately fell on those with links to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Ms Savchuk said the orders at the Troll Factory were handed down quickly.

“They were just told: ‘Nemtsov is killed. Everyone should urgently concentrate on this job. We shall write this and that’,” she said.

“On that day they were writing that it was a provocation against the authorities, that he was killed by ‘his own people’.”
Kremlin moves focus to social networks

After smothering political dissent, the Kremlin is now targeting social networks.

They have been viewed as a threat since anti-Putin protests seemingly sprung up out of nowhere in late 2011.

The driving force behind the brief opposition surge was social media.

Journalist Andrei Soldatov writes about Russia’s security agencies and their extensive online surveillance.

“You don’t need any kind of organisations to do these things,” he told 7.30.

Andrei Soshnikov is the investigative journalist who has led the efforts to expose the Troll Factory

“And that frightened the Kremlin in 2011.

“They still believe social networks [are] a major tool that might, if you have any kind of crisis, help people to send people in the thousands to the streets.”

Right now, the priority topic for the Kremlin’s trolls is Ukraine.

As the war in eastern Ukraine has dragged on, the Troll Factory has played a key role in the huge Russian propaganda campaign to demonise the Ukrainian government.

“In Ukraine, you don’t have people, you don’t have someone you can talk to,” Soldatov said summing up the stereotypes reinforced by the Kremlin’s trolls.

“You have only fascists.”

The Troll Factory’s actual address is 55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg.

The building is surrounded by cameras, and employees do not appreciate being filmed.

Consequences for revealing secrecy behind trolls

“You have not just enemies, but someone who [is] completely unhuman.”

7.30 tried to speak with someone from the Internet Research Agency, but the request was denied.

All of the companies listed in the directory in the building’s foyer are fake.

Soshnikov said none of them could be found on St Petersburg’s corporate register.

The secrecy makes Ms Savchuk’s revelations about the work going on here all the more exceptional.

“I think Luda is a hero,” Soshnikov said.

“I had serious concerns about my safety and I still have them now.” - Luda Savchuk.

“Here in Russia is big atmosphere, strange atmosphere, of fear, of lies. And not everyone will act as a normal citizen, or patriot, in this situation.”

Ms Savchuk and others are prepared to fight back against the methodical re-establishment of the security state in Russia.

She accepts the consequences that come with shining the light on Russia’s trolls.

“I had serious concerns about my safety and I still have them now. Because the people who run this factory are quite serious,” she said.

But she has no regrets.

“I did this with my eyes open.”

Related Story: European & Asian Regional Alliance

Equifax announced Thursday that its systems were hacked in May, exposing 143 million consumers’ personal information.

NPR, “Hackers Accessed The Personal Data Of 143 Million People, Equifax Says”, 7 Sept 2017:

Equifax, an international credit reporting agency, has announced that a cybersecurity breach exposed the personal information of 143 million U.S. consumers. In a statement released Thursday, the Atlanta-based agency acknowledged that “criminals exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files.”

Those files include data such as Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses and, Equifax adds, “in some instances, driver’s license numbers.”

For a span of roughly two months — from mid-May through July 29, when Equifax says it uncovered the breach — hackers had access to this information, as well as the credit card numbers of about 209,000 consumers and “certain dispute documents with personal identifying information” of about 182,000.

All told, the number of American consumers affected constitutes about 44 percent of the U.S. population.

Equifax did not explain why more than two months passed before it discovered the hack, which also affected an unspecified number of consumers from Canada and the U.K.

Rick Smith, Chairman and CEO of Equifax, on Cybersecurity Incident Involving Consumer Data.

New Observer, “Jews Arrested for World’s Biggest Denial of Service (DDOS) Attack System” 11 Aug 2017:

Israel has once again maintained its reputation as the world’s leading online fraud and subversion center with the arrest of two Jews in that country for running the planet’s biggest Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack system, which crashes websites by overwhelming them with fake “pings.

According to an article on the Krebs on Security blog, the two arrested Jews together founded the attack system known commercially as vDOS, the “largest and most profitable cyber attack-for-hire service online.”

The two were only arrested by Israeli police after the Federal Bureau for Investigation (FBI) in the U.S. demanded that the Jewish ethnostate take action, in a move similar to the arrest of the Jew hacker who made all the fake “death threats” against Jewish Community Centers (JCC) in America and around the world.

(In that incident, the Jews arrested for making bomb threats to the JCCs had been operating freely in Israel for over two years, and had made over 1,000 such calls to the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They had even been paid in bitcoin for their activities, and were only arrested after the FBI went to Israel and demanded that the Israelis take action).

The vDos service apparently “attracted tens of thousands of paying customers and facilitated more than two million distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the four year period it was in business,” the Krebs blog revealed.

The two Jews, named as Yarden “applej4ck” Bidani and Itay “p1st” Huri were arrested last week Thursday and then released Friday on the equivalent of about USD $10,000 bond each. Israeli authorities also seized their passports, placed them under house arrest for 10 days, and forbade them from using the Internet or telecommunications equipment of any kind for 30 days.

vDOS is a “booter” service that has earned in excess of $600,000 over the past two years helping customers coordinate more than 150,000 so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks designed to knock Web sites offline.

The two men’s identities were exposed because vDOS got massively hacked, spilling secrets about tens of thousands of paying customers and their targets. A copy of that database was obtained by KrebsOnSecurity.

Huri and Bidani were fairly open about their activities, or at least not terribly careful to cover their tracks. Yarden’s now abandoned Facebook page contains several messages from friends who refer to him by his hacker nickname “AppleJ4ck” and discuss DDoS activities.

The fact that the Israeli government knew about their activities is clear from the facts of the case, as outlined by the Krebs Security blog:

vDOS’s customer support system was configured to send a text message to Huri’s phone number in Israel — the same phone number that was listed in the Web site registration records for the domain v-email[dot]org, a domain the proprietors used to help manage the site. At the end of August 2016, Huri and Bidani authored a technical paper on DDoS attack methods which was published in the Israeli security e-zine Digital Whisper. In it, Huri signs his real name and says he is 18 years old and about to be drafted into the Israel Defense Force (IDF). Bidani co-authored the paper under the alias “Raziel.b7@gmail.com,” an email address that was assigned to one of the administrators of vDOS.

Earlier, the Times of Israel revealed that the online “binary options industry” is headquartered in the Jewish state and specifically targets non-Jews in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. This particular swindle brings in over a billion dollars, and employs thousands of Jews cheating “naive would-be investors via a range of corrupt practices.”

Rob Goldstone, left, shown in contact with Trump prior to his son’s meeting with Goldstone that promised high level Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Oh, Wait. Maybe It Was Collusion.

New York Times, Op-Ed Contributors JOHN SIPHER and STEVE HALL, August 2, 2017:

Did the Trump campaign collude with Russian agents trying to manipulate the course of the 2016 election? Some analysts have argued that the media has made too much of the collusion narrative; that Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Kremlin-linked Russians last year was probably innocent (if ill-advised); or that Russian operatives probably meant for the meeting to be discovered because they were not trying to recruit Mr. Kushner and Mr. Trump as agents, but mainly trying to undermine the American political system.

We disagree with these arguments. We like to think of ourselves as fair-minded and knowledgeable, having between us many years of experience with the C.I.A. dealing with Russian intelligence services. It is our view not only that the Russian government was running some sort of intelligence operation involving the Trump campaign, but also that it is impossible to rule out the possibility of collusion between the two.

The original plan drawn up by the Russian intelligence services was probably multilayered. They could have begun an operation intended to disrupt the presidential campaign, as well as an effort to recruit insiders to help them over time — the two are not mutually exclusive. It is the nature of Russian covert actions (or as the Russians would call them, “active measures”) to adapt over time, providing opportunities for other actions that extend beyond the original intent.

It is entirely plausible, for example, that the original Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers was an effort simply to collect intelligence and get an idea of the plans of the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate. Once derogatory information emerged from that operation, the Russians might then have seen an opportunity for a campaign to influence or disrupt the election. When Donald Trump Jr. responded “I love it” to proffers from a Kremlin-linked intermediary to provide derogatory information obtained by Russia on Hillary Clinton, the Russians might well have thought that they had found an inside source, an ally, a potential agent of influence on the election.

The goal of the Russian spy game is to nudge a person to step over the line into an increasingly conspiratorial relationship. First, for a Russian intelligence recruitment operation to work, they would have had some sense that Donald Trump Jr. was a promising target. Next, as the Russians often do, they made a “soft” approach, setting the bait for their target via the June email sent by Rob Goldstone, a British publicist, on behalf of a Russian pop star, Emin Agalarov.

They then employed a cover story — adoptions — to make it believable to the outside world that there was nothing amiss with the proposed meetings. They bolstered this idea by using cutouts, nonofficial Russians, for the actual meeting, enabling the Trump team to claim — truthfully — that there were no Russian government employees at the meeting and that it was just former business contacts of the Trump empire who were present.

When the Trump associates failed to do the right thing by informing the F.B.I., the Russians probably understood that they could take the next step toward a more conspiratorial relationship. They knew what bait to use and had a plan to reel in the fish once it bit.

While we don’t know for sure whether the email solicitation was part of an intelligence ploy, there are some clues. A month after the June meeting at Trump Tower, WikiLeaks, a veritable Russian front, released a dump of stolen D.N.C. emails. The candidate and campaign surrogates increasingly mouthed talking points that seemed taken directly from Russian propaganda outlets, such as that there had been a terrorist attack on a Turkish military base, when no such attack had occurred. Also, at this time United States intelligence reportedly received indications from European intelligence counterparts about odd meetings between Russians and Trump campaign representatives overseas.

Of course, to determine whether collusion occurred, we would have to know whether the Trump campaign continued to meet with Russian representatives subsequent to the June meeting. The early “courting” stage is almost always somewhat open and discoverable. Only after the Russian intelligence officer develops a level of control can the relationship be moved out of the public eye. John Brennan, the former director of the C.I.A., recently testified, “Frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late.”

Even intelligence professionals who respect one another and who understand the Russians can and often do disagree. On the Trump collusion question, the difference of opinion comes down to this: Would the Russians use someone like Mr. Goldstone to approach the Trump campaign? Our friend and former colleague Daniel Hoffman argued in this paper that this is unlikely — that the Russians would have relied on trained agents. We respectfully disagree. We believe that the Russians might well have used Mr. Goldstone. We also believe the Russians would have seen very little downside to trying to recruit someone on the Trump team — a big fish. If the fish bit and they were able to reel it in, the email from Mr. Goldstone could remain hidden and, since it was from an acquaintance, would be deniable if found. (Exactly what the Trump team is doing now.)

If the fish didn’t take the bait, the Russians would always have had the option to weaponize the information later to embarrass the Trump team. In addition, if the Russians’ first objective was chaos and disruption, the best way to accomplish that would have been to have someone on the inside helping. It is unlikely that the Russians would not use all the traditional espionage tools available to them.

However, perhaps the most telling piece of information may be the most obvious. Donald Trump himself made numerous statements in support of Russia, Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks during the campaign. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his team have gone out of their way to hide contacts with Russians and lied to the public about it. Likewise, Mr. Trump has attacked those people and institutions that could get to the bottom of the affair. He fired his F.B.I. director James Comey, criticized and bullied his attorney general and deputy attorney general, denigrated the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and assails the news media, labeling anything he dislikes “fake news.” Innocent people don’t tend to behave this way.

The overall Russian intent is clear: disruption of the United States political system and society, a goal that in the Russian view was best served by a Trump presidency. What remains to be determined is whether the Russians also attempted to suborn members of the Trump team in an effort to gain their cooperation. This is why the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is so important. It is why the F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation, also quietly progressing in the background, is critical. Because while a Russian disruption operation is certainly plausible, it is not inconsistent with a much darker Russian goal: gaining an insider ally at the highest levels of the United States government.

In short, and regrettably, collusion is not off the table.

John Sipher (@john_sipher), a former chief of station for the C.I.A., worked for over 27 years in Russia, Europe and Asia and now writes for The Cipher Brief and works for CrossLead, a consulting company. Steve Hall (@StevenLHall1) is a former C.I.A. chief of Russian operations and a CNN national security analyst.

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The web connecting the Trump administration to Russia

From Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to former campaign director Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s allies have business and personal connections to Russia. As Congress and the FBI look into Russia’s involvement with the 2016 election, those connect (Natalie Fertig and Patrick Gleason McClatchy).

McClatchy DC, “Trump-Russia investigators probe Jared Kushner-run digital operation”, 12 July 2017:

WASHINGTON

Investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation – overseen by Jared Kushner – helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Congressional and Justice Department investigators are focusing on whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton, according to several people familiar with the parallel inquiries.

Also under scrutiny is the question of whether Trump associates or campaign aides had any role in assisting the Russians in publicly releasing thousands of emails, hacked from the accounts of top Democrats, at turning points in the presidential race, mainly through the London-based transparency web site WikiLeaks.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told McClatchy he wants to know whether Russia’s “fake or damaging news stories” were “coordinated in any way in terms of targeting or in terms of timing or in terms of any other measure … with the (Trump) campaign.”

By Election Day, an automated Kremlin cyberattack of unprecedented scale and sophistication had delivered critical and phony news about the Democratic presidential nominee to the Twitter and Facebook accounts of millions of voters. Some investigators suspect the Russians targeted voters in swing states, even in key precincts.

Russia’s operation used computer commands knowns as “bots” to collect and dramatically heighten the reach of negative or fabricated news about Clinton, including a story in the final days of the campaign accusing her of running a pedophile ring at a Washington pizzeria.

One source familiar with Justice’s criminal probe said investigators doubt Russian operatives controlling the so-called robotic cyber commands that fetched and distributed fake news stories could have independently “known where to specifically target … to which high-impact states and districts in those states.”

All of the sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation, led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, is confidential.

Top Democrats on the committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election have signaled the same.

Schiff said he wants the House panel to determine whether Trump aides helped Russia time its cyberattacks or target certain voters and whether there was “any exchange of information, any financial support funneled to organizations that were doing this kind of work.”

Trump son-in-law Kushner, now a senior adviser to the president and the only current White House aide known to be deemed a “person of interest” in the Justice Department investigation, appears to be under the microscope in several respects. His real estate finances and December meetings with Russia’s ambassador and the head of a sanctioned, state-controlled bank are also being examined.

Kushner’s “role as a possible cut-out or conduit for Moscow’s influence operations in the elections,” including his niche overseeing the digital operations, will be closely looked at, said the source knowledgeable about the Justice Department inquiry.

Kushner joined Donald Trump Jr. and Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort at a newly disclosed June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York.. The meeting, revealed by The New York Times, followed emails in which Trump Jr. was told the lawyer for the Russian government would provide him with incriminating information on Clinton and he replied “If it’s what you say I love it.”

That disclosure could only serve to heighten interest in whether there was digital collaboration.

Mike Carpenter, who in January left a senior Pentagon post where he worked on Russia matters, also has suspicions about collaboration between the campaign and Russia’s cyber operatives.

“There appears to have been significant cooperation between Russia’s online propaganda machine and individuals in the United States who were knowledgeable about where to target the disinformation,” he said, without naming any American suspects.

Trump has repeatedly repudiated or equivocated about the finding of four key intelligence agencies – the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and the Directorate of National Intelligence – that Russian cyber operatives meddled with the U.S. election.

Last Friday, during their first face-to-face meeting, Trump questioned Putin about Russia’s role in the election meddling and Putin denied culpability, said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was present. Trump then said the two countries should find ways to move forward in their relationship, Tillerson said.

A Russian official who was at the meeting said the two sides agreed to form a working group to address cybersecurity, including interference in other countries’ internal affairs. However, Trump backtracked Sunday night, saying in a tweet that he doesn’t believe such an effort can happen.

As more has been learned about the breadth of the Russian cyber onslaught, congressional Democrats have shown growing resolve to demand that the Republican-controlled intelligence committees fully investigate ways in which Trump associates may have conspired with the Russians.

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