Intelligence

The disinformation hoax

Featured image In late March Tablet published Jacob Siegel’s “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.” Subhead accompanied by the profile of a blackbird’s head: “Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation.” (The subhead and graphic allude to the Wallace Stevens poem). It’s a long-form essay that runs to some 13,000 words. The introduction is followed by a table of contents with links to the chapters: I. Russophobia Returns, Unexpectedly: The »

The dirtiest trick, take 2

Featured image The letter of the Deep State 51 condemning the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop reportage as consistent with a Russian information operation or Russian disinformation, as advertised by Natasha Bertrand and Politico, must be the dirtiest American political dirty trick of all time. At any rate, it is up there with the Steele Dossier. John updated the story with the latest evidence yesterday. We now know for a fact »

“Russian Disinformation” Memo Was a Biden Campaign Op

Featured image We have known for a long time that the Steele “dossier” was created by and for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. It was the most successful bit of disinformation of modern times. The second most successful, perhaps, was the absurd claim that the obviously-authentic Hunter Biden laptop somehow constituted “Russian disinformation.” How and why that could be true, no one ever explained. The provenance of the laptop has never been »

It ain’t me, babe, Blinken edition

Featured image Secretary of State Antony Blinken sat down for an interview with Fox News Channel’s Benjamin Hall yesterday. Good for both of them — it might have been Hall’s first day back on the job from the devastating injuries he suffered covering the war in Ukraine and he had the temerity to ask Blinken an uncomfortable question or two. Blinken was nervously blinkin’ in response to Hall’s question about his putative »

Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?

Featured image It is great fun to joke about how the Clintons must be the force behind the suspicious death of Jeffrey Epstein in his New York City jail cell in 2019, but after the bombshell story published this morning in the Wall Street Journal about heretofore unknown close connections Epstein had we’re moved to ask: who didn’t have a motive for wanting him gone? The story is behind the Journal‘s paywall, »

Notes on the Twitter Files (20)

Featured image I have tried to keep up with the Twitter Files in this series of notes to which I have added a separate series of footnotes. I think the revelations of the Twitter Files are the biggest story out there. The silence of the mainstream media in the story is certainly suggestive. Andrew Lowenthal has now added a twentieth installment of the Twitter Files in a 36-part thread he calls “The »

News blackout in effect

Featured image Have you heard that the Biden campaign orchestrated the lying letter of the Deep State 51 that then-candidate Biden found so useful in the 2020 presidential campaign? I called it “The dirtiest trick.” It seems to be something of a secret. Matt Taibbi observes: “An all-time media blackout is in effect. We’re experiencing real-time Sovietization.” Taibbi writes at his Racket News site: It transpires that the infamous incident before the »

The dirtiest trick

Featured image The letter of the Deep State 51 condemning the New York Post’s Hunter Biden’s laptop reportage as consistent with a Russian information operation or Russian disinformation, as advertised by Natasha Bertrand and Politico, must be the dirtiest American political dirty trick of all time. At any rate, it is up there with the Steele Dossier. We now know for a fact that the letter was itself a disinformation operation orchestrated »

A Chinese police station of our own

Featured image One has to turn to the national and international press for the news that Minneapolis may serve as the host to one of the six or seven clandestine Chinese “police stations” reportedly operating on American soil. The New York Post reports on the matter in “After FBI busts Chinese ‘police station’ in NYC, six more exposed in US” and the Daily Mail in “China may have up to six more »

FBI catching up

Featured image The New York Times has seven bylines on its story identifying Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira as “[t]he leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months.” That would be the group to which the leaker — Mr. OG — belonged, per the Washington Post this morning. At any rate, Teixeira dos not seem to conform »

About that leaker

Featured image The Washington Post purports to have identified the leaker of the sensitive Pentagon documents that were rolled out on social media earlier this year and reported by the New York Times in this April 8 story (and several follow-ups since then including this one today). Now the Washington Post claims to have identified the leaker in “Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says,” by Shane Harris »

About that leak

Featured image National Review’s Jim Geraghty had a good account of the intelligence breach that has come to light in the past few days. Geraghty’s Morning Jolt yesterday was headlined “The Biggest Exposure of Classified Secrets Since Edward Snowden.” Geraghty does a good job of tracing the rollout of the leaks online since early this year. Today’s Politico Playbook follows up with “Anatomy of a megaleak.” Reuters has a “factbox” summary here. »

Beyond Baghdad Bob

Featured image The Biden administration has rendered its final judgement on our catastrophic exit from Afghanistan. Insofar as it went poorly, you will be shocked to learn, it was Trump’s fault. The Washington Free Beacon’s Ben Wilson reports on the administration’s unclassified National Security Council summary that was released yesterday. NSC spokesman John Kirby answered questions at a press conference minutes after the summary was released. The White House has posted transcript »

13 ways of looking at disinformation

Featured image Last week Tablet published Jacob Siegel’s “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.” Subhead accompanied by the profile of a blackbird’s head: “Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation.” (The subhead and graphic allude to the Wallace Stevens poem). Siegel’s magnum opus runs to some 13,000 words. The introduction is followed by a table of contents with links to the chapters: I. Russophobia Returns, Unexpectedly: The Origins of Contemporary »

A Twitter Files footnote (15)

Featured image Michael Shellenberger touches on several of the most important themes that emerge from the Twitter Files in the interview with Joe Rogan that RealClearPolitics has posted here (with transcript). Shellenberger is one of the journalists who participated in the excavation and reporting of the Twitter Files. It is useful to have his assessment of the findings, among which is this: Over time we kept finding all these weird, “Oh, FBI »

Rockin’ pneumonia or the Wuhan flu? A look back [With comment by John]

Featured image The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend’s big story about the probable origin of the Covid-19 virus in China’s Wuhan lab. In the related editorial this morning the Journal calls its scoop “Another turn in the Covid lab-leak story.” The editorial harks back to the April 2020 op-ed column “Coronavirus and the laboratories in Wuhan” by Senator Tom Cotton. Senator Cotton has posted the column in accessible form here. Today’s »

MS. found at UD

Featured image By reference to “MS.” I am reverting to my preferred euphemism for classified documents in the unauthorized possession of Joe Biden. In today’s installment of the saga we learn that the FBI has conducted two searches of the archives of Biden’s papers that the president has deposited at the University of Delaware under restrictive conditions. CNN reports: Investigators retrieved materials from two university locations on two different days. The material »