"RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA..." Interesting Twitter thread

Click

1. The person who led the relevant section, Charles McGonigal, has just been charged with taking money from the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Follow this thread to see just how this connects to the victory of Trump, the Russian war in Ukraine, and U.S. national security. 1/20
   
   
2. The reason I was thinking about Trump & Putin in 2016 was a pattern. Russia had sought to control Ukraine, using social media, money, & a pliable head of state. Russia backed Trump the way that it had backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, in the hopes of soft control 2/20
   
   
3. Trump & Yanukovych were similar figures: interested in money, & in power to make or shield money. And therefore vulnerable partners for Putin. They also shared a political advisor: Paul Manafort. He worked for Yanukovych from 2005-2015, taking over Trump's campaign in 2016. 3/20
   
   
4. You might remember Manafort's ties to Russia from 2016. He (and Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr.) met with Russians in June 2016 in Trump Tower as part of, as the broker of the meeting called it, "the Russian government's support for Trump" (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 237). 4/20
   
   
5.  Manafort had to resign as Trump's campaign manager in August 2016 when news broke that he had received $12.7 million in cash from Yanukovych. But these details are just minor elements of Manafort's dependence on Russia. (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 235). 5/20
   
   
6. Manafort worked for Deripaska, the same Russian oligarch to whom McGonigal is linked, between 2006 and 2009. Manafort's assignment was to soften up the U.S for Russian influence. He promised "a model that can greatly benefit the Putin government." (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 234). 6/20
   
   
7. While Manafort worked for Trump in 2016, though, Manafort's dependence on Russia was deeper. He owed Deripaska money, not a position one would want to be in. Manafort offered Deripaska "private briefings" on the campaign. He was hoping "to get whole." (#RoadToUnfreedom, 234) 7/20
   
   
8. Reconsider how the FBI treated the Trump-Putin connection in 2016. Trump and other Republicans screamed that the FBI had overreached. In retrospect, it seems the exact opposite took place. The issue of Russian influence was framed in a way convenient for Russia and Trump. 8/20
   
   
9. The FBI investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, focused on the narrow issue of personal connections between the Trump campaign and Russians. It missed Russia's cyber attacks and the social media campaign, which, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, won the election for Trump. 9/20
   
   
10. Once the issue of Russian soft control was framed narrowly as personal contact, Obama missed the big picture, and Trump had an easy defense. Trump knew that Russia was working for him, but the standard of guilt was placed so high that he could defend himself. 10/20
    
    
11. It is entirely inconceivable that McGonigal was unaware of Russia's 2016 cyber influence campaign on behalf of Trump. Even I was aware of it, and I had no expertise. It became one of the subjects of my book #RoadtoUnfreedom. 11/20
    
    
12. The FBI did investigate cyber later, and came to some correct conclusions. But this was after the election, and missed the Russian influence operations entirely. That was an obvious counterintelligence issue. Why did the FBI take so long, and miss the point? 12/20
    
    
13. I had no personal connection to this, but will just repeat what informed people said at the time: this sort of thing was supposed to go through the FBI counter-intelligence section in New York, where tips went to die. That is where McGonigal was in charge. 13/20
    
    
14. The cyber element is what McGonigal should have been making everyone aware of in 2016. In 2016, McGonigal was chief of the FBI's Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section. That October, he was put in charge of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI's NY office. 14/20
    
    
15. We need to understand why the FBI failed in 2016 to address the essence of an ongoing Russian influence operation. The character of that operation suggests that it would have been the responsibility of an FBI section whose head is now accused of taking Russian money. 15/20
    
    
16. Right after the McGonigal story broke, Kevin McCarthy ejected Adam Schiff from the House intelligence committee. Schiff is expert on Russian influence operations. It exhibits carelessness about national security to exclude him. It is downright suspicious to exclude him now. 16/20
    
    
17. Back in June 2016, Kevin McCarthy expressed his suspicion that Donald Trump was under Putin's influence. He and other Republican members concluded that the risk of an embarrassment to their party was more important than American security. #RoadToUnfreedom, p. 255. 17/20
    
    
18. The Russian influence operation to get Trump elected was real. It serves no one to pretend otherwise. We are still learning about it. Denying that it happened makes the United States vulnerable to ongoing Russian operations. 18/20
    
    
19. I remember a certain frivolity from 2016. Trump was a curiosity. Russia was irrelevant. Nothing to take seriously. Then Trump was elected, blocked weapon sales to Ukraine, and tried to stage a coup. Now Ukrainians are dying every day in the defining conflict of our time. 19/20
    
    
20. The McGonigal question goes even beyond these issues. He had authority in the most sensitive possible investigations within U.S. intelligence. Sorting this out will require a concern for the United States that goes beyond party loyalty. 20/20.

I've read two of his books.

 

Serious scholar. 

 

Below, I just downloaded another of his books and have begun reading.

 

The year 2010 was a time of reflection. A financial crisis two years before had eliminated much of the world’s wealth, and a halting recovery was favoring the rich. An African American was president of the United States. The great adventure of Europe in the 2000s, the enlargement of the European Union to the east, seemed complete. A decade into the twenty-first century, two decades away from the end of communism in Europe, seven decades after the beginning of the Second World War, 2010 seemed like a year for reckonings.

I was working on one that year with a historian in his time of dying. I admired Tony Judt most for his history of Europe, Postwar, published in 2005. It recounted the improbable success of the European Union in assembling imperial fragments into the world’s largest economy and most important zone of democracy. The book had concluded with a meditation on the memory of the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe. In the twenty-first century, he suggested, procedures and money would not be enough: political decency would require a history of horror.

In 2008, Tony had fallen ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative neurological disorder. He was certain to die, trapped in a body that would not serve his mind. After Tony lost the use of his hands, we began recording conversations on themes from the twentieth century. We were both worried, as we spoke in 2009, by the American assumptions that capitalism was unalterable and democracy inevitable. Tony had written of the irresponsible intellectuals who aided totalitarianism in the twentieth century. He was now concerned about a new irresponsibility in the twenty-first: a total rejection of ideas that flattened discussion, disabled policy, and normalized inequality…

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom (p. 2). Crown. Kindle Edition.

UPDATE

 

Read his Substack piece.

 

We are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves.

On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests.  One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office.  Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI.  Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite industrialist," was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016.  Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018.  Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications. One of them is that Trump’s historical position looks far cloudier. In 2016, Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian oligarch.  And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections then went to work (according to the indictment) for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska).  This is obviously very bad for Trump personally.  But it is also very bad for FBI New York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America…

This bears ongoing close scrutiny.

 

JOE CONASON

…Before he moved on to other positions at FBI headquarters, McGonigal's career had begun in New York, where he worked closely with James Kallstrom — the right-wing ideologue who headed the New York office for decades. A bosom buddy of Giuliani and Trump, Kallstrom is suspected of leading the pressure campaign that induced Comey to reopen the Clinton investigation. The explicit threat of leaks by agents and former agents like Kallstrom, who reportedly hated Clinton, spurred Comey's disastrous decision and his public announcement, which again violated department policy against election interference.


Damning as those facts may seem, they only get us so far. There is much more to learn before we can understand the full story of 2016. The scrupulously nonpartisan presidential historian Michael Beschloss asked this week whether McGonigal's indictment will lead us closer to the truth. Will the prosecution of McGonigal reveal the details of his relationship with Deripaska, whom he had once investigated before becoming his corrupt stooge? Will Comey provide a full and honest accounting of what happened in the New York FBI office before the election? Will the New York Times examine — and disclose — how that misleading story about Trump and Russia appeared on its front page? Who briefed the Times for that bogus story?


With Trump seeking to return to the White House, the answers to those questions do not merely reckon with the past but are critical to democracy's future. The malign conspirators who first brought that would-be tyrant to power, both foreign and domestic, are still at large

HORRIFIC OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

Speechless.

From The Atlantic:

The first video only begins as an officer pulls up behind Nichols’s car and he and other officers demand, with weapons drawn, that Nichols get out of the car. “Damn, I didn’t do anything,” Nichols says as they drag him from the car and pepper-spray him. But in the scrum, the officers also spray themselves, and Nichols somehow breaks free and runs away on foot. After giving chase, two officers mill around, pouring water in their eyes and catching their breath. The radio barks that an officer has found Nichols some distance away. “I hope they stomp his ass,” one cop says.

He got his wish. The next three videos, two from body cams and one from SkyCop, don’t capture the moment when officers catch up with Nichols, but the surveillance camera shows several officers beating him on a suburban corner. He doesn’t appear to be resisting them, or even physically able to do so; he looks like a rag doll. They shout for him to do this and that, but Nichols, being yanked in every direction by the officers, could hardly have complied if he wanted to. They stomp and kick him as he repeatedly calls for his mother…

Will this stuff ever end?

 __________