Thursday, January 9, 2020

Dear CNN: What parts of the Steele dossier were corroborated? (Answer: None)


Eighth in a series on the media’s handling of the Steele dossier. Read the rest of the series here.

Cable news analysis is no match for a huge,
complicated, controversial and unverifiable document.

For proof of this dynamic, sample a conversation from CNN’s “New Day” morning program in January 2018. Co-hosts John Berman and Poppy Harlow chatted with Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) about President Trump’s attacks against special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who was at the time investigating whether Trump’s 2016 campaign had coordinated with Russia.


As the discussion progressed, Stewart chose to attack the dossier of memorandums compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. “We now know that the dossier, which was so famous and really the foundation for many of these accusations — asking the FBI, tell me anything in that, that’s true. And they can’t . . .” said Stewart.
“Look, what was true: Russian election meddling,” responded Berman, “all of the intelligence agencies say is true.” Then Berman moved from the general to the semi-specific: “Many of the meetings that the dossier discusses were corroborated, of course.”
Into the weeds they dove, with Berman mentioning alleged meetings between Russians and former Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos:
Berman: Number two, there are meetings between Russians, Carter Page, meetings with Russia. George Papadopoulos, meetings with Russia.
Stewart: Well, of course, U.S. citizens meet with Russians every day.
Berman: But that was in the dossier.
Recent history frowns upon this exchange.

Yes, the dossier’s passages on Russian meddling exist. But before Steele submitted his first memorandum to research firm Fusion GPS, The Post had already reported in June 2016 that Russian government hackers had infiltrated the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee — netting emails that would be leaked in the following months. As EmptyWheel’s Marcy Wheeler noted last year, “The Steele report remained way behind public contemporaneous reporting on the hack-and-leak” operation.

As for the meetings: The dossier doesn’t even mention Papadopoulos. “None of Steele’s sources had ever reported on him,” write Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, co-founders of the firm that commissioned the dossier, in their book “Crime in Progress.”

The dossier does mention the alleged activities of Page, against whom the feds secured warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with information from the dossier. However, the report released Dec. 9 by Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, says this about the dossier and Page: "We determined that prior to and during the pendency of the FISAs, the FBI was unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations against Carter Page contained in the election reporting [i.e., dossier] and relied on in the FISA applications.”

Dossier-deflating references such as that populate the Horowitz report. Its global assessment is blunt: “The FBI concluded, among other things, that although consistent with known efforts by Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections, much of the material in the Steele election reports, including allegations about Donald Trump and members of the Trump campaign relied upon in the Carter Page FISA applications, could not be corroborated; that certain allegations were inaccurate or inconsistent with information gathered by the Crossfire Hurricane team; and that the limited information that was corroborated related to time, location, and title information, much of which was publicly available.”

The findings create a problem for many media figures, including CNN, whose anchors and guests repeatedly defended the Steele dossier on the grounds that it had been corroborated in some fashion. Here’s a look at some examples:
  • “You ask your intel community. Your intel community has corroborated all the details.” — CNN host Alisyn Camerota to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), 12/8/2017
  • “That takes you back to the infamous Steele dossier . . . that information collected by a former British intelligence officer about some of the allegations about the president’s activities in Moscow with women there. If that turns out to be true — and I think we have information that suggests the FBI has corroborated some of that — I could see a national security implication.” — Phil Mudd, CNN counterterrorism analyst, 3/26/2018
  • “Of course, we now know that the DNC did pay for this Steele dossier drafted by that British agent, Christopher Steele, containing allegations of coordination and the like with Trump and Russia. Some of those have been corroborated. Some of those have not been substantiated in that dossier.” — CNN correspondent Manu Raju, 12/18/2017
  • "A lot has been been verified.” — CNN anchor John Vause, 1/19/2018
  • “Listen, so we haven’t reported here on CNN the salacious details of that dossier, but much of the dossier has been corroborated.” — CNN anchor Don Lemon, 11/15/2017
CNN’s prism for viewing the dossier emerges from a story by CNN’s Jim Sciutto and Evan Perez on Feb. 10, 2017. It was titled, “US investigators corroborate some aspects of the Russia dossier.” So what “aspects” had CNN corroborated? Michael Cohen’s alleged trip to Prague? Those Trumpian “moles” inside the DNC? The wide-ranging and mutually backscratching alliance between the Trump campaign and Russia?

No, the “aspects” were “conversations between foreign nationals,” reported Sciutto and Perez. The story continued: “The dossier details about a dozen conversations between senior Russian officials and other Russian individuals. Sources would not confirm which specific conversations were intercepted or the content of those discussions due to the classified nature of US intelligence collection programs.” Though the story was silent on which particular allegations in the dossier drew strength from these findings, CNN indicated that the intercepted communications fostered “greater confidence” in the dossier among the authorities.

At the time, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said, “We continue to be disgusted by CNN’s fake news reporting.” It is here that some hindsight-assisted dossier accountability falls on the Erik Wemple Blog. After Spicer’s blast, we wrote a post criticizing the White House for its “authoritarian” response to the CNN story. Though the White House’s conduct was typically bush-league and anti-democratic, the Erik Wemple Blog should have spread some of the skepticism to CNN for its vague story. We did not — a pathetic media-criticism failure.

We have asked CNN to point us to any subsequent reporting — by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, for instance, or the Horowitz report — that shores up the Sciutto-Perez story about confirmed communications from the dossier. Weeks after the CNN story surfaced, the New Yorker reported, too, that authorities had confirmed some of the dossier’s “less explosive claims, relating to conversations with foreign nationals.”

In any case, CNN dined out on the Sciutto-Perez story. On May 30, 2017, for instance, anchor Anderson Cooper said, “And regardless of the sourcing, it’s not accurate to say that dossier has been discredited. We’re not reporting on the details of it because some of it has yet to be confirmed or disproven. . . . To say, however, that it’s been completely discredited in part or in whole is simply not true. In fact, CNN reported in February, some parts of that dossier have been corroborated. For instance, the U.S. intelligence agencies found that some of the meetings and communications contained in the dossier indeed took place on the dates and . . . locations as described.” On June 7, 2017, anchor Wolf Blitzer said, “CNN, by the way, has corroborated some elements of that dossier.”

Roughly a month later, CNN exploded over the release of emails involving Donald Trump Jr. and that famous meeting at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, between Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer, among others. Emails showed that Trump Jr. had reason to expect dirt on Hillary Clinton. In a July 11, 2017, appearance on CNN, Sciutto spotted good news for the dossier: “We already know and we have reported that the intelligence community has corroborated some of what was contained in that dossier,” said Sciutto, whom the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross named the dossier’s foremost defender. “Some of those meetings took place. Here you have something that corroborates at least one of the main propositions of the dossier, right, was that there were meetings between Trump world and Russia with the intent to cooperate on releasing damaging information about Hillary Clinton.”

Upon further investigation, the Trump Tower meeting fell short of the “extensive conspiracy" allegations of the dossier. As the Mueller report put it: “Although damaging opposition research is surely valuable to a campaign, it appears that the information ultimately delivered in the meeting was not valuable.” One of the participants — Georgian-American businessman Ike Kaveladze — provided his daughter this assessment: “meeting was boring. The Russians did not have any bad info on Hilary.” 

While Mueller and media figures investigated what happened — and didn’thappen — in that meeting, the dossier “corroboration” claims continued spilling from CNN airwaves.

Given the frequency of such commentary, the Erik Wemple Blog posed a question to the network: Just which parts of the dossier, in CNN’s view, have been corroborated? It’s an important question not only because of CNN’s claims, but also because the dossier itself is so vast, containing in excess of 100 paragraphs spread across 35 pages. Does CNN believe that there was an “extensive conspiracy between [Trump’s] campaign team and Kremlin, sanctioned at highest levels and involving Russian diplomatic staff based in US”? Does CNN believe there was a two-way exchange of intelligence and that one “mechanism for transmitting . . . intelligence involves ‘pension’ disbursements to Russian emigres living in the US as cover . . .”

We didn’t receive an on-the-record response to that particular inquiry. The network, however, has issued this statement about its overall coverage: “CNN stands by our reporting. Our approach to the dossier has been consistent since day one. CNN only reported details when they were corroborated, part of a government filing, or publicly discussed by officials or those mentioned.”

Perhaps a more detailed answer lies in CNN’s January 2019 story under the headline, “Revisiting the Trump-Russia dossier: What’s right, wrong and still unclear?” Deference to Steele permeates the story. For instance, the CNN assessment says, “The dossier said that the hacks against Democrats, which were publicly released by WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign, were part of a wider Russian hacking effort. That has since been confirmed in Mueller’s court filings.” Again, The Post — days before the first dossier report — made that clear. (In fact, an early Steele report plays up an alleged dossier against Hillary Clinton, consisting of “bugged conversations” and other eavesdropping on the veteran politico during her visits to Russia over the years. What happened to that?)

The CNN story also pads the dossier with this claim: “Another allegation that’s proven true: Steele’s sources noted that the Russian government had indirectly paid Michael Flynn to travel to Moscow, a reference to his attendance at a gala honoring the state-run broadcaster RT.”

Well. Flynn’s gala participation in December 2015 was promoted by RT and drew some coverage in the media as well, so the trip itself was no secret. As for the payment, Flynn himself confirmed it during an interview with Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News in July 2016. “Top Trump adviser defends payment for Russian speaking engagement,” reads the Yahoo News headline.

So, by July 2016, the world knew that Flynn had traveled to Russia for the gala, and that he’d been paid for it. The dossier memorandum containing this same claim about Flynn — and others — is dated Aug. 10, 2016. Therefore, Steele’s claim about Flynn appeared to be an aggregation job.

There’s a contradiction deep in CNN’s record on the dossier. On the one hand, its journalists talked about its alleged corroboration for years. On the other hand, the network was careful not to parrot particular claims from the dossier, as its own statement notes. That restraint stemmed from start of the dossier drama, after CNN itself — behind reporting from Perez, Sciutto, Jake Tapperand contributor Carl Bernstein — scooped in January 2017 that then-President-elect Trump had been briefed on the dossier. “At this point, CNN is not reporting on details of the memos, as it has not independently corroborated the specific allegations,” noted the story.

The FBI, as it turned out, didn’t independently corroborate key, specific allegations, either — as the Horowitz report found. Based on a massive document review as well as interviews with more than 100 witnesses, the Justice Department inspector general’s team discovered that the FBI had built a spreadsheet of Steele claims — as John Solomon reported in July — with very few, if any, checkmarks. The 400-plus page Horowitz report brims with credibility-diminishing information on the dossier and the methods used to compile it.

So how did CNN handle the news of the dossier’s non-corroboration? “There was no spying and many parts of that dossier were later corroborated," said CNN anchor Christine Romans on Dec. 11, two days after the Horowitz report hit the streets.

The problem with such chatter lies in its suggestiveness. The dossier is best known to the public as a set of allegations alleging conspiracy with Russians by Trump campaign aides. By hyping small-bore “corroboration” — about “meetings" or “communications” or whatever — CNN programming bathed the dossier’s large-bore claims in credibility that they turn out not to deserve.

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If this was Iran's response, then killing Soleimani was a major victory for Trump



Should the missile attack on Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops turn out to be the extent of Iran's response, then the operation to kill Iranian terrorist leader Qassem Soleimani will turn out to be a major victory for President Trump. 

The Pentagon reports that Iran's action resulted in no U.S. casualties. After days of tough talk and chants of, "Death to America," Iranian officials are now claiming that they have no interest in further escalation if the United States does not retaliate. This could be it. 

If this is indeed the case, there is no doubt that the U.S. dealt a far more devastating blow to Iran than it absorbed in return. Soleimani was one of the most important figures in Iran and the architect of its regional strategy to extend the regime's influence from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea. He directed global terrorist attacks, targeted U.S. troops in Iraq, aided Bashar Assad in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of his own people, supported the terrorist group Hezbollah, and fueled the civil war in Yemen by supporting the radical Houthi movement. 

Analysts of all ideological stripes argued that Soleimani was irreplaceable to Iran and that his death was a devastating blow to the regime. The major debate concerned whether the benefits of killing Soleimani were worth the risks of triggering an Iranian response that would eventually escalate into a bloody war.

As I pointed out before, Trump most likely viewed taking out Soleimani as a calculated risk worth taking. With an economy being crippled by sanctions, regular domestic protests, and military stretching throughout the Middle East, the Iranian regime could afford a major escalation a lot less than the U.S. To Iran's rulers, war with the U.S. poses an existential threat.

The early indications are that Iran blinked. The regime dramatically launched ballistic missiles toward U.S. troops and made a big show of it to the world, but it also chose targets where it knew Americans were expecting an attack and would be able to take preparations to reduce or avoid casualties. It was telling that even the threats Iran issued tonight, that if the U.S. retaliates, Iran will attack Israel and Dubai, suggest an unwillingness to engage the U.S. were it to risk actual casualties. 

It's possible that, as the sun rises in Iraq and there is a full assessment, it will reveal there were, in fact, casualties. It also is possible that, even in the absence of casualties, Trump could choose to retaliate in a way that triggers another response from Iran. But that seems unlikely. Remember, when Trump backed off retaliating for Iran's downing of a drone in June, he said the decisive factor was that it was unmanned. If there were no casualties in this case, Trump has an opening to declare victory and avoid a retaliatory strike. In any event, he certainly can take a pause before making any dramatic moves. 

This seemed to be what he was indicating when he declared, "All is well," on Twitter.
All is well! Missiles launched from Iran at two military bases located in Iraq. Assessment of casualties & damages taking place now. So far, so good! We have the most powerful and well equipped military anywhere in the world, by far! I will be making a statement tomorrow morning.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 8, 2020
By taking out Soleimani, Trump not only undermined Iran's capabilities in the region, but he reestablished deterrence by demonstrating that the U.S. had the means, the intelligence assets, and the will to strike Iran hard. Barring casualties, this attack can be shrugged off by the U.S. The cost-benefit analysis is not even close.

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Greta Thunberg Is A Joke


Greta Thunberg Is a Joke

Climate-change activist Greta Thunberg attends a Fridays for Future protest in Turin, Italy, December 13, 2019. (Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters)

Far from being the historic figure she and Time magazine imagine her to be, the climate-change spokeschild is attracting mockery.
‘Poll Finds Most People Would Rather Be Annihilated By Giant Tidal Wave Than Continue To Be Lectured By Climate Change Activists,” the Babylon Bee reported in December, adding in an attached news story that one man’s response to hearing “just 30 seconds of a Greta Thunberg lecture” was to scrawl on the survey form, “Come, sweet death.”

The Bee was, as usual, ahead of the pack, but these days it’s becoming common for even left-leaning comics to mock Thunberg. “Iconic”? “Courageous”? Nah. Just tiresome. Far from being a visionary difference-maker who put it all on the line for her righteous cause, Thunberg is increasingly being derided as just another hyperemotional, tantrum-prone, attention-seeking teen brat.

Joan of Arc became Veruca Salt.

Ricky Gervais (a lifelong lefty) saw the opportunity at the Golden Globes Sunday when he smacked the audience and the tiny Nordic doom-monger with a classic double punchline: “You know nothing about the real world,” he told a ballroom full of celebrities. “Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.” BBC Scotland ran a skit in which comics playing Thunberg’s parents talk about all of the fun they’ve been having while she’s been away and blanch when she returns. When the BBC starts making fun of Greta Thunberg, it’s like L’Osservatore Romano satirizing the pope.

Meanwhile, Thunberg has become shorthand for environmentally based vapidity, which becomes all the funnier the more clueless earnestness with which it is delivered. After fashion designer Stella McCartney presented Joaquin Phoenix as the new world champion of climate-change activism for committing to (top this!) wearing only one tuxedo during Hollywood awards season, the deluge of mockery that followed on Twitter included lots of collateral comic damage to Thunberg. Personal favorite: the British man who replied, “f*** me. I wore the same undercrackers for over a month before I got some new ones for crimbo [Christmas]. I’m basically a sexy, bald, bloody Greta Thunberg.”

On The Last Leg, a British chat show, comic Rosie Jones (who has cerebral palsy and is no one’s idea of a bully) made a dirty joke at Thunberg’s expense on New Year’s Eve, and another standup, Josh Widdicombe, called Thunberg “the first person to perfect the art of bunking school.” Days later, Dave Chappelle joked about Thunberg in a San Francisco set. I don’t know what Chappelle said, but a San Francisco Chronicle writer who declined to quote the remark instead wrote, “Let’s just say the 17-year-old activist irks him, to put it mildly, rather than going into detail about Chappelle’s joke involving R. Kelly and [Thunberg].” Do tell.

Thunberg’s overwrought September speech to the U.N. — “I shouldn’t be up here,” she said, as though she had to be dragged up to the podium in chains, forced against her will to do all those photo shoots and interviews — might have looked like a bravura performance to her disciples in the media but turned out to be far too easy to mock. “Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” Thunberg thundered. A bit strong. Maybe the girl should learn the art of self-deprecating banter or rephrase her paranoia as a rap. Anyway, to an ordinary point of view the wee thing seems to be doing pretty well for herself. “‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood,’ says girl currently gracing the cover of Time magazine,” was the Babylon Bee’s perfectly honed take after Thunberg was crowned World’s Wokest Human or whatever it was.

That Thunberg — a non-scientist, non-wonk, and non-adult — has very little insight to offer the world, and that youthful indignation is not actually very useful or interesting, much less new, begins to sink in. Mary Wakefield writes in The Spectator, “The most sophisticated adults in the world have signed up to the bonkers idea that children can somehow intuit the answers to humanity’s existential problems, though Lord knows what the grown-ups expect the kids to do — build a better world on Minecraft?”

Wakefield continues, waspishly but astutely:
Of course [young people] bang drums, sit on roofs and declare the world to be doomed. It’s what they’re supposed to do. What’s strange is that so many grown-ups seem content to imagine that this is, in itself, an answer. Got a problem? Simply make like a teen and shout about it. Job done. When Greta turned to the Davos crowd and said ‘I want you to panic’, they should have asked her: why? Surely the graver the crisis the more important it is not to panic.
Thunberg is too young to know this, but achieving celebrity status is relatively easy compared to the challenge of maintaining it. Far from being the historic figure she and Time magazine imagine her to be, she may go the way of many a precocious child star of the past. The good news is that after she disappears from magazine covers, she can look forward to a gig on Big Brother or Dancing with the Stars.


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Progressive Governments’ Economic War on...


Progressive Governments’ Economic War on the NRA Fails in Court

An attendee at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Indianapolis, Ind., April 28, 2019.  (Bryan Woolston/Reuters)

In California and New York, efforts to target the gun-rights group’s business relationships are failing on First Amendment grounds.
Some politicos just can’t stop grandstanding, even if it means their court case goes down in flames. Consider what just happened in a federal court in Los Angeles.

Not long ago, progressive state and local officials nationwide were vowing to take down the hated National Rifle Association by targeting its pocketbook. When city authorities in Los Angeles and San Francisco gave that idea a try, they were following the lead of Governor Andrew Cuomo, who had unleashed New York financial regulators to go after the gun-rights organization’s access to insurance and banking services.

Now all three are facing a reckoning in court, based not on the Second Amendment but on the First. Without needing to even consider the issue of gun rights, federal courts are recognizing that boycotts enforced by government power can menace free speech and free association.

The amusing part is that the public officials themselves are helping to provide the basis for these rulings by tweeting and speechifying about how much damage they intend to do the NRA.

In December, a federal court in California granted a preliminary injunction against a Los Angeles ordinance requiring city contractors to disclose any business links to, or memberships in, the gun group. It found the evidence “overwhelming” that the city’s intent in passing the law was “to suppress the message of the NRA.”

*    *    *
Public officials have been on notice about this sort of thing for at least two decades, since the 1996 Supreme Court case Board of County Commissioners v. Umbehr. In that case, the Court held that a county’s having terminated a government contract in retaliation for the contractor’s persistent and annoying political speech could violate the First Amendment. Controversial and unpopular speech is protected speech; officials cannot yank a contract from some business, or threaten to, just because it has donated to, or partnered in some venture with, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, or the NRA.

Lawyers for Los Angeles tried to defend their ordinance by saying all it did was require disclosures from contractors, which wouldn’t necessarily amount to punishing or chilling speech. But this sort of First Amendment claim comes down to a question of intent. And the court found that the city’s lawmakers had made their intent to suppress speech and association utterly clear. They had done so in the text of the ordinance itself, in its legislative history, and in the statements made at the time by its chief sponsor, Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell (Hollywood-Silver Lake).

The ordinance starts off with a long preamble that, amid much demagogy, cites the NRA’s $163 million (2015) in membership dues and asserts that those dues go toward foiling beneficent legislative ends. That helped establish nicely that part of the bill’s aim was “to cut off revenue to the NRA because of its pro-firearm advocacy,” as the court put it.

Then there were O’Farrell’s various pronouncements. Earlier in the year, he had motioned the city to “rid itself of its relationships with any organization that supports the NRA” and further moved that the city’s chief legislative analyst “report back with options for the City to immediately boycott those businesses and organizations” that do business with the NRA “until their formal relationship with the NRA ceases to exist.”

Were doubt left about his intentions, O’Farrell’s Twitter outbursts through 2018 told of his efforts to jawbone businesses such as FedEx and Amazon into cutting off business relations with the NRA, often tagging friendly accounts such as @everytown, @momsdemand, @shannonrwatts, and @bradybuzz. It was unnecessary to show that the city had actually cut off any businesses, or that any such businesses had cut ties with the NRA for fear of city displeasure. So long as the ordinance was intended to chill speech and association, as it was, it would fall.

San Francisco’s similar ordinance, although also the subject of a brief challenge in court, collapsed as a practical matter even more quickly. The measure’s tantrum-like preamble branded the NRA a domestic terrorist group, in a move calculated to draw wide national attention. The text of the ordinance proclaimed that the city should “take every reasonable step to limit those entities who do business with the City and County of San Francisco from doing business with” the gun-rights organization. Commentators promptly pointed out that any such step would fail in court as unconstitutional.

Soon thereafter, San Francisco mayor London Breed issued a memo clarifying that “the City’s contracting processes and policies have not changed and will not change as a result of the Resolution” because only an actual ordinance can enact changes to city law. The NRA is suing anyway, but by the city’s own account the measure at this point does nothing except beam out vain hostility.

Governor Cuomo was shrewder. He avoided the blatant statements of intent that tripped up his California counterparts. But did he retain enough deniability to survive a court challenge? In April 2018, he issued a statement saying he was directing “the Department of Financial Services to urge insurance companies, New York State-chartered banks, and other financial services companies licensed in New York to review any relationships they may have with the National Rifle Association and other similar organizations.” Review such relationships for what, exactly? Well, “the companies are encouraged to consider whether such ties harm their corporate reputations and jeopardize public safety.” In a press release, he made things a tad more explicit, saying that he was directing his financial regulators “to urge insurers and bankers statewide to determine whether any relationship they may have with the NRA or similar organizations sends the wrong message” (emphasis added).

Those regulators, of course, have the discretion to make life very unpleasant for insurers and banks dense enough not to take the hint. Sure enough, the NRA in short order was cut off by some long-term business partners, notable among them one major insurer and one major insurance broker. The state declared that it had found regulatory infractions in NRA-branded insurance-affinity offerings, and in the ensuing settlements with the insurer and the broker it got them to promise never to do business with the NRA again, in New York or anywhere else. Yet at the same time, the NRA says, the state took no action against similarly marketed affinity products sold by others. Cuomo’s financial regulator made things a little more explicit still: “DFS urges all insurance companies and banks doing business in New York to join the companies that have already discontinued their arrangements with the NRA.”

In November 2018, a federal court in New York found that all in all, there was enough plausible evidence of “direct and implied threats to insurers and financial institutions because of these entities’ links with the NRA” to allow the group to proceed with a First Amendment suit. While Cuomo was of course free to express his own views, the Constitution would have something to say about it if he or his appointees had made veiled threats against banks and insurers to encourage them to disassociate from the NRA. The court also asked for more evidence documenting a selective-enforcement claim, and this summer, against stiff legal resistance from the state, the NRA succeeded in getting discovery of some state files. In a filing on December 20, the NRA said it had found new documentation of both the pressure and the selective enforcement.

One reason the California disputes went so well for the NRA is that the officials just couldn’t help grandstanding at every turn in search of followers’ applause. That’s how O’Farrell, in Los Angeles, helped tweet his side of the case right out of court. But Cuomo, while he’s been more circumspect, has not covered himself as thoroughly as he might have. “If I could have put the NRA out of business, I would have done it 20 years ago,” he declared in response to one legal development.

Tell us more, Governor.

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How Extensive Is FBI Domestic Spying?


How Extensive Is FBI Domestic Spying? 

We’re Trying To Find Out

Earlier today, Cato issued a press release based on the current results of a major and ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) project designed to try to determine the magnitude of FBI domestic surveillance activities that may be unconstitutional or otherwise questionable from a civil liberties standpoint. First, some background.

Since April 2019, I’ve filed over 400 FOIAs. One of the core questions my FOIA work seeks to answer is whether, and to what extent, the kinds of domestic surveillance abuses that were surfaced by the Church Committee (and later the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) have resumed—particularly the targeting of domestic groups on the basis of their constitutionally protected right to free speech and association. Based on the evidence I and others in the media and civil liberties community have accumulated to date, I believe the answer is yes. 

To refresh your memory, I wrote this piece for JustSecurity on Constitution Day 2019 regarding some very disturbing findings I and others had made regarding FBI targeting of domestic advocacy groups, including groups involved in immigration work. 

On November 26, I reviewed all of the FOIA responses I’ve received to date to ensure any additional actions that might be necessary on my part and not previously addressed were cataloged and scheduled. In the course of that review, I realized that one Department of Justice Office of Information Policy (DoJ/OIP) response I received in June 2019 regarding Cato contained “Glomar” exemption language. The third paragraph of the DoJ letter contains the key language and reads as follows:
"I have determined that the FBI properly refused to confirm or deny the existence of any national security or foreign intelligence records responsive to your request because the existence or nonexistence of any such responsive records is currently and properly classified. See 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(1). Please be advised that the Department Review Committee will determine whether the existence or nonexistence of this category of records should continue to be considered a classified fact. Additionally, the existence or nonexistence of any such responsive records is protected under the FOIA pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(3). This provision concerns matters specifically exempted from release by a statute other than the FOIA (in this instance, 50 U.S.C. § 3024(i)(1), which pertains to the National Security Act of 1947 and the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949).”

So what exactly is a “Glomar” FOIA response and what does it mean? A little background follows.

FOIA exemptions and the Glomar Explorer case
Statutorily (at 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)), there are nine specific categories of exemptions under FOIA:
  • Exemption 1: Information that is classified to protect national security.
  • Exemption 2: Information related solely to the internal personnel rules and practices of an agency.
  • Exemption 3: Information that is prohibited from disclosure by another federal law.
  • Exemption 4: Trade secrets or commercial or financial information that is confidential or privileged.
  • Exemption 5: Privileged communications within or between agencies, including those protected by the:
    1. Deliberative Process Privilege (provided the records were created less than 25 years before the date on which they were requested)
    2. Attorney-Work Product Privilege
    3. Attorney-Client Privilege
  • Exemption 6: Information that, if disclosed, would invade another individual’s personal privacy.
  • Exemption 7: Information compiled for law enforcement purposes that:
    • 7(A). Could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings
    • 7(B). Would deprive a person of a right to a fair trial or an impartial adjudication
    • 7(C). Could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy
    • 7(D). Could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source
    • 7(E). Would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law
    • 7(F). Could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual
  • Exemption 8: Information that concerns the supervision of financial institutions.
  • Exemption 9: Geological information on wells.

However, one particular court case involving a FOIA on a deep-sea salvage vessel named the Glomar Explorer, allegedly hired by the CIA to retrieve a sunken Soviet sub, led to a now infamous court case (Phillippi v. CIA, 546 F.2d 1009, 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1976) in which the court sided with the CIA in its contention that simply confirming or denying the Agency’s connection with the Glomar Explorer was classified. The Agency argued that an answer either way would harm national security (and thus fell under the FOIA b(1) national security exemption, listed above). Hence the terms “Glomar exemption” or “Glomar response” in the FOIA context.

With respect to FOIA b(1) exemption Glomar invocations, federal courts have often sided with the Executive branch in the decades since the Phillippi decision (see for example Gardels v. CIA, 689 F.2d 1100, 1103 (D.C. Cir. 1982) and Wilner v. National Security Agency, 592 F.3d 60, 68 (2d Cir. 2009)). It was not until 2010 that the CIA formally acknowledged its role in the Glomar Explorer episode, thus successfully using the court-created “Glomar” exemption to withhold relevant records for decades on that particular intelligence operation. 

I note, however, that in most of these court cases, the issue generally involved a foreign intelligence or foreign policy activity. Federal courts have been more willing to deny agency or department Glomar invocations in a law enforcement context (the FOIA b(7) series of exemptions), as was the case earlier this year when the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press won its case against the FBI over its invocation of Glomar to try to conceal its tactic of impersonating news crews as part of investigations. What has not been tested in court thus far (so far as I am aware) is whether the FBI or any other federal agency can employ a Glomar b(1) or b(3) FOIA response in connection with a domestic group or a media organization that may have been targeted for some level of data accumulation or surveillance.

Significance of the Glomar responses I’ve received to date
What makes the Glomar responses I’ve received thus far extremely concerning and noteworthy is 1) the sheer number and 2) the invocation of Glomar b(1)(i.e., national security/intelligence) and b(3) vice Glomar b(7)(i.e., law enforcement). 

As you can see from the Cato press release, the organizations run the gamut--some are clearly on the left side of the political spectrum, others from the conservative side, and of course the libertarian slice of the spectrum as well. The fact that I received Glomar responses on several media organizations or media trade/membership organizations, as well as a number of immigration-related groups—many involved in direct client services delivery—is alarming. Cato is, at this time, only publishing the names of organizations that have agreed to be so identified. The notification, coordination, and follow up process with other organizations is ongoing.

Does DoJ’s invocation of national security-related Glomars provide conclusive evidence that these organizations have been targeted for surveillance or informant/penetration operations? 

Some might argue that this apparent surge in Glomar responses simply represents a new FBI tactic to thwart FOIA requests. If that were the case, I would expect to be getting Glomar boiler plate response language in every FOIA response I receive on domestic organizations, which has not been the case. However, to more thoroughly explore that possibility, I’ve submitted over 100 additional FOIAs on a number of other organizations that I've designated a "control group" to help confirm or deny whether the Glomars I've received are likely concealing nefarious activity or are the initial wave of a change in DoJ policy to "Glomar everything" to make FOIA nearly useless. 

As I noted over the weekend, prior cases of Glomar being confirmed as having hidden real activity speak to the reason why getting to the bottom of this issue is so important:
More recently, CIA attempts to "Glomar" the ACLU over the existence of the agency's "Drone War" in Iraq and Afghanistan failed. And just last year, the Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press won its Glomar FOIA case against the FBI, which had argued that it properly invoked Glomar to avoid confirming or denying whether its agents sometimes impersonate journalists. In each of these national security or law enforcement cases, the "Glomar" invocation in question was used to cover a real activity undertaken by the agency or department in question.

My own view is that the the Glomar responses received to date may indicate that the FBI has been accumulating information on the organizations in question, possibly utilizing social media surveillance, commercial and government database searches, and physical surveillance measures (either by FBI personnel or informants recruited for the purpose) for what the FBI terms “assessments”—a form of preliminary but often expansive information gathering operation that may, or may not, lead to a preliminary or full field investigation, and thus more aggressive surveillance and related activities down the road. 

I strongly suspect that if such “assessments” are underway, they very likely violate the 1st and 4th Amendment rights of the targets. That is certainly the case with regards to Antiwar.com, which has been in litigation for years regarding confirmed FBI monitoring/surveillance of their website and activities. 

If any of the organizations for which I've received Glomar responses were current or potential targets of a criminal investigation, I likely would have received a FOIA response containing the following language, which is drawn from the FBI FOIA response I got on an encrypted messaging app provider (which I will not identify at this time, as the FOIA appeal process is ongoing):
“The FBI has completed its search for records responsive to your request. The material you requested is located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A). 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A) exempts from disclosure:
records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information ... could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings...
“The records responsive to your request are law enforcement records; there is a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records, and release of the information could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings. Therefore, your request is being administratively closed.”

To date, I have received no such FOIA response on any domestic advocacy group or media organization, though many of my FOIAs are in various stages of initial response or appeal. Accordingly, this assessment is subject to change.

One final note. One FOIA response I received on a domestic advocacy organization was not a Glomar and did, in fact, reveal FBI monitoring of the organization and/or individuals associated with it. In that case, the surveillance took place during the Bush 43 administration. However, that response was heavily redacted and clearly only a partial response to my request. That particular FOIA remains on appeal with the Department of Justice and will likely be the subject of litigation in the near future.


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Yes, Obama Helped Fund the Iranian Regime



In his address to the nation yesterday, President Donald Trump asserted that the ballistic missiles that targeted the al-Assad and Erbil bases in Iraq yesterday were paid for using “funds made available by the last administration.” Few things irritate media fact checkers more than Trump’s accusation that Obama helped fund the Iranian regime and its terror apparatus. Probably because it’s completely true.

Now, we don’t really know that Obama’s ransom payments to Iran in 2016 subsidized those specific ballistic missiles, but we do know that money is fungible — especially when you have access to small denominations of European cash — and that the military, IRGC, and Hezbollah were the major beneficiaries of the replenished coffers of the Iranian state. Distinctions over the details of the exact allocation of funds would be completely irrelevant in any conversation not involving Donald Trump. Yet Andrea Mitchell and CNN, and all the usual suspects, immediately rallied to Obama’s defense to also explain that actually Trump is talking about money we owed Iran.

 We never “owed” the Islamic Republic any money. This is a myth. In 2016, the United States was in the middle of an unresolved dispute in front of the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal at The Hague over cash advanced by the Shah for military equipment we refused to deliver after the 1979 revolution. You might recall, this is when Iran began prosecuting its war against the United States, taking hostages, and killing service members.

It is unlikely that U.S. would ultimately have been obligated to hand over a single deutschmark to the mullahs. For one thing, the U.S. had its own counterclaims over Iran’s many violations — which, in total, exceeded the amount supposedly “owed” to it. Obama, in his obsessive goal of placating Iran to procure a deal, unilaterally dismissed a stipulation held by the previous administration that the United States wouldn’t release funds until other court judgments held against Iran for its terrorist acts on American citizens were all resolved.

Let’s remember, until the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration had secretly airlifted $400 million in ransom payments for four Americans detained in Tehran — seven months after the fact — we were never informed about the cash transfers. And Obama never offered any legal justification or accounting for the billions he transferred. Nor did Obama ever explain the fiscal calculation of tacking on an extra $1.3 billion in interest payments. The president, in fact, risibly claimed that the agreement had saved “billions of dollars.”

Reporters like to point out that “$150 billion,” the amount Trump likes to claim Obama transferred to the Iranians, is almost surely the high-end estimate, or likely an exaggeration. But we don’t know for sure because institutional media didn’t mobilize its considerable resources to find out. If reporters had spent as much time talking about the ransom payments — or the 600 soldiersmurdered by Iran — as they do fact checking Trump’s ransom assertions, the public would be a lot better informed.

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Sen. Ted Cruz Goes Absolutely Beast Mode in Discussing Obama Administration’s Failed Iran Policy



When it comes to President Trump’s foreign policy on Iran, few Republicans in Washington, D.C. have gone on the record defending it as much as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has. He also hasn’t been shy at all when it comes to taking the Obama administration over their , which did exactly the opposite of containing the Iranian regime.

Such was the case on Tuesday night, when Cruz was interviewed on Sean Hannity’s program as news broke of Iranian against American and Iraqi targets in Iraq.

Thankfully there were no American or Iraqi casualties in the attacks, but that didn’t stop Cruz from absolutely unloading on the Obama administration, of funding the very missiles used in last night’s strikes:

“If you look at Iran policy, I think you’ve seen a dramatic shift [under President Trump],” he said. “Under Barack Obama, as you noted, the policy was appeasement. The policy under the disastrous Iranian nuclear deal under Obama was to give over $100 billion to Iran.”

Cruz recalled how $1.7 billion in cash was sent via airliner to Iran — “on pallets, in the dead of night.”

“In a very real sense, the missiles that we saw fired on U.S. servicemen and women tonight were paid for by the billions the Obama administration flooded the ayatollah with,” he said, “If history teaches anything, it’s don’t give billions of dollars to people who hate you and want to kill you.”

Watch below:



I’d say that sums up things pretty well.

This is a point President Trump has made time and time again as well when pressed on the Iran situation by panicked , and the Obamaites are most certainly not pleased with the reminder:


Meanwhile, Ben Rhodes is still of himself and spinning like a top on this issue on Twitter, but that’s another story for another day. 


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