NYT’s Report on Russian Bounties is False

Let us begin with Catherine Herridge and her Tweets shall we?

President Trump’s response to the NYT’s article was that he was never told of such a thing. Now we have Speaker Pelosi saying this is as bad as it gets.

Have we forgotten about the op-ed published by the New York Times this past February?

The deputy leader of the Taliban and one of the world’s most wanted militants has written an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he says the Afghan insurgents are “fully committed” to a deal with Washington.

The article, headlined “What the Taliban Want”, represents the highest-level statement from the group on months of negotiations with the United States, and comes as they are believed to be days away from signing an agreement that would see America begin to withdraw troops from its longest war.

It is also believed to the first time that Sirajuddin Haqqani — who doubles as head of the Haqqani network, a US-designated terror group that is one of the most dangerous factions fighting Afghan and US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan — has given such a lengthy statement in English.

Previously, he has communicated mainly through rare audio messages, usually in Pashto. The most recent one on a Taliban website was dated June 2017.

In the Times article, Haqqani repeated many Taliban talking points from the negotiations, including how women would have rights “granted by Islam” — the problem being, as many observers have pointed out, the group’s repressive and brutal interpretation of the faith.

The leader of a group known for the frequent use of suicide bombers targeting civilians also said he is “convinced the killing and the maiming must stop”.

The Taliban have been conducting direct talks with the US since 2018 on a deal which would see Washington begin pulling troops out in return for security guarantees from the militants and a promise to begin peace talks with the government in Kabul. More here.

Are we to assume the New York Times has sided with the Taliban and manifesting more Russian disinformation? Yup for sure. Perhaps too, the NYT’s and Russia have officially collaborated in Infektion. What is that?

Forgeries

The Internet Research Agency is infamous for flooding mainstream social media platforms with compelling disinformation campaigns. The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, deploys strategic data leaks and destabilizing cyberattacks. But in the recent history of Russia’s online meddling, a third, distinct entity may have been at work on many of the same objectives—indicating that Russia’s disinformation operations went deeper than was publicly known until now.
Dubbed Secondary Infektion, the campaign came on the radar of researchers last year. Today, the social media analysis firm Graphika is publishing the first comprehensive review of the group’s activity, which seems to have begun all the way back in January 2014. The analysis reveals an entity that prioritizes covering its tracks; virtually all Secondary Infektion campaigns incorporate robust operational security, including a hallmark use of burner accounts that only stay live long enough to publish one post or comment. That’s a sharp contrast to the IRA and GRU disinformation operations, which often rely on cultivating online personas or digital accounts over time and building influence by broadening their reach.
Secondary Infektion also ran disinformation campaigns on a notably large array of digital platforms. While the IRA in particular achieved virality by focusing its energy on major mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Secondary Infektion took more than 300 platforms in all, including regional forums and smaller blogging sites. The combination of widespread and endless burner accounts has helped the group hide its campaigns—and its motives—for years. But the approach also made the actor less influential and seemingly less effective than the IRA or GRU. Without being able to build a following, it’s difficult to get posts to take off. And many Secondary Infektion campaigns were either flagged by platform anti-abuse mechanisms or simply pilloried by regular users.
“The main thing is that this really adds a large-scale, persistent threat actor into the mental map we have of Russian information operations,” says Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika. “All the while you have the IRA running its operations, all the while you have GRU running its operations, you had Secondary Infektion running its own brand of operations, which had a very different style, had a very different approach. This was all running at the same time, and quite often they were all homing in on the same targets.”
Secondary Infektion has a familiar hit list. The group has been active in running disinformation campaigns related to world elections, has attempted to sow division between European countries, and has highlighted US and NATO dominance and aggression. Domestically, the actor has run campaigns in defense of Russia and its government, targeted activists and groups critical of the regime—like the reporting group Bellingcat and anti-corruption advocate Alexei Navalny—and tried to discredit the World Anti-Doping Agency. Secondary Infektion has also painted Turkey as a villainous rogue state and sown division over issues of global migration, particularly Muslim displacement. It has run relatively few campaigns related to Syria and its civil war but is devoted to a common priority for Russia-backed digital actors: undermining and destabilizing Ukraine.
Though Secondary Infektion’s activities are difficult to track, Graphika researchers were able to piece the its activity together by looking at rare occasions where the group reused an account a few times, and identifying patterns in sets of blogs and forums the group would post to. Secondary Infektion also has a particular tendency to build its campaigns around “leaked” documents that are really just fabricated by the group but claim to reveal, say, corruption among the Kremlin’s critics or an anti-Russian plot from the US. Graphika did not see evidence that Secondary Infektion used ads to promote its content, but after months of investigation the researchers did find a sort of digital fingerprint they could use to track Secondary Infektion campaigns at a much larger scale and link many more digital posts to the actor. Graphika would not comment on the nature of this tell, though.
Facebook was the first to discover a group of Secondary Infektion accounts in May 2019, and provided the data to disinformation researchers along with the initial attribution to Russia. Since then other social networks and researchers have gathered more examples of the actor’s activity and reinforced the attribution. The group seemingly reduced its operations or went further underground after being publicly named in 2019. But it was still operating as of at least March 2020. Graphika is clear, though, that Secondary Infektion has not been tied to a specific organization or apparatus within Russia. Based on the available evidence and the group’s distinctive techniques and behaviors, the researchers don’t believe that Secondary Infektion operates under the purview of the IRA or GRU. But that remains possible. More here.
GRU is the Russian military mentioned in the NYT’s piece highly debated and contested in Washington DC right now.

 

Appeals Judge Orders Flynn Case to be Dismissed

A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan lacks authority to undertake a review of the Justice Department’s extraordinary decision to drop the case against Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying about his past communications with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.

“This is plainly not the rare case where further judicial inquiry is warranted,” Judge Neomi Rao said in the majority decision. “To begin with, Flynn agrees with the government’s motion to dismiss, and there has been no allegation that the motion reflects prosecutorial harassment. Additionally, the government’s motion includes an extensive discussion of newly discovered evidence casting Flynn’s guilt into doubt.”

“Each of our three coequal branches should be encouraged to self-correct when it errs. If evidence comes to light calling into question the integrity or purpose of an underlying criminal investigation, the Executive Branch must have the authority to decide that further prosecution is not in the interest of justice,” Rao wrote.

“This is not the unusual case where a more searching inquiry is justified,” Rao added in her opinion, which was joined by Judge Karen Henderson, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush.

Rao’s opinion leans heavily on the “presumption of regularity” often afforded to Executive Branch decision-making — the notion that courts should presume prosecutorial decisions are made in good faith. Through this lens, the judges concluded, the Justice Department’s discovery of new evidence that cast doubt on Flynn’s guilt should be treated with deference.

Judge Robert Wilkins' experience of "driving while black ... photo

Judge Robert Wilkins, an Obama appointee, issued a sharply worded dissent. Wilkins said the government’s U-turn in the case was so abrupt that a judge could reasonably question it.

“This is no mere about-face; it is more akin to turning around an aircraft carrier,” Wilkins wrote.

Wilkins also complained that his colleagues were departing with normal federal court practice by prematurely intruding in the affairs of a district court judge who had not yet ruled.

“It is a great irony that, in finding the District Court to have exceeded its jurisdiction, this Court so grievously oversteps its own,” wrote Wilkins.

Sullivan could ask the full bench of the appeals court to reconsider the issue or take the ruling to the Supreme Court, but it would be extraordinary for a district court judge to do that. However, any judge on the D.C. Circuit — including Wilkins — could call for a vote to do so. Source

Executive Order to Protect Historic Monuments

When mob rule exceeds at grabbing power over law and authority, anarchy is real. Such is the case in several cities across the country where mayors have failed at the duty of public safety and protection. Sadly, the President has to issue an Executive Order to preserve historical monuments. Sure, perhaps there is a time for some to be moved and replaced but not by anarchists. It should be considered by a vote, that is the American way.

Trump issues warning amid vandalism, effort to topple ...

There is already a law that protects Federal property, meaning that of antiquity and assigned to the National Parks Service. So, one must challenge the mayor(s) and District Attorneys at this point. If even Al Sharpton says justice must be equal….heh…so be it…make it equal and applied as such.

“We are looking at long-term jail sentences for these vandals and these hoodlums and the anarchists and agitators, and call them whatever you want,” Trump said. “Some people don’t like that language, but that’s what they are. They’re bad people. They don’t love our country. And they’re not taking down our monuments. I just want to make that clear.”

The executive order as Trump described it appeared to be largely symbolic. Existing law already makes it criminal to destroy “any structure, plaque, statue, or other monument on public property commemorating the service of any person or persons in the armed forces of the United States.”

18 U.S. Code § 1369. Destruction of veterans’ memorials

(a)

Whoever, in a circumstance described in subsection (b), willfully injures or destroys, or attempts to injure or destroy, any structure, plaque, statue, or other monument on public property commemorating the service of any person or persons in the armed forces of the United States shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.
(b) A circumstance described in this subsection is that—

(1)

in committing the offense described in subsection (a), the defendant travels or causes another to travel in interstate or foreign commerce, or uses the mail or an instrumentality of interstate or foreign commerce; or
(2)

the structure, plaque, statue, or other monument described in subsection (a) is located on property owned by, or under the jurisdiction of, the Federal Government.
As reported by HuffPo in 2017:

Several states have laws that make it extremely difficult to remove Confederate monuments. Here are five of the strictest.

North Carolina

In 2015, then-Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, signed a bill that gave the North Carolina General Assembly full power over public “objects of remembrance.”

Earlier this week, a group of protesters toppled a Confederate statue in Durham, and on Thursday, dozens of people lined up to turn themselves in for the “crime.”

The current governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, has said that the monuments “should come down” and that he wants the state law repealed.

Alabama

Alabama’s law is new. In May, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act of 2017, which forbids “the relocation, removal, alteration, renaming, or disturbance of any architecturally significant building, memorial building, memorial street, or monument on public property which has been in place for 40 or more years.” Many of the nation’s Confederate monuments were erected in the early 20th century.

 The Committee on Alabama Monument Protection created by the act approves any modification to monuments.

Mississippi

 A Mississippi law says that statues, monuments, memorials or landmarks from previous wars cannot be removed unless they are being moved to another location or they obstruct drivers’ vision.

 Rep. John Moore (R-Miss.) told WTOK-TV in Meridian that he supports the law because the memorials can used to learn about history.

 “That’s one of the things about history,” Moore said. “If we cease to learn from it and don’t have reminders, we are doomed to repeat it.”

Georgia

 A law in the Peach State protects publicly owned military monuments from being relocated, removed, concealed, obscured or altered unless doing so would protect the monument or aid in its interpretation. A petition currently calls on state lawmakers to change the law.

Virginia

 In Virginia, ground zero of this latest iteration of the Confederate statue debate, it is illegal to disturb or interfere with any war monuments or memorials. There is an ongoing lawsuit over the Charlottesville City Council’s vote to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee that white supremacists and neo-Nazis gathered to defend. Opponents claim the removal of the statue is illegal under state law.

 

Executive Order Suspending Work Visas Extended

The original executive order signed in April:

would temporarily suspends the issuance of new green cards, a limit on immigration he says will protect American jobs amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“In order to protect our great American workers, I have just signed an executive order temporarily suspending immigration into the United States,” Trump said at a White House briefing Wednesday.

“This will ensure that unemployed Americans of all backgrounds will be first in line for jobs as our economy reopens,” Trump continued. “It will also preserve our health care resources for American patients.”

***

President Donald Trump signed an executive order temporarily halting work visas like the H-1B visa program for highly-skilled workers, cutting off a critical source of foreign labor for tech companies already complaining about tech talent shortages.

Visa-holders already in the U.S. and those applicants who have already received a visa are exempt from the ban. The restrictions are intended to last until the end of the year, which would disrupt the government’s typical process of awarding new visas at the beginning of the national fiscal calendar in October.

Officials from the Trump administration told the Wall Street Journal that the move is intended to protect American jobs, but executives in the technology industry have long warned that visa restrictions would hurt the nation’s ability to compete in industries that have both strategic and financial significance as engines of economic growth. More here.

The renewal of the April Executive Order applies to H-1B, L-1 and J visas. The goal is to protect an estimated 525,000 jobs where American citizens get first priority.

“President Trump has repeatedly promised that he would put American workers first, and to his credit, he did just that,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for lower levels of immigration. FAIR had called on Trump to suspend guest worker visas.

“For the most part, the president withstood intense pressure from powerful business interests that continue to demand more cheap foreign labor, even as they have laid off an unprecedented number of American workers over the past three months ” Stein said.

*** Trump to Sign New Executive Order Freezing Green Cards ...

Sadly, it takes an executive order to protect American citizens and their jobs…

President Donald J. Trump Is Putting American Workers First as We Restore Our Economy to Greatness

LEADING AN AMERICA FIRST RECOVERY: President Donald J. Trump is extending and expanding the suspension of certain visas through the end of the year to ensure American workers take first priority as we recover from the economic effects of the coronavirus.
  • President Trump is extending the pause on new immigrant visas through the end of the year to ensure we continue putting American workers first during our ongoing coronavirus recovery.
  • President Trump is building on this measure with an additional pause on several job-related nonimmigrant visas—H-1Bs, H-2Bs without a nexus to the food-supply chain, certain H-4s, as well as Ls and certain Js—preserving jobs for American citizens.
  • President Trump’s efforts will ensure businesses look to American workers first when hiring.
    • Many workers have been hurt through no fault of their own due to coronavirus and they should not remain on the sidelines while being replaced by new foreign labor.
  • The Trump Administration has also finalized regulations to eliminate the incentive to file an asylum application for the primary purpose of obtaining an Employment Authorization Document.
  • With some exceptions, we should not permit large numbers of foreign workers to enter the United States at a time when so many Americans are out of work.
MOVING TO A MERIT-BASED IMMIGRATION SYSTEM: The Trump Administration will reform our immigration system to prioritize the highest-skilled workers and protect American jobs.
  • At President Trump’s direction, the Trump Administration is taking action to reform our H-1B immigration program.
  • Under these reforms, the H-1B program will prioritize those workers who are offered the highest wage, ensuring that the highest-skilled applicants are admitted.
  • The Trump Administration will also close loopholes that have allowed employers in the United States to replace American workers with low-cost foreign labor.
  • These reforms will help protect the wages of American workers and ensure that foreign labor entering our country is high skilled and does not undercut the United States labor market.
WIDESPREAD SUPPORT FOR COMMONSENSE ACTION: The American people stand by President Trump as he takes commonsense action to preserve jobs for American citizens.
  • Polls show that the overwhelming majority of Americans support pausing immigration as we recover as a Nation from the coronavirus pandemic.
    • A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that 65% of those polled support pausing immigration into the country, including 61% of minority respondents.
    • A Pew Research Center poll found that 81% of Americans see mass immigration as a threat as we confront the challenges posed by the coronavirus.
  • Democrats and liberal commentators used to support such commonsense efforts to protect American jobs.
    • Sen. Bernie Sanders: “You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those [American] kids?”
    • Paul Krugman stated that “Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants. That’s just supply and demand.”
    • Then-Sen. Barack Obama warned that mass migration “threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.”

 

Do You Recognize Chinese Propaganda?

Fake accounts, false news stories, bots and media paid by Chinese operatives. Sounds like Russia right? Same playbook, only perhaps more aggressive. As a public service, this article provides you as an internet user, a consumer of news and holding accounts on social media, be fair warned you could be vulnerable to Chinese propaganda.

(UPI) The Trump administration on Monday designated four more major Chinese state-run media outlets as foreign missions for being propaganda mouthpieces of the Chinese Communist Party, a move that will likely worsen already strained relations between Washington and Beijing and attract retaliatory measures.

China Central Television, China News Service, the People’s Daily and the Global Times were all designated Monday as foreign missions as they are “substantially owned or effectively controlled” by the Chinese government, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in a statement.

The companies will have to report the names of their staff and their real estate holdings to the Office of Foreign Missions within the State Department, treating the companies as arms of the Chinese government in the United States like foreign embassies or consulates.

“The decision to designate these entities is not based on any content produced by these entities, nor does it place any restrictions on what the designated entities may publish in the United States,” she said. “It simply recognizes them for what they are.” More here.

 

***

There is a backstory, a good one on how this came to be.

A radio station controlled by the Chinese Communist Party propaganda outlet Phoenix TV has been ordered by the Trump administration to cease its broadcasts within 48 hours.

Here’s how pro-China station Phoenix TV got into the White ... source

The Federal Communications Commission ruled on Monday that a Mexico-based radio station owned in part by Phoenix TV—one of the Communist regime’s leading propaganda organs—must end its broadcasts due to its failure to disclose its ties to China.

Prior to the FCC’s ruling, the station was exploiting a loophole that allows content produced in the United States to be broadcast from foreign radio towers, such as those in Mexico. Phoenix TV, which is headquartered in California, produced its content domestically and then used the more powerful Mexican station to broadcast across the U.S. border.

The FCC denied a license for that radio station, XEWW-AM, because it “failed to include in their application a key participant, Phoenix Radio, which produces the Mandarin programming in its studio,” the agency disclosed. Phoenix Radio, Phoenix TV’s radio affiliate, was using the station to broadcast Chinese propaganda across Southern California, in violation of FCC statutes.

Phoenix TV first found itself in Congress’s crosshairs earlier this year, after one of its reporters confronted President Donald Trump during a White House briefing about the coronavirus pandemic and Chinese government efforts to cover up the illness. The station’s presence at the White House generated concerns about the proliferation of Chinese state-controlled press organs in the United States.

The Mexican radio station failed to disclose Phoenix TV’s “extensive role” in producing content, an FCC spokesperson told the Washington Free Beacon. “It was a violation of the Communications Act for that company, which has ties to the Chinese government, not to be included on the application filed with the Commission. Therefore, the application was deficient and was dismissed.”

Phoenix TV used Mexican radio towers to skirt U.S. laws barring the dissemination of foreign propaganda in America. The FCC’s ruling is a sign the Trump administration seeks to more aggressively police these types of outlets, which for years have operated with little oversight. Congress has moved in recent months to crack down on a range of Chinese broadcasters and social media accounts that help the Communist regime saturate the American marketplace with state-approved propaganda.

The Free Beacon first reported in April that Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) was leading a charge to see the Mexican station shut down over its ties to Phoenix TV. Cruz introduced legislation exposing how Phoenix TV used a series of corporate cutouts to purchase the Mexican radio station and use its airwaves to broadcast Communist propaganda in the United States. The legislation would have closed loopholes in the FCC’s statutes that permitted Phoenix TV to operate in this manner.

“Today’s decision sends an important message to the world that the U.S. will not allow China to exploit FCC loopholes and spread its propaganda over our airwaves,” Cruz told the Free Beacon. “More importantly, this decision is a critical step in countering the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to control what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think.”

The FCC ruling accuses XEWW-AM’s owners of trying to hide the station’s ties to Phoenix TV. The station’s license application, the FCC said, did not disclose Phoenix TV’s role in producing the station’s broadcasts. The license was rejected on this basis. While the station can resubmit its application at a later date, it is likely to be rejected due to mounting concerns about Phoenix TV’s distribution of Communist regime propaganda.

Cruz first raised concerns with the FCC in 2018, when the H&H Capital investment group purchased the Mexican station. H&H, Cruz said, is completely enmeshed in Phoenix TV’s operations. H&H is owned in large part by Vivian Huo, a U.S. citizen and Beijing native who formerly worked for several Chinese-run media outlets.