Khald Hiftar of Libya Hires DC Lobby Firm

Col. Hiftar hires a DC lobby firm….why? To get money from the U.S. and Russia at the same time perhaps?

Khaled Khalifa Hiftar is restoring Libya to what end and before Russia fully steps in?What about the migrant crisis?

After Hiftar gained political and military legitimacy, Hifter concentrated on fighting Islamists in Benghazi, though with little initial success. His most sworn enemy was Ansar al-Sharia, the dominant terror group in Benghazi at the time, which the United States had already declared a terrorist organization after it was accused of killing the US ambassador in 2012.

Hifter relied heavily on his tribal connections in eastern Libya and capitalized on the bad security situation in Benghazi. By May 2015, he believed he had enough force to declare war on terror throughout Libya, not just Benghazi, where hundreds of former security officials, army officers and civil and political activists had been assassinated. In a way he was defending himself since he knew that he could be next on the death list.

His offensive in Benghazi stalled for a while since the army fragments he managed to reorganize were few in numbers and lacked training and equipment. Above all, many former professional officers did not join him because neither his motives nor his objectives were clear. More here.

For months, the Kremlin has sought to draw Libya’s eastern potentate General Khalifa Hiftar into its orbit. Hiftar is currently the de facto leader of a bloc of eastern Libyan forces that oppose Libya’s internationally recognized government in Tripoli, the so called Government of National Accord. Negotiations between the two sides are going nowhere and rumors of a potential Hiftar offensive against the Tripoli government have been swirling for months.

Hiftar has been to Moscow and paid a visit to the Russian aircraft carrier Kuznetsov in the Mediterranean, during which he held a video call with Russian Defense Minister Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Then, last week, Moscow reportedly deployed troops to a base on Egypt’s northern coast just 60 miles from the border crossing with Libya.

There are a few ways to interpret their latest move: It could just be posturing, part of a Russian hybrid warfare strategy aimed at influencing ongoing negotiations over Libya’s future. But there are plenty of reasons to believe it may be the early phase of a Russian intervention.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is eager to underscore the challenges that U.S. pro-democracy interventions in the Middle East have faced and offer up an alternative Russian strategy that relies on authoritarian leaders that look a lot like Putin himself. The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya has long been a target of Kremlin criticism and the chance to portray Russia as Libya’s savior as Russia has attempted to do in Syria must be more than a little tempting for the Russian president.

Closer ties to Libya would also offer Russia the chance to extend its reach further along the Mediterranean’s southern littoral i.e. NATO’s southern flank. Russia could, for example, seek to deploy advanced anti-access, area-denial systems along the Libyan coast, significantly enlarging the anti-access bubble that it has already established in the Eastern Mediterranean with similar deployments in Syria a bubble that was already raising significant concern with top U.S. military commanders a year ago. More here.

Related reading: What Americans Need To Know If Russia Intervenes in Libya’s Civil War

Related reading: The European Migrant Crisis Includes Libya

Further, what was his relationship with Hillary and Ambassador Cretz? We may never know due to those still missing Hillary emails.

Downfall and exile

Gaddafi put Haftar – recently promoted to field marshal – in charge of the Libyan forces involved in the conflict in Chad in the 1980s. This proved to be his downfall, as Libya was defeated by the French-backed Chadian forces, and Haftar and 300 of his men were captured by the Chadians in 1987.

Having previously denied the presence of Libyan troops in the country, Gaddafi disowned him. This led Haftar to devote the next two decades towards toppling the Libyan leader.

He did this from exile in the US state of Virginia. His proximity to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley hinted at a close relationship with US intelligence services, who gave their backing to several attempts to assassinate Gaddafi.

Return from exile

After the start of the uprising against Gaddafi in 2011, Haftar returned to Libya where he became a key commander of the makeshift rebel force in the east.

With Gaddafi’s downfall, Haftar faded into obscurity until February 2014, when he outlined on TV his plan to save the nation and called on Libyans to rise up against the elected parliament, the General National Congress (GNC), whose mandate was still valid at the time.

His dramatic announcement was made at a time when Libya’s second city, Benghazi, and other towns in the east had in effect been taken over by the local al-Qaeda affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia, and other Islamist groups who mounted a campaign of assassinations and bombings targeting the military, police personnel and other public servants.

Although Haftar did not have the wherewithal to put his plan into action, his announcement reflected popular sentiment, especially in Benghazi, which had become disenchanted with the total failure of the GNC and its government to confront the Islamists.

Haftar’s popularity is not necessarily shared elsewhere in the country where he is remembered more for his past association with Gaddafi and his subsequent US connections.

He is also detested by Islamists who resent him for confronting them in Benghazi and elsewhere in the east.

Operation Dignity

In May 2014 Haftar launched Operation Dignity against Islamist militants in Benghazi and the east. In March 2015 Libya’s elected parliament, the House of Representatives (HoR) – which had replaced the GNC – appointed him commander of the Libyan National Army (LNA).

After a year of little progress, in February 2016 the LNA pushed the Islamist militants out of much of Benghazi. By mid-April this had been followed up by further military action that dislodged the Islamists from their strongholds outside Benghazi and as far as Derna, 250km east of Benghazi.

Operation Swift Thunder

In September 2016, the LNA launched operation “Swift Thunder”, seizing from the Petroleum Facilities Guard – an armed group aligned with the UN-brokered Government of National Accord (GNA) – the key oil terminals of Zueitina, Brega, Ras Lanuf and Sidrah, in the oil-rich heartland locally known as the Oil Cresent.

In recognition of this, the Speaker of the HoR and supreme commander of the armed forces, Agilah Saleh, promoted Haftar from lieutenant-general to field marshal. More here from BBC.

Saudi: Prince AlWaleed bin Talal is in the Criminal Stacks

Finally…

So Harvard University what say you?

The Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program promotes the scholarly study of Islam and the Muslim world in a broadly interdisciplinary context.

The Islam in the West (IITW) program is an interfaculty initiative launched in 2003 with funds from the Office of the Provost at Harvard University. The Program’s mission is to enhance our knowledge on Muslim minorities in secular and democratic contexts in the West, assist undergraduate and graduate students from different schools and disciplines find guidance and resources, develop a collaborative group of Harvard faculty members from different disciplines with an interest in the subject, and to advance knowledge in an increasingly important area of research. More here.

photo

Forbes posted a 2010 interview with the Prince:

Would you look into purchasing more American real estate?
Well, we are a presence in the U.S., but maybe not directly through our real estate in the
ownership of hotels. For example, we own the Plaza in New York. We own, for example,
the Four Seasons brand with Bill Gates. We own the Fairmont brand with the Colony
group, private equity. I own almost 100 hotels in North America. Some of them are only in management, but some of them we have some small stakes in them. So we are in the real estate arena in the United States indirectly through our hotel portfolio. More details here.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia has arrested dozens of princes, senior military officers, businessmen and top officials, including a well-known royal billionaire with extensive holdings in Western companies, as part of a sweeping purported anti-corruption probe that further cements control in the hands of its young crown prince.

A high-level employee at Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding Co. told The Associated Press that the royal, who is one of the world’s richest men, was among those detained overnight Saturday. The company’s stock was down nearly 9 percent in trading Sunday on the Saudi stock exchange.

Reports suggested those detained were being held at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh, which only days earlier hosted a major investment conference with global business titans from the U.S., Japan and other countries. A Saudi official told The Associated Press that other five-star hotels across the capital were also being used to hold some of those arrested.

The surprise arrests, which also reportedly include two of the late King Abdullah’s sons, were hailed by pro-government media outlets as the greatest sign yet that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is keeping his promise to reform the country, long been plagued by allegations of corruption at the highest levels of government.

A Saudi government official with close ties to security says 11 princes and 38 others are being held. The official spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

Saudi Twitter accounts released several other names of those arrested, such as: Alwalid al-Ibrahim, a Saudi businessman with ties to the royal family who runs the Arabic satellite group MBC; Amr al-Dabbagh, the former head of the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority; Ibrahim Assaf, the former finance minister; and Bakr Binladin, head of the Saudi Binladin Group, a major business conglomerate.

An earlier crackdown on perceived critics of the crown prince included clerics, writers, lesser-known princes and Saudi figures popular on social media.

“The dismissals and detentions suggest that Prince Mohammed rather than forging alliances is extending his iron grip to the ruling family, the military, and the national guard to counter what appears to be more widespread opposition within the family as well as the military to his reforms and the Yemen war,” James M. Dorsey, a Gulf specialist and senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said an analysis of the shake-up. More here.

***

In part from Reuters:

Aside from a stake in Citigroup, Prince Alwaleed, 62, owns significant stakes in Twitter (TWTR.N), ride-hailing firm Lyft and Time Warner (TWX.N).

His investment firm Kingdom Holding 4280.SE – whose share price plunged 10 percent on Sunday in response to news of his detention – recently bought about half of a 31.1 percent stake in Saudi lender Banque Saudi Fransi 1050.SE from France’s Credit Agricole (CAGR.PA).

FINANCE MINISTER‘S SON

Prince Alwaleed’s father was the kingdom’s finance minister during the 1960s. Prince Alwaleed formed Kingdom Holding in 1979, initially pouring money into real estate in Riyadh; in the 1990s he ventured into Wall Street, investing heavily in Citigroup.

He had a close relationship with former Citigroup Chief Executive Sanford “Sandy” Weill, and has nurtured close ties with other Wall Street leaders including Goldman Sachs (GS.N) CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Prince Alwaleed increased his stake in Citigroup at the height of the global financial crisis a decade ago and he has held on to the stake, saying as recently as last month that he was very happy with the investment.

“He’s always been a colorful and unofficial public face of Saudi Arabia, though he has never been a key decision-maker in the kingdom,” a Gulf-based businessman said.

During the U.S. election campaign, Prince Alwaleed demanded that Trump withdraw from the election campaign after the candidate pledged to ban Muslims’ entry into the United States.

Trump responded by tweeting that the Saudi prince wanted to control “our politicians with daddy’s money. Can’t do it after I get elected.”

After Trump’s election victory, Prince Alwaleed said whatever their past differences, America had spoken, and he congratulated Trump on his victory.

Prince Alwaleed was an early advocate of women’s employment in Saudi Arabia and a lifting of the ban on women driving. In September, King Salman ordered that the ban should be lifted next year.

Import a Terrorist, Apply to the Diversity Visa Lottery Program

Even the LATimes calls for the program to be ended. In part: Sayfullo Saipov, who allegedly killed eight and wounded 11 in a truck attack on Tuesday, entered the country from Uzbekistan through the diversity visa lottery. He is not the first presumed terrorist to enter using the program. Lottery terrorists include Hesham Mohamed Ali Hedayet, who shot up an El-Al ticket counter in 2002, killing two, and Imran Mandhai, who planned to bomb power stations in Florida the same year.

photo

The chilling details on Imran Mandhai are located here.

Imran Mandhai.

National security problems with the lottery have long been known. At a 2003 congressional hearing, the inspector general of the State Department, which oversees the lottery, testified that the program “contains significant risks to national security from hostile intelligence officers, criminals and terrorists attempting to use the program for entry into the United States as permanent residents.”

The concerns identified at that hearing 14 years ago remain. In 2016, Immigration and Customs Enforcement created a list of countries that “promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations or their members.” Of the top 10 source countries for lottery winners in 2016, four were on ICE’s list: Egypt (No. 2), Iran (No. 3), Uzbekistan (No. 5) and Sudan (No. 7). Many other countries on the ICE list also send significant numbers of lottery winners.

In 2015, 14.4 million individuals plus family members successfully registered for the annual drawing. The State Department has to weed out those who do not qualify. After a computer randomly selects 100,000 names. State Department employees interview and vet the finalists, whittling down the list to the 50,000 cap. This is no simple task, since most applicants come from countries where recordkeeping is spotty and documents are hard to verify. Screening for visa lottery fraud takes up valuable State Department resources that could be allocated elsewhere if the program did not exist.

*** Suddenly, Chucky Schumer is suddenly quiet or forgets some facts.

The program was created by the late-Senator Ted Kennedy in the early 1990s, with help from then-Rep. Chuck Schumer, now the Senate Minority Leader, as a way to open the door to more Irish immigrants who could not qualify for immigration opportunities because of our equally nonsensical family chain migration policy. Of course, Schumer (and Kennedy until his death), continues to this day to defend family chain migration, and is fighting efforts to adopt a merit-based immigration policy that would obviate the need for the annual Wheel of Fortune exercise. More here. 

Included in the lottery are all four countries the U.S considers state sponsors of terror — Iran, Sudan, Cuba, and Syria — and 13 of the 14 nations that are coming under special monitoring from the Transportation Security Administration as founts of terrorism. Pakistan is excluded because, like China, it sends over tens of thousands of immigrants each year and doesn’t need to be in the lottery.

Among the winners for 2010 are:

Nigeria: 6,006
Iran: 2,773
Algeria: 1,957
Sudan: 1,084
Afghanistan: 345
Cuba: 298
Somalia: 229
Lebanon:
181
Libya: 152
Iraq: 142
Saudi Arabia:
104
Syria:
98
Yemen:
72

The State Department’s Office of the Inspector General recommended in a 2003 report that terror-sponsoring nations be removed from the diversity visa program.

“OIG believes that this program contains significant vulnerabilities to national security as hostile intelligence officers, criminals and terrorists attempt to use it to enter the United States as permanent residents,” the office’s deputy inspector testified to Congress in 2004.

A separate report filed by the Government Accountability Office also faulted the program for being susceptible to widespread fraud. A cottage industry has emerged abroad to cater to the lottery, and it regularly bilks people out of massive amounts of money and even coerces some into marriage to keep their diversity visas. More here.

Meanwhile:

The resettlement of refugees in the U.S. has been fairly consistent across the country since 2002, with no state resettling a majority of them. In fiscal year 2017, no state resettled more than 10% of the 53,716 refugees the nation admitted that year. California, Texas, New York, Washington, Michigan and Ohio each accounted for at least 5% of refugees resettled, while all other states had a lower share. In fiscal 2002, the earliest year state-level data are publicly available, California resettled 16% of the nation’s 27,110 refugees, the only state to account for more than 15% of the nation’s total that year – or in any following year, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. State Department data.

Most refugees today come from the Middle East and Africa, but this has not always been the case. Check more details here.

Russia Hacked the World, DoJ Suing Kremlin Operatives?

photo

FNC: The Justice Department reportedly has garnered enough evidence to charge at least six Russian government operatives with hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers during the 2016 presidential election.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that federal prosecutors could bring charges early next year. The Journal reported that dozens of others may have also played a role in the cyberattack.

Even tech companies are suing Russia.

How Russia hacked the world: Putin’s spies used ‘digital hit list’ to hunt global targets

  • 19,000 malicious links collected by Secureworks after Fancy Bear mistake.

  • 4,700 Gmail users across the globe were targeted by the state hacking team.

  • Alongside Democrats, a handful of Republican targets were also identified.

The hackers who upended the US presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, US defence contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.

The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that stretched back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users across the globe — from the pope’s representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow.

“It’s a wish list of who you’d want to target to further Russian interests,” said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP’s findings. He said the data was “a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence.”

The AP findings draw on a database of 19,000 malicious links collected by cybersecurity firm Secureworks, dozens of rogue emails, and interviews with more than 100 hacking targets.

Secureworks stumbled upon the data after a hacking group known as Fancy Bear accidentally exposed part of its phishing operation to the internet.

The list revealed a direct line between the hackers and the leaks that rocked the presidential contest in its final stages, most notably the private emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

The issue of who hacked the Democrats is back in the national spotlight following the revelation Monday that a Donald Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, was briefed early last year that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton, including “thousands of emails.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the notion that Russia interfered “unfounded.” But the list examined by AP provides powerful evidence that the Kremlin did just that.

“This is the Kremlin and the general staff,” said Andras Racz, a specialist in Russian security policy at Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Hungary, as he examined the data. “I have no doubts.”

New evidence

Secureworks’ list covers the period between March 2015 and May 2016. Most of the identified targets were in the United States, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Syria.

In the United States, which was Russia’s Cold War rival, Fancy Bear tried to pry open at least 573 inboxes belonging to those in the top echelons of the country’s diplomatic and security services: then-Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-NATO Supreme Commander, US Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, and one of his predecessors, US Army Gen. Wesley Clark.

The list skewed toward workers for defence contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and — especially — Democrats. More than 130 party workers, campaign staffers and supporters of the party were targeted, including Podesta and other members of Clinton’s inner circle.

The AP also found a handful of Republican targets.

Podesta, Powell, Breedlove and more than a dozen Democratic targets besides Podesta would soon find their private correspondence dumped to the web. The AP has determined that all had been targeted by Fancy Bear, most of them three to seven months before the leaks.

“They got two years of email,” Powell recently told AP. He said that while he couldn’t know for sure who was responsible, “I always suspected some Russian connection.”

In Ukraine, which is fighting a grinding war against Russia-backed separatists, Fancy Bear attempted to break into at least 545 accounts, including those of President Petro Poroshenko and his son Alexei, half a dozen current and former ministers such as Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and as many as two dozen current and former lawmakers.

The list includes Serhiy Leshchenko, an opposition parliamentarian who helped uncover the off-the-books payments allegedly made to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort — whose indictment was unsealed Monday in Washington.

In Russia, Fancy Bear focused on government opponents and dozens of journalists.

Among the targets were oil tycoon-turned-Kremlin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison and now lives in exile, and Pussy Riot’s Maria Alekhina. Along with them were 100 more civil society figures, including anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and his lieutenants.

“Everything on this list fits,” said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media analyst who was himself among the targets. He said Russian authorities would have been particularly interested in Navalny, one of the few opposition leaders with a national following.

Many of the targets have little in common except that they would have been crossing the Kremlin’s radar: an environmental activist in the remote Russian port city of Murmansk; a small political magazine in Armenia; the Vatican’s representative in Kiev; an adult education organisation in Kazakhstan.

“It’s simply hard to see how any other country would be particularly interested in their activities,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on Russian military affairs at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre in Washington.

He was also on the list.

“If you’re not Russia,” he said, “hacking these people is a colossal waste of time.”

Working 9 to 6 (Moscow Time)

Allegations that Fancy Bear works for Russia aren’t new. But raw data has been hard to come by.

Researchers have been documenting the group’s activities for more than a decade and many have accused it of being an extension of Russia’s intelligence services. The “Fancy Bear” nickname is a none-too-subtle reference to Russia’s national symbol.

In the wake of the 2016 election, US intelligence agencies publicly endorsed the consensus view, saying what American spooks had long alleged privately: Fancy Bear is a creature of the Kremlin.

But the US intelligence community provided little proof, and even media-friendly cybersecurity companies typically publish only summaries of their data.

That makes the Secureworks’ database a key piece of public evidence — all the more remarkable because it’s the result of a careless mistake.

Secureworks effectively stumbled across it when a researcher began working backward from a server tied to one of Fancy Bear’s signature pieces of malicious software.

He found a hyperactive Bitly account Fancy Bear was using to sneak thousands of malicious links past Google’s spam filter. Because Fancy Bear forgot to set the account to private, Secureworks spent the next few months hovering over the group’s shoulder, quietly copying down the details of the thousands of emails it was targeting.

The AP obtained the data recently, boiling it down to 4,700 individual email addresses, and then connecting roughly half to account holders.

The AP validated the list by running it against a sample of phishing emails obtained from people targeted and comparing it to similar rosters gathered independently by other cybersecurity companies, such as Tokyo-based Trend Micro and the Slovakian firm ESET.

The Secureworks data allowed reporters to determine that more than 95% of the malicious links were generated during Moscow office hours — between 9 am and 6 pm Monday to Friday.

The AP’s findings also track with a report that first brought Fancy Bear to the attention of American voters. In 2016, a cybersecurity company known as CrowdStrike said the Democratic National Committee had been compromised by Russian hackers, including Fancy Bear.

Secureworks’ roster shows Fancy Bear making aggressive attempts to hack into DNC technical staffers’ emails in early April 2016 — exactly when CrowdStrike says the hackers broke in.

Hacking hands
Fancy Bear have long been linked to the Russian security services iStock

And the raw data enabled the AP to speak directly to the people who were targeted, many of whom pointed the finger at the Kremlin.

“We have no doubts about who is behind these attacks,” said Artem Torchinskiy, a project coordinator with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund who was targeted three times in 2015. “I am sure these are hackers controlled by Russian secret services.”

The myth if the 400-pound man

Even if only a small fraction of the 4,700 Gmail accounts targeted by Fancy Bear were hacked successfully, the data drawn from them could run into terabytes — easily rivalling the biggest known leaks in journalistic history.

For the hackers to have made sense of that mountain of messages — in English, Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian, Arabic and many other languages — they would have needed a substantial team of analysts and translators. Merely identifying and sorting the targets took six AP reporters eight weeks of work.

The AP’s effort offers “a little feel for how much labour went into this,” said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

He said the investigation should put to rest any theories like the one then-candidate Donald Trump floated last year that the hacks could be the work of “someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

“The notion that it’s just a lone hacker somewhere is utterly absurd,” Rid said.

***

Axios: Marathon congressional hearings on Russian election interference and social media left execs from Facebook, Google and Twitter badly bruised and with a new view of just how mad Washington is about their handling of content aiming to divide Americans.

The big takeaway: Lawmakers’ rebukes went far beyond the companies’ responses to Russia’s interference. They also repeatedly revealed a discomfort with the size, power and limited accountability of the large web platforms.

What else we learned:

  • Washington isn’t buying that Facebook, Google and Twitter aren’t media companies. Both Republicans and Democrats seemed baffled at times by an assumption that has been fundamental to Google, Facebook and Twitter’s growth: that they are neutral platforms for information, not judges of content. Multiple lawmakers questioned that argument: “That may well be a distinction that is lost on most of us, that you’re just a platform for other people to express their views as opposed to being a publisher in their own right of those views,” said Republican Sen. John Cornyn.
  • We now know what the Russian ads look like. Lawmakers released some of the Russian-bought ads, which were focused largely on divisive political issues like civil rights, immigration and religion. According to the metadata released, the ads targeted both Republicans and Democrats and were paid for in rubles. For example, one “Black Matters” ad targeted adults in Georgia, Maryland, Missouri and Virginia and received more than 200,000 impressions and more than 12,000 clicks. It cost 53,425 rubles ($915).
  • Still no backing for a regulatory fix. The only piece of concrete legislation tied to this issue is the Honest Ads Act, which would require disclosure for online political ads. While the companies all committed to improving transparency, and companies indicated that they could work with lawmakers on the bill, they did not endorse it.
  • Lawmakers felt slighted by the CEOs’ absence. “I wish your CEOs were here,” said Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, one of many lawmakers who voiced that sentiment. “They need to answer for this.”
  • The companies are putting significant resources toward vetting content. During nine hours of hearings, they repeatedly touted how much they were investing in both money and personnel to solve the election interference issue. Facebook is doubling the people working on safety and security issues to 20,000 by the end of 2018, for example.
  • Democrats were the harshest critics. Silicon Valley has long had a strong relationship with the liberal left, but that didn’t stop California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, as well as tech ally Sen. Ron Wyden, from lacing into the witnesses. Republicans, while critical of the companies, stopped short of conceding that social media manipulation was a deciding factor in Donald Trump’s win.
  • Congressional investigators are still learning the basics. One lawmaker asked Twitter’s general counsel to explain the difference between a bot and a troll. Several inquired about the definition of “impressions.” This highlights how steep the learning curve is for elected officials to fully grasp the nuances of what went wrong online in 2016.
  • Tech made a huge political miscalculation in not moving faster. Again and again, the companies were chided for how long it took them to deliver the goods to investigators. “I hear all your words,” said Sen. Mark Warner, “but I have more than a little bit of frustration that many of us on this committee have been raising this issue since the beginning of this year, and our claims were frankly blown off by the leaderships of your companies.”
What’s next? All of the companies indicated their investigations are ongoing, so the scale of the Russian disinformation campaign could turn out to be even bigger than we know now.

Go deeper:

Foreign Agents in DC, at the White House?

Romanian leader seeks more Trump meetings

A Romanian politician sentenced to jail for rigging elections is trying to arrange meetings with Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), according to recent Justice Department filings.

Liviu Dragnea, who is speaker of Romanian Parliament’s lower chamber and party president, received a two-year suspended jail sentence last year for trying to rig a referendum election to impeach the country’s president.

Now, his Social Democratic Party is paying Washington public-affairs group Madison & Co. $100,000 to introduce Dragnea to Pence and Ryan “as soon as possible” and to arrange “political, media and academic meetings” for Dragnea. Operatives working on the case include Madison & Co. president Al Madison; Democratic lobbyist and “rainmaker” William Oldaker; Drew Willison, Senate Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid’s (Nev.) final chief of staff; and William Harris, a Republican operative who “has worked for the Trump Organization on a variety of political and business matters,” according to a disclosure filing. The Justice Department has not yet released disclosures forms for Oldaker or Willison.

This wouldn’t be Dragnea’s first brush with members of the current administration. In the days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Dragnea met with the president-elect, now-former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Ed Royce (R-Calif), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

*** Remember Guccifer is Romanian.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act is in fact a joke, but quite a lucrative one if you are part of a Washington DC law firm. As noted on the website, under the guidance and management of the Department of Justice:

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was enacted in 1938. FARA is a disclosure statute that requires persons acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities. Disclosure of the required information facilitates evaluation by the government and the American people of the statements and activities of such persons in light of their function as foreign agents. The FARA Registration Unit of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES) in the National Security Division (NSD) is responsible for the administration and enforcement of the Act.

The person at the Justice Department who is in charge of this division was Dana Boente. He suddenly resigned last week…..hummmm. Boente assumed the position of Deputy Attorney General, when Trump fired Sally Yates when she refused to defend Trump’s travel suspension executive order. Boente declared he would defend in court that executive order, but was that really true since he suddenly resigned?

Seems Boente was selected to oversee the department’s division handling the probe into alleged Russian election interference, overseeing efforts on cybersecurity and counterintelligence.

Another hummm

So back to foreign lobby and continued foreign interference in DC…

*** In part from Politico:

The last time I can remember a stir about a lobby firm evading disclosure law was in 2004, when Qorvis Communications’ offices were raided by the FBI in a probe about its work for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. However, nothing much came of it, and business carried on as usual among Washington lobbyists. Two years ago, reportedly, a number of Qorvis lobbyists quit because they were uncomfortable with the firm’s work. According to this 2015 story in the New York Observer, more than a third of Qorvis partners had left the firm—to start their own lobby shops—“partly because of the firm’s work on behalf of such clients as Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the Central African nation of Equatorial Guinea,” reported the Huffington Post. “‘I just have trouble working with despotic dictators killing their own people,’ said one Qorvis insider.”

The last time I can remember a stir about a lobby firm evading disclosure law was in 2004, when Qorvis Communications’ offices were raided by the FBI in a probe about its work for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. However, nothing much came of it, and business carried on as usual among Washington lobbyists. Two years ago, reportedly, a number of Qorvis lobbyists quit because they were uncomfortable with the firm’s work. According to this 2015 story in the New York Observer, more than a third of Qorvis partners had left the firm—to start their own lobby shops—“partly because of the firm’s work on behalf of such clients as Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the Central African nation of Equatorial Guinea,” reported the Huffington Post. “‘I just have trouble working with despotic dictators killing their own people,’ said one Qorvis insider.”