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Diageo Claims Diddy Gave The Company An Ultimatum To Give Him $100M Or He Would ‘Publicly Accuse’ Them Of Racism – AfroTech

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As AFROTECH previously reported, Combs sued Diageo as he believed the company was not providing DeLeón the same thought and care as its other tequila brands, including George Clooney’s Casamigos, which Diageo purchased for $1 billion in 2017.

He continued, “So there was no plan for us to be successful. It was no equal treatment. The other brands, they had agave planted, they had no agave planted for me.”

According to court documents shared with AFROTECH, Diageo suggests that they have provided substantial support for DeLeón, while Diddy has significantly failed to uphold his end of the joint venture (JV).

“Diageo has disproportionately supported and grown the DeLeón brand despite the Combs Parties’ repeated failures to live up to their own commitments and their repudiation of their bargainedfor role as true equity partners,” court papers read. “That is why CWS will not prevail on the sole breach of contract claim brought here: it is contrary to every fact about the parties’ actual performance of their contractual obligations.”

Diageo also cites Diddy’s lack of equity in the partnership as a result of his failures “to take on any of the risks, burdens, and responsibilities that come with being a true equity owner and partner.”

It was expected that Combs would provide marketing, advertising, and promotional services.

Diageo also addressed Combs accusation of racial discrimination. He had mentioned that the liquor company wanted to box him in the “colored section” and only had plans to distribute his products in Black neighborhoods.

Diageo states the allegations are untrue and has countered his claims. The company claims the mogul “asked to be paid millions of dollars more under threat of publicly accusing Diageo of racism” and once demanded $100 million in the wake of COVID-19.

“In May 2021, following Diageo’s public commitment of $100 million to help with COVID recovery for the hospitality sector and underprivileged communities, Mr. Combs demanded that Diageo pay him $100 million and threatened then to ‘reach out to every news outlet’ to ‘burn the house down’ and cause maximum damage to Diageo and the DeLeón brand, by making public accusations of racism if Diageo refused to write the check,” an excerpt from the court filing read.

Furthermore, the company does acknowledge the disruption of DeLeón supply and states it was a result of the effects of the pandemic.

“Following the July 2020 reset, Mr. Combs and CWS nonetheless periodically accused Diageo of racism, citing supply disruption issues and occasional ‘stock-outs’ of DeLeón products as evidence of supposedly discriminatory treatment,” the company stated. “These disingenuous accusations ignored the incontrovertible fact that the COVID pandemic was impacting every part of the supply chain; indeed, the pandemic negatively affected supply for all of Diageo’s tequilas, as well as for its other brands and products.”

In response, Diddy’s attorney, John C. Hueston, shared the following statement with AFROTECH: “Diageo claims its executives were available to hear all of Mr. Combs concerns about race and diversity issues. The sad truth is that they never truly listened to what Mr. Combs was saying and brushed them off as threats and demands for money. If they had actually taken the time to comprehend his concerns, and lived up to the agreements they signed, we wouldn’t be in court today.”


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The Hill

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Former FBI Special Agent Daniel Brunner said if President-elect Trump chooses loyalist and former Trump administration aide Kash Patel to lead the FBI, it would do “massive damage” to the agency.

“Putting someone like Kash Patel in the position of director of the FBI is, I believe, extremely, extremely dangerous because … his resume isn’t traditional,” Brunner said Sunday on CNN.

Brunner later added that Patel “has no experience leading an organization, no less a Cub Scout pack.”

Reports have surfaced that Trump is eyeing Patel for the position and may fire current FBI Director Christopher Wray after the president-elect takes power.

Patel, who was the chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, has defended Trump and testified on behalf of the president-elect against states that were considering taking him off the ballot due to Jan. 6.

Patel works as an adviser to Trump for national security issues and as a board member for Trump’s media company.

In the interview Sunday, Brunner noted that Patel “clearly stated” he wants to seek revenge on those who investigated Trump and his allies.

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“He will conduct a massive amount of damage to the interior of the FBI,” he said.

Brunner noted there will be hundreds of employees who are “unjustly fired.” Patel’s potential appointment would mean he’s in charge of “tens of thousands” of employees, including special agents, analysts and “everyone that is enforcing the law” federally.

“So, I think he’ll be very, very dangerous,” Brunner added.

The Hill has reached out to the Trump transition team for comment.

Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.


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Counterintelligence expert Kash Patel, close to Trump under consideration to head FBI – Yes Punjab News

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New York, Nov 17 2024-

Counterintelligence expert Kash Patel, who is close to US President-Elect Donald Trump, is reportedly under consideration for appointment to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after having been passed over for the leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

If he gets the job, he will likely be the highest-ranking Indian American in the administration even though it is not a Cabinet post and no names from the community have emerged as of Saturday for the remaining Cabinet-level jobs.

Media reports say that several Trump loyalists are pushing the appointment of Patel, who has called for “drastic measures” to reshape the FBI.

Patel had close ties with Trump who considered him one of his policy specialists, and they both share the view that Trump had won the 2020 election but was unlawfully deprived of the presidency and that there should be retribution for those they consider responsible.

During his campaign, Trump endorsed Patel’s proposals to reshape government in his book, ‘Government of Gangsters’, a title that reflects both their views that a cabal of “Deep State” operatives was running the country behind the scenes.

Patel had served as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism (CT) at the National Security Council (NSC), before becoming the chief of staff to the then Acting Secretary of Defence Christopher Miller, his final job in the first Trump administration.

His appointment to head the FBI, the powerful domestic intelligence service, is by no means certain as there are others in the running and opposition to him from the more establishment types in the Republican party and government.

Nearing the end of his first term, Trump had sought to appoint Patel as the deputy director of the CIA, but was foiled by opposition from the then-head, Gina Haspel.

The then-Attorney General William Barr also shot down a proposal to appoint him as the Deputy Director of the FBI.

Christopher Wray, who Trump appointed to a ten-year term as the FBI Director in 2017 and who was retained by President Joe Biden, will have to be fired or voluntarily resign for Trump to nominate a new head.

The job required confirmation by the Senate.

Patel started off as a public defender – the government-paid lawyer for poor defendants – and made his jump to the prosecution side as a trial attorney for the Justice Department’s National Security Division which handles terrorism-related cases, and as the liaison to the military’s Joint Special Operations Command.

According to a Defence Department biography, Patel worked with the command “to conduct collaborative global targeting operations against high-value terrorism targets” and oversaw the elimination of Islamic State terror group’s and al-Qaeda’s leaders.

That helped him build his expertise on terrorism and led to his next career move as the national security advisor to the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

His work there to unravel the claims of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump, and on the FBI’s questionable wiretaps of Trump’s campaign staff drew the attention of the White House and Trump’s allies.

He joined the White House as the Senior Director for Counterterrorism in the National Security Council with also the rank of Deputy Special Assistant to the President.

Trump expanded it, placing Patel among his “top Ukraine policy specialists.”

Politico reported that according to former White House sources Patel had direct access to Trump, to the chagrin of other officials.

He rapidly rose to become a principal deputy to Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, with his next stop at the Defence Department.

Patel, who uses an abbreviated version of his first name Kashyap, is the son of Gujaratis who came to the US from East Africa, and in his book, he speaks of a deep connection to India.

Patel’s view of the government establishment, like Trump’s, is coloured deeply by distrust and suspicions that it has its own agenda and is loyal to external forces.

He was a firm believer that Trump had won the 2020 election and supported Trump’s calls for retribution.

He said in a podcast interview, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media” responsible for what he asserted was rigging the election.

About the FBI, he wrote in his book that it “has become so thoroughly compromised that it will remain a threat to the people unless drastic measures are taken.” (Agency)


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Bombshell House Committee Report on DEI, The FBI, and National Security

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Donald Trump Has ‘Obligations’ to Those Who Brought Him to Power—Putin Ally

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A Vladimir Putin aide has warned Donald Trump that he is “obliged” to fulfill promises he made during his presidential campaign to bring peace to Ukraine.

The President-elect said repeatedly during his campaign to secure his return to the White House that he would put a stop to the more than two and a half years of war in Ukraine “within 24 hours.”

And Nikolai Patrushev, part of the Russian president’s inner circle and former Secretary of the Security Council, told the Russian newspaper Kommersant that Trump was duty-bound to act on his words.

Patrushev said: “To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.

“During the preelection period, he made many statements to attract voters to his side, who ultimately voted against the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current U.S. presidential administration.

“But the election campaign is over, and in January 2025, it will be time for the specific actions of the elected president. It is known that election promises in the United States can often diverge from subsequent actions.”

Newsweek has contacted Trump’s team for comment.

Patrushev was answering a question about whether the new U.S. administration amounted to “positive changes from Russia’s point of view.”

He went on to say that Putin gave a speech, at the Valdai Forum, an international conference held in Russia, last Thursday, which “sent a kind of greeting to Washington when there is a shift change there.”

Patrushev also said that Putin called Trump “a man” after seeing his response to the assassination attempt on him in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. This “coming from Putin is high praise,” Patrushev added.

But he went on to add that relations between Russia and the Western world could also go in the opposite direction, if the U.S. and the U.K. “consider sabotage on Nord Stream as one of many methods of advancing their economic interests,” for example.

Patrushev said the U.S. and the U.K. were behind the September 2022 attacks on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, which are still shrouded in mystery—and were planning others.

The U.S. Department of State has denied these accusations, telling Newsweek they are “completely and utterly false.”

A spokesperson also said they would not speculate about how the next administration will deal with the war in Ukraine.

Similarly, the U.K. Foreign Office said it “condemns acts of sabotage on critical national infrastructure and takes the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines seriously.”

A spokesperson added: “It would be wrong to speculate on any policy decisions that the incoming administration of President-elect Trump may make. We have welcomed sustained bipartisan US support for Ukraine, which has been absolutely key in the international effort.”

A Swedish investigation found evidence of sabotage on the pipelines between Russia and Germany. Moscow had initially accused the U.S. but probes by Sweden and Denmark were closed in February 2024 without identifying those responsible, although a German investigation is ongoing.

German authorities had reportedly issued a European arrest warrant in June for a Ukrainian national suspected of sabotaging the pipeline along with two others, using a yacht called Andromeda.

But Patrushev believes that the Ukrainian Navy has “neither the equipment nor the trained specialists to carry out a deep-sea terrorist attack” and said that “only special forces units of NATO countries could carry out sabotage of this scale.”

He said that in the future, new infrastructure, including marine fiber-optic cables that provide connectivity around the world, could come under attack.” The move would have the goal of sowing “chaos” in the global energy market, “including by destabilizing maritime transportation.”

Patrushev is considered one of the key drivers of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and served as secretary of Russia’s Security Council before being moved to the position of Putin aide. He is also chairman of Russia’s maritime board.

Update 11/13/24, 11:20 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from the U.S. State Department and the U.K. Foreign Office.


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Opinion | Why Trump Wants Hegseth at Defense

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He seems to want a culture warrior to take on the military brass. There are bigger security issues.


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Fundamentals of open-source intelligence for journalists

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Open-source intelligence (OSINT) – the gathering and analysis of publicly available information found on social media, and in databases and government records – can be invaluable in situations when information is sparse, controlled or censored. Journalists today leverage OSINT to expose corruption, investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity, and hold governments and other powerful actors to account.

The investigative journalism group Bellingcat has pioneered the use of OSINT in its cutting-edge reporting over the years. The outlet’s journalists have used OSINT to uncover Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of Malaysian Flight MH17 over Ukraine, provide critical evidence of the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons against civilians, and revealed the massacre of civilians by Cameroonian soldiers in 2020, among other investigations.

“We’ve uncovered and verified lots of potential war crimes, […] spy networks, state-backed assassination teams, the movements and activities of drug cartel leaders, […] and sanctions breaches by the likes of Russia, Iran and many, many more,” said Bellingcat’s lead editor, Eoghan Macguire, during a recent IJNet Crisis Reporting Forum session. 

Macguire outlined how Bellingcat has used OSINT to support its investigations across Africa, and he provided key tools and resources for journalists interested in using OSINT in their own investigative reporting.

Using OSINT to identify war crimes

In his presentation, Macguire detailed how his team investigated alleged war crimes in Ethiopia’s Tigray region during the Tigray war, which lasted from November 2020 until November 2022. During what was a civil war, the Ethiopian government and its allies fought against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. 

Bellingcat reporters began their investigation in March 2021 when graphic videos purportedly depicting the execution of civilians by Ethiopian soldiers surfaced on social media. “Even though these were tough videos to watch, they contained clues that allowed us to verify crucial details,” said Macguire.

Bellingcat investigators analyzed the shadows cast in the footage to deduce the time of day the videos were filmed, and the team used PeakVisor, an app originally designed for mountaineers, to determine the location where the videos were filmed. 

An alternative to Google Maps, which offers only limited detail in rural areas, explained Macguire, PeakVisor provided valuable topographic information that Bellingcat’s journalists could identify in the videos, such as ridges and plateaus. They then compared these features against satellite imagery from Google Earth to identify the location of the massacre: a village known as Mahbere Dego in the Tigray region.  

To identify the perpetrators of the massacre, Bellingcat examined the language spoken in the videos and the uniforms being worn. “Using independent translators, we established that the soldiers were speaking Amharic, indicating they were not from the Tigray region,” Macguire said. This led to the conclusion that they were likely members of the Ethiopian military. 

Ultimately, in collaboration with Newsy and BBC Africa Eye, Bellingcat reported that the executions were carried out by Ethiopian forces. “It was important information to put out,” MacGuire stressed, noting that other major news organizations including CNN later corroborated their results using similar methods.

Tools of the trade

Crucially, many of the tools employed in the investigation, including Google Earth, Natural Earth, and PeakVisor, were free. “You don’t have to be a tech wizard or spend lots of money to conduct open-source investigations,” Macguire noted. “With simple online tools, we were able to do something really powerful.”

In another example, Bellingcat utilized open-source software to track and document the movement of ships to shed light on illicit grain trade originating from the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. The investigation highlighted how one ship, the Zafar, engaged in ship-to-ship transfers of grain at sea, obscuring the origins of the sanctioned grain, and later integrated the grain into the global market.

Using satellite imagery collected by Planet Labs and ship tracking data from Lloyd’s List Intelligence, Bellingcat reconstructed the journey of the Zafar from Crimea, where it was observed loading grain into silos with its Automatic Identification System (AIS) — a system that is required to be turned on to identify a vessel — turned off. The ship later activated its AIS en route to Yemen, where it transitioned through a U.N. inspection point in Djibouti without being flagged as evading sanctions. 

“Satellite imagery provided a different story from what conventional ship tracking revealed,” said Macguire. The investigation raised critical questions about the efficacy of sanctions and U.N. inspections, and ignited concerns about lack of oversight by U.N. officials of sanction-evading vessels.

The future of OSINT

The potential of open-source data extends beyond journalism; it has implications in legal settings, too, including being used as evidence in international courts

As the field matures, however, it faces unique challenges — developments in social media, AI, and disinformation, to name a few. “Social media platforms, once goldmines for information, have become more difficult to navigate,” Macguire observed. He highlighted, in particular, recent changes to platforms like X, which once offered a wealth of information as users regularly posted on the platform, but has seen its use decline after being acquired by Elon Musk.

Emerging technologies like AI, meanwhile, present both opportunities and threats. Although tools developed to analyze large amounts of data — for example, satellite image datasets — can enhance investigative capabilities, AI’s ability to generate deceptive content also poses challenges. “As AI improves, distinguishing between authentic and fabricated images may become increasingly complex,” Macguire warned.

Bellingcat encourages journalists and researchers to collaborate when utilizing OSINT data, sharing their findings and methodologies. As the outlet continues to refine its techniques and adapt to a shifting media landscape, it remains committed to transparency. “The results you can get [from OSINT] can be really, really important,” Macguire said.  

OSINT resources

Macguire offered several tools and resources for journalists interested in OSINT. Here are a few: 

Open-source community

Bellingcat’s Discord allows members to engage, learn and collaborate with fellow OSINT investigators. Beginners and experts alike are welcome.

General OSINT toolkits

Bellingcat’s Online Open Source Investigation Toolkit

BBC Africa Eye Forensics Dashboard

Free satellite imagery

Sentinel Hub EO Browser

Google Earth

Paid satellite imagery (generally of higher quality)

Planet Labs

Maxar Technologies

Free ship tracking data

Global Fishing Watch

Paid ship tracking data

Lloyd’s List Intelligence

Marine Traffic

VesselFinder

Aircraft tracking

ADS-B Exchange

Flight Radar 24

Free open-source tools

Bellingcat GitHub


Photo by Маk Каmmerer on Unsplash.


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How a Trump presidency could lead to a purge at the Pentagon

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  • Summary
  • During campaign, Trump vowed to purge military of ‘woke’ generals
  • Former generals and defense secretaries are among Trump’s fiercest critics
  • Trump will prioritize loyalty during his second term, U.S. officials say

WASHINGTON, Nov 10 (Reuters) – During his campaign for re-election, Donald Trump vowed to purge the military of so-called “woke” generals. Now that he is president-elect, the question in the halls of the Pentagon is whether he would go much further.

Trump is expected to have a far darker view of his military leaders in his second term, after facing Pentagon resistance over everything from his skepticism toward NATO to his readiness to deploy troops to quell protests on U.S. streets.

Trump’s former U.S. generals and defense secretaries are among his fiercest critics, some branding him a fascist and declaring him unfit for office. Angered, Trump has suggested that his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, could be executed for treason.

Current and former U.S. officials say Trump will prioritize loyalty in his second term and root out military officers and career civil servants he perceives to be disloyal.

“He will destroy the Department of Defense, frankly. He will go in and he will dismiss generals who stand up for the Constitution,” said Jack Reed, the Democrat who leads the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Culture war issues could be one trigger for firings. Trump was asked by Fox News in June whether he would fire generals described as “woke,” a term for those focused on racial and social justice but which is used by conservatives to disparage progressive policies.

“I would fire them. You can’t have (a) woke military,” Trump said.

Some current and former officials fear Trump’s team could target the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, a widely respected former fighter pilot and military commander who steers clear of politics.

The four-star general, who is Black, issued a video message about discrimination in the ranks in the days after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, and has been a voice in favor of diversity in the U.S. military.

Asked for comment, Brown’s spokesperson, Navy Captain Jereal Dorsey, said: “The chairman along with all of the service members in our armed forces remain focused on the security and defense of our nation and will continue to do so, ensuring a smooth transition to the new administration of President-elect Trump.”

Trump’s vice president-elect, J.D. Vance, voted as a senator last year against confirming Brown to become the top U.S. military officer, and has been a critic of perceived resistance to Trump’s orders within the Pentagon.

“If the people in your own government aren’t obeying you, you have got to get rid of them and replace them with people who are responsive to what the president’s trying to do,” Vance said in an interview with Tucker Carlson before the election.

During the campaign, Trump pledged to restore the name of a Confederate general to a major U.S. military base, reversing a change made after Floyd’s killing.

Trump’s strongest anti-woke messaging during the campaign took aim at transgender troops. Trump has previously banned transgender service members and posted a

campaign ad, opens new tab

on X portraying them as weak, with the vow that “WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!”

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

‘LAWFUL ORDERS’

Trump has suggested the U.S. military could play an important role in many of his policy priorities, from tapping National Guard and possibly active-duty troops to help carry out a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants to even deploying them to address domestic unrest.

Such proposals alarm military experts, who say deploying the military on American streets could not only violate laws but turn much of the American population against the still widely respected U.S. armed forces.

In a message to the forces after Trump’s election win, outgoing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged the results of the election and stressed the military would obey “all lawful orders” from its civilian leaders.

But some experts caution that Trump has wide latitude to interpret the law and U.S. troops cannot disobey legal orders they consider to be morally wrong.

“There is a widespread public misperception that the military can choose not to obey immoral orders. And that’s actually not true,” said Kori Schake of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Schake warned that a second Trump term could see high-level firings as he pushes ahead with controversial policies.

“I think there will be an enormous chaos premium in a second Trump term, both because of the policies he will attempt to enact and the people he will put in place to enact them in terms of appointments,” she said.

One U.S. military official downplayed such concerns, saying on condition of anonymity that creating chaos within the U.S. military’s chain of command would create political backlash and be unnecessary for Trump to accomplish his goals.

“What these guys will find out is that military officers are generally focused on warfighting and not politics,” the military official said.

“I feel they’ll be satisfied of that – or at least they should be.”

HOLLOW OUT CIVILIAN RANKS?

Career civil servants at the Pentagon could be subjected to loyalty tests, current and former officials say. Trump allies have publicly embraced using executive orders and rule changes to replace thousands of civil servants with conservative allies.

A senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters there was increasing concern within the Pentagon that Trump would purge career civilian employees from the department.

“I’m deeply concerned about their ranks,” the official said, adding that several colleagues had expressed concern about the future of their jobs.

Career civil servants are among the nearly 950,000 non-uniformed employees who work within the U.S. military and in many cases have years of specialized experience.

Trump vowed during the campaign to give himself the power to gut the federal workforce across the government.

During his first administration, some of Trump’s controversial suggestions to advisers, such as potentially firing missiles into Mexico to destroy drug labs, never became policy in part because of pushback from officials at the Pentagon.

“This will be 2016 on steroids and the fear is that he will hollow out the ranks and expertise in a way that will do irreparable damage to the Pentagon,” the official said.

Get weekly news and analysis on the U.S. elections and how it matters to the world with the newsletter On the Campaign Trail. Sign up here.

Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Don Durfee and Daniel Wallis

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The ‘Trumpian revolution’: what will Trump do (and how) once back in power

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Updated

The election winner has five objectives: abandon Ukraine, lower taxes for the wealthy, fill the Administration with his loyalists, increase tariffs, and deport 11.5 million migrants

One of the differences between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the subsequent ones, especially this one that has just ended, is the complete disappearance of the president-elect’s worker-oriented rhetoric. In 2016, he said he would end the carried interest that allows billionaires in private equity funds to pay only a 20% tax rate on their financial investments, claimed that hedge fund managers “are like committing murders and getting away with it” (on August 23, 2015), and to justify his attacks on Barack Obama, he multiplied the U.S. unemployment rate by 10, from 4% to 40%.

These redistributive plans were nothing but electoral rhetoric from a candidate who stated that “we cannot afford” to raise the federal minimum wage, which has been frozen since 2009. In fact, Trump appointed those same financiers he abhorred to his cabinet, including “the king of foreclosures” (Steve Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary) and “the king of bankruptcies” (Wilbur Ross, Commerce Secretary).

In this 2024 campaign, Trump’s program has been more elusive. His objectives are five: isolationism, which includes abandoning Ukraine; tax cuts for higher incomes and companies; taking over the Public Administration by his loyalists; tariffs; and deportation of 11.5 million undocumented immigrants.

The first three parts of that triad are more likely to be carried out, the fourth is in an intermediate situation, and the fifth presents more difficulties.

Trump can reach an agreement with Russia, which would impose on Ukraine, for that country to cede Crimea and all the territories that Putin’s forces have occupied in the wars of 2015 and the one that began in 2022. Certainly, with a Republican Senate, it seems almost impossible for the U.S. to approve more military aid to Kiev, so Trump and Putin will have an excellent bargaining chip over Ukraine. But it would be enough for Putin and Trump to sign it for it to take effect. In addition, Trump can easily veto Ukraine’s entry into NATO, and exert enough pressure on the EU so that it, showing its traditional ability to yield, prolongs the accession negotiations of Kiev.

Such an agreement would not be ratified by the Senate, as Republicans are far from having the 60 votes needed for approval in that chamber of 100 seats. But that is not a problem in itself. Also, there is an important issue: Trump does not like having to negotiate with Congress. He prefers to operate through executive orders, which reinforce his image of authority, even though they can be overturned by his successors.

Tax cuts may be a done deal. Senate Republicans would approve them, perhaps only for a limited period. And even if Democrats were to gain control of the House of Representatives, their majority would be so slim that Trump would have no trouble convincing them to approve, if not all of his tax plans, at least the majority of them.

This would mean extending the income tax cuts approved in Trump’s first term in 2017, which were set to expire in 2025. It is a tax cut that benefits higher incomes, further contributing to increasing the U.S. public deficit, which reached 7% of GDP this year. As for the Corporate Tax, the president-elect wants to lower it to 15% from the current 21%, where he himself set it after reducing it from a maximum rate of 39% in 2017 to 15%. That is the reason for the stock market rise this Wednesday, as the money that companies save on federal taxes will go towards dividends and share buybacks, increasing their value. Additionally, it will also increase the deficit.

To control the Public Administration, Trump only needs to issue a similar order to the one he launched in October 2020 – too late, as he lost the elections the following month – with the so-called Schedule F, which created a new category of officials who transitioned from technical roles to political positions of trust. This rule would increase the current number of political positions in the federal government from 4,000 to 30,000 and would be a decisive step in the politicization of the Administration following a model akin to Erdogan or Orban.

The issue of tariffs is more complicated. To raise them, as Trump proposes (20% with the entire planet Earth and 70% with China and 76% with Mexico), he needs Congress’s favorable vote. Such a steep increase is unlikely to be approved. However, he can use accusations of illegal trade practices or national security defense to raise tariffs in specific areas, from Spanish table olives to Chinese microprocessors, as he did in his first term.

Finally, there is the deportation of immigrants. Once again, it seems unlikely that Congress will approve additional funding, among other reasons because it would devastate the U.S. economy. But Trump can redirect funds from other Defense allocations, claiming that the country is being invaded. In any case, he cannot deport 11.5 million undocumented individuals simply because there would be no one to work in construction, clean floors, pick fruit, or cook in restaurants, including, according to many reports, those at his own Bedminster golf club near New York.


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The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference

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The Intelligence Community Campus-Bethesda, a vast office complex covered in vertical panels of maroon siding and mirrored glass, sits on a cliff overlooking the Potomac, surrounded by a forty-acre lawn and a tall wrought-iron fence. Roughly three thousand employees of various United States spy agencies work there. About two dozen of them are assigned to the Foreign Malign Influence Center—the command hub of the battle to protect the Presidential election from manipulation by foreign powers. The center, which opened in 2022, is responsible for deciphering, and defeating, surreptitious efforts to rig or tilt the American vote. The October before an election is the busy season.

Jessica Brandt, a forty-year-old newcomer to the intelligence world, is the center’s first director. Before her appointment, last year, she’d spent her career writing research papers at Washington think tanks, most recently on “digital authoritarianism”—the way dictators use technology to control or manipulate people, at home and abroad. At a thirty-seat conference table in the center, we talked about her move from theory to practice. Now that Brandt has access to classified intelligence, she knows as much as anyone about how foreign powers are trying to tamper with American elections. But she has also experienced firsthand how the polarization of U.S. politics is making it harder to protect the fairness and credibility of the vote. These days, a warning from the U.S. intelligence agencies is no longer accepted at face value. It’s immediately spun for partisan advantage.

Intelligence officials use the term “election interference” to describe attacks on the actual mechanics of vote counting. This is now considered an extremely slight risk. The hodgepodge of state voting systems makes a mass hacking impossible, and recent security upgrades have insured the preservation of paper backups for almost every ballot. The more realistic danger is what officials call “malign foreign influence”: hacks and leaks, bots and trolls, hidden payments and targeted attack ads. Adversaries can use these underhanded tactics to twist public opinion, discredit the vote, and sway its outcome. The center’s job is to mitigate the effects of such machinations, and one of its main tools is forewarning voters through public bulletins.

Yet ever since July 28, 2016, when the director of the C.I.A. began briefing President Barack Obama on the Kremlin’s plot to help elect Donald Trump, it has been agonizingly clear that government alarms about hidden meddling by foreign hands might themselves be perceived as tainting the electoral process. Obama decided not to alert the public before Election Day about the full extent of the Russian conspiracy to assist Trump, fearing that such a disclosure would look like a thumb on the scale in favor of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and potentially undermine her widely expected victory.

That, it turned out, was the wrong worry. When the Kremlin brazenly pulled off another hack-and-leak operation the next year, in Europe, France’s response provided an instructive contrast. The Russians had stolen gigabytes of e-mails and other data from the Presidential campaign of Emmanuel Macron. But, before the day of the vote, credibly nonpartisan government agencies informed citizens of a foreign cyberattack; an electoral commission instructed news organizations not to report on the leaked material. David Salvo, the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, at the German Marshall Fund, told me that the French government’s action, and the public’s trusting response, was “the best-case scenario.”

The U.S. intelligence agencies, though, waited until two months after Trump won the 2016 election to lay out the sweeping scale of the Russian operation. Instead of averting a partisan battle, the delay ignited one. Democrats argued that the Kremlin’s support rendered Trump an illegitimate leader; Trump and his allies claimed that the intelligence agencies were part of a deep-state conspiracy against him. Seven years later, the fight continues.

Now another U.S. Presidential election may hinge on tens of thousands of votes across a handful of states. Almost any illicit advantage could arguably decide the outcome (and cast doubt on the results), making the race a prime opportunity for foreign meddling. Indeed, intelligence officials and tech-company analysts say that more foreign spies than ever are getting into the game. Clint Watts, the manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, told me that the Kremlin’s success in 2016 “convinced almost every authoritarian nation that they needed to jump into this.” And the biggest players, Russia and Iran, are working even harder at election influence than they did in 2016 or 2020. Yet the government’s warnings about foreign schemes are frequently undercut by the efforts of both Democrats and Republicans to weaponize such intelligence. In 2024, Democrats have railed about Vladimir Putin “rooting for” Trump, while Republicans have insisted that Biden-appointed intelligence officials are underplaying Iran’s schemes to defeat the former President—including by plotting his assassination. Representative Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee—and who recently put out a statement under the headline “Is the Biden-Harris Administration Colluding with Iran?”—told me, “You don’t hear a lot from the Administration about the malign influence of Iran in hacking the Trump campaign and attempting to kill Donald Trump.” According to people involved in a recent classified briefing on election security, the two sides of the House Intelligence Committee got into a shouting match over the relative scale of the threats.

Brandt told me wearily that she’d heard “the critiques,” and insisted that the center nevertheless stayed focussed on building “the most accurate threat picture we can.” But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an expert on public opinion at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a book documenting the effects of the Kremlin’s influence operation in 2016, told me that, with so much partisan noise threatening to drown out the center’s warnings, “our system is still defective.”

A parliamentary election in Slovakia last September marked the advent of a new era in election chicanery. A pro-Russia faction promising to end support for Ukraine was locked in a tight race against a Western-friendly party, Progressive Slovakia. Three days before the vote, an anonymous Instagram account uploaded a recording of the voice of Progressive Slovakia’s leader, Michal Šimečka, describing a “secret plan” to curb alcoholism: raising the price of beer “by seventy per cent to a hundred per cent.” As that recording raced across Slovakian social media, a second one appeared to catch Šimečka conspiring with one of the country’s best-known investigative journalists, Monika Tódová. “Again, will someone walk in and insert the ballots directly?” Tódová’s voice asked.

Šimečka: “This has been taken care of already.”

Tódová: “All right, then. What about me? Is it true that ‘by coincidence’ I will win some kind of valuable prize?”

Šimečka and Tódová called the recordings fraudulent. But while tech-company fact checkers were struggling to determine their authenticity, the Slovakian media entered a legally required forty-eight-hour news blackout before the vote. By the time the recordings were debunked as A.I.-generated deepfakes, the pro-Russia party had won a narrow victory.

The impact of the deepfakes is difficult to quantify. Their exposure did not stop an ally of the pro-Russia party from winning the Presidency the following year. Yet the Slovakian election put Washington on guard that A.I. could blur the boundaries of political reality as never before. This year, U.S. intelligence agencies said that China was probably behind videos of A.I.-generated Taiwanese newscasters reading aloud from a made-up book containing made-up scandals about Taiwan’s President. Brandt, of the Foreign Malign Influence Center, told me that deepfakes “can come in thirty-six thousand flavors,” so teams of forensics experts from throughout the government had conducted a “summer of exercises,” rehearsing plans to quickly evaluate the authenticity and origin of inflammatory material that might surface in the final days of an American Presidential campaign.

In a one-page “election security update” issued in September, the intelligence agencies declared that various foreign adversaries had already posted numerous deepfakes on the Internet. Russia had deployed the most, spreading “conspiratorial narratives” and amplifying “divisive U.S. issues such as immigration” in order to help Trump and hurt the Democrats. Iran had used A.I. “to help generate social media posts and write inauthentic news articles” about everything from the Presidential race to the Israel-Palestine conflict. China was “using A.I. in broader influence operations” but “not for any specific operations targeting U.S. election outcomes.”

Intelligence officials said that, so far, foreign adversaries’ A.I. trickery was “a malign influence accelerant” but not “revolutionary,” in part because those countries had not yet caught up with Silicon Valley in their use of the technology. The report noted that one of Russia’s most widely circulated fakes—a video of a woman in a wheelchair claiming that Kamala Harris had disabled her in a hit-and-run accident—had actually been staged the old-fashioned way, with real actors.

Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me, “A.I. is the dog that hasn’t barked—yet.” Warner, whose committee compiled a thirteen-hundred-page report on the Russian intervention in the 2016 election, believes that the U.S. is less prepared than ever to fend off foreign influence schemes. Major social-media companies, he told me, have slackened their crackdowns on misinformation—partly because of lawsuits claiming that the platforms’ coöperation with the government threatens free speech. Then, there’s the matter of who is in charge: Elon Musk has taken over Twitter (now X), and TikTok is owned by the Chinese. Moreover, Warner told me, political polarization has made voters increasingly credulous about fake claims that reinforce their instincts—whether the subject is a stolen election or the Vance family couch.

Voters have a limited number of ways to learn about the illicit attempts of foreign powers to manipulate them. One way is for private companies—Microsoft is currently the most active—to publish research about suspicious social-media content or cybercrimes that appear to be state-sponsored. Brandt described such civilian-identified plots as “caught in the wild.” But private companies can never speak with the authority of the government, and, without subpoenas or spies, they also lack the same breadth of information. Watts, a former F.B.I. special agent, told me that the government is “the ultimate source of confirmation on attribution and actors.” A deepfake that Microsoft spots “may be the tip of the iceberg,” he continued, and U.S. intelligence officials “can understand it at a much deeper level.” Then, there is what he called “a chicken-and-egg problem” facing private companies. The government asks them to shut their platforms to malicious foreign trolls, but the companies “are waiting for the state to tell them who those accounts are.”

Criminal prosecutions are another way that covert foreign plots targeting an election can be exposed. Since the appointment of the special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Kremlin’s gambit in 2016, federal indictments have consistently provided the most detailed, and therefore potent, accounts of such influence operations. This past summer, news reports about a hacking of the e-mail accounts of Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser, evidently prompted prosecutors in Washington, D.C., to file an indictment against three Iranians. They were charged with dozens of hacking attacks during a five-year period, almost all of them against Americans involved in national security or foreign affairs. The U.S. government had been watching these Iranians for at least four years; the indictment cites evidence that, in each of those years, two of the operatives repeatedly visited a Tehran address linked to the crimes. On June 27, 2024, according to the indictment, the Iranians e-mailed two Biden campaign officials a stolen copy of materials that Trump had used to prepare for that night’s Presidential debate. (The Iranians presciently warned that, if Biden lost the debate, the Democrats “will have to replace” him.) There’s no evidence, however, that the recipients read the e-mails; Biden flailed in any case. A subsequent attempt to give journalists stolen vetting materials about Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, also found no takers. The Times reported its editors had concluded that “publication was likely to serve the interests of the attackers.”

Other legal findings, also unsealed in September, described a sweeping Russian operation that was years in the making. An affidavit by an F.B.I. investigator quoted notes from meetings held at the Kremlin by a top aide to Putin as early as April, 2022. The aide had hired three Russian contractors to conduct a covert online propaganda campaign to weaken global support for Ukraine’s attempt to repel Russia’s invasion. In 2023, one of the contractors submitted a more detailed proposal, called the Good Old U.S.A. Project, to sway the 2024 election in America. The proposal asserted that an isolationist view of the Ukraine war had become a “centerpiece” of the Presidential race; Russia must therefore “put a maximum effort to ensure that the Republican point of view (first and foremost the opinion of Trump’s supporters) wins over the U.S. public opinion.” (The names of the parties and candidates were redacted in the filing.) The proposal’s authors saw an opportunity in “the high level of polarization of American society,” which had created an “information situation” that “differs dramatically from that in all other Western countries.”

The Good Old U.S.A. Project envisaged setting up hundreds of fake online accounts, including eighteen seemingly apolitical “sleeper” groups on multiple social-media platforms across six swing states; “at the right moment,” they would “distribute bogus stories disguised as newsworthy events.” (Kremlin documents included in the filing describe Twitter as the most hospitable “mass platform,” although a partially redacted sentence suggests that the Russians liked Trump’s Truth Social even more.) To avoid detection, the Russians planned to disseminate misinformation by inserting comments or replies into authentic message threads; these comments would include links directing users to sites showcasing more elaborate propaganda. The Russians also set out to secretly promote real American influencers who supported “ending the war in Ukraine” and were “ready to get involved in the promotion of the project narratives.”

In March, two of the Russian contractors were sanctioned by the Treasury Department for their role in the operation. In July, U.S. prosecutors, after receiving a tip from another government agency, seized nearly a thousand X accounts allegedly tied to a Russian “bot farm” that used A.I. “to create fictitious social media profiles,” evidently as part of the same scheme. Finally, in September, the government shut down thirty-two Web sites that disguised Kremlin propaganda as content from news organizations such as Fox News and the Washington Post. At the same time, prosecutors charged two Russian spies with conspiring to pay ten million dollars to a group of conservative American influencers. Although the unsealed indictment redacted the names, other details indicated that the Russians worked through a Nashville startup called Tenet Media. According to the indictment, in recent months the Russians had posted nearly nine hundred video clips of their own propaganda directly to Tenet social-media feeds. Until the indictment was unsealed, American viewers had no way of knowing that the Kremlin was behind this.

But U.S. intelligence agencies definitely did, just as they plainly knew about the disguised Web sites. Details from the indictments make clear that federal prosecutors were aware of the underlying schemes for months or longer before informing voters. Of course, educating voters about foreign plots is not the primary responsibility of law enforcement, which moves at its own methodical pace. Subpoenas must be obtained to legally acquire information that other agencies might have learned through spycraft; it takes time to squeeze conspirators to testify against one another, and to lock down conclusive evidence before unsealing charges. Law-enforcement agencies may also want to delay an indictment so that they can arrest suspects before they can flee—although, in the recent election-influence cases, the three Iranians and two Russians indicted were already far out of reach.

Prosecutors also work under their own deadlines. Justice Department policy precludes the agency from taking any public actions in the sixty days before an election which might affect the outcome—including filing indictments that expose a foreign adversary’s backing of a candidate. Prosecutors appear to have kept working on the Russia indictments in secrecy as long as they could. They were unsealed on September 4th, on the eve of the sixty-day deadline. Still, Brandt told me that, whatever the timing constraints, the Justice Department can “go much farther than we can” when releasing information. “That is how you end up making public multiple internal Russian planning documents, which is something the intelligence community could never release.”

For voters, the Russia and Iran indictments also raise questions about what else the government knows. Both filings offer keyhole views of major influence operations that surely were not limited to a few inconsequential hacks and to the staff of a small Tennessee media company. Watts, of Microsoft, told me that the government is cracking down on covert Russian influence operations more aggressively than it did before the 2020 election, when there were no such indictments; prosecutors have gone after a “sizable chunk of the Russian efforts we have noted.” But he said that law enforcement had not yet taken any visible action against two other Russian online networks that Microsoft had spotted meddling in the election. The company calls those two networks Storm-1516 (which pushed the staged video falsely accusing Harris of a hit-and-run) and Storm-1679 (which pushed a viral video showing a fake New York billboard that hyped false claims about Harris).

Representative Jim Himes, of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told me he was “quite certain” that the foreign corruption of Tenet Media was not an isolated incident: “We are going to find out there are other cases where some cutout says, ‘Hey, I’ve got five million dollars for you to promote that Fauci is a Bolshevik,’ or whatever, and the answer is ‘Yeah, give me that five million!’ ”

Hearing directly from the U.S. intelligence agencies is the third way Americans can learn about foreign efforts to manipulate our elections. This election season, the Foreign Malign Influence Center has scheduled periodic “updates” to address the torrent of questions from journalists about such plots. For the spy services, one official told me, this level of public disclosure “is like standing there naked compared to what we have done in the past.” The agencies, always zealous about protecting their sources and methods, prefer to talk as little as possible, and as vaguely as possible. The resulting updates, typically about five hundred words each, are exasperatingly abstract. Speaking as the “intelligence community,” or I.C., an update from early October noted:

A range of foreign actors continue to try to influence U.S. elections as we approach November. These activities include broad efforts aimed at undermining trust in U.S. democratic processes and exacerbating divisions in our society, while also seeking to shape voter preferences toward specific candidates. Our assessments about the activities and goals of Russia, Iran, and China are unchanged from earlier election security updates. On the presidential race, the IC continues to assess that Russia prefers the Former President and Iran prefers the Vice President; China is not seeking to influence the Presidential election.

The center also holds hour-long conference calls with journalists, but the officials on the calls limit their answers to the contents of the written updates.

The opacity of such intelligence assessments, whether to journalists or to lawmakers, inevitably opens opportunities for political spin. In 2019, intelligence officials appointed a career spy named Shelby Pierson to the new post of election-threats executive. Her job was to coördinate the analysis of foreign interference or influence operations. After Pierson briefed the bipartisan leaders of the congressional intelligence committees, people on Capitol Hill leaked that she had said the Kremlin once again preferred Trump. The President exploded in anger, tried to get Pierson fired, and attempted to stop the briefings.

She survived. But Trump then appointed two new directors of National Intelligence, both of whom downplayed the Russian threat. The first was the former ambassador Ric Grenell, who served as temporary acting director. Under Grenell’s tenure, a declassified update provided to the committees declared that the intelligence community “has not concluded” that the Kremlin was aiding either Trump or Biden, “nor have we concluded that the Russians will definitely choose to try to do so in 2020.”

John Ratcliffe, a Republican congressman and a former prosecutor, took over as director in May, 2020. He played up supposed intelligence about a major plot by China instead of Russia. Shortly before the election that fall, Ratcliffe was asked in an interview on Fox News whether China opposed Trump. Ratcliffe replied that he could not “get into a whole lot of details” in an unclassified setting, but did say that China was “using a massive and sophisticated influence campaign that dwarfs anything that any other country is doing.”

Democrats complained that the Trump appointees were twisting the conclusions of the career analysts, but the classified nature of the reports left no way to settle the dispute. Then, on January 6, 2021, the spy agencies’ “analytic ombudsman” released a report saying that, in the final year of the Trump Administration, intelligence about foreign efforts to influence the election had been “delayed, distorted, or obstructed” for “political reasons,” and that career analysts viewed some of the public statements issued under Grenell and Ratcliffe as a “gross misrepresentation” of the agencies’ assessments of the Russian and Chinese operations. (Grenell told me that the ombudsman’s report had relied on liberal partisans inside the intelligence agencies; Ratcliffe defended his statements about China as a dissenting view based on his own analysis.) Two months after Biden took office, a declassified version of the agencies’ post-election assessment stated that several arms of the Russian government had, in fact, carried out influence operations “supporting former President Trump” and that the Russians had also been spreading misinformation denigrating Biden for at least six years. A headline in the assessment declared, “China Did Not Attempt to Influence Presidential Election Outcome.”

Grenell has since become an informal adviser to Trump’s 2024 campaign, and he argued to me recently that Biden Administration appointees were now slanting intelligence about foreign influence operations to benefit the Democrats. “You’re surprised?” Grenell asked me incredulously. He added, “Putin says he would prefer Joe Biden, or now Kamala Harris, because they are more predictable! Why would you dismiss that?” (Prosecutors unsealed their detailed Russia indictment a few weeks after I interviewed Grenell, and news reports that Trump had stayed in touch with Putin after leaving the White House emerged after that.) If Trump wins, Grenell, Ratcliffe, and Turner, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, are all prime candidates for senior roles in the new Administration.

Brandt, the Foreign Malign Influence Center’s director, told me that the intelligence agencies now adhere to a formal protocol designed to keep politics out of the process—thereby insulating Presidents from the anxieties that stifled Obama, and from the accusations of bias that have hung over Trump and Biden. The rules, which are little known to the public and are all but ignored by the political class, were formulated in 2019, initially under the tenure of Dan Coats, Trump’s first director of National Intelligence. Coats, a former Republican senator, remains widely respected by lawmakers of both parties for his handling of that role. Biden signed off on the protocol with only slight modifications.

The process hinges on an “experts’ group” of a dozen career intelligence analysts or other civil servants from across the relevant agencies. Brandt—who was tapped for her job by the current director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, a Biden appointee and an Obama Administration alumna—is excluded. Under the policy, the committee evaluates any intelligence of an imminent foreign-influence threat according to five criteria. Two of the criteria address the quality of the intelligence: Is it credible and specific? Three address the nature of the threat: Is it foreign in origin, underhanded or covert in nature, and severe in its potential impact? If the experts deem all five criteria met, the group can recommend a public notification.

One catch, however, is that the public does not know who sits on the experts’ group—all its members are anonymous, as is its chair. Since the Foreign Malign Influence Center was inaugurated, the intelligence authorities have withheld even the name of the election-threats executive, making Brandt (or Haines) the face of any public notifications.

Another catch is that, before a warning from the experts can be shared with the public, their recommendation must be reviewed by a “leaders’ group” composed entirely of political appointees. The group essentially duplicates the National Security Council: the director of National Intelligence convenes the Secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, and Homeland Security, along with the Attorney General and the directors of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the N.S.A., and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. An emergency notification becomes public only with the approval of these leaders. (A loophole: the notification protocol does not necessarily restrict a director of National Intelligence from making statements or giving interviews about election threats, as Ratcliffe did.)

The day I visited the center, Brandt, in an attempt to dispel doubts about partisanship, took the exceptional step of introducing me to the chair of the experts’ group—a stern veteran of the intelligence agencies who looked at least a decade older than Brandt, and whom I agreed not to name. She told me, “As a career civil servant, I try not to have a public persona.” During her two years leading the experts’ group, she said, nobody had ever discussed potential political repercussions: “Never in any of the meetings has it even come up—what will this mean for a political party, or what will it mean for an Administration?”

The main threshold for a public notification about a piece of intelligence, the experts’ chair said, is “Could it undermine the credibility of an election or potentially change its outcome?” Brandt, speaking as a former think-tank scholar, noted that political scientists still have no accepted way to gauge the impact of an online propaganda campaign. But the chair struck a firmer tone, saying, “If we think the activity might undermine the credibility or affect the outcome, we are going to weigh very seriously a public notification.”

The experts’ chair insisted that in this cycle the intelligence agencies had not withheld information “that met all five of the criteria”—and did not risk exposing sources and methods. Nor had the leaders’ group ever overruled a recommendation by the career experts. And if they did? It would be the job of the chair of the experts’ group to stand up or speak out, she told me: “That is why we pick a career civil servant who is retirement-eligible.” In other words, she can resign in protest.

Brandt said that, if a private player like Microsoft calls out a foreign influence operation, that can alleviate the need for a government notification. In other cases, she said, law-enforcement agencies tell their intelligence counterparts, “We’ve got this one.” And if a foreign operation aims at only an individual or a campaign—as is often the case—officials from the intelligence agencies may notify the target privately.

As a result, since 2019, the experts have proposed only three public notifications. All were carried out, and all were about Iran. The first occurred on October 21, 2020, when Ratcliffe, the director of National Intelligence, publicly announced that Iran was secretly behind a wave of e-mails, putatively sent by the Proud Boys, telling Democrats that if they didn’t vote for Trump “we will come after you.” At a press conference, Ratcliffe declared that the e-mails were an Iranian plot “to incite social unrest.”

Yet Ratcliffe went on to say that Iran also sought to “damage President Trump”—a conclusion that intelligence officials told me was Ratcliffe’s own inference. Playing up the Iranian threat, he added that “we have not seen the same actions from Russia.” Democrats, fearing that Trump might gain from the impression that Iran backed Biden, spun the revelation in another direction: in a television interview, Senator Chuck Schumer, the head of the Democratic caucus, insisted that his intelligence briefing had characterized the Iranian operation as a ploy “to undermine confidence in elections, and not aimed at any particular figure.”

The second and third expert-group notifications, which took place within a few weeks of each other this year, did not forestall controversy, either. A notification issued on August 19th confirmed earlier news reports that Iran had hacked Roger Stone’s e-mails in an attempt “to compromise former President Trump’s campaign.” But the notification, unlike those reports, also brought up the Democrats. To influence the “election process,” the notification added, Iran had also sought to access “the presidential campaigns of both political parties.” A few weeks later, another notification revealed that the Iranians had sent Trump’s debate-prep materials to the Biden campaign.

Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of National Intelligence, told me that the August 19th notification’s mention of “both parties” had been a favor to Kamala Harris: the gratuitous reference to an attack on her campaign had obscured the broader fact that Iran wanted her to win. But the chair of the experts’ group defended the assessment to me, insisting that the agencies had disclosed the hacking activities as soon as they learned about them—and not in response to news reports about Stone. “We go with what we know,” she said, and argued that withholding the information about “both parties” would have been the truly partisan choice.

Both Brandt and the experts’ chair contended that the public-notification procedure was as insulated as possible from the appearance of political influence, given that the U.S. government is headed by an elected official. Nonetheless, in two out of two Presidential election cycles, the protocol has failed to allay accusations of a partisan agenda. I could see why. As I spoke with the two officials, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was sitting across a table from people who knew much more than they were telling me about how foreign spies were trying to influence my vote or mess with our heads. My questions kept colliding with the intelligence agencies’ concern about protecting their sources and methods.

But even a little more real-time transparency would surely bolster public trust, if only by dispelling some of the mystery. Could the U.S. intelligence agencies have told the public any sooner that Iranian hackers with a history of conventional espionage were attempting to breach the Trump campaign? Did the government need to wait until almost exactly sixty days before the election to warn voters that the Kremlin was behind Tenet Media (whose YouTube videos in the past year have logged sixteen million views)? Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told me that timely information about election-influence operations too often gets bottled up by the “tension between law enforcement and intelligence gathering.” He added, “Law enforcement wants to put people in jail. Intelligence would like the criminals to keep doing what they do for twenty years, so they can identify their associates. But maybe there should be more of a tension between prosecution and the public’s right to know.”

At the end of last year, the intelligence agencies released a public version of their assessment of foreign influence operations during the 2022 midterm-election season, and it underscored how little information the government shared with Americans before voters went to the polls. The assessment described an upward trend in activity by “a diverse and growing group of foreign actors,” which the agencies attributed to “perceptions that election influence activity has been normalized” and to “the low cost but potentially high reward of such activities.” The foreign mischief that had been detected in 2022 included “payments to influencers and enlistment of public relations (PR) firms” and efforts aimed at “amplifying authentic U.S. public narratives.” Like devious music producers, foreign powers were turning up the volume of certain “authentic” American voices to maximize discord. But which influencers took what payments, and how were narratives amplified? What other governments were in that “growing group of foreign actors”? Later in the assessment, bullet points name six foreign governments—all blacked out—whose covert influence activities “did not clearly meet” an intelligence-community threshold for public disclosure. People familiar with the classified assessment told me that the redacted names were often “frenemies,” such as Middle Eastern clients with their own agendas in Washington. (Senator Warner told me, “There are countries that are our friends one day and our challengers the next.”)

Although the Foreign Malign Influence Center has said that China is staying out of the Presidential race, the center’s updates have also said that the country is attempting to sway certain down-ballot races, including “tens” of congressional races. The assessment of the 2022 election also concluded that Chinese authorities had “tacitly approved efforts to try to influence a handful of midterm races” and had “identified specific members of Congress to punish for their anti-China views.” That included “covertly denigrating a named U.S. Senator online using inauthentic accounts.” Did anyone notify the voters in the senator’s state? The intelligence officials declined to say. (The Washington Post, citing a researcher at Clemson University, recently reported that in 2022 Chinese-linked accounts had spread memes and tweets attacking Senator Marco Rubio, a prominent China hawk who was on the ballot that year. Rubio declined to respond to my questions.) Nor have the intelligence officials disclosed which other statewide races China has tried to influence in either 2022 or 2024. (The Post identified one current target as Representative Barry Moore, an Alabama Republican. A Chinese-linked account called him a “Jewish dog,” although he is not Jewish.)

Brandt told me that the elliptical bulletins are “setting the table” for the possibility that future operations by China or other nations might rise to a level meriting a public warning. She argued that, if the intelligence agencies alerted the public about every scrap of intelligence on an influence scheme, no matter how minor the threat, the constant notifications would lose their power to arouse public alarm. The din of suspicion could also weaken the credibility of the democratic process. “We would be blowing wind in our adversaries’ sails,” she said. Still, she insisted, no foreign nation got a free pass: “If you are a foreign actor trying to influence our elections, you are in our sights.”

Salvo, of the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, said that he now worries about what will happen if the intelligence agencies successfully expose a major foreign influence operation in the final weeks of the Presidential race. “The closer we get to Election Day, the less I think that would even matter, because of the hyperpoliticized moment that we live in,” he said. “The director of National Intelligence could come out then with information about a Russian or Iranian information operation targeting Election Day, and you’ll have tens of millions of Americans who don’t believe it, because national political figures are out there challenging the Intelligence director!”

During the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, the experts’ group has been meeting three times a week to evaluate any intelligence about potential threats, and staying in contact on the weekends. In a measure of both the group’s vigilance and the over-all threat level, an intelligence official recently told journalists that the number of “nominations” the experts had proposed for a notification had “increased threefold” from the 2020 election. All but the two notifications about Iran were privately rendered, but Brandt and the experts’ chair told me that, unlike the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies have no rule against publicizing allegations about a foreign influence plot in the days before the vote. Their mandate is just the opposite. The experts’ chair said, “What we don’t want to do is get the information out after the election.”

Brandt then added, “We’ll all be a lot smarter in January.” ♦


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