Ninth Amendment

CIA Staffers And NRO Officials Committed Sex Crimes Include Thousands Of Images Of Children Being Abused None Criminally Prosecuted Reports Say

2021-12-02T14:47:00.000-06:00

THE SECRET CIA FILES CIA Files Say Staffers Committed Sex Crimes Involving Children. They Weren’t Prosecuted. Declassified CIA inspector general reports show a pattern of abuse and a repeated decision by federal prosecutors not to hold agency personnel accountable. Picture of Jason Leopold Jason Leopold BuzzFeed News Reporter Picture of Anthony Cormier Anthony Cormier BuzzFeed News Reporter Posted on December 1, 2021, at 4:25 p.m. ET Tweet Share Copy Anthony Gerace for BuzzFeed News Over the past 14 years, the Central Intelligence Agency has secretly amassed credible evidence that at least 10 of its employees and contractors committed sexual crimes involving children. Though most of these cases were referred to US attorneys for prosecution, only one of the individuals was ever charged with a crime. Prosecutors sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA to handle internally, meaning few faced any consequences beyond the possible loss of their jobs and security clearances. That marks a striking deviation from how sex crimes involving children have been handled at other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration. CIA insiders say the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets. ADVERTISEMENT The revelations are contained in hundreds of internal agency reports obtained by BuzzFeed News through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. One employee had sexual contact with a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old. He was fired. A second employee purchased three sexually explicit videos of young girls, filmed by their mothers. He resigned. A third employee estimated that he had viewed up to 1,400 sexually abusive images of children while on agency assignments. The records do not say what action, if any, the CIA took against him. A contractor who arranged for sex with an undercover FBI agent posing as a child had his contract revoked. Only one of the individuals cited in these documents was charged with a crime. In that case, as in the only previously known case of a CIA staffer being charged with child sexual crimes, the employee was also under investigation for mishandling classified material. ADVERTISEMENT Got a tip? You can email tips@buzzfeed.com. To learn how to reach us securely, go to tips.buzzfeed.com. The CIA did not answer detailed questions, saying only that the agency “takes all allegations of possible criminal misconduct committed by personnel seriously.” A spokesperson for the Eastern District of Virginia, where many of the criminal referrals were sent, also did not answer detailed questions, saying the district “takes seriously its responsibility to hold accountable federal government employees who violate federal law within our jurisdiction.” Four former officials who are familiar with how internal investigations work at intelligence agencies told BuzzFeed News there are many reasons that prosecutors might not pursue a criminal case. One of them, familiar with the workings of the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General, said the agency is concerned that in a criminal case, it could lose control of sensitive information. The former official, who reviewed the declassified inspector general reports, characterized the concern from CIA lawyers as, “We can’t have these people testify, they may inadvertently be forced to disclose sources and methods.” The official, who noted the agency has had a problem with child abuse images stretching back decades, said they understand the need to protect “sensitive and classified equities.” However, “for crimes of a certain class whether it’s an intelligence agency or not, you just have to figure out how to prosecute these people.” Want to support more reporting like this? Become a BuzzFeed News member today. Sexual crimes involving children, including the viewing of images of abuse, have been uncovered at other agencies that handle sensitive information. In a November 2009 report, the Department of Defense acknowledged that dozens of Pentagon staff members or contractors had such images. In 2014, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community found that two officials from the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees America’s spy satellites, acknowledged viewing images of child sexual abuse during polygraph examinations. At a symposium in 2016, Daniel Payne, a top Pentagon security official, said that when workers’ computers were examined, “the amount of child porn I see is just unbelievable.” Olivier Doulier / Pool / Getty Images CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia ADVERTISEMENT The child abuse revelations are drawn from an unprecedented release of reports by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General. BuzzFeed News gained access to these documents after a decadelong pursuit, which included 13 public records requests and three separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. Those requests, the earliest of which date back to 2012, were for investigations closed by the Office of the Inspector General, which acts independently of the agency to examine misconduct by employees or contractors. New requests were filed each subsequent year. At first the CIA did not respond to the requests; then, it said it would take years to provide any documents. Those requests were followed in 2014, 2015, and 2020 by lawsuits, and the agency entered into negotiations about what documents to release. The coronavirus pandemic delayed the process by a year, but the agency finally began to release the documents in March and will release the final set in December. BuzzFeed News is publishing the reports here for public review. Among more than 3,000 pages, covering the years 2004 to 2019, are investigations big and small involving billing irregularities by contractors, a spy who expensed a visit to an overseas “gentleman’s club,” and an employee who used government computer systems to resell more than 700 items purchased at yard sales. ADVERTISEMENT Other reports have been the subject of previous news coverage, such as the CIA’s involvement in the production of the film Zero Dark Thirty, the torture of detainees held at black site prisons, and a decades-old operation in Peru that led to the death of missionaries. More recent reports show that a CIA employee was investigated in October 2018 for using agency computer systems and databases to conduct “unofficial searches” on her brother, and that the inspector general substantiated allegations in a January 2018 memorandum that another CIA employee violated the Hatch Act, which limits political activity by civil servants in the executive branch. The documents also reveal the pattern of sexual abuse cases, whereby internal investigators unearthed evidence of sexual crimes involving children but federal prosecutors brought no charges. As is typical of intelligence documents, the records have been heavily redacted. Among the information that has been hidden are the names of the accused employees and contractors and details about their jobs at the CIA. The agency cites privacy reasons, national security, and a federal law that exempts the CIA from disclosing details about its operations. Obtained via FOIA A heavily redacted report from the CIA inspector general ADVERTISEMENT “Not knowing the identities of the suspects is a hindrance in identifying these cases and why they were declined,” the spokesperson for the Eastern District of Virginia said. Of the 10 workers who the inspector general found had committed sexual crimes involving children, five were fired or resigned. Four others were referred to a personnel board or the Office of Security, which investigates classified leaks and is responsible for the safety of CIA facilities. The outcome of one case — in which 10 child sexual abuse images were discovered on a CIA computer that had been left unattended — is unknown. The employee to whom that device was assigned said he switched computers while he was overseas. He denied using it to view such material. In an eleventh case, the inspector general received a complaint in November 2016 that an employee used a government computer to view child sexual abuse images. Although the investigators couldn’t corroborate the allegation, they discovered that he had shown a “consistent interest and pattern of [redacted] conversations involving sexual activities between adults and minors.” ADVERTISEMENT The inspector general alerted security officials and the Directorate of Science and Technology because the accusation raised “potential security and accountability issues.” Details of how the case was resolved, and any penalties the employee faced, are redacted. Beyond the CIA’s handling of these cases, questions linger over why US attorneys chose not to charge anyone, even when they seemed to have significant evidence. Prosecutors generally have wide discretion over whether to bring criminal charges. They can judge the evidence too old or weak, consider a crime victim’s desire to proceed with prosecution, and weigh the chances of convincing a jury. “The occupation or employer of the suspect does not factor into that evaluation,” the spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said. “While we cannot comment on the reasons why specific cases were declined, we do take very seriously any allegation that our prosecutors declined a potential case based on an improper assessment of the relevant factors.” It appears that at least half of the sexual abuse investigations originated with a confession. The documents do not spell out the circumstances surrounding those statements, or whether they emerged during grueling “full-scope” polygraph examinations that can probe every part of CIA employees’ and contractors’ lives. ADVERTISEMENT SmartAsset These Are the Top Financial Advisors in San Antonio Sponsored by SmartAsset See more During those screenings, one former intelligence official told BuzzFeed News, it is not uncommon for a candidate to admit unlawful behavior in order to prove they aren’t lying — only later to realize that their statement might have sunk their chance to work for the agency and even put them in legal jeopardy. Such statements are sent to the inspector general, which then tries to collect evidence proving the crime occurred. But that gives the subject time to delete or destroy evidence, said the former official. That’s what happened in January 2010, when a CIA contractor logged into a chatroom using an agency IP address and solicited sex from an FBI agent posing as a child. The contractor acknowledged an obsession with child sexual abuse images, but by the time the inspector general obtained a search warrant and seized the man’s computer, someone had “removed the hard drives and thrown them away,” according to the reports. An excerpt from a CIA IG's report Obtained via FOIA ADVERTISEMENT SmartAsset These Are the Top Financial Advisors in San Antonio Sponsored by SmartAsset See more An excerpt from a CIA IG's report Obtained via FOIA Another CIA employee signed an affidavit admitting he used a government laptop to view photographs and videos of girls as young as 10 being abused by an “older guy.” The employee acknowledged that he first began seeking child sexual abuse images while he was in college, and viewed as many as 1,400 while on assignment for the agency. He told CIA investigators that he was “truly sorry” but also said “he did not understand that it was a violation of agency policy to access child pornography until he took the Agency Information Security Course.” When the inspector general examined the man’s computers, however, no such images were visible. A federal prosecutor declined to charge the man in “favor of administrative action” by the CIA. The personnel board’s recommendation is redacted. ADVERTISEMENT SmartAsset These Are the Top Financial Advisors in San Antonio Sponsored by SmartAsset See more But in several of the cases, prosecutors had plenty to go on. During an investigation that ended in August 2009, an official with a security clearance acknowledged having sexual contact with two girls, ages 2 and 6, and downloading illicit images while working for the CIA. The inspector general started a broad inquiry and attempted to identify the victims. An excerpt from a CIA IG's report Obtained via FOIA The investigators found that he had “extensively” downloaded abuse material, such as 63 videos of children between 8 and 16. The man regularly used government Wi-Fi to download the material, he distributed it to others, and he brought the photos back into the US after he returned from a trip overseas. Despite the admissions and the evidence that investigators found on his devices, prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia declined to take up a criminal case. They told the inspector general there were “taint issues,” a term that is sometimes used to refer to mishandled evidence. The attorneys also said that the girls in those videos had not been “previously identified child pornography victims,” making it harder to prove they were minors. ADVERTISEMENT SmartAsset These Are the Top Financial Advisors in San Antonio Sponsored by SmartAsset See more An excerpt from a CIA IG's report Obtained via FOIA By contrast, in the only two cases known to have led to criminal charges, both parties were also accused of serious offenses related to classified information. According to an Aug. 6, 2013, inspector general report, an investigation into a CIA contractor suspected of being in possession of child sexual abuse images turned up classified material stored on his personal hard drive and “numerous technical documents related to the Agency's systems” on his laptop. The contractor was fired and stripped of his security clearance. He later pleaded guilty to the child abuse charges and registered as a sex offender. The report says the contractor was sentenced, but the details, along with his name, were redacted. In the other case, CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte was charged in 2018 with possession of child sexual abuse images as part of a much larger investigation into the largest leak of classified information in the agency’s history. Known as Vault 7 and published by WikiLeaks, the trove of documents revealed secret tools that the CIA used to hack into computers. It was prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Schulte faces a separate trial on the child sexual abuse charges. He has pleaded not guilty. ● Read the CIA inspector general reports on child abuse ADVERTISEMENT SmartAsset These Are the Top Financial Advisors in San Antonio Sponsored by SmartAsset See more Read the hundreds of reports from the CIA inspector general obtained by BuzzFeed News Picture of Jason Leopold Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Los Angeles. He is a 2018 Pulitzer finalist for international reporting, recipient of the IRE 2016 FOI award and a 2016 Newseum Institute National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame inductee. Contact Jason Leopold at jason.leopold@buzzfeed.com. Got a confidential tip? Submit it here. Picture of Anthony Cormier Anthony Cormier is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. While working for the Tampa Bay Times, Cormier won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Contact Anthony Cormier at anthony.cormier@buzzfeed.com. Copyright Martin P. 2021 All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to Buzzfeed News content)

U.S. Britain Canada: Russia Cyberspies Try To Steal Covid Vaccine Research

2021-09-11T13:15:00.004-05:00

World

U.S., Britain and Canada say Russian cyberspies are trying to steal coronavirus vaccine research

U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab arrives at Downing Street in London on July 8. Raab said July 16 that “it is completely unacceptable that the Russian Intelligence Services are targeting those working to combat the coronavirus pandemic.” (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg)

William Booth,

Adam Taylor and

Ellen Nakashima

16 July 2020

LONDON — Security officials announced Thursday that hackers linked to Russia's intelligence services were actively trying to steal information from researchers working to produce coronavirus vaccines in the United States, Britain and Canada.

Paul Chichester, director of operations at Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), said the government-backed hackers launched “despicable attacks against those doing vital work to combat the coronavirus pandemic.”

The British urged organizations working on vaccines and antivirals “to defend their networks,” Chichester said in a statement.

Britain’s cybersecurity agency, alongside the National Security Agency in the United States, said that a group named APT29, also known as “the Dukes” or “Cozy Bear,” has targeted British, American and Canadian vaccine research and development organizations.

Attorney General William P. Barr on July 16 accused hackers linked to the Chinese government of trying to steal information related to covid-19. (Reuters)

British officials said there was 95 percent certainty that APT29 was part of the Russian intelligence services. U.S. and Canadian experts concurred.

“APT29 has a long history of targeting governmental, diplomatic, think-tank, healthcare and energy organizations for intelligence gain so we encourage everyone to take this threat seriously and apply the mitigations issued in the advisory,” Anne Neuberger, cybersecurity director for the U.S. National Security Agency, said in a statement.

It was highly likely that the group was trying to collect information on vaccine development or research on the virus itself, Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office said.

[U.S. officials say Russian government hackers have penetrated energy and nuclear company business networks]

The Russian spying is ongoing, with British, American and Canadian cyber experts working to defend laboratories and research data, according to the Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, Britain’s intelligence and security branch.

“It is completely unacceptable that the Russian intelligence services are targeting those working to combat the coronavirus pandemic,” British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said.

Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, the agency responsible for the country’s foreign signals intelligence, said in a statement that the attacks “serve to hinder response efforts at a time when health-care experts and medical researchers need every available resource to help fight the pandemic.”

The agency said in May that it was “near certain” that state-sponsored actors had “shifted their focus” during the pandemic and that Canadian intellectual property represented a “valuable target” for them.

It later said that it was investigating possible security breaches at Canadian organizations working on coronavirus-related research, but it did not indicate whether the alleged breaches were state-sponsored.

“We’ve seen some compromises in research organizations that we’ve been helping to mitigate,” Scott Jones, head of the Communications Security Establishment’s Cyber Center, told a parliamentary committee. “We’re still continuing to look through what’s the root cause of those.”

The British, Canadian and American intelligence officials did not divulge what — if anything — might have been stolen from the incursions. But the intention, officials said, is there.

In recent efforts targeting vaccine developers, the Russian hacker group scanned computer IP addresses owned by the organizations and then deployed malware to try to gain access, British officials said. In some cases, the hackers used custom malware known as “WellMess” and “WellMail” to conduct further operations on a victim’s system, they said.

The World Health Organization reports that of the more than 160 vaccines being developed, 23 have begun clinical trials in humans, including top candidates being developed by academics, national laboratories and pharmaceutical companies in Britain, Canada and the United States.

Russia is developing 26 vaccines, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said Wednesday, but only two are undergoing clinical trials. A month-long trial on 38 people for one of the vaccines concluded this week, and Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, told reporters that a larger trial with several thousand people is expected to begin in August.

“We will produce 30 million doses of the vaccine in Russia, or 50 million if necessary, which means that Russia may complete vaccinations early next year,” Dmitriev said.

Despite their own efforts, the Russians are cheating, Western cyber sleuths say.

“I have absolutely no doubt that if there was the slightest probability of stealing it, the Russians would do it,” said Jonathan Eyal, international director at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.

“Mr. Putin has not had a good pandemic,” Eyal said, “He has devolved the handling of it to regional governments to try and escape responsibility. He’s nowhere to be seen. The figures about the numbers who have died are clearly manipulated.”

The Russian hackers in APT29 are well known to cyber experts. The group was one of the two Russian intelligence actors that hacked Democratic National Committee servers during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

U.S. intelligence officials say that APT29 is part of the SVR, Russia’s equivalent of the CIA. That outfit infiltrated the DNC servers in summer 2015, many months before the Russian military spy agency GRU did, investigators said.

“They quietly steal information from their targets, and if you are hit by this actor you may never know it,” said John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis for the cybersecurity firm FireEye. “It’s not going to be some hack and leak or destructive operation. We’re talking about a quiet intelligence collection operation where Russia quietly leverages the research of others to advance their own.”

The allegations of Russian spying on virus researchers comes two months after the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warned that China was also targeting covid-19 research, and that health-care, pharmaceutical and research labs should take steps to protect their systems.

“The biggest thing to keep in mind is Russia’s not alone,” Hultquist said. “This is an existential threat to almost every government on Earth, and for Russia, China and Iran, we can expect that tremendous resources have been diverted from other tasks to focus on stealing research.”

[How the Russians hacked the DNC and passed its emails to WikiLeaks]

U.S. officials say a desire for geopolitical influence is also driving nations’ actions.

“Having been caught covering up the coronavirus outbreak, Beijing is desperate for a public relations coup, and may hope that it will be able to claim credit for any medical breakthroughs,” Attorney General William P. Barr said Thursday in a speech in Michigan.

And John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security, said earlier this year: “Whatever country’s or company’s research lab is first to produce that is going to have a significant geopolitical success story.”

Last week, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said that “it’s not unusual” to see “cyber activity” traced to China soon after a pharmaceutical company or research institution makes an announcement about promising vaccine research. “It’s sometimes almost the next day,” he said.

Britain’s foreign secretary also told a parliamentary intelligence committee Thursday that “Russian actors” sought to interfere in the United Kingdom’s 2019 general election by acquiring unpublished documents used in trade talks between the United States and Britain, and then leaking the material via social media.

“Sensitive government documents relating to the UK-US Free Trade Agreement were illicitly acquired before the 2019 General Election and disseminated online via the social media platform Reddit,” Raab said in a written statement to Parliament.

The foreign secretary added, “It is almost certain that Russian actors sought to interfere in the 2019 General Election through the online amplification of illicitly acquired and leaked Government documents.”

Moscow called the charges of election meddling “unfounded.”

“The British administration is making the same anti-Russian mistake again and thus not only further undermining bilateral relations with Moscow, but also its own authority,” Leonid Slutsky, head of the Russian State Duma’s foreign affairs committee, told reporters Thursday, according to the Interfax news agency.

“Raab is using the phrase ‘highly likely’ again,” Slutsky said. “That is, a criminal case is again being initiated on the basis of ‘highly likely,’ in the absence of specific evidence, which the head of the Foreign Office admits. What happened to the presumption of innocence? Where is the evidence?”

After the trade documents emerged online, they were used during the December 2019 election by the opposition Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who accused Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party of preparing to “sell off” precious access to the National Health Service to U.S. companies.

The charges were hot-button at the time but did not change the outcome: Johnson won the election in a landslide.

A much-delayed report into allegations of wider Russian interference in Britain’s democracy is due next week.

Nakashima and Taylor reported from Washington. Isabelle Khurshudyan in Moscow, Amanda Coletta in Toronto and Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.

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William Booth

William Booth is The Washington Post’s London bureau chief. He was previously bureau chief in Jerusalem, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Miami.Follow

Adam Taylor

Adam Taylor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. Originally from London, he studied at the University of Manchester and Columbia University.Follow

Ellen Nakashima

Ellen Nakashima is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter covering intelligence and national security matters for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 1995 and is based in Washington, D.C.Follow

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Copyright 2020 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The Washington Post content)

Sociopath Putin Destroys Remaining Russian Civilian Society U.S. Must Increase Sanctions On Crush Serial Murderer Putin And Criminal Oligarchs

2021-08-11T02:26:00.018-05:00

The Post's View Opinion: Putin is destroying what is left of Russian civil society. Biden must keep the pressure on. Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a government meeting in Magnitogorsk, Russia, on Aug. 6. Caption without an image Opinion by the Editorial Board 10 August 2021 Alexei Navalny has now served more than six months in prison on a charge intended solely to silence Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken and prominent opponent, and Mr. Navalny’s organization has been gutted by the Russian authorities. With a steady tightening of the screws, Mr. Putin is decimating what is left of Russia’s civil society. Mr. Putin’s security services attempted to poison Mr. Navalny a year ago, and he spent five months recovering in Germany. When he courageously returned to Russia on Jan. 17, he was charged, absurdly, with violating the terms of a suspended sentence in a six-year-old case that the European Court of Human Rights had called “arbitrary.” A Russian court nonetheless sent Mr. Navalny to prison in February for 32 months. As thousands attended rallies to support Mr. Navalny, the authorities arrested his close ally Lyubov Sobol, among other well-known activists, on charges of breaking pandemic regulations. The public demonstrations, including one in early February, were met with force, and nearly 10,000 people were detained across the country. Russian authorities launched more than 90 criminal cases against protesters; nearly two dozen of these defendants were sentenced to jail time. In May, legislation was introduced to outlaw anyone designated an “extremist” by the government from running for election. The bill was rushed through parliament and signed by Mr. Putin on June 4. Five days later, a Moscow court ruled that Mr. Navalny’s organizations are “extremist.” This effectively barred anyone affiliated with Mr. Navalny from running for office in September’s elections. Mr. Navalny’s backers had succeeded in a political strategy known as “smart voting,” advancing select candidates to defeat those backed by the Kremlin. Now his network of offices is closed. As the U.S. State Department aptly put it, “With this action, Russia has effectively criminalized one of the country’s few remaining independent political movements.” On Aug. 3, Ms. Sobol was sentenced to parole-like restrictions for a year and a half, stemming from her January arrest on the pandemic charge, which she correctly called nonsense. On Aug. 7, she left Russia. All of Russian civil society is under pressure. News organizations are regularly being labeled “foreign agents” and required to issue a disclaimer on every article and broadcast. Those singled out include Meduza; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; a business news site, VTimes; and an investigative news site, the Insider. Authorities raided the home of the Insider's editor in chief, Roman Dobrokhotov, who has often partnered with Bellingcat, the open-source organization that helped expose the actions of Russia’s security services, including the attack on Mr. Navalny. The investigative site Proekt was labeled an “undesirable organization” and banned. Russia used a chemical weapon to poison Mr. Navalny. President Biden is overdue in imposing mandatory sanctions for it. When Mr. Biden met with Mr. Putin in June, the American president raised Mr. Navalny’s persecution and vowed to keep up the pressure, because “that’s what we are, that’s who we are.” Mr. Biden pledged to “stand up for the universal and fundamental freedoms that all men and women have, in our view.” Yet two months later, Mr. Putin’s war on civil society grinds.... 0 Comments Gift Article OPINIONS ABOUT RUSSIA HAND CURATED Putin is destroying what is left of Russian civil society. Biden must keep the pressure on. August 10, 2021 Trying to pry Russia away from China is a fool’s errand July 21, 2021 Reformers just won a rare victory in Russia’s backyard. Biden should help them. July 20, 2021 Russian hackers are sowing havoc. So why are we letting Moscow write the U.N.’s rules on cyberspace? Washington is still shying away from punishing Putin’s closest cronies. Why? August 5, 2021 As a new Russian election season begins, the Kremlin’s fraudsters are working overtime July 14, 2021 Copyright 2021 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (fair comment no claim to Washington Post content)

Secret Court Unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) ACLU Legal Director, Columbia University Knight Institute Executive Director, G.W. Bush Former Solicitor General Together Petition U.S Supreme Court

2021-06-02T16:00:00.093-05:00

OPINION GUEST ESSAY What Is America’s Spy Court Hiding From the Public? June 2, 2021 Credit...Associated Press By David D. Cole, Jameel Jaffer and Theodore B. Olson Mr. Cole is legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Jaffer is executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and former deputy legal director at the A.C.L.U. Mr. Olson was solicitor general under President George W. Bush and is a member of the Knight Institute’s board. One of the most powerful courts in the country, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, is cloaked in unnecessary secrecy. It authorizes panoramic surveillance programs that can have profound implications for the rights of millions of Americans, but many of its significant decisions have been withheld from the public. The three of us have different views about how expansive the government’s surveillance powers should be. One of us, as solicitor general of the United States, defended the broad authority granted to federal officials to track and intercept communications for law enforcement and intelligence-gathering purposes under the U.S.A. Patriot Act; the other two have been among that law’s most active critics. But we agree about one crucial point: The needless secrecy surrounding the surveillance court is bad for the court, the intelligence agencies and the public — and it is also unconstitutional. We said this to the Supreme Court last month in a petition filed on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, arguing that the public should have access to the surveillance court’s decisions. And in briefs filed with the court last week, many others — including former intelligence officials, civil society groups, and a major technology company — reinforced the same point. Congress created the surveillance court in 1978 after a congressional committee found that the intelligence agencies had abused their surveillance powers in ways that violated Americans’ rights and jeopardized our democracy. The court was charged with overseeing certain kinds of surveillance conducted for national security purposes. In its original incarnation, its role was narrow. It authorized a few hundred wiretaps a year. The Supreme Court: Upcoming Cases A Big Month. June is peak season for Supreme Court decisions. It is the final month of the court’s annual term, and the justices tend to save their biggest decisions for the term’s end. 4 Big Cases. The court is set to rule on the fate of Obamacare, as well as a case that could determine scores of laws addressing election rules in the coming years. It is also taking on a case involving religion and gay rights and one on whether students may be disciplined for what they say on social media (here’s an audio report on that subject; and here’s where public opinion stands on several of the big cases). What to Watch For. The approaches that Amy Coney Barrett, the newest justice, and Brett Kavanaugh, the second-newest, take. They will be crucial because the three liberal justices now need at least two of the six conservatives to form a majority. Before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberals needed only one conservative. Looking Ahead. Next year’s term, which will start in the fall, will have cases on abortion, guns and perhaps affirmative action, and could end up being the most significant term so far under Chief Justice John Roberts. But the court’s role has since been transformed. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress expanded the government’s surveillance power. New technology also made possible more sweeping and intrusive forms of surveillance. Today, the court is frequently asked to evaluate surveillance programs whose scale is staggering, and its opinions in such cases are of immense consequence for Americans’ privacy, expressive and associational rights. For nearly a decade, for example, the court authorized the government to collect records on most phone calls made or received in the United States, detailing who called whom, when, and for how long — all without any suspicion of illegal activity. In another opinion, the court upheld the government’s practice of scanning Americans’ emails for intelligence purposes as those communications enter and leave the country. More recently, it permitted the F.B.I. to fish for information about Americans in huge databases of international emails, online messages and web chats obtained without probable cause. And in a series of opinions, including one involving the F.B.I.’s investigation of Carter Page, a onetime campaign adviser to Donald Trump, the court addressed episodes in which the government was not fully candid about the intelligence agencies’ surveillance of Americans. These opinions are among the subset that have been published — some of them in response to the 2015 U.S.A. Freedom Act, which requires the intelligence agencies to conduct a declassification review of opinions that include significant legal analysis. The publication of these opinions helped inform public debate, and in some instances led to legislative reform. But many of the surveillance court’s opinions remain secret, and the U.S.A. Freedom Act does not ensure that the court’s future opinions will see the light of day. The surveillance court has made clear it believes the executive branch should have the last word on whether the court’s opinions should be published. When the A.C.L.U. challenged this conclusion, both the surveillance court and the appeals court that oversees it held that they lacked authority even to consider the A.C.L.U.’s claim. This state of affairs is not reconcilable with the Constitution. The Supreme Court held four decades ago that the First Amendment protects the public’s right of access to certain judicial proceedings. It is now widely accepted that the public has a First Amendment right of access to judicial opinions except where redactions are necessary to serve a compelling government interest and are as limited as possible. The surveillance court has exempted itself from this rule on the ground that it deals with national security matters. But other American courts address such matters, too, and yet they honor the First Amendment right of access as a matter of course. They publish their opinions even when they concern the same questions the surveillance court addresses in its opinions, such as the legality of digital searches conducted for national security purposes. The unwarranted secrecy surrounding the surveillance court impoverishes public debate about government surveillance. It means that surveillance power can grow invisibly and easily become unmoored from the democratic consent that gives it legitimacy. The friend-of-the-court brief filed by former government officials — including James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence; John Brennan, a former C.I.A. director; and Donald Verrilli, a former solicitor general — makes exactly this point. Unnecessary secrecy also undermines public confidence in the surveillance court. As the Supreme Court once observed, “People in an open society do not demand infallibility from their institutions, but it is difficult for them to accept what they are prohibited from observing.” The surveillance court’s suggestion that it is not subject to the usual constraints of the First Amendment — and, indeed, that it lacks authority even to consider the First Amendment question — has only engendered suspicion of the court, and of the surveillance the court approves. No one — not the public, not the intelligence agencies and not the surveillance court — benefits if public debate about these questions is hobbled by unjustified secrecy. The petition we and our colleagues filed in the Supreme Court seeks to bring the surveillance court’s practices in line with the Constitution. The Supreme Court should make clear that the same First Amendment rules that apply to other courts apply to the surveillance court as well. David D. Cole is legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Jameel Jaffer is executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and former deputy legal director at the A.C.L.U. Theodore B. Olson was solicitor general under President George W. Bush and is a member of the Knight Institute’s board. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. Copyright 2021 Martin P.All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to New York Times Content - Credit To Associated Press)

GOP Cop-Killer Trump Sought DOJ Get Supreme Court To Overturn Election

2021-01-24T18:04:00.003-06:00

24 Jauary 2021, WASHINGTON, DC - GOP RICO leader accused serial child rapist and cop-killer alleged but never legitimate former "President" Donald Trump sought to replace acting U.S. attorney general with an official willing to pursue unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, and he pushed the Justice Department to ask the Supreme Court to invalidate President Joe Biden’s victory, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. Slideshow ( 2 images ) Citing people familiar with the matter, the Journal said the efforts in the last weeks of Trump’s presidency failed because of resistance from his Justice appointees who refused to file what they viewed as a legally baseless lawsuit in the Supreme Court. Other senior department officials later threatened to resign if Trump fired then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, several people familiar with the discussions told the Journal. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters on Saturday. Senior officials including Rosen, former Attorney General William Barr and former acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall refused to file the Supreme Court case, concluding there was no basis to challenge the election outcome and the federal government had no legal interest in whether Trump or Biden won the presidency, some of these people told the Journal. Then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy, Patrick Philbin, also opposed Trump’s idea, which was promoted by his outside attorneys, these people said. After his Supreme Court plan got nowhere, Trump explored replacing Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a Trump ally who had expressed a willingness to use the department’s power to help Trump continue his unsuccessful legal battles contesting the election results, the people told the Journal. Trump backed off that plan after the threats from senior Justice Department leadership to resign if Rosen were removed, people familiar with the discussions said. The plan to oust Rosen was first reported by the New York Times. A Trump adviser, asked to respond to the U.S. media reports, said the former president “has consistently argued that our justice system should be investigating the broader, rampant election fraud that has plagued our system for years. Any assertion to the contrary is false and being driven by those who wish to keep the system broken.” Democrats reacted with fury on Saturday to the New York Times’ report, with Senator Richard Durbin, incoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, saying he would investigate efforts to use the Justice Department to further Trump’s efforts to overthrow the election results. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer calling on the department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, to investigate “this attempted sedition.” Trump’s relentless and baseless claims of election fraud - and his refusal to acknowledge Biden’s victory - culminated on Jan. 6 when Trump urged a rally of his supporters to march to the Capitol to protest the certification of the results. The resulting rampage led to five deaths, including a Capitol police officer. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives impeached Trump for a second time a week later for inciting the insurrection at the Capitol, and a Senate trial on the charge will begin the week of Feb. 8. Biden took office on Wednesday. Reporting by Timothy Gardner and John Whitesides; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Daniel Wallis Copyright 2021 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to Reuters / WSJ content)

Trump Never President 2016 Campaign Russia Help Election Fraud Acts Void

2020-08-20T07:23:00.029-05:00

The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed.

“Cooperation” or “collusion” or whatever. It was a plot against American democracy.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

19 August 2020

Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

From the start, the Trump-Russia story has been both eye-glazingly complex and extraordinarily simple.

Who is Oleg Deripaska? What’s the G.R.U. again? Who owed what to whom? The sheer number of crisscrossing characters and interlocking pieces of evidence — the phone calls, the emails, the texts, the clandestine international meet-ups — has bamboozled even those who spend their days teasing it all apart. It’s no wonder average Americans tuned out long ago.

A bipartisan report released Tuesday by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee cuts through the chaff. The simplicity of the scheme has always been staring us in the face: Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign sought and maintained close contacts with Russian government officials who were helping him get elected. The Trump campaign accepted their offers of help. The campaign secretly provided Russian officials with key polling data. The campaign coordinated the timing of the release of stolen information to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The Senate committee’s report isn’t telling this story for the first time, of course. (Was it only a year ago that Robert Mueller testified before Congress about his own damning, comprehensive investigation?) But it is the first to do so with the assent of Senate Republicans, who have mostly ignored the gravity of the Trump camp’s actions or actively worked to cast doubt about the demonstrable facts in the case.

It’s also a timely rebuke to the narrative that Attorney General William Barr has been hawking since before he took office early last year — that “Russiagate” is a “bogus” scandal. Mr. Barr and other Trump allies claim that the Russia investigation was begun without basis and carried out with the intent of “sabotaging the presidency.” That argument has been debunked by every investigative body that has spent any time looking into what happened, including the nation’s intelligence community, Mr. Mueller’s team, the Justice Department’s inspector general and now the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In fact, the committee report, which is nearly 1,000 pages long and is the fifth in a series examining Russian interference in 2016, goes further than Mr. Mueller’s investigation.

For example, Mr. Mueller declined to say whether Mr. Trump had lied under oath when he said that he did not recall speaking with Roger Stone, his longtime aide and confidant, about WikiLeaks, which released the batches of emails stolen by the Russians. But the Senate committee found that the president “did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”

The committee documented that, on Oct. 7, 2016, Mr. Stone received advance notice of the impending release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. In response, Mr. Stone made at least two phone calls arranging for WikiLeaks to release stolen internal emails from the Democratic National Committee.

The report also found that Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime business associate of Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was a Russian intelligence officer, and may have been linked to the Russian military’s hacking and leaking of the D.N.C. emails in the first place.

Mr. Trump and his allies will parse and prevaricate forever. Ignore them. If it wasn’t already overwhelmingly clear what was going on, it is now. As the Democrats on the committee put it in an appendix to the report: “This is what collusion looks like.” Alas, the Republicans refused to join in on this straightforward assessment, stating in their own appendix that “we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion.” That is to insist that up is down.

But call it whatever you like: The Intelligence Committee report shows clear coordination between Russians and the Trump campaign, though there is no evidence of an explicit agreement. The evidence the report lays out suggests Mr. Trump knew this at the time. Whether or not it can be proved that he ordered this interference or violated the law in doing so, the fact remains that neither he nor anyone else in his campaign alerted federal law-enforcement authorities, as any loyal American should have.

And remember: Mr. Trump tried this scheme again. The president was impeached for his efforts to invite foreign interference in the 2020 election, this time by Ukraine, again on his behalf. Part of that requested interference involved an attempt to smear Joe Biden. But the other part involved pinning the 2016 election interference on Ukraine rather than on Russia. Who was “almost certainly” one of the primary sources spreading that claim in the media, according to the senators’ report? None other than Konstantin Kilimnik.

There has never been any reliable evidence that Ukraine interfered in 2016; the Senate committee concluded as such, in line with all previous investigations.

Russia is now attempting to help Mr. Trump again this November, according to American intelligence assessments reported in The Times. For any normal president, that would be a top-of-mind concern, and he or she would be marshaling all available resources to thwart it. What has Mr. Trump done? On Sunday night, he retweeted Russian propaganda that the U.S. intelligence community had already flagged as part of that country’s efforts to skew the election.

On Monday, Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, wrote that the president “showed vanishingly little interest in subjects of vital national security interest, including cybersecurity, domestic terrorism and malicious foreign interference in U.S. affairs.” He added, “the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions.”

There’s no way to sugarcoat it. In less than three months, the American people could re-elect a man who received a foreign government’s help to win one election and has shown neither remorse nor reservations about doing so again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/opinion/trump-russia-2016-report.html

Copyright 2020 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The New York Times content fair use)

Russia Pays Taliban To Kill U.S. Troops GRU Unit 29155 Putin For Trump 2020

2020-07-03T22:49:00.001-05:00

Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says

The Trump administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment.

Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

By Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz

Published 26 June 2020 Updated 17 August 2020

WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.

The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.

Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

An operation to incentivize the killing of American and other NATO troops would be a significant and provocative escalation of what American and Afghan officials have said is Russian support for the Taliban, and it would be the first time the Russian spy unit was known to have orchestrated attacks on Western troops.

Any involvement with the Taliban that resulted in the deaths of American troops would also be a huge escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against the United States, a strategy of destabilizing adversaries through a combination of such tactics as cyberattacks, the spread of fake news and covert and deniable military operations.

The Kremlin had not been made aware of the accusations, said Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “If someone makes them, we’ll respond,” Mr. Peskov said.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, denied that the insurgents have “any such relations with any intelligence agency” and called the report an attempt to defame them.

“These kinds of deals with the Russian intelligence agency are baseless — our target killings and assassinations were ongoing in years before, and we did it on our own resources,” he said. “That changed after our deal with the Americans, and their lives are secure and we don’t attack them.”

Spokespeople at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A. declined to comment.

The officials familiar with the intelligence did not explain the White House delay in deciding how to respond to the intelligence about Russia.

While some of his closest advisers, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have counseled more hawkish policies toward Russia, Mr. Trump has adopted an accommodating stance toward Moscow.

At a summit in 2018 in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump strongly suggested that he believed Mr. Putin’s denial that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential election, despite broad agreement within the American intelligence establishment that it did. Mr. Trump criticized a bill imposing sanctions on Russia when he signed it into law after Congress passed it by veto-proof majorities. And he has repeatedly made statements that undermined the NATO alliance as a bulwark against Russian aggression in Europe.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the delicate intelligence and internal deliberations. They said the intelligence had been treated as a closely held secret, but the administration expanded briefings about it this week — including sharing information about it with the British government, whose forces are among those said to have been targeted.

Image

Credit...Kirill Kallinikov/Host Photo Agency, via Getty Images

The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials did not describe the mechanics of the Russian operation, such as how targets were picked or how money changed hands. It is also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan or met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere.

The revelations came into focus inside the Trump administration at a delicate and distracted time. Although officials collected the intelligence earlier in the year, the interagency meeting at the White House took place as the coronavirus pandemic was becoming a crisis and parts of the country were shutting down.

Moreover, as Mr. Trump seeks re-election in November, he wants to strike a peace deal with the Taliban to end the Afghanistan war.

Both American and Afghan officials have previously accused Russia of providing small arms and other support to the Taliban that amounts to destabilizing activity, although Russian government officials have dismissed such claims as “idle gossip” and baseless.

“We share some interests with Russia in Afghanistan, and clearly they’re acting to undermine our interests as well,” Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of American forces in Afghanistan at the time, said in a 2018 interview with the BBC.

Though coalition troops suffered a spate of combat casualties last summer and early fall, only a few have since been killed. Four Americans were killed in combat in early 2020, but the Taliban have not attacked American positions since a February agreement.

American troops have also sharply reduced their movement outside military bases because of the coronavirus, reducing their exposure to attack.

While officials were said to be confident about the intelligence that Russian operatives offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants for killing Americans, they have greater uncertainty about how high in the Russian government the covert operation was authorized and what its aim may be.

Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the American military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries, as they advanced on an American outpost. Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in Afghanistan. But the motivation remains murky.

The officials briefed on the matter said the government had assessed the operation to be the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known widely as the G.R.U. The unit is linked to the March 2018 nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury, England, of Sergei Skripal, a former G.R.U. officer who had worked for British intelligence and then defected, and his daughter.

Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and assassination. In addition to the 2018 poisoning, the unit was behind an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the poisoning of an arms manufacturer in Bulgaria a year earlier.

American intelligence officials say the G.R.U. was at the center of Moscow’s covert efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In the months before that election, American officials say, two G.R.U. cyberunits, known as 26165 and 74455, hacked into Democratic Party servers and then used WikiLeaks to publish embarrassing internal communications.

In part because those efforts were aimed at helping tilt the election in Mr. Trump’s favor, his handling of issues related to Russia and Mr. Putin has come under particular scrutiny. The special counsel investigation found that the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s intervention and expected to benefit from it, but found insufficient evidence to establish that his associates had engaged in any criminal conspiracy with Moscow.

Operations involving Unit 29155 tend to be much more violent than those involving the cyberunits. Its officers are often decorated military veterans with years of service, in some cases dating to the Soviet Union’s failed war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Never before has the unit been accused of orchestrating attacks on Western soldiers, but officials briefed on its operations say it has been active in Afghanistan for many years.

Though Russia declared the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2003, relations between them have been warming in recent years. Taliban officials have traveled to Moscow for peace talks with other prominent Afghans, including the former president, Hamid Karzai. The talks have excluded representatives from the current Afghan government as well as anyone from the United States, and at times they have seemed to work at crosscurrents with American efforts to bring an end to the conflict.

The disclosure comes at a time when Mr. Trump has said he would invite Mr. Putin to an expanded meeting of the Group of 7 nations, but tensions between American and Russian militaries are running high.

In several recent episodes, in international territory and airspace from off the coast of Alaska to the Black and Mediterranean Seas, combat planes from each country have scrambled to intercept military aircraft. . . .

Mujib Mashal contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghanistan-bounties.html?

Copyright 2020 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to New York Times content)

CIA Elite Unit Leaked Hacking Cyberweapons Task Force Internal 2017 Report

2020-06-22T17:49:00.004-05:00

National Security

Elite CIA unit that developed hacking tools failed to secure its own systems, allowing massive leak, an internal report found

CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Ellen Nakashima and

Shane Harris

16 June 2020

The theft of top-secret computer hacking tools from the CIA in 2016 was the result of a workplace culture in which the agency’s elite computer hackers “prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems,” according to an internal report prepared for then-director Mike Pompeo as well as his deputy, Gina Haspel, now the director.

The breach — allegedly committed by a CIA employee — was discovered a year after it happened, when the information was published by WikiLeaks in March 2017. The anti-secrecy group dubbed the release “Vault 7,” and U.S. officials have said it was the biggest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the CIA’s history, causing the agency to shut down some intelligence operations and alerting foreign adversaries to the spy agency’s techniques.

WikiLeaks says it has obtained trove of CIA hacking tools

The October 2017 report by the CIA’s WikiLeaks Task Force, several pages of which were missing or redacted, portrays an agency more concerned with bulking up its cyber arsenal than keeping those tools secure. Security procedures were “woefully lax” within the special unit that designed and built the tools, the report said.

Without the WikiLeaks disclosure, the CIA might never have known the tools had been stolen, according to the report. “Had the data been stolen for the benefit of a state adversary and not published, we might still be unaware of the loss,” the task force concluded.

The task force report was provided to The Washington Post by the office of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has pressed for stronger cybersecurity in the intelligence community. He obtained the redacted, incomplete copy from the Justice Department. A version also was earlier obtained by an independent journalist, Matthew Russell Lee.

The breach came nearly three years after Edward Snowden, then a National Security Agency contractor, stole and disclosed classified information about the NSA’s surveillance operations.

A British court began hearings on Feb. 24 to decide whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be extradited to the United States. (Reuters)

“CIA has moved too slowly to put in place the safeguards that we knew were necessary given successive breaches to other U.S. Government agencies,” the report said, finding that “most of our sensitive cyber weapons were not compartmented, users shared systems administrator-level passwords, there were no effective removable media [thumb drive] controls, and historical data was available to users indefinitely.”

The task force noted that it could not determine the precise size of the breach because the CIA hacking team did not require monitoring of who used its network, but it was concluded that the employee stole as much as 34 terabytes of information, or about 2.2 billion pages.

Timothy Barrett, the CIA press secretary, declined to comment directly on the report. “CIA works to incorporate best-in-class technologies to keep ahead of and defend against ever-evolving threats,” he said.

The hacking tools were developed by the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, where the agency’s most-sophisticated hackers devised ways to gain access to hard-to-penetrate networks, for instance, to secretly activate the camera and microphone on a foreign target’s tablet, or steal the design plans for a foreign adversary’s advanced weapons systems.

WikiLeaks release could blow the cover on CIA hacking operations

Those employees are under constant pressure to find vulnerabilities in commercial software and other technology, said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the task force’s findings.

The task force acknowledged the drive “to meet growing and critical mission needs,” which it blamed for the laxness in “day-to-day security practices.”

The report has been introduced as evidence in the criminal trial of Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee who worked in the center and is accused of stealing the hacking tools and giving them to WikiLeaks.

Trial begins for former CIA employee accused of leaking agency hacking tools

Schulte has pleaded not guilty, and the task force’s findings have figured in his defense. His attorneys argued at a trial this year that security on the computer network was so poor that any one of hundreds of employees or contractors may have had access to the same information Schulte did.

A jury failed to reach a verdict in March on whether Schulte gave the tools to WikiLeaks. Prosecutors have said they intend to try Schulte again this year.

The report distinguishes between the CIA’s “enterprise information technology system,” which accounts for the vast majority of the agency’s computer network, and specialized “mission systems,” including the one that housed the hacking tools.

The former intelligence official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity, said the mission systems are segregated from the enterprise systems, which follow the “gold standard” for insider threat detection. The task force said the CIA had been “an early leader” in securing its enterprise system.

The former official said he agreed with most of the task force’s findings, but he objected to the assertion that the CIA hadn’t emphasized computer security or that the elite hacking unit was cavalier about protecting its secrets.

“The idea or the assertion that we weren’t working to get all of our systems to the highest level of cybersecurity would be a false claim,” said the former official who was familiar with the unit’s operations.

The center’s mission system was housed in a separate building not at CIA headquarters, and access was highly restricted, the former official said.

But the CIA hackers presumed that the ability to “audit” the network, to know who was logging on and doing what, was better and more detailed than it actually was, the former official said.

The computer network also was maintained by contractors, the former official added. “There was a misunderstanding between the people who ran the unit and people who ran and maintained the network.”

The breach occurred less than six months into a CIA reorganization that emphasized computer security, including for the mission center networks.

“The hardest thing to do is protect against your own people,” said another former intelligence official who is familiar with the breach.

Congress in 2014 gave the Department of Homeland Security the power to require federal agencies to meet minimum cybersecurity standards but exempted the spy agencies, reasoning that as guardians of the nation’s most valuable secrets, they would take extra care to secure their systems, Wyden said. “It is now clear that exempting the intelligence community from baseline federal cybersecurity requirements was a mistake,” Wyden wrote in a letter Tuesday to Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe.

Some analysts fault Congress as doing too little to hold intelligence agencies to account for their lapses. The 2017 breach of the Equifax credit reporting agency got far more scrutiny than breaches at the NSA and CIA, said Thomas Rid, an information security professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

As more and more data was placed online and the barriers to sharing intelligence among agencies fell after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, breaches occurred more often.

In 2010, Chelsea Manning, then an Army intelligence analyst, gave hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and military files to WikiLeaks. In 2013, Snowden provided troves of data to journalists about sensitive surveillance programs.

“You’d think that these incidents would be major wake-up calls for the intelligence community and the entire American security establishment,” Rid said. “But it appears that the most powerful and best-funded intelligence agencies on the planet are unable to stop the bleeding of their own data.”

WikiLeaks apparently did not obtain even more sensitive information contained in a “Gold folder” that included “final versions” of the hacking tools, as well as source code. . . .

Ellen Nakashima

Shane Harris

Shane Harris covers intelligence and national security for The Washington Post. He has been a writer at the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast and Foreign Policy, among other publications. He has written two books, "The Watchers" and "@War," and is a national security analyst for CNN. Follow

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/elite-cia-unit-that-developed-hacking-tools-failed-to-secure-its-own-systems-allowing-massive-leak-an-internal-report-found/2020/06/15/502e3456-ae9d-11ea-8f56-63f38c990077_story.html

Copyright 2020 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The Washington Post content)

Child Rapist Capitol Cop-Killer Trump Hides In WH Baghdad-Like Green Zone

2020-06-07T05:04:00.026-05:00

WHITE HOUSE MEMO

Security Concerns Give the White House a Fortified New Look

It increasingly resembles a Washington version of the Green Zone that sheltered American and Iraqi officials in Baghdad.

Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

By Peter Baker

June 5, 2020

WASHINGTON — President Trump was furious when news got out last weekend that as protesters gathered outside the White House he had been rushed to an underground bunker. But now, as crowds keep coming back to demonstrate, the entire White House seems to be turning into one.

Every day, more fences go up and more concrete barriers are put in place as the security perimeter expands farther and farther. The universally recognized symbol of American democracy increasingly looks like a fortress under siege in the heart of the nation’s capital, a Washington version of the Green Zone that sheltered American and Iraqi officials in Baghdad during the worst of the war.

The measures taken over the last week have made the compound occupied by the president, his family and his staff more sealed off from demonstrations but also more removed from the American public. National Guard troops and riot police will certainly withdraw at some point, and White House officials say the barriers will be eventually removed. But history shows that security changes made at the White House in the heat of a momentary perceived threat often become lasting fixtures.

With the capital awash in security forces and much of downtown boarded up, Washington officials bristle at the martial moment and fear that the city is being transformed once more in a way evoking locked-down authoritarian nations instead of an open, pluralistic society.

“Keep in mind that that’s the people’s house,” Mayor Muriel E. Bowser said this week even as she sent Mr. Trump a letter asking him to withdraw extra security forces from the streets. “It’s a sad commentary that the house and its inhabitants have to be walled off.”

Ms. Bowser sent a signal of her own overnight, dispatching city workers on Friday to paint the words “Black Lives Matter” in giant yellow letters covering the entirety of two blocks of 16th Street leading toward the White House. She also posted a sign renaming the area Black Lives Matter Plaza and on Friday night projected the slogan on nearby buildings while protesters chanted: “Whose house? Our house.”

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Mr. Trump fired back on Friday evening. “.@MayorBowser is grossly incompetent, and in no way qualified to be running an important city like Washington, D.C.,” he wrote on Twitter. “If the great men and women of the National Guard didn’t step forward, she would have looked no better than her counterpart Mayor in Minneapolis.”

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His aides stressed that the security changes around the White House were not ordered by Mr. Trump but were made at the direction of the Secret Service based on its assessment of the security situation. Small fires were set as close as a block away from the compound last weekend, including one that did minor damage at the iconic St. John’s Church, and a few protesters penetrated a barricade near the Treasury Department, next door to the White House. The authorities said dozens of law enforcement personnel had been injured in scrapes with protesters.

But while the demonstrations near the White House have been predominantly peaceful, especially as the week has progressed, Mr. Trump shows no discomfort with the increasing security. He has embraced the idea of military units in the streets of the capital, seeing it as a demonstration of strength and berating governors for not using the National Guard more in their states.

“They came in, and this was like a piece of cake,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Rose Garden, sheltered behind the new fencing and surrounded by security. “Call in the National Guard. Call me. We will have so many people, more people then you have to dominate the streets. You can’t let what’s happened happen. It’s called dominate the streets.”

Video

0:00/1:06

Trump Says, ‘Call In the National Guard’

The president spoke at the White House on Friday, encouraging governors to deploy the National Guard to quell protests around the country.

: We have fantastic military, we have fantastic National Guard. National Guard was barely used and these people have done an unbelievable job. They helped the Secret Service at Washington — Secret Service by the way are unbelievable. The job they did at the White House is unbelievable. There was never any form of like, Oh gee, this sounds dangerous. All I could see is what I was seeing on television. But they were outside and the Secret Service was incredible. But we were also helped by the D.C. police, and we were helped by the National Guard was unbelievable. They came in and they — this was like a piece of cake. And I really am suggesting, because if you look at Minnesota and the great success we had there and other places, I’m suggesting to some of these governors that are too proud in New York — I mean you see what’s going on there. Don’t be proud. Get the job done. You’ll end up looking much better in the end. Call in the National Guard. Call me. We’ll have so many people. More people than — you have to dominate the streets. You can’t let what’s happening happen.

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The president spoke at the White House on Friday, encouraging governors to deploy the National Guard to quell protests around the country.CreditCredit...Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

The Secret Service said on Friday that it was closing off the areas beyond the 18-acre White House compound until June 10 but did not explicitly say whether the barriers would then come down. “These closures are in an effort to maintain the necessary security measures surrounding the White House complex, while also allowing for peaceful demonstration,” it said in a statement.

With the demonstrations still ongoing, the White House was bracing for the possibility of hundreds of thousands of protesters descending on Washington on Saturday. The White House declined to discuss the matter on the record. “The White House does not comment on security protocols and decisions,” said Judd Deere, a spokesman.

But another official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss security protocols, said there was no intention to make the new fencing and concrete barriers permanent and compared the expanded perimeter to the temporary measures taken when Pope Francis visited President Barack Obama in 2015.

For now, at least, the images are jarring. “The White House is the people’s house,” said Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian at the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona College. “The American people own it, pay for it and permit the president to live there. The fencing and barriers show that Trump is rejecting his predecessors’ example and instead concealing himself from the American people.”

Plenty of critics and commentators compared the additional barriers around the White House to the wall he is building along the nation’s southern border, a small-scale manifestation of his desire to wall off outsiders. In this case, the outsiders are not foreigners but fellow Americans.

“If Trump erected more than three miles of fence around the White House, it would exceed the length of his new wall on the southern border,” Anthony Scaramucci, who served briefly as Mr. Trump’s White House communications director before breaking with him, wrote on Twitter. “His bigotry is only exceeded by his incompetence.”

For now, at least, the new security perimeter has annexed Lafayette Square, a leafy landmark with its signature statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback just north of the White House, where for a couple hundred years city residents, tourists, protesters and cranks have strolled, shouted and speechified.

A new chain-link fence about eight feet tall was first erected this week along the park’s northern edge, forcing the demonstrations farther away from the White House. The fencing has now been extended down 17th Street, along the western side of the White House compound, and about halfway along Constitution Avenue, the southern border of the Ellipse. Concrete barriers have been put behind the fencing in many places. Stacks of fencing segments were piled on 15th Street on Friday for workers to complete the perimeter.

Image

Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

The barriers reflect a radical evolution since the early days of the mansion. Thomas Jefferson, the first president to live eight years in the building, installed a low, wooden and rail fence and later a stone wall, but the grounds were kept open to the public. In 1833, according to the White House Historical Association, the stone wall was cut down and a heavy wrought-iron fence was installed along Pennsylvania Avenue. Ulysses S. Grant expanded the grounds and the iron fencing.

For generations, the public largely had the run of the grounds during daytime, treating it as an open park of sorts. Jackson invited thousands into the mansion itself on his Inauguration Day, a moment of populist mayhem that served as a metaphor for his presidency.

Irritated that visitors were trying to photograph his daughter, Grover Cleveland closed the South Grounds in 1893, and William Howard Taft restricted the North Grounds to certain days in 1913. Still, outsiders managed to wander in from time to time, including one who slipped into the building and watched a movie in the dark with an unsuspecting Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The grounds were closed altogether to the public during World War I and World War II, and the first version of the bunker that Mr. Trump would later be taken to was built under Roosevelt in case of enemy attack. In addition, soldiers camped on the grounds and gun crews were stationed on the roof. But Roosevelt rejected deploying tanks outside the mansion “because it might look as if our democracy was under siege,” as the historian Michael Beschloss noted.

Protests were permitted along Pennsylvania Avenue and in Lafayette Square during the Vietnam War, close enough that Lyndon B. Johnson could hear them chanting, “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?” But when President Richard M. Nixon feared protesters against his Cambodia incursion in 1970 would storm the White House, the authorities surrounded the building with buses.

In 1995, after a drunken pilot crashed a Cessna 150L onto the South Lawn, a gunman opened fire at the White House from outside the gates and militia members blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City with a truck bomb, Bill Clinton closed Pennsylvania Avenue to vehicle traffic.

The street was further closed to pedestrian traffic for three years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the bunker under the White House where George W. Bush was brought during subsequent terror scares has since been upgraded. After intruders made it onto the grounds during Mr. Obama’s presidency, the government designed a more formidable 13-foot steel fence with what the police called “anticlimb and intrusion detection technology” to replace the historic one about half as tall.

As it happens, construction on that new fence began only last year and is not scheduled to be completed until next year.

Image

Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/politics/white-house-security.html

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last four presidents for The Times and The Washington Post. He also is the author of five books, most recently “Impeachment: An American History.” @peterbakernyt • Facebook

conteA version of this article appears in print on June 6, 2020, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: The People’s House Is Now an Embattled President’s Fortress. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

White House Hidden Fortified Bunkers Tunnels Coward Trump Escapes Map

2020-06-01T18:18:00.000-05:00

What we know about the White House’s secret bunkers and tunnels

Officers form a line on H Street as demonstrators gather near the White House on Sunday to protest the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. (Alex Brandon/AP)

Philip Bump

1 June 2020 at 2:26 p.m. CDT

At some point Friday night, with angry demonstrators gathered just north of the White House, the Secret Service took the unusual step of moving President Trump out of the executive mansion proper and into a secure underground facility. It was understandable, given the violence and vandalism that had accompanied protests in Minnesota earlier in the week and erupted near the White House, as well. But it offered an odd contrast with Trump’s tweets on Saturday morning, which made a particular point of noting that he was watching the conflict between his security team and the protesters.

It also raised a question: The White House has an underground bunker? It does. In fact, it apparently has more than one — and other ways in which the president can be protected.

The PEOC

Beneath the White House’s East Wing is the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, built during World War II as a protective measure for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It’s where then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney went during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Former first lady Laura Bush described being evacuated to the facility that same day in a book published in early 2010.

“I was hustled inside and downstairs through a pair of big steel doors that closed behind me with a loud hiss, forming an airtight seal,” she wrote. “I was now in one of the unfinished subterranean hallways underneath the White House, heading for the PEOC, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, built for President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. We walked along old tile floors with pipes hanging from the ceiling and all kinds of mechanical equipment. The PEOC is designed to be a command center during emergencies, with televisions, phones, and communications facilities.”

She describes being taken to a small conference room with a large table. The National Archives later released photos of members of the George W. Bush administration in that room that day.

President George W. Bush, right, and Vice President Richard B. Cheney. (National Archives)

If the New York Times’s reporting about Trump’s movement on Friday is accurate, it’s likely that this was the facility the president was taken to. According to Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, Trump was taken “to the underground bunker used in the past during terrorist attacks,” probably referring to the attacks of Sept. 11.

The other, larger, newer facility wasn’t in place that day.

The multilevel bunker

In fact, it was built because of lessons learned after the 9/11 attacks.

Ronald Kessler, who wrote about the construction in his 2018 book, “The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game,” spoke with The Washington Post by phone on Monday to describe the project.

“After that attack, the national security people recognized that that just is not going to cut it,” Kessler said, referring to the old facility. “That’s just not sufficient.”

“The idea was, before that, that if there were a nuclear attack or something — biological, radiological attack — that the White House staff and the president’s people could be evacuated to some remote location at West Virginia or Pennsylvania,” he continued. “But then they realized after the 9/11 attack that they could never leave Washington, certainly by vehicle, because all the roads were clogged. It would take too long. And even by helicopter, it would take — it would be very risky, given that the country was under attack. So they came up with this scheme to create a totally separate facility, an underground bunker under the North Lawn.”

In 2010, the General Services Administration began a large project outside the section of the White House where the Oval Office and offices of the president’s senior advisers are located. The GSA insisted that the work was meant to replace existing infrastructure at the White House, but the scale and secrecy of the project belied that.

“The GSA went to great lengths to keep the work secret,” the Associated Press reported in 2012, when construction neared completion, “not only putting up the fence around the excavation site but ordering subcontractors not to talk to anyone and to tape over company info on trucks pulling into the White House gates.”

“It’s a bunker, right?” The Post’s Christian Davenport wrote in 2011. “It’s gotta be a bunker.”

According to Kessler, it was.

“What it consists of is five stories deep into the ground with its own air supply and food supply,” he said, noting that few details are known. “It is sealed off from the aboveground area so that if there were, for example, a nuclear attack, the radiation would not penetrate into this bunker, which has very thick concrete walls and that sort of thing.”

The purpose is to serve as a command center and living quarters for the president and staff members. The air supply is self-contained, Kessler said, and the facility is stocked with enough food to last for months.

When Trump arrived at the White House in 2017, he and a few select officials were given a tour of the facility, which remains unstaffed, a sort of subterranean “break glass in case of emergency” option.

The tunnels

Kessler pointed out that escaping the White House was still an option. There are tunnels (like the one Laura Bush employed) under the building, including at least two that leave the mansion entirely. One leads to the Treasury Building and, eventually, up to an unmarked entrance on H Street. The other emerges onto the South Lawn, where the president can access Marine One if needed.

For all the drama surrounding the events of Friday night, Trump’s physical safety was secured in a comparatively unexciting way: in a secure room under the East Wing of the White House. Assuming it exists, the five-story, self-contained facility closer to the Oval Office remains unoccupied, as it probably has since it was built. . . .

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/01/what-we-know-about-white-houses-secret-bunkers-tunnels/

Copyright 2020 Martin P, All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The Washington Post content)

BunkerBoy Trump Virus >240K Homicides More GOP Crime Against Humanity

2020-04-29T03:20:00.010-05:00

National Security

President’s intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat

President Trump delivers a television national address on the coronavirus pandemic from the Oval Office on March 11. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Greg Miller and

Ellen Nakashima

27 April 2020

U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.

Over the past two months, President Trump has regularly sought to downplay the coronavirus threat with a mix of facts and false statements. (Video: JM Rieger/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The advisories being relayed by U.S. spy agencies were part of a broader collection of worrisome signals that came during a period now regarded by many public health officials and other experts as a squandered opportunity to contain the outbreak.

As of Monday, more than 55,000 people in the United States had died of covid-19.

Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.

The frequency with which the coronavirus was mentioned in the PDB has not been previously reported, and U.S. officials said it reflected a level of attention comparable to periods when analysts have been tracking active terrorism threats, overseas conflicts or other rapidly developing security issues.

A White House spokesman disputed the characterization that Trump was slow to respond to the virus threat. “President Trump rose to fight this crisis head-on by taking early, aggressive historic action to protect the health, wealth and well-being of the American people,” said spokesman Hogan Gidley. “We will get through this difficult time and defeat this virus because of his decisive leadership.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is responsible for the PDB. In response to questions about the repeated mentions of coronavirus, a DNI official said, “The detail of this is not true.” The official declined to explain or elaborate.

U.S. officials emphasized that the PDB references to the virus included comprehensive articles on aspects of the global outbreak, but also smaller digest items meant to keep Trump and senior administration officials updated on the course of the contagion. Versions of the PDB are also shared with Cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking U.S. officials.

One official said that by mid- to late January the coronavirus was being mentioned more frequently, either as one of the report’s core articles or in what is known as an “executive update,” and that it was almost certainly called to Trump’s attention orally.

The administration’s first major step to arrest the spread of the virus came in late January, when Trump restricted travel between the United States and China, where the virus is believed to have originated late last year.

But Trump spent much of February publicly playing down the threat while his administration failed to mobilize for a major outbreak by securing supplies of protective equipment, developing an effective diagnostic test and preparing plans to quarantine large portions of the population.

The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged

Trump insisted publicly on Feb. 26 that the number of cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” and said the next day that “it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

In reality, the virus was by then moving swiftly through communities across the United States, spreading virtually unchecked in New York City and other population centers until state governors began imposing sweeping lockdowns, requiring social distancing and all but closing huge sectors of the country’s economy.

As late as March 10, Trump said: “Just stay calm. It will go away.” The next day, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic.

By then, officials said, the warnings in the PDB and other intelligence reports had taken on the aspect of an insistent drumbeat. The first mention of the coronavirus in the PDB came at the beginning of January, focusing on what at that point were troubling signs of a new virus spreading through the Chinese city of Wuhan, and the Chinese government’s apparent efforts to conceal details of the outbreak.

In the ensuing weeks, U.S. intelligence agencies devoted additional resources and departments to tracking the spread of the coronavirus. At the CIA, the effort involved agency centers on China, Europe and Latin America, as well as departments devoted to transnational health threats, officials said.

The preliminary intelligence on the coronavirus was fragmentary, and did not address the prospects of a severe outbreak in the United States.

U.S. intelligence officials, citing scientific evidence, have largely dismissed the notion that the virus was deliberately genetically engineered. But they are continuing to examine whether the virus somehow escaped a virology lab in Wuhan, where research on naturally occurring coronaviruses has been conducted.

“We’re looking at it very closely, but we just don’t know,” said one senior U.S. intelligence official.

The warnings conveyed in the PDB probably will be a focus of any future investigation of the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in early April called for the formation of an independent commission analogous to the one created to investigate the Sept, 11, 2001, attacks.

In response to that probe, the George W. Bush administration was pressured to declassify portions of the PDB from August 2001 — a month before 9/11 — warning that al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was “determined to strike in U.S.”

Senior officials with direct knowledge of Trump’s intelligence briefings say that Trump listens and asks questions during the sessions. “We go in and he treats us with respect,” one senior official said.

But Trump has also been combative or dismissive toward U.S. intelligence agencies throughout his presidency.

In mid-February, as the pathogen was spreading, Trump fired acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire after learning that a senior analyst had briefed members of Congress that Russia was seeking to interfere in the 2020 presidential election and had “developed a preference” for Trump.

Officials have noted that Trump was also contending with the Senate impeachment trial in January and focused on other security issues, including tracking Iran’s response to a Jan. 3 U.S. airstrike that killed a top Iranian commander, Qasem Soleimani, in Baghdad.

David Priess, a former CIA officer who was a PDB briefer in the George W. Bush administration, said that even if Trump is ignoring his briefing book, other officials including national security adviser Robert O’Brien are probably digesting the material and interacting with Trump daily.

O’Brien’s deputy, Matthew Pottinger, has a background in intelligence and was among a small circle of senior officials urging early action to contain the coronavirus, U.S. officials said. Pottinger pushed to close off air travel from Europe in February, officials said, but Trump did not do so until mid-March.

“The fact that [Trump] gets only two or three briefings a week from the intelligence professionals doesn’t mean that’s the only exposure to the PDB he’s getting,” Priess said. “He can get the best intelligence in the world and still not make good decisions based on it.”

Priess, author of a book on intelligence briefings for presidents, said that Trump’s predecessors have been varied in their approaches to consuming intelligence. President Barack Obama was considered an avid reader of “the book,” which was prepared for him on a specially equipped computer tablet. President George W. Bush reviewed the highlights of the PDB and often discussed its contents at length with his briefer. President Richard M. Nixon likely didn’t read the PDB, Priess said, but was extensively briefed by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.

Trump’s top health officials and advisers were also delivering warnings on the coronavirus through January and February, though their messages at times appeared muddled and contradictory.

On Feb. 25, Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned publicly that virus was spreading so rapidly that “we need to be prepared for significant disruption in our lives.”

Trump, traveling in India at the time, was outraged by what he regarded as the alarmist tone of her remarks and their perceived impact on the U.S. stock market.

Two days later, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar testified before a Congressional committee that the risk to the public remained “low,” and that the coronavirus would “look and feel to the American people more like a severe flu season in terms of the interventions and approaches you will see.”

On March 11, with cases surging in New York and the stock market plummeting, Trump declared a national emergency and announced a ban on travel from Europe, which had become the new epicenter . . . .

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/presidents-intelligence-briefing-book-repeatedly-cited-virus-threat/2020/04/27/ca66949a-8885-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html?

"Barr Can't Be Trusted" Rules Fed Judge On Trump IC IG Revenge Firing Lies

2020-04-11T23:05:00.000-05:00

Endorsing Trump’s Firing of Inspector General, Barr Paints Distorted Picture

The attorney general misstated key facts in explaining the dismissed official’s handling of the whistle-blower complaint that prompted impeachment.

Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

By Charlie Savage

10 April 2020

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr endorsed and defended President Trump’s firing of Michael K. Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general, in an interview with Fox News. But in making the case that Mr. Atkinson committed a firing offense in his handling of a whistle-blower complaint last year that led to the impeachment battle, Mr. Barr made several claims that are subject to scrutiny.

What did Mr. Atkinson do?

Mr. Atkinson pushed the Trump administration in September to tell Congress about the whistle-blower complaint accusing Mr. Trump of abusing his power to try to coerce Ukraine into announcing investigations that could deliver him personal political benefits. The complaint touched off Mr. Trump’s impeachment by the Democratic-controlled House.

Since the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted the president, he has been purging officials who cooperated with the House inquiry. On April 3, Mr. Trump fired Mr. Atkinson. The next day, the president made clear at a news briefing that he did so because he remained angry that the inspector general wanted to disclose the complaint to Congress.

“He did a terrible job, absolutely terrible,” Mr. Trump said, adding: “He took a fake report and he brought it to Congress with an emergency, OK? Not a big Trump fan, that I can tell you.”

What did Mr. Barr say?

He endorsed Mr. Trump’s move while putting forth a dubious account of what happened. This is Mr. Barr’s statement:

“The president did the right thing in removing Atkinson. From the vantage point of the Department of Justice, he had interpreted his statute — which is a fairly narrow statute, gave him jurisdiction over wrongdoing by intelligence people — and tried to turn it in to a commission to explore anything in the government and immediately report it to Congress without letting the executive branch look at it and determine whether there was any problem. He was told this in a letter from the Department of Justice, and he is obliged to follow the interpretation of the Department of Justice and he ignored it, so I think the president was correct in firing him.”

Did Mr. Atkinson do what Mr. Barr said?

No, not when it came to an executive branch review. Mr. Atkinson tried to follow the procedures laid out in the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, which requires that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence review the complaint, then report it to Congress.

After determining that the complaint was “credible” and raised an “urgent concern,” Mr. Atkinson provided it on Aug. 26 to the acting director of national intelligence at the time, Joseph Maguire. Mr. Atkinson believed that under the whistle-blower protection law, Mr. Maguire would have seven days to review the materials and append any comments before passing on the complaint to Congress.

A senior Justice Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, defended Mr. Barr’s claim that Mr. Atkinson instead thought he could “immediately report it to Congress without letting the executive branch look at it,” arguing that a week was insufficient for the department to conduct its own review of the complaint.

But it was Congress, not Mr. Atkinson, that set the review period at one week for complaints covered by the whistle-blower law. In addition, officials at the White House and the Justice Department already knew that an intelligence official had raised concerns about Mr. Trump’s Ukraine dealings even before he filed the complaint on Aug. 12. The department ultimately decided not to open any criminal investigation.

Did Mr. Atkinson ignore the Justice Department’s view?

No. While Mr. Atkinson disagreed with it, he considered himself bound by it.

After Mr. Atkinson gave the complaint to Mr. Maguire, Steven E. Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, opined that the whistle-blower law did not apply because the complaint was not about an intelligence activity, so the administration could lawfully withhold it from Congress.

On Sept. 9, about a week after the deadline, Mr. Atkinson wrote to the intelligence oversight committees with the approval of Mr. Maguire, notifying them that a dispute had arisen over how the law applied to a whistle-blower complaint without disclosing its subject. Mr. Atkinson also wrote in a follow-up letter to Congress, “I understand that I am bound by the determination” of the Justice Department and “will continue to abide by that determination.”

The senior department official, defending Mr. Barr’s claim that Mr. Atkinson instead “ignored” the Justice Department’s interpretation, argued that if he had truly respected the Office of Legal Counsel’s role, he would not have told the oversight committees anything.

Did Mr. Barr assert anything else factually questionable?

Yes. He claimed that the F.B.I. had opened its investigation into whether Trump campaign officials were coordinating with Russia’s election interference “without any basis.” But the official who decided to open the investigation, Bill Priestap, then the assistant director of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division, did so on the basis of certain facts.

Specifically, after WikiLeaks started dumping out stolen Democratic emails believed to have been hacked by Russia and timed to disrupt the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Australia told the United States that two months earlier, a Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, had told one of its diplomats that Russia had offered to help the Trump campaign by anonymously disclosing “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Defending Mr. Barr’s claim that the F.B.I. did not have “any basis” to open an investigation, the department official pointed to the apparent opinion of John H. Durham, a prosecutor whom Mr. Barr has assigned to reinvestigate the Russia investigators, that the F.B.I. should have opened a “preliminary investigation” rather than a “full investigation.”

The Justice Department inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, concluded that the facts available to Mr. Priestap were an adequate basis for a full investigation, but said in testimony last year that Mr. Durham had disagreed with him and believed the factual basis for the inquiry only rose to the standard for a preliminary one.

Has Mr. Barr’s candor about the Russia inquiry come under question before?

Yes. He has repeatedly come under fire for misleading the public about the findings and analysis of the special counsel who eventually took over the case, Robert S. Mueller III.

Last month, Reggie B. Walton, a federal judge appointed by a Republican president, declared in a ruling that Mr. Barr’s initial account of the then-still-secret Mueller report was so “distorted” and “misleading” that the court could not trust him. Judge Walton also suggested that the attorney general had made “a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump.”

The Justice Department has said it “stands by” Mr. Barr’s statements without addressing the substance of the judge’s critique.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/us/politics/barr-inspector-general-firing.html?

Copyright 2020 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The New York Times content)

Criminal CIA Leads Gitmo Prosecutors Unconstitutional 9/11 "War Court" Trial

2020-04-05T05:58:00.000-05:00

The Growing Culture of Secrecy at Guantánamo Bay

The war court where the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are on trial operates under classification rules that are inconsistent, complex and sometimes absurd.

Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

By Carol Rosenberg

4 April 2020

This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — During a court session this year in the case of the men accused plotting Sept. 11, defense lawyers spotted something curious: Prosecutors were huddled around a wireless silver tablet computer.

When confronted about it, the judge made a surprising disclosure. He had secretly approved use of the device to allow real-time communication between prosecutors and representatives of the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies monitoring the trial from afar. The purpose, he said, was to allow the agencies to signal when they were concerned about a potential “spill,” the inadvertent disclosure of classified information.

“Spills cannot occur,” said the judge, Col. W. Shane Cohen, defending his decision to give the agencies a way to relay requests to silence the court audio. “That is the bottom line. The goal is zero spills.”

The judge said he regretted that he had agreed with prosecutors to keep secret the new communication system, but he stood by his decision to allow its use. He released his secret order, calling the wireless silver tablet a “teletype machine.”

In granting the request, Colonel Cohen added another layer of secrecy to the at times remarkably opaque national security court at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Government censors black out portions of transcripts of public hearings before they are posted on the military commissions website, which is adorned with the motto, “Fairness Transparency Justice.” Witnesses from the prison, including lawyers and some commanders, testify anonymously. Soldiers strip their name tapes off their Army uniforms when on the courtroom premises.

The judge and a court security officer can hit a mute button to silence the audio system that pipes the proceedings — on a 40-second delay — into the sealed-off observation room at the back of the courtroom where relatives of victims, journalists and other visitors watch.

But the secrecy extends beyond the courtroom, which is at the heart of the hybrid federal-military justice system that the United States created in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

All court filings, including a judge’s order, undergo a security review before the public can see it.

By Defense Department regulation, court filings are to be released to the public within 15 business days. But they undergo a censorship scrub first, with representatives of a series of security agencies like the C.I.A., F.B.I., Guantánamo prison and the Pentagon’s United States Southern Command having a say on what portions of the filing are classified.

But delays are common. It took 10 months from filing until the public could read a legal motion from May 2019 asking the Army judge in that case to hold a hearing on the question of granting time served credit for the torture endured by Majid Khan, who pleaded guilty to being a courier for Al Qaeda.

Before Mr. Khan was brought to Guantánamo in 2006, the C.I.A. held him for three years in isolation and incognito in the C.I.A.’s secret prison network, the black sites. There, members of the medical staff “infused” a puréed meal into his rectum after he had gone on a hunger strike, an episode that itself was kept secret at the court until it was included in a declassified portion of a Senate study of the interrogation program.

It is a matter of not only concealing information that is classified — for example the countries that hosted the black sites — but also blacking out words that the intelligence agencies say could create a mosaic of information that could let people discern government secrets. So a continent that was the location of a black site is also classified.

Transcripts of public court sessions are also censored, with at times perplexing results.

On Jan. 27, a defense lawyer questioning James E. Mitchell, the C.I.A. contractor who waterboarded prisoners in 2002 and 2003, read aloud a sentence from Dr. Mitchell’s 2016 memoir, “Enhanced Interrogation,” which was released with approval of the agency.

In it, Dr. Mitchell, a psychologist, described the staffing of a black site this way: “There were also computer and communications geeks, analysts, targeters, subject matter experts, many, many agency police officers to act as security guards, two psychologists (counting me), nurses, and a physician.”

The transcript, released two weeks later, blacked out the words “agency police,” as though the C.I.A. had, on reconsideration, not wanted the world to know it used its own police force in the clandestine prison system.

“The commissions are susceptible to it because they are captive to the agency,” said Joshua L. Dratel, a New York criminal defense lawyer who has handled dozens of federal national security cases and represented David Hicks, a prisoner at Guantánamo who went home to Australia in 2007 as part of plea deal in a conviction that was overturned in 2015.

Mr. Dratel returned to the war court in February as an observer for the American Bar Association and spotted the court’s motto sewn into a carpet at the entrance.

“You looking at the floor, there’s a rug that says ‘blah, blah, blah transparency,’ and then you look up and you see a soldier in front of you, another one, and they have their names taped over,” he said. “To me it’s just the dissonance of Gitmo.”

In federal court in the United States, a defendant can choose to testify and tell his or her own story and let a judge or jury decide the truth of it. But at Guantánamo, Mr. Dratel said, even the detainee’s own story can be classified.

Lawyers for the man accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, are forbidden from releasing the full details of his memories of his interrogations — he was waterboarded 183 times — because where they were done, and the identities of some of those who he believes carried them out, are classified.

Defense lawyers in the Sept. 11 case were particularly outraged over the decision by Colonel Cohen, who abruptly announced in recent days that he was stepping down as the trial judge, to secretly allow prosecutors a direct channel of communication with the intelligence agencies from inside the court.

In 2013, the C.I.A., which was monitoring the proceedings from outside the courtroom, used the ability it had at the time to remotely mute the audio at a mention of the intelligence agency’s secret prison network.

The judge at that time, Col. James L. Pohl, was furious. He ordered anybody with remote access to the court’s systems to unplug. Colonel Cohen’s decision to allow the intelligence agencies to communicate directly with prosecutors in the courtroom during the proceedings effectively restored that ability, albeit through a prosecutor who was reading warnings from the C.I.A. somewhere else and signaling the court security officer to cut the feed.

Retroactive redaction is not unusual at the court. In last year’s motion in the Khan case, censors twice blacked out the name of President George W. Bush in an Amnesty International report from 2007 that recounted public remarks Mr. Bush had made in 2006.

The rule-making can be random and constantly changes. In January, students, lawyers and human rights advocates who were at Guantánamo to observe a hearing were instructed that they were forbidden to talk about the Sept. 11 case outside the confines of Camp Justice, the crude housing area of tents and trailers at the razor-wire ringed court complex.

Julia Hall, who works for Amnesty International, said she was discussing the case with other observers at O’Kelly’s, the base’s Irish pub, when a chaperone waved her hand in front of her mouth to silence her. The gag order was rescinded the next day.

A new delegation of observers brought to the base the next week were given a new gag order: They were forbidden to talk about how many soldiers were inside the court guarding . . . .

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/us/politics/the-growing-culture-of-secrecy-at-guantanamo-bay.html

FISA Chief Judge Order FBI Review 29 Terror / Espionage Wiretap Applications

2020-04-03T20:06:00.000-05:00

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/us/politics/fbi-fisa-court-surveillance-applications.html

National Security Court Orders Deeper Look at 29 F.B.I. Wiretap Applications

The rare public order follows an inspector general’s findings of pervasive problems with how the bureau has prepared applications to wiretap people.

Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

By Charlie Savage

3 April 2020

WASHINGTON — A secretive court that oversees national security surveillance ordered the F.B.I. on Friday to conduct a searching review of 29 wiretap applications in terrorism and espionage investigations, after an inspector general uncovered pervasive problems with how the bureau prepared them.

In a rare public order to the F.B.I., James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, ordered the bureau to immediately tell the court the names of the 29 wiretapping targets, and to scour the applications and underlying case files for any inaccuracies or material omissions.

The F.B.I. is to submit by June 15 a sworn declaration about the results of that analysis, Judge Boasberg wrote. If the F.B.I. finds misstatements or omissions, it must also assess whether they undermined the legal basis for placing those targets under surveillance.

The F.B.I. said in a statement that the 29 flawed applications predated changes it made after a separate damning inspector general report last year uncovered numerous errors and omissions in applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to monitor the former Trump adviser Carter Page as part of the Russia investigation.

The bureau emphasized that “maintaining the trust and confidence of the court is ”paramount,” adding that: “In line with our duty of candor to the court and our responsibilities to the American people, we will continue to work closely with the FISC and the Department of Justice to ensure that our FISA authorities are exercised responsibly.”

In the report this week, the Justice Department inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, sought to examine the so-called Woods files, in which the F.B.I. is required to compile supporting evidence for each statement of fact in the application that goes to a judge, for each of the 29 applications.

Mr. Horowitz’s team said that it “identified apparent errors or inadequately supported facts in all of the 25 applications we reviewed” and that the F.B.I. could not even locate the supporting files for the other four. The inspector general wrote that he lacked confidence that the procedures, intended to ensure that surveillance applications were “scrupulously accurate,” were working.

“It would be an understatement to note that such lack of confidence appears well founded,” Judge Boasberg wrote. “None of the 29 cases reviewed had a Woods file that did what it is supposed to do: Support each fact proffered to the court.”

The inspector general report referred to some factual errors in the applications but did not provide a comprehensive accounting of them. It also did not compare the applications to voluminous raw case files in search of omissions of any mitigating evidence that could cast doubt on the F.B.I.’s assertion that a target is probably a foreign agent.

The inspector general audit was a follow-up to the report scrutinizing the F.B.I.’s application for court permission to eavesdrop on Mr. Page.

Although the Page wiretap was only a small part of the Russia investigation, President Trump and his allies have sought to portray the serious problems with the Page wiretap applications as evidence to support their theory that there was a politically biased conspiracy against the Trump campaign at the F.B.I. that amounted to an attempted coup.

But Mr. Horowitz’s follow-up findings of serious problems with how the F.B.I. put together every unrelated FISA application his team scrutinized suggests that the bureau had been routinely and systematically negligent when preparing FISA applications, as opposed to singling out Mr. Page for special mistreatment.

After the report about the problems with the Page applications, the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, ordered more than 40 corrective actions, like greater training and new checklists agents must follow when putting together applications. Last month, Judge Boasberg accepted those changes and added a few additional rules.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/eus/politics/fbi-fisa-court-surveillance-applications.html

Ventilator-Alternative Helmet Orders $162 Flood TX Sea-Long Medical FDA OK

2020-04-01T00:31:00.000-05:00

CORONAVIRUS

Texas 'mom and pop' business flooded with orders for helmet ventilators amid coronavirus crisis

Sea-Long Medical Systems has drawn huge interest from hospitals and foreign countries seeking alternatives in treating COVID-19 patients amid a ventilator shortage.

Helmet may aid as alternative amid ventilator crisis

MARCH 31, 202004:10

March 31, 2020, 7:32 PM CDT

By Lisa Cavazuti, Cynthia McFadden and Rich Schapiro

One month ago, Chris Austin was running a little-known mom-and-pop business in Texas that fielded a few dozen orders a week for his helmet-style ventilation devices.

He had five employees and a handful of volunteers from the family's church who would pitch in at the workshop behind their home in the small town of Waxahachie.

Then the coronavirus epidemic hit.

Austin's company, Sea-Long Medical Systems Inc., is getting thousands of orders every day, from America's top hospitals to countries as far flung as the United Arab Emirates. Researchers say the device, which costs less than $200, could help hospitals free up ventilators for only the most critically ill coronavirus patients.

"'Overwhelmed' doesn't scratch the surface," Austin told NBC News.

Sea-Long Medical Systems helmets resemble crude spacesuit helmets, with transparent hoods sealed at the neck and two tubes extending from the base.Sea-Long Medical Systems

The demand for the Sea-Long helmet underscores the dire shortage of ventilators in the U.S. and around the globe fueled by a surge in hospital patients suffering from COVID-19.

In the last few weeks, hospitals have been flooded with patients experiencing respiratory problems so severe they need the help of a machine to help them breathe.

Governors have made impassioned pleas for more equipment. Companies like General Motors and Ford have redesigned their assembly lines to produce the lifesaving devices. And hospital executives are scrambling to snap up any equipment that might help ease the escalating crisis playing out inside their facilities.

The Sea-Long device doesn't look the part of a lifesaving medical device. It resembles a crude spacesuit helmet, with a transparent hood sealed at the neck and two tubes extending from its base. The helmet was originally designed to supply oxygen to patients receiving treatment in hyperbaric chambers.

But doctors in Italy, where a version of the helmet has long been used to treat people experiencing breathing problems, found it to be effective in helping some COVID-19 patients.

Dr. Bhakti Patel, who has been studying the devices for four years, said they hold promise as an early intervention that could spare respiratory patients the need to be put on the more traditional — and costly and invasive — ventilators.

"I would love for there to be a silver bullet for this pandemic," said Patel, a pulmonologist at the University of Chicago. "My best hope is that the way it changes the game is that maybe it shaves off the number of patients who need a ventilator — even if it's 1 out of 3 or 1 out of 5."

"If that is the case," Patel added, "that would be a game changer when we're seeing this tidal wave of patients who need a ventilator."

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

Patel led a first-of-its-kind study in 2016 that tested the Sea-Long helmet against an oxygen mask for a group of 83 intensive care patients suffering from acute respiratory distress. The researchers found that the helmet led to superior outcomes: Patients using them required ventilation 18.2 percent of the time, compared to 61.5 percent for the masks, and had a better 90-day survival rate, according to the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The trial was stopped early because the helmets proved more effective than the masks, resulting in a smaller sample size than originally intended. But Patel believes the device could lead to a sea change in intensive care units that have long relied on traditional ventilators. Those devices require doctors to fully sedate patients and insert a tube into their windpipes, a process that can cause pneumonia and other problems when used for extended periods of time.

"If we take away the ventilator — which comes with this package of sedating people, making them not move, making them sort of not have memory of what's happening — perhaps we could spare some patients some long-term complications," Patel said.

At $162 apiece, the Sea-Long helmet costs a tiny fraction of the five-figure ventilators.

The original devices were made to run through ventilators. But working with Patel and her mentor, Dr. John Kress, Sea-Long has modified the helmets so they can be hooked up to a hospital's regular oxygen supply, keeping the ventilators free for those who need them most. They have also made another significant modification, adding a viral filter to prevent possible COVID-19 exposure to others.

This week, the team at the University of Chicago Medical Center used the helmet on one coronavirus patient and has gotten encouraging results, Kress said. The facility has received 20 of an expected 100 helmets and is planning to use them on additional patients, the doctors said.

Chris Austin, fourth left, says his team has been working around the clock for the past several weeks.NBC News

Other companies make similar ventilator helmets, but Sea-Long's is the only helmet available in the U.S. that meets requirements of the Food and Drug Administration and has been validated in a clinical study for acute respiratory syndrome. No studies have yet been done, however, examining the effectiveness of the devices in treating COVID-19 patients.

Austin's team has been working around the clock for the past several weeks. The workforce has at least doubled to more than 10 people, Austin said, and volunteers have been showing up in droves.

"We have people showing up that we don't even know that say: 'We're here to help. What can we do?'" Austin said. "They don't ask for anything. They don't expect anything. They just say, 'Whatever you want me to do, we'll do it.'"

"It just about brings tears to my eyes," Austin added.

The attention has led to some other acts of extraordinary generosity.

Austin said he recently got a surprised call from Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides offering to help him produce more devices.

"Chris, I saw what you do, and we want to help," Whitesides said, according to Austin. "Whatever it takes."

Austin told him he needed more machines to manufacture the devices but didn't have the cash to pay for them. Later that day, Austin got a call from his New Jersey-based supplier.

"Somebody just paid your bill," Austin said he was told. "They'll be shipping tomorrow."

With the four additional machines, Sea-Long expects to produce thousands of helmets a week. The goal is to produce 50,000 per week.

"This is the classic sort of American story," Patel said. "It's the little engine that could."

Download the NBC News app for full coverage and alerts about the coronavirus outbreak

James Vanderploeg, Virgin Galactic's chief medical officer, said the company is working with Sea-Long "to help them expand their capacity, helping with recruiting additional people and getting equipment in place and helping with the logistics and so forth — anything we can do to help them expand their throughput." Virgin Galactic is also modeling potential prototypes for its own design of helmets used for ventilation, Vanderploeg said.

Major U.S. medical centers are now stocking up on the helmets, including Massachusetts General Hospital and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Austin said he's also received orders from Canada, Mexico and several countries in Europe, including hard-hit Italy.

A Mass General spokesperson said the hospital has ordered five Sea-Long helmets but has not yet received them.

A Penn Health spokesperson confirmed that the hospital has ordered the devices.

With so much of the world in need and so many orders coming in at once, Austin has faced a difficult question: Whom to prioritize?

"We really look at where is the need," Austin said. "We know New York has a stronger need. We know Boston. We know Chicago. ... But we also know that we have to get what we can to Italy."

For now, the company is shipping only a limited number helmets per order, "because we still can't afford the volume of a huge order," he said.

Amid the worsening pandemic, Sea-Long isn't planning to raise the price in part because it doesn't want to limit who has access to the devices.

"This probably sounds sappy," Austin said, "but we think of what if that was our son or daughter or grandfather sitting there in that bed gasping for air and we have to explain to him: 'I'm sorry. We don't have anything for you.'"

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-mom-pop-business-flooded-orders-helmet-ventilators-amid-coronavirus-n1173466

Lisa Cavazuti

Lisa Cavazuti is an associate producer for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Cynthia McFadden

Cynthia McFadden is the senior legal and investigative correspondent for NBC News.

Rich Schapiro

Rich Schapiro is a reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Christine Romo and Brenda Breslauer contributed.

see also https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/coronavirus/north-texas-company-offering-ventilator-alternatives/2342307/

see also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27179847

Copyright Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to NBC News / JAMA Content)

by Taboola

China Russia Virus Disinformation Theory Lies To Harm US Hide Own Failures

2020-03-28T14:00:00.001-05:00

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/politics/china-russia-coronavirus-disinformation.html

As Virus Spreads, China and Russia See Openings for Disinformation

The two powers amplify discredited conspiracy theories and sow division as they look to undermine the United States.

Credit...Eve Edelheit for The New York Times

By Julian E. Barnes, Matthew Rosenberg and Edward Wong

28 March 2020

WASHINGTON — China and Russia have both seized on the novel coronavirus to wage disinformation campaigns that seek to sow doubts about the United States’ handling of the crisis and deflect attention from their own struggles with the pandemic, according to American intelligence officials and diplomats.

Kremlin-aligned websites aimed at Western audiences have trafficked in conspiracy theories to spread fear in Europe and political division in the United States, the officials said, noting that Russia’s diplomats and state-run news media have arguably been more restrained.

China has been more overtly aggressive. It has used a network of government-linked social media accounts to spread discredited, and sometimes contradictory, theories. And China has adopted Russia’s playbook for more covert operations, mimicking Kremlin disinformation campaigns and even using and amplifying some of the same conspiracy sites.

The propaganda campaigns show how both countries turned to a typical authoritarian tactic of spreading propaganda to undermine their shared adversary, the United States, rather than addressing public criticism of their own problems.

In the days to come, China is likely to back off the public spread of disinformation through its Foreign Ministry and network of embassies and to further embrace the more subtle Russian-style approach, relying on its intelligence services to spread misinformation about the origins of the virus and China’s handling of it, senior American intelligence officials assessed.

Washington and Beijing have reached a tentative détente, other American officials said, that calls for both sides to halt public attacks on each other about the virus, but officials are skeptical that the uneasy truce will hold.

One senior American official said China had signaled to the United States that it would throttle its disinformation in the face of criticism from European countries and the U.S. State Department. Other officials said China was merely shifting tactics, finding its disinformation campaign was less effective than it had hoped. And President Trump has moved toward conciliation, holding a telephone call with President Xi Jinping of China on Thursday night in which the two leaders “agreed to work together to defeat the coronavirus pandemic,” according to a White House summary of the conversation.

Diplomats and official accounts from Russia and China as well as Iran have sharply increased their dissemination of disinformation about the coronavirus since January, even repeating and amplifying one another’s propaganda and falsehoods, including anti-American conspiracy theories, said Lea Gabrielle, a special envoy and coordinator of the Global Engagement Center at the State Department.

“The Covid-19 crisis has really provided an opportunity for malign actors to exploit the information space for harmful purposes,” Ms. Gabrielle told reporters on Friday, referring to the disease caused by the virus. Teams at the department are working on countering the messages, she said.

Speaking at the White House on March 20, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denounced China, Russia and Iran for “coordinated efforts” at spreading disinformation.

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China has a long history of propaganda and efforts to cajole the world into following its own narrative on geopolitical issues like Taiwan, Tibet or Hong Kong. While it pushes its policies and views, some openly anti-American, it rarely puts enormous resources behind fringe conspiracy theories.

But that has changed during the pandemic, intelligence officials and outside experts said. In a highly coordinated campaign, Chinese officials and institutions have spread talking points centered on two narratives: that the United States is to blame for the origins of the virus and that the Communist Party has successfully contained the virus after a hard-fought campaign, affirming the superiority of its system.

As part of the information war, China is also expelling journalists from three major American newspapers, including The New York Times.

After remaining relatively quiet early in the year, Chinese Foreign Ministry officials have in recent weeks amplified conspiratorial stories as the coronavirus outbreak has spread globally while China has claimed to have wrested it under control in the city of Wuhan where it originated.

Chinese officials appeared to have relied on borrowing falsehoods pushed by anti-American organizations cultivated by the Kremlin that already have an audience in Western countries. Some of the sites have received Russian money, according to experts.

On March 12, for instance, Zhao Lijian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, posted a link on Twitter to what he described as a “very much important” article that falsely described American origins of the coronavirus.

The article was from Global Research, a group based in Montreal that presents itself as a think tank but largely traffics in conspiracy theories, many of them pro-Russian and anti-American.

At least a dozen other Chinese Embassies around the world retweeted Mr. Zhao’s post. All told, more than 12,000 accounts have retweeted it and more than 20,000 users have liked it.

Other outlets that routinely push out disinformation subsequently picked up the theory and added their own twists. One of the main contributors to the far-right financial site ZeroHedge, who goes by the pseudonym “Tyler Durden” — the name of Brad Pitt’s character in the 1999 movie “Fight Club” — referred to Mr. Zhao’s tweet in a lengthy post on a lesser-known site and presented the new coronavirus as the “black swan that the globalists were waiting for (or planning) all along.”

Another site, Veterans Today, which traffics in conspiracy theories, many of them anti-American, claimed to “break” the untrue story of how an American sports team had brought the coronavirus to Wuhan in October. “No video or photos exist of the U.S. team, no records were kept,” the outlet asserted, adding that many athletes from the purported team did not even compete and instead hung around the open-air market where the virus is believed to have first emerged in humans.

The tactics are “a significant departure from how the Chinese have operated in the past,” said Laura Rosenberger, the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the nonpartisan German Marshall Fund of the United States.

“Russia has long spread multiple, seemingly contradictory disinformation narratives and then said, ‘How can we know for sure what happened, how can we know the truth?’” she added. “We have never really seen China do that externally before. But now we see Chinese officials and media trying out those typically Russian tactics.”

On Monday, the Alliance for Securing Democracy will unveil a tool to track the Chinese disinformation and give a sense of the narrative Beijing is pushing. The group’s Hamilton dashboard has long monitored Russian Twitter accounts and broadcast feeds.

In recent days, Chinese officials have refined their messaging to move away from outright lies or falsehoods, Ms. Gabrielle said.

“I will say that the information space is ever-evolving,” she said. “It’s been very fluid, and China’s approach to it has been as well.”

In Africa, for example, Beijing’s diplomatic accounts tried for a couple of days to amplify the conspiracy theories pushed by Mr. Zhao. But since March 15, the propaganda in Africa has mainly praised Chinese efforts. Ms. Gabrielle said her teams had seen similar shifting patterns in China’s messaging in Italy and elsewhere in the West.

China’s own initial failures in fighting the virus prevented its government from mounting a propaganda campaign of simply promoting its own achievements, forcing it to embrace Russian-style disinformation, said Matthew Kroenig, a former C.I.A. official and the author of a new book on the growing competition between China and the United States, “The Return of Great Power Rivalry.”

“Part of the reason the Chinese are copying the Russian playbook is because they mismanaged the crisis,” Mr. Kroenig said. “But they are also learning from the Russians.”

Russia’s public messaging about the coronavirus has been reserved, prompting some American officials and experts to conclude that Moscow, uncertain of how the pandemic will play out, had decided to hedge its public message by avoiding conspiracy theories that could blow back on the Russian government.

Still, Russia has shifted its propaganda efforts in Europe and elsewhere to focus on the virus, spreading conspiracy theories about it, according to the European Union’s disinformation unit, which has tracked it.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been a target of the Russian effort. The Lithuanian government believes Moscow was behind a falsified account that an American soldier serving in the NATO force in Lithuania had tested positive for coronavirus, a Lithuanian official said. Since then, Russia has spread other disinformation in Lithuania and in other countries in the Atlantic alliance.

The Russians’ tactics have a canny circularity, Ms. Gabrielle said. They push out a false message, which the Chinese and Iranians pick up and promote, and then Russian actors will repost the Chinese or Iranian versions of the message to make it seem like new information that had originated independently . . . .

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/politics/china-russia-coronavirus-disinformation.html

Parscale Small-Time Web Punk Stole For Trump GO.P. Database To Get Rich

2020-03-09T05:58:00.000-05:00

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/us/trump-campaign-brad-parscale.html

Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

How the Trump Campaign Took Over the G.O.P.

The president’s campaign manager and his allies commandeered Republican voter data and fund-raising engines, consolidating power — and profiting — in ways never before possible.

Brad Parscale, President Trump’s campaign chairman. His firm has billed nearly $35 million to the campaign, the Republican National Committee and related entities since 2017.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

By Danny Hakim and Glenn Thrush

9 March 2020

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s campaign manager and a circle of allies have seized control of the Republican Party’s voter data and fund-raising apparatus, using a network of private businesses whose operations and ownership are cloaked in secrecy, largely exempt from federal disclosure.

Working under the aegis of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, with the cooperation of Trump appointees at the Republican National Committee, the operatives have consolidated power — and made money — in a way not possible in an earlier, more transparent analog era. Since 2017, businesses associated with the group have billed roughly $75 million to the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and a range of other Republican clients.

The takeover of the Republican Party’s under-the-hood political machinery parallels the president’s domination of a party that once shunned him, reflected in his speedy impeachment trial and summary acquittal. Elected Republicans have learned the political peril of insufficient fealty. Now, by commanding the party’s repository of voter data and creating a powerful pipeline for small donations, the Trump campaign and key party officials have made it increasingly difficult for Republicans to mount modern, digital campaigns without the president’s support.

The process has not been exactly frictionless, shot through with accusations of empire-building and profiteering by the campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and his allies. Mr. Parscale’s flagship firm, Parscale Strategy, has billed nearly $35 million to the Trump campaign, the R.N.C. and related entities since 2017 — the vast bulk of it, he says, passed along to advertising and digital firms.

What’s more, the move to consolidate voter data came at the expense of a competing data vehicle developed by the conservative activist Koch brothers, provoking resentment from Koch allies, especially in the Senate. And a fierce pressure campaign to centralize fund-raising on the new platform, a for-profit company that Mr. Trump branded WinRed, brought dissent from candidates initially reluctant to sign on, as well as competitors who believed they were being pushed aside without a fair hearing.

For all that, WinRed, created last summer, has given the party an overdue counterweight to ActBlue, the Democrats’ small-donor fund-raising juggernaut. With WinRed, donors could contribute with a few clicks, and candidates could reap windfalls through joint appeals with the president. In its first six months, capitalizing on the Republican base’s outrage over impeachment, WinRed raised $100 million, a fast start, though still well behind the roughly $1 billion raised last year by ActBlue.

Image

Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

“It is completely, thoroughly ironic that Trump, who ran against anything to do with the R.N.C. and the establishment, is the guy who is breathing new life into the party,” said WinRed’s chairman, Henry Barbour. Perhaps no one better represents the new outside-in reality than Mr. Barbour — nephew of the former Republican Party chairman Haley Barbour — who once said it would be “very hard” to vote for Mr. Trump.

The younger Mr. Barbour is also chairman of the other central pillar of the Republican machine, Data Trust, a storehouse of personal, commercial and demographic voter data collected from state parties and voter files or bought from data brokers (or from WinRed, itself a vital source of donor information). Data Trust, a private company controlled by a board of Republican grandees, provided much of the raw material behind the Republicans’ digital-messaging advantage in 2016 — a deficit that the Democrats, after leading on tech during the Obama years, are now struggling to close amid the divisive funk of this primary season.

The Parscale-led group — including Katie Walsh Shields and her husband, Mike Shields, both former R.N.C. chiefs of staff; and the party’s former digital director, Gerrit Lansing — has also presided over the creation of a number of other political tools, from the president’s affiliated super PACs to a forthcoming party-controlled news app intended to produce cheerleading content.

Mr. Parscale declined to comment in detail for this article. But he and his associates have said that private companies give them greater operational flexibility, given the constraints of campaign-finance laws. (ActBlue, by contrast, is a nonprofit. Both entities, though, are required to disclose individual donors.) Still, the millions moving through opaque private businesses have left even the president perpetually concerned that Mr. Parscale and his team are making too much money, according to campaign and White House staff members.

The Trump family looms over the whole operation, starting with Mr. Kushner. While his White Houseportfolio has variously encompassed everything from immigration to the Middle East, his most consistent assignment has been informal campaign chairman, overseeing the most vital arm of the new family business: politics.

According to two people with knowledge of the matter, Parscale Strategy has also been used to make payments out of public view to Lara Trump, the wife of the president’s son Eric, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., who have been surrogates on the stump and also taken on broader advisory roles. Their presence makes for an odd dynamic between a campaign manager and a candidate’s family.

During a campaign appearance last summer in Orlando, Ms. Guilfoyle confronted Mr. Parscale: Why were her checks always late? Two people who witnessed the encounter said a contrite Mr. Parscale promised that the problem would be sorted out promptly by his wife, Candice Parscale, who handles the books on many of his ventures.

A Data Arms Race

In the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential run, the Republican Party released a 100-page report that many considered an autopsy. Reince Priebus, then the R.N.C. chairman, offered this blunt assessment: “Our message was weak. Our ground game was insufficient. We weren’t inclusive. We were behind in both data and digital.”

While Mr. Trump’s team shredded its core recommendation — a tolerant immigration policy and outreach to women and minorities — it embraced the call for technological change.

Previously, parties had spent heavily on television advertising, but now the R.N.C. moved to rebuild around Data Trust, which it had recently helped establish. The idea was compelling: If state and national party committees and campaigns fed information into one place, it could create a deeper understanding of voters. If that place were outside the party, fund-raising limits would not apply. Contractors were fired, and much of the R.N.C.’s data staff was moved into Data Trust, which effectively became an off-campus arm of the party.

“Naturally we faced opposition from a lot of the entrenched interests who had business models that benefited from the old way of doing things,” said Mr. Shields, the R.N.C. chief of staff in 2013 and 2014.

That included the Koch brothers and their data vehicle, i360, which built personality profiles of millions of voters and was used by a number of campaigns. They weren’t the only skeptics who worried that the committee was steering business to its pet company. Aides to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, believed that Data Trust was inferior to its competitor, and Mr. McConnell gave senators the option of using either.

The battle came to a head in mid-2016, when Mr. Priebus and Ms. Walsh-Shields, who had become R.N.C. chief of staff the previous year, visited the National Republican Senatorial Committee. She accused the committee of working against the interests of the party and its presumptive presidential nominee, Mr. Trump. From there, the meeting devolved into shouting, several Republicans with direct knowledge of the clash said.

While Ms. Walsh-Shields said in a statement that she did not recall the specific meeting, she added: “I have found that quite often when a woman in a position of power disagrees with a man, it is later referred to as a bad meeting.”

She said the Senate committee’s staff was “bizarrely very beholden to using i360 and the Koch brothers’ system,” while Mr. Priebus’s general position was that the party would help pay campaigns’ staff expenses only if those aides were “going to be using — and gathering — data that would help elect the president.”

In the end, some Senate Republicans continued to use the Koch data.

Money was another point of contention. Some Senate committee staff members chafed at a consulting contract given to Mr. Shields by Data Trust, given Ms. Walsh-Shields’s influence, though she had briefly left the R.N.C. in 2017 during the period when it was awarded. (Mr. Barbour said Mr. Shields “provided tremendous value.”) Data Trust also chronically needed to purchase new state voter files and pay its staff and vendors like Mr. Shields. The party has pumped nearly $15 million into the company since 2016, filings show.

Building relations with Senate Republicans became secondary after Mr. Trump secured the nomination. Ms. Walsh-Shields struck an unlikely alliance with Mr. Parscale, then the Trump campaign digital director, when the two began sharing a Trump Tower office.

Mr. Parscale, now 44, was a small-time San Antonio web entrepreneur with a gift for salesmanship. Ms. Walsh-Shields, 35, had worked her way up through the political ranks on the strength of her fund-raising abilities and knowledge of the party’s internal workings. With Mr. Kushner’s blessing and Data Trust’s information — and some help from the now-defunct, controversial data firm Cambridge Analytica — Mr. Parscale focused on targeting Facebook ads at voters.

Karl Rove, campaign manager and confidant to President George W. Bush, was an early backer of Data Trust and has been informally advising Mr. Parscale. He wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that technology had played a critical role in battleground states, adding, “Data Trust was a big reason why Donald Trump won the 2016 election.”

Building a Cash Machine

Just before the Republicans lost the House in 2018, Mr. Kushner convened a cadre of operatives at the Trump family’s Washington hotel to confront a rising threat to the president.

Republicans had watched with alarm as ActBlue helped Beto O’Rourke, a previously obscure Texas congressman, pull in more than $50 million for his improbably serious challenge to Senator Ted Cruz. Megadonors warned Mr. Kushner that, come 2020, they would not make up for the party’s small-donor deficit.

Republicans had fund-raising tools, but by coalescing around a single vendor like ActBlue, candidates could raise money jointly and more easily share data on contributors. There were several contenders. But to Mr. Kushner and Mr. Parscale, who by then was the 2020 campaign manager, only one vendor was acceptable, according to several people with knowledge of the deliberations: a company called Revv which had already been processing payments for the campaign.

Revv had been co-founded by Mr. Lansing, who was well regarded as a tech-savvy operator and for raising alarms about ActBlue for years. But in 2017, Politico reported that, after taking over as the R.N.C.’s digital director the year before, he had encouraged Republican campaigns to use Revv, earning a $909,000 payout from the company. Some party veterans viewed this as self-dealing.

By the summer of 2019, WinRed was created atop Revv’s platform, but only after negotiations that ended with the Senate campaign committee, and R.N.C. representatives, imposing restrictions that blocked Mr. Lansing from selling WinRed in the future and tightening control of firms he could hire.

Mr. Lansing, in a statement, called WinRed “the work of seven months of lawyering to ensure every major stakeholder would be happy with all data, financial and ownership arrangements.”

The new company was a joint venture between Revv and Data Trust, with 60 percent of profits going to Revv. (WinRed charges campaigns 3.8 percent, plus 30 cents per credit card transaction.) Officials involved would not detail Mr. Lansing’s remuneration. Mr. Parscale, Ms. Walsh-Shields and Mr. Shields do not own stakes, according to financial records reviewed by The New York Times.

WinRed became ascendant, and this time the Trump team and Senate Republicans joined in a pressure campaign to convert holdouts. Mr. McConnell told colleagues at a lunch in mid-2019 that his personal goal was to “shut down all the competitors,” according to one senator who was surprised at the majority leader’s directness. The party even sent a cease-and-desist letter to one of the losing contenders, Anedot, instructing it to remove G.O.P. logos from solicitations.

With or without a stake in WinRed, key aides have positioned themselves at the center of a formidable political machine. Ms. Walsh-Shields’s consulting firm receives a $25,000-a-month R.N.C. retainer and 1 to 5 percent of money it raises for the party’s 2020 convention. Mr. Shields’s firm, Convergence Media, represents clients ranging from the R.N.C. to Representative Devin Nunes of California, one of the president’s staunchest defenders against impeachment.

But it is Mr. Parscale who has most often been the focus of Mr. Trump’s complaints that those around him are making too much money from his name and brand. Mr. Parscale has not always discouraged suspicions. A few weeks before the 2016 election, the campaign staff gathered at the Whiskey Trader, a watering hole near Trump Tower, to play beer pong and brace for near-certain defeat. In walked Mr. Parscale, returning from dinner with a new campaign hire.

“I’m making so much money!” Mr. Parscale declared, inserting an expletive, according to two people who were present.

Mr. Parscale, in a statement, called their account “untrue and ridiculous,” but since his appointment as campaign manager, he has bought a $2.4 million canalside home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; two condos, owned with his family, together worth $2 million; and a Ferrari. A campaign official attributed the spending to Mr. Parscale’s relocation and divestment from businesses in Texas.

But after a rival aide left an underlined copy of a Daily Mail story detailing his spending on the president’s desk, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Parscale for a pointed lecture, according to a senior White House official.

Others in his circle have made purchases of their own. Mr. Lansing bought a $1.7 million home in Washington last year, while Ms. Walsh-Shields and Mr. Shields bought a $2 million beach house in the Florida panhandle. Asked about the house, Ms. Walsh-Shields referred a reporter to her mother, who said the down payment and mortgage payments had come mostly from her. Mr. Shields had also recently sold the house he owned before their marriage.

That Ms. Walsh-Shields has endured is noteworthy. While Vice President Mike Pence said, in a statement, that “we are grateful for her hard work, loyalty and professionalism,” Mr. Trump has privately referred to her as a ‘leaker,’ blaming her for unflattering media coverage during her brief tenure as White House deputy chief of staff in 2017. He has pressed Ronna McDaniel, the party chairwoman, about Ms. Walsh-Shields’s role in recent days. And during a meeting last summer, after prodding by his longtime security consultant, Keith Schiller, the president asked if Ms. McDaniel trusted her, according to people with knowledge of the exchanges. “I do,” Ms. McDaniel replied. “She works for me.”

‘We Have the Upper Hand’

Start-ups have proliferated around the Trump campaign.

A company called Excelsior Strategies, run by employees at Mr. Shields’s firm, Convergence, was contracted to rent Mr. Trump’s crown jewel, his list of some 20 million donors; Mr. Shields said that only the campaign profited from the arrangement. And Opn Sesame, a start-up run by Gary Coby, a Parscale protégé, is being paid $200,000 to $300,000 a month through the R.N.C., according to campaign filings.

When the Trump campaign’s digital operation recently moved to its own floor at the campaign’s Northern Virginia headquarters, much of it was being run by Mr. Coby, who recently merged his operations with the R.N.C.’s data team. Opn Sesame’s specialty is texting voters, a burgeoning and lightly regulated field that is expected to be a factor in the 2020 campaign.

To allay Mr. Trump’s concerns, tens of millions of dollars worth of campaign advertising that once ran through Parscale Strategy has been redirected to a new company, American Made Media, which is run by a Parscale lieutenant. There are no public records detailing the company’s financial structure; Mr. Parscale and other advisers said they did not profit from it. Mr. Parscale has declined to provide detailed accounting of his network of interlocking businesses, and has told associates he follows Mr. Trump’s directive, relayed through Ms. McDaniel, that he make no more than $700,000 or $800,000 for his campaign work.

Even to insiders, the campaign’s activities can seem opaque.

Last fall, Mr. Pence’s office scheduled his first visit to the headquarters, to get a firsthand look. But when the day came, Mr. Parscale canceled, even though the visit was already on the vice president’s official schedule. Mr. Parscale, who spends much of his time working from his Florida home — though he recently said he would relocate to Washington — told Mr. Pence’s office that the campaign’s landlord had vetoed the idea, fearing a vice-presidential visit would disrupt other tenants. Mr. Pence was puzzled not to learn sooner, and the visit has not been rescheduled, two officials with knowledge of the episode said.

For the moment, such concerns are muted as the Trump campaign, the R.N.C. and other affiliated committees raised $155 million in the final three months of 2019, a 23 percent increase over the previous quarter that was buoyed by the impeachment proceedings. The digital operation overseen by Mr. Coby and Mr. Parscale has been developing a series of new products, including a news app for volunteers to dole out Trump-friendly content, republish Trump-world tweets and raffle MAGA hats. An arm of the campaign has also hired a company called Phunware, which specializes in tracking cellphone locations; a senior campaign official said the company was hired to develop an app, not track people.

The Democrats are trying to regroup, but their efforts have been scattershot. A year ago, the party installed its former chairman, Howard Dean, to create a Data Trust for the left, but the momentum around the venture has lagged.

“We’re very far behind right now,” said Mikey Dickerson, a former Obama administration official who is chief technology officer at Alloy, a nonprofit tech venture on the left. “They got motivated by the stories from the 2008 and 2012 campaigns saying that the Democrats had an insurmountable advantage,” he said, adding that it “caused our side to be complacent.”

Most Republican officeholders have succumbed to the WinRed pressure campaign. One late convert was Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who learned the power of being linked to Mr. Trump’s money machine when WinRed unexpectedly sent out a joint fund-raising appeal that brought in a “six-figure sum in a single day, which is huge in a down-ballot race,” said Tim Cameron, a Tillis adviser and former digital director at the Republican senatorial committee.

Without Mr. Trump’s victory, “there’d be nothing at the scale of WinRed,” he said. “All of a sudden, it’s one election, and we have the upper hand. . . .

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/us/trump-campaign-brad-parscale.html
Copyright 2020 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The New York Times content)

Impeach Disbar AG Barr Felon Perjurer "Must Resign" 2,000+ Ex-DOJ Officials

2020-02-16T13:16:00.000-06:00

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/more-than-1100-ex-justice-department-officials-call-for-barrs-resignation/2020/02/16/d9b56d10-50c0-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.htmL?

Also see: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/16/us/politics/barr-trump-justice-department.html?

UPDATED 20 February 2020

National Security

More than 1,100 ex-Justice Department officials call for Barr’s resignation

Attorney General William Barr waves after speaking at a National Sheriffs' Association conference in Washington on Feb. 10. (Susan Walsh/AP)

Devlin Barrett

16 February 2020

More than 1,100 former Justice Department employees signed a public letter Sunday urging Attorney General William P. Barr to resign over his handling of the case of President Trump’s longtime friend Roger Stone — and exhorted current department employees to report any unethical conduct.

The letter is the latest sign of a crisis of confidence inside the department. Four prosecutors quit the Stone case last week after Barr and other Justice Department leaders pushed for a softer prison recommendation for Stone, who is due to be sentenced this week.

The four prosecutors had originally recommended a prison sentence of seven to nineyears for Stone after he was convicted of lying to Congress and obstruction. The president publicly attacked that recommendation, and at Barr’s urging the Justice Department filed an updated sentencing memo suggesting Stone should receive less prison time.

Barr’s use of prosecutors to review and reinvestigate sow distrust inside Justice

Barr has said he did not talk to the president about the Stone sentence, but current and former Justice Department officials have sharply criticized the attorney general.

“Mr. Barr’s actions in doing the President’s personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words,” the Justice Department alumni wrote in the letter posted online. “Those actions, and the damage they have done to the Department of Justice’s reputation for integrity and the rule of law, require Mr. Barr to resign.”

Signatures for the letter were gathered by Protect Democracy, a group that has been critical of Barr’s handling of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian election interference and Trump.

The letter acknowledges there is little chance the signatories’ criticism will lead to Barr’s departure, adding, “because we have little expectation he will do so, it falls to the Department’s career officials to take appropriate action to uphold their oaths of office and defend nonpartisan, apolitical justice.”

The letter calls on every Justice Department employee to follow the “heroic” example of the four prosecutors who quit the Stone case “and be prepared to report future abuses to the Inspector General, the Office of Professional Responsibility, and Congress; to refuse to carry out directives that are inconsistent with their oaths of office; to withdraw from cases that involve such directives or other misconduct; and, if necessary, to resign and report publicly — in a manner consistent with professional ethics — to the American people the reasons for their resignation.”

The letter calls for similar vigilance in other government agencies, adding, “The rule of law and the survival of our Republic demand nothing less.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

In an interview Thursday with ABC News, Barr said Trump’s commentary makes it “impossible for me . . . .

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/more-than-1100-ex-justice-department-officials-call-for-barrs-resignation/2020/02/16/d9b56d10-50c0-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.html?

Also see: "Former Justice Department Lawyers Press For Barr To Step Down" by Katie Benner, The New York Times, 16 February 2020:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/16/us/politics/barr-trump-justice-department.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

CIA Torturer James E. Mitchell "Bloody Gina" Jessen Pal Testifies Guantanamo Gina Haspel CIA Code Name "Wicked Witch Of The West Without The Charm"

2020-01-22T08:52:00.000-06:00

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/us/politics/guantanamo-bay-interrogation.html?

Architect of C.I.A. Interrogation Program Testifies at Guantánamo Bay

Appearing for the first time at the military war court, James Mitchell was defiant, saying he was there for the benefit of the victims of the 9/11 attacks and their families.

Credit...Angel Valentin for The New York Times

By Carol Rosenberg

21 January 2020Updated Jan. 22, 2020, 3:30 a.m. ET

This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — On the witness stand was James E. Mitchell, a psychologist and architect of the Bush-era interrogation program that had inflicted torture on prisoners held in secret C.I.A. prisons after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Defiantly, he described how the program came about and why in his view it was necessary, growing emotional only when recounting how he came to the conclusion that it was his patriotic duty to personally implement the techniques he had devised.

Sitting yards from him in the military courtroom built specifically for their death-penalty trial were the five men accused of helping plot the attacks. All of them had been subject to the methods developed by Dr. Mitchell. Their alleged leader, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 by a team including Dr. Mitchell. They sat impassively as he testified at a pretrial hearing in their case.

It was an extraordinary moment in the slow-moving justice system set up to try foreign prisoners of the war on terror, with American lawyers for defendants who were tortured more than a decade and a half ago flipping the script to question an interrogator from the so-called black sites.

Dr. Mitchell, a former contract psychologist for the C.I.A., expressed no regrets or contrition, tearfully saying he did it for the American people at a time when President George W. Bush’s administration feared a follow-on attack by airplane or nuclear bomb to the Sept. 11 hijackings that killed 2,976 people.

“I’d get up today and do it again,” he said.

“I thought my moral duty,” he said, choking up, “to protect American lives outweighed the feelings of discomfort of terrorists who voluntarily took up arms against us. To me it just seemed like it would be dereliction of my moral responsibilities.”

He was talking about the first man he waterboarded, a Palestinian known as Abu Zubaydah. In 2002, Mr. Zubaydah was the first known C.I.A. prisoner subjected to the full range of interrogation techniques, which also included sleep deprivation and being crammed inside a coffin-size box and slammed into a wall. He has never been charged with a crime and has never been to the war court but is held at Guantánamo as an indefinite detainee.

But the five men charged as conspirators in the Sept. 11 attacks were present. It was the first time they had seen Dr. Mitchell since their transfer to Guantánamo from the black sites in 2007. Lawyers for Mr. Mohammed and another defendant, Walid bin Attash, asked the judge to clear two thick binders of materials off the witness stand that had obstructed their view of him.

None of the defendants expressed any visible emotion, although defense lawyers had a psychologist and a psychiatrist with experience treating torture survivors in court to sit with two of them.

Lawyers for Mr. Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi, called Dr. Mitchell to testify in a long-running defense effort to show the interrogation program was a Bush administration-wide effort and persuade the judge to exclude subsequent F.B.I. interrogations of the defendants at Guantánamo in 2007 from their trial. It is scheduled to get underway next January.

By law, prosecutors cannot use what the men told Dr. Mitchell and other interrogators in the C.I.A. prison as evidence in the death-penalty trial. Prosecutors consider the F.B.I. interrogations to be crucial case evidence.

Dr. Mitchell described the decision to use waterboarding and other “coercive physical pressure” as born of a climate that feared Al Qaeda was plotting a nuclear attack on the United States, or plotting to crash another plane somewhere, “and the gloves were off.” Until that point, C.I.A. and F.B.I. agents were taking turns interrogating Mr. Zubaydah, who had stopped cooperating, in a secret prison that has since been revealed to have been in Thailand.

“C.I.A. was never interested in prosecutions,” Dr. Mitchell said. “The C.I.A. was not going to let them set off another catastrophic attack in the United States. They were going to go right up to the line of what was legal, put their toes on it and lean forward.”

Dr. Mitchell opened what is expected to be two weeks of testimony by telling defense lawyers that the only reason he had come to Guantánamo was to testify in person in front of families of the Sept. 11 victims.

“You folks have been saying untrue and malicious things about me and Dr. Jessen for years,” Dr. Mitchell said, referring to John Bruce Jessen, another psychologist who worked with him to devise the interrogation system. They went on to set up a business that provided guards and interrogators to work at the secret overseas prisons set up after the 2001 attacks and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. They received $81 million for the contract.

Had Dr. Mitchell refused to come, the Air Force colonel presiding in the case could have ordered him to testify by video teleconference from Washington.

“I actually did it for the victims and families. Not you,” Dr. Mitchell said under questioning by James G. Connell III, a lawyer for Mr. al-Baluchi. About 12 relatives of victims and their companions were observing the hearing, one wearing a necktie with the Statue of Liberty on it.

They were sequestered behind a blue curtain in the spectator’s gallery of the court, hidden from the troops, journalists, legal observers and court staff also watching what is expected to be the most dramatic testimony so far since arraignment of the five men in the case in May 2012.

Dr. Mitchell, with a full snow-white beard and thinning white hair, wore a charcoal suit to court with a crisp white button-down shirt and a red tie. Mr. Mohammed was in his typical court attire: a green camouflage hunting jacket atop white flowing clothes, a black and silver scarf fashioned into a turban and black orthopedic shoes.

Dr. Mitchell adopted an aggressive approach as a witness. After a prosecutor provided him with a top secret guide to the codes the United States government had assigned to interrogators whose names cannot be used in court, he declared the list flawed. He said it gave a “false and misleading impression that these men were interrogated during their entire time in custody. And they were not.”

He said some of the code-named people identified as interrogators were actually “debriefers, targeters and analysts.”

Drs. Mitchell and Jessen were called to testify by lawyers for Mr. al-Baluchi. But all five defense teams are expected to question them about what went on in the clandestine overseas prisons, including one in Thailand that for a time was run by Gina Haspel, now the C.I.A. director. . . .

Shabab Kill 3 Injure 3 Overrun Manda Bay Kenya Airstrip Hourslong Firefight

2020-01-22T07:34:00.000-06:00

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/world/africa/shabab-kenya-terrorism.html?

Hiding in the Grass: Fear and Confusion as Fighters Overran a U.S. Airfield

The brazen Shabab assault at Manda Bay, Kenya, a sleepy seaside base near the Somali border, on Jan. 5 left three Americans dead, raising complex questions about the military’s mission in Africa.

Credit...Farah Abdi Warsameh/Associated Press

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Eric Schmitt, Charlie Savage and Helene Cooper

22 January 2020 5:00 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — Armed with rifles and explosives, about a dozen Shabab fighters destroyed an American surveillance plane as it was taking off and ignited an hourslong gunfight earlier this month on a sprawling military base in Kenya that houses United States troops. By the time the Shabab were done, portions of the airfield were burning and three Americans were dead.

Surprised by the attack, American commandos took around an hour to respond. Many of the local Kenyan forces, assigned to defend the base, hid in the grass while other American troops and support staff were corralled into tents, with little protection, to wait out the battle. It would require hours to evacuate one of the wounded to a military hospital in Djibouti, roughly 1,500 miles away.

The brazen assault at Manda Bay, a sleepy seaside base near the Somali border, on Jan. 5, was largely overshadowed by the crisis with Iran after the killing of that country’s most important general two days earlier, and is only now drawing closer scrutiny from Congress and Pentagon officials.

But the storming of an airfield used by the American military so alarmed the Pentagon that it immediately sent about 100 troops from the 101st Airborne Division to establish security at the base. Army Green Berets from Germany also were shuttled to Djibouti, the Pentagon’s major hub in Africa, in case the entire base was in danger of being taken by the Shabab, an East African terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda.

“The assault represented a serious security lapse given how much of a target the base was and its location near the border with Somalia,” said Murithi Mutiga, the International Crisis Group’s Horn of Africa project director, based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Many details of the attack remain murky, and the military’s Africa Command has released only scant particulars pending an investigation. But the deaths of the three Americans — one Army soldier and two Pentagon contractors — marked the largest number of United States military-related fatalities in Africa since four soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger in October 2017. The Kenya attack underscores the American military’s limits on the continent, where a lack of intelligence, along with Manda Bay’s reputation as a quiet and unchallenged locale, allowed a lethal attack.

The deaths also signify a grim expansion of the campaign waged by the United States against the Shabab — often confined to Somalia, but in this case spilling over into Kenya despite an escalating American air campaign in the region. Kenya is a new addition to the list of countries where Americans have been killed in combat since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, joining Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Niger, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

The attack is raising new and complex questions about the enduring American military mission on the continent, where more than 5,000 troops now serve, especially as the Pentagon weighs the potential withdrawal of hundreds of forces from West Africa to better counter threats from Russia and China. A Pentagon proposal to reduce the American military footprint in Africa drew sharp criticism last week from senior lawmakers of both parties, including Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is a close adviser to President Trump.

This article is based on interviews with a dozen American military officials or other people who have been briefed on the attack. Several spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss aspects of a security failure that is now under investigation.

Early on the morning of Jan. 5, Dustin Harrison, 47, and Bruce Triplett, 64, two experienced pilots and contractors with L3 Technologies, a Pentagon contractor that helps conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions around the world, were taxiing their Beechcraft King Air 350 on Manda Bay’s tarmac. They throttled down their engines, according to one person familiar with the attack. The two men reported that they saw animals darting across the runway.

They were wrong. The animals were in fact Shabab fighters, who had infiltrated the base’s outer perimeter — a poorly defended fence line — before heading to the base’s airstrip. As the twin-propeller Beechcraft, loaded with sensors and video equipment for surveillance, began to taxi, the Shabab fighters fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the plane, killing Mr. Harrison and Mr. Triplett. With the plane on fire, a third contractor, badly burned in the rear of the aircraft, crawled out to safety.

The Shabab fighters were not done. In the ensuing chaos, they made quick work of a significant portion of the American fleet of aircraft — a mix of six surveillance aircraft and medical evacuation helicopters on the ground at the time. The Shabab fighters also destroyed a fuel storage area, rendering the airfield next to useless. The attack most likely cost the Pentagon millions of dollars in damages.

Specialist Henry Mayfield Jr., 23, of the Army was in a nearby truck acting as an air traffic controller when he was killed in the gunfight, according to a person familiar with the incident. His colleague inside the truck, another American, escaped and hid in the grass to avoid the insurgents. He was found hours later.

Manda Bay is at the southern edge of an archipelago of American outposts used in the fight against the Shabab in East Africa. It took about eight hours to fly the burned contractor to Djibouti for hospital-level care, according to the person familiar with the attack, underscoring a recurring vulnerability for American personnel spread across the continent. Two American service members were also wounded in the attack.

While parts of the airfield burned and some Americans who were there returned fire, roughly a dozen members of a Marine Special Operations team from Third Marine Raider Battalion based at Camp Lejeune, N.C., led the American counterattack, alongside several of the Kenyan Rangers they had been training and accompanying during their deployment. But since the team was at Camp Simba, an American enclave roughly a mile from the airfield, the insurgents had ample time to disperse.

At the center of the hourslong gun battle is the risky dependence of American forces on their local counterparts, especially when it comes to base security. The battle bore striking similarity to an attack in Afghanistan in March 2019 when Taliban fighters managed to slip onto a sprawling base in southern Helmand Province with help from Afghan troops, and quickly threatened a small American Marine base inside the perimeter of the larger Afghan facility.

At Manda Bay, where American forces have a smaller presence, the troops rely largely on the Kenyans to protect the airfield. “Those forces are typically not as capable as U.S. forces, and are easier for terrorist groups to infiltrate,” said Representative Michael Waltz, a Florida Republican who served in Africa while an Army Green Beret.

The performance of the Kenyan security forces during and after the battle frustrated American officials. At one point, the Kenyans announced that they had captured six of the attackers, but they all turned out to be bystanders and were released.

There are about 200 American soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines, as well as about 100 Pentagon civilian employees and contractors, in Kenya helping train and assist local forces. A large majority of them work at Manda Bay, according to military officials. But there were not enough Americans to stand perimeter security on the airfield, one Defense Department official said.

American forces have used Manda Bay for years. Special Operations units — including Green Berets, Navy SEALs and more recently, Marine commandos — have helped train and advise Kenyan Rangers there.

The Kenyan Rangers, alongside their American commando counterparts, often operate in the border region pursuing Shabab fighters. Surveillance aircraft, flying from the airstrip at Manda Bay, watch the border between Somalia and Kenya, a region of unforgiving terrain that has hindered ground operations. In recent months, the border missions against the Shabab have dwindled, and military officials have sought to end the American Special Operations presence at Manda Bay.

Why the base was not better protected is unclear. Surveillance aircraft, much like those destroyed in the attack, are valuable assets, especially in Africa, where extremist groups seek to exploit the vast expanses and porous borders to avoid detection. Even to shuttle a single aircraft from one part of the continent to another often requires approval from a four-star general, and losing a surveillance aircraft, one Defense Department official said, means the loss of hundreds of hours of reconnaissance flights until it is replaced.

The Shabab have typically avoided American outposts and the technological superiority of the American military, instead attacking more exposed Kenyan and Somali troops in the hinterlands.

But that may be changing. On Sept. 30, a suicide bomber detonated a car packed with explosives at the gate of a military airfield in Bale Dogle, Somalia, injuring one American service member.

On Nov. 5, the Shabab released a 52-minute video narrated by the group’s leader, Abu Ubaidah, in which he called for attacks against Americans wherever they are, saying the American public is a legitimate target.

“The recent threats and attacks are likely in part a reaction to the U.S. air campaign against the group,” said Tricia Bacon, a Somali specialist at American University in Washington and a former State Department counterterrorism analyst.

The Pentagon carried out 63 drone strikes in Somalia last year — almost all against Shabab militants, with a few against a branch of the Islamic State. That compares with 47 strikes against the Shabab in 2018. There have already been three strikes in Somalia this year. The air campaign has been shrouded in secrecy, and an investigation by Amnesty International last year reported on evidence that these airstrikes had killed or wounded more than two dozen civilians since 2017.

Since March 2017, the Shabab have launched close to 900 attacks on civilians and hundreds more against United States, Somali and Kenyan troops, the Soufan Center, a research organization for global security issues in New York, said in an analysis last week. An Army Special Forces soldier, Staff Sgt. Alex Conrad, died from wounds he received during a firefight with Shabab fighters in June 2018 in Somalia.

The attack in Kenya came about a week after an explosives-laden truck blew up at a busy intersection in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, killing 82 people. The Shabab also claimed responsibility for that attack.

The group’s strength has ebbed and flowed over the past 15 years, weathering a string of territorial losses, defections and the killing of several high-profile leaders. Even so, the Shabab has proved remarkably resilient, even in the face of an intensified campaign of United States airstrikes against its fighters and facilities, the Soufan analysis said.

It remains unclear how the Shabab fighters made their way onto the Manda Bay base, whether by surprise or a vehicle packed with explosives. According to one American official, the group likely had patiently watched the base and had selected their attack based on the Americans’ well-established patterns. Investigators are looking at the possibility the attackers had help from Kenyan staff on the base, said one person briefed on the inquiry.

American officials said five Shabab fighters were killed. Several others fled, most likely slipping back across the border into Somalia, the officials said.

“This was designed for propaganda, to show they could strike American bases,” said Matt Bryden, the director of Sahan Research, a Nairobi-based think tank. “Their capability to strike in East Africa is . . . .

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/world/africa/shabab-kenya-terrorism.html?

Copyright 2020 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The New York Times content)

"Trump Attracts The Worst Grifters And Scumbags" Rick Wilson Starts Tirade

2020-01-21T02:48:00.000-06:00

o https://www.msnbc.com/11th-hour/watch/rick-wilson-trump-attracts-the-worst-grifters-and-scumbags-
77170245796? Video 2:54

o https://www.msnbc.com/11th-hour/watch/rick-wilson-trump-attracts-the-worst-grifters-and-scumbags-77170245796? Video 2:54

11TH HOUR

Rick Wilson: Trump attracts the worst grifters and scumbags

o https://www.msnbc.com/11th-hour/watch/rick-wilson-trump-attracts-the-worst-grifters-and-scumbags-
77170245796? Video 2:54

Copyright 2020 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim MSNBC Brian Williams "11th Hour" Show)

Russia Syria Bomb Hospitals Schools And Civilians Violating International Law

2020-01-20T18:24:00.000-06:00

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/31/world/middleeast/syria-united-nations-investigation.html?

The bombs smashed into a child care center, a refugee camp and a school. They destroyed makeshift clinics and hospitals, disabling essential services for tens of thousands of people.

Over the past year, attacks on buildings in northwestern Syria, which are supposed to be off limits during wartime under international law, grew so frequent that the head of the United Nations launched an inquiry to document the violations.

Secretary General António Guterres's establishment of the investigation is seen by many diplomats as a success at a United Nations largely stymied by division in the powerful Security Council. Russia, a Syrian government ally and a major perpetrator of these attacks, has cast 14 vetoes in the Security Council since the start of the war in Syria, blocking accountability efforts and hindering humanitarian aid deliveries into Syria.

Since April, at least 60 health facilities in northwestern Syria have been damaged in strikes, and at least 29 of them were on the off limits list. But the United Nations, at least so far, is looking at just seven incidents. A United Nations spokesman would not say how the inquiry’s sites were determined.

Human rights and medical groups that support hospitals in Syria have criticized the inquiry as insufficient, saying it fails to match the gravity of the violations. The inquiry, for example, is looking at only one attack likely to have been carried out by Russia, despite previous investigations by The New York Times that found Russia bombed hospitals at least five times in May and November.

Seven incidents on the United Nations list investigated by The Times.Satellite image by Landsat and Copernicus, via Google Earth

Diplomats also told The Times that Russia had pressed Secretary General Guterres to keep the findings of the inquiry secret. A United Nations spokesman, Farhan Haq, said the U.N. was still considering whether the report, or parts of it, would be made public. In addition, Mr. Haq said the inquiry was meant to be a fact-finding mission, not a criminal investigation to determine responsibility.

The Times obtained the list of attacks under examination from four officials briefed on the inquiry, and investigated those incidents in an attempt to determine culpability. Our reporting suggests that the Syrian military was most likely responsible for at least four of the attacks, the Russian Air Force for one and rebel groups for one or two.

To reconstruct individual attacks, The Times relied on witness statements, forensic analysis of photos and videos, weapons identification, satellite imagery and cockpit recordings of Syrian and Russian pilots during bombing missions.

We correlated this information with thousands of flight logs recorded by Syrian ground observers, who listen in on radio transmissions, track the flight paths of warplanes and identify aircraft by sight and sound.

Several of the attacks happened in late April and early May, when the Syrian government and its Russian allies began a major offensive to retake the last insurgent-held parts of Syria, in Hama and Idlib, provinces in the country’s northwest.

Satellite image by Maxar Technologies, via Google Earth

Ariha Child Protection Center

DATE July 27 and 28, 2019

SUSPECT Syrian Air Force

The child center was put out of service during a weekend of airstrikes most likely carried out by the Syrian Air Force.

The center provided health and recreation services for the children of Ariha, Idlib’s second-largest city.

“It was a safe space for children to go back to their childhood and move away from weapons and what they see in the streets,” said Baraa al-Smoudi, executive director of Ihsan Relief and Development, an organization that supported the center.

In September 2018, the center’s coordinates were entered onto the United Nations list of facilities meant to be off limits. But less than a year later, airstrikes on consecutive days damaged the center beyond repair, and killed over a dozen civilians, including several children, who were nearby.

WHERE

The center was nestled between apartments in a busy high-rise residential area in central Ariha. Several apartment buildings were also severely damaged in the airstrikes.

WHEN

Witnesses began reporting airstrikes at 11:22 a.m. on Saturday, July 27.

The strikes hit two apartment blocks just 50 yards from the Child Protection Center’s entrance. The force of the blast blew in the center’s doors and windows, Mr. al-Smoudi said.

Videos verified by The Times show the gruesome aftermath of that July 27 attack.

Airstrikes destroyed apartment buildings just 50 yards from the children’s center on July 27.Ariha Today, Hadi Alabdallah, @shamalmjd1, via Twitter, Maxar Technologies, via TerraServer.

Warplanes returned almost exactly 24 hours later, at 11:18 a.m. on July 28. This time, pilots bombed the street in front of the center and a building adjacent to it.

The center was relocated after airstrikes hit it and buildings adjacent to it on July 28.

WHO

Our timeline of evidence and an analysis of the damage suggest the strikes were likely carried out by the Syrian Air Force.

At 11:14 a.m., minutes before the airstrikes, flight spotters log a MiG-23 fighter jet, which only the Syrians fly, circling Ariha.

LOCATION	PROVINCE	AIRCRAFT TYPE	AIRCRAFT CATEGORY	HEADING	LOCAL TIME
Jabal Akrad	Lattakia	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	Circling	11:12:05 a.m.
Jabal Al-Zawye	Idlib	Other Fixed-Wing	Fixed Wing	North West	11:12:13 a.m.
Mha.m.bal	Idlib	Other Fixed-Wing	Fixed Wing	Circling	11:13:04 a.m.
Ariha	Idlib	MiG-23 (Flogger)	Fixed Wing	Circling	11:14:30 a.m.
Ha.m.a Military Airbase	Ha.m.a	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	North	11:15:15 a.m.
Jabal Akrad	Lattakia	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	Circling	11:15:58 a.m.
Approximate time of the Ariha apartment block strike: 11:22 a.m.
Tal Tuqan	Idlib	Drone	Drone	Circling	11:25:36 a.m.
Jabal Al-Zawye	Idlib	Drone	Drone	Circling	11:31:04 a.m.
Zmar	Aleppo	Russian	Fixed Wing	South East	11:34:05 a.m.

The airstrikes happen close to 11:22 a.m. An eyewitness who describes himself as a citizen journalist posts a video reporting the continuous shelling of Ariha after that.

And at 11:29 a.m., cockpit recordings capture a Syrian pilot, codenamed Baz 4, confirming that he has finished his operation, a phrase we have heard Syrian pilots use countless times to confirm a bombing run is complete.

July 27 audio of Syrian pilots

11:29:09 a.m.

PILOT

“Wehad, Baz 4 finished.”

No other airstrikes in Idlib are reported at the time of the Ariha strikes, and Russian pilots are not conducting strikes at this time, according to audio files obtained by The Times. This suggests that the Syrian pilot was most likely responsible for the strike.

On July 28, flight observers again logged a MiG-21 fighter jet, another model that only the Syrian Air Force flies, circling Ariha and four miles away at Jabal Al-Zawye at 11:15 a.m.

LOCATION	PROVINCE	AIRCRAFT TYPE	AIRCRAFT CATEGORY	HEADING	LOCAL TIME
Khan al-Sobol	Idlib	Other Fixed-Wing	Fixed Wing	North West	11:13:59 a.m.
Jabal Akrad	Lattakia	Su-24 (Fencer)	Fixed Wing	Circling	11:14:31 a.m.
Kafr Zeita	Hama	Other Fixed-Wing	Fixed Wing	Circling	11:14:45 a.m.
Ariha	Idlib	MiG-21 (Fishbed)	Fixed Wing	Circling	11:15:27 a.m.
Jabal Al-Zawye	Idlib	MiG-21 (Fishbed)	Fixed Wing	South	11:15:46 a.m.
Jabal Akrad	Lattakia	Su-24 (Fencer)	Fixed Wing	Circling	11:15:59 a.m.
Approximate time of the Ariha street strike: 11:18 a.m.
Jisr al-Shughour	Idlib	Su-24 (Fencer)	Fixed Wing	Circling	11:18:02 a.m.
Hama Military Airbase	Hama	MiG-23 (Flogger)	Fixed Wing	North	11:18:16 a.m.
Jabal Akrad	Lattakia	Su-24 (Fencer)	Fixed Wing	Circling	11:18:49 a.m.

Airstrikes are first reported just a few minutes later at 11:18 a.m. on a local Facebook page, Ariha Today.

The Times has spoken to experts on the Russian and Syrian Air forces, former Soviet and Syrian pilots, and conflict analysts. The pattern of airstrikes on both days — when weapons are dropped and hit several locations at once — is typical of Syrian attacks. An incident report by the conflict monitoring group Airwars also listed the Air Force as suspects.

Children were among at least 11 people killed and 25 people injured on July 27, according to Ariha Today. At least four people were killed in the July 28 strikes.

Satellite image by Maxar Technologies, via Google Earth

Kafr Nabl Surgical Hospital

DATE July 4, 2019

SUSPECT Syrian Air Force

The surgical hospital was disabled by airstrikes highly likely to have been carried out by the Syrian Air Force.

Kafr Nabl Surgical was a well-known hospital that provided services to around 14,000 patients per month, according to Physicians for Human Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group that has investigated attacks on health care.

Repeated attacks on the hospital throughout the Syrian conflict forced administrators to move it underground. After attacks rendered it unusable in early 2019, it was restored in March with support from the World Health Organization and the Japanese government.

Officials say the U.N. is investigating only the July 4 incident, but other attacks on the hospital in 2019, including Russian attacks in May and November, have wrought greater damage, including death and injury to patients and workers.

WHERE

Kafr Nabl Surgical Hospital is located in opposition-controlled Idlib Province. On the day of the attack, the front lines were over 15 miles south of the town.

Since 2016, the hospital has been run by the U.K.-based charity Hand in Hand for Aid and Development, which suspended services after the July 4 attack.

WHEN

The hospital came under fire at 2:52 p.m. and 3:40 p.m. local time on July 4, according to the British charity.

Local activists said that the town of Kafr Nabl suffered its heaviest bombardment that day since late April, when the Syrian military and its allies launched a campaign to retake northwestern Syria.

WHO

Flight logs, cockpit tapes and visual evidence provided to The Times tie the airstrikes to the Syrian Air Force.

Kafr Nabl Surgical was first attacked at around 2:52 p.m. with three barrel bombs that rocked the hospital in quick succession, according to the British charity. Barrel bombs are crude unguided bombs that are dropped out of a helicopter. They have been used extensively by the Air Force.

Around that time, flight spotters recorded an Mi-8 helicopter circling above Kafr Nabl at 2:43 p.m., 2:47 p.m. and 2:57 p.m.

LOCATION	PROVINCE	AIRCRAFT TYPE	AIRCRAFT CATEGORY	HEADING	LOCAL TIME
Ma'ret Hurma	Idlib	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	Circling	2:39:35 p.m.
Ma'ret Hurma	Idlib	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	Circling	2:40:14 p.m.
Ma'ret Hurma	Idlib	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	North	2:40:25 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	Circling	2:43:33 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	Circling	2:43:40 p.m.
Khan Sheikhun	Idlib	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	Circling	2:44:09 p.m.
Jabal Al-Zawye	Idlib	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	North	2:44:56 p.m.
Ma'rrat al-Nu'man	Idlib	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	North West	2:45:39 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	Circling	2:47:12 p.m.
Ma'rrat al-Nu'man	Idlib	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	West	2:48:33 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	Circling	2:49:07 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	South	2:50:25 p.m.
Ma'rrat al-Nu'man	Idlib	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	North West	2:51:05 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	Circling	2:51:19 p.m.
Approximate time of first airstrike (helicopters): 2:52 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	South	2:57:46 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	Circling	2:57:56 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	Circling	3:03:02 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	Drone	Drone	Circling	3:10:53 p.m.

Yaser Kaddour, the hospital’s administrator, filmed it being rocked by one of the barrel bombs. He said it was the third explosion.

Hand in Hand for Aid and Development

The audio recordings capture a Syrian pilot confirming an attack at this time. At 2:51 p.m. — seconds before the barrel bomb reportedly exploded — a crew member is heard saying “I executed one.”

Cockpit recording of a Syrian pilot

2:51:34 p.m.

PILOT

“I executed one.”

Mr. Kaddour was lucky to survive. He went to the hospital’s entrance to document the attack, and filmed the remains of an apparent barrel bomb. In the video, an airplane is suddenly heard overhead. Then, another airstrike.

Hand in Hand for Aid and Development

The time of this next strike — at 3:40 p.m., according to the British charity — is corroborated by local news media reports just two minutes later of “renewed raids” on Kafr Nabl by MiG-23 warplanes. These planes are flown only by the Syrian Air Force.

“Renewed raids of MiG-23 warplanes with four vacuum rockets at once on the city of #Kafranbel.”kafranbelnews, via Telegram

Flight observations from plane spotters show that a MiG-23 was seen circling over Kafr Nabl at 3:39 p.m. and 3:41 p.m. — one minute before and after the attack.

LOCATION	PROVINCE	AIRCRAFT TYPE	AIRCRAFT CATEGORY	HEADING	LOCAL TIME
Ma'rrat al-Nu'man	Idlib	MiG-23 (Flogger)	Fixed Wing	North West	3:37:12 p.m.
Ma'rrat al-Nu'man	Idlib	MiG-23 (Flogger)	Fixed Wing	North West	3:38:02 p.m.
Ma'rrat al-Nu'man	Idlib	MiG-23 (Flogger)	Fixed Wing	West	3:38:21 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	MiG-23 (Flogger)	Fixed Wing	Circling	3:39:27 p.m.
Approximate time of second airstrike (air-to-surface): 3:40 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	MiG-23 (Flogger)	Fixed Wing	South	3:41:15 p.m.
Hama Military Airbase	Hama	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	North	3:41:21 p.m.
T4 West Airbase	Homs	Su-22 (Fitter)	Fixed Wing	North West	3:47:46 p.m.
Shayrat Airbase	Homs	Su-22 (Fitter)	Fixed Wing	North	3:49:14 p.m.

Following the July 4 bombings, the Hand in Hand charity expressed concern that the United Nations’ system of sharing coordinates of protected facilities with warring parties was not preventing attacks and had become “inept.” Four months later, Kafr Nabl Surgical Hospital was bombed again, this time by a Russian pilot, a Times investigation found.

Satellite image by Maxar Technologies, via Google Earth

Martyr Akram Ali Ibrahim Al-Ahmad School

DATE April 28, 2019

SUSPECT Russian Air Force

The Russian Air Force was bombing the town, and most likely carried out the attack.

The secondary school was located in the town of Qalaat al-Madiq. A maternity and children’s hospital built inside the school compound served around 8,000 people each month, said Ibrahim Shamali, the media officer for the Hama Health Directorate.

Staff members evacuated most of the hospital on April 26, when Russian and Syrian forces began an offensive to wrest control of the town from opposition armed groups.

On April 28, Russian airstrikes on Qalaat al-Madiq forced both the hospital and school to be abandoned. Attacks on the town killed five civilians and wounded seven, according to the Hama Media Office.

Eleven days later, Syrian government forces took the town.

WHERE

Qalaat al-Madiq sat on a front line in Hama province dividing armed opposition groups from President Bashar al-Assad’s military for more than a year before government forces took the town on May 9. It had been the target of Russan and Syrian government attacks on numerous occasions, and there were multiple reports of shelling and airstrikes throughout April and early May.

Both the hospital and secondary school were located at the northern end of the town, alongside two primary schools. An opposition-run education office was located across the street.

Satellite image by Maxar Technologies, via TerraServer

WHEN

The airstrike on the school and hospital compound occurred sometime between 1:00 a.m. and 1:30 a.m, according to Mr. Shamali and the international charity that supported the hospital. The Syrian Network for Human Rights said that the first projectile landed on or near the education offices and the second in the street between them.

A video filmed by a witness around 7:30 a.m., and verified by The Times, showed heavy damage to both the education offices and the hospital.

This clip from a video filmed inside Hospital 111 shows extensive damage to the facility. It was abandoned after the April 28 attack.

Photos provided by the network also confirmed heavy damage to both.

The local education office, located about 130 feet north of the school and hospital, was also heavily damaged by the April 28 airstrike. Syrian Network for Human Rights

At 12:07 a.m., local news outlets began reporting Russian airstrikes on the town. Over the next 19 minutes, Wisam al-Hamwi, a reporter, would tweet about three strikes, at 12:07 a.m., 12:15 a.m. and 12:26 a.m.

“Russian warplanes launch an air raid in the city of Qalaat al-Madiq in the western Hama countryside.”@wseemalkade, via Twitter

At 1:11 a.m., a local news agency reported a fourth Russian airstrike, and at 1:31 a.m., an Amman-based member of a Syrian activist network tweeted about a fifth airstrike.

“Urgent: Russian occupation warplanes target Qalaat al-Madiq with a fourth raid with high-explosive missiles and are still circling.”Gaftleknews, via Telegram

“Hama countryside
Russian warplanes strike Qalaat al-Madiq
Five air raids on the city until now
God protect them”@yaseenalbakhi, via Twitter

WHO

Witnesses reported five airstrikes in the two hours after midnight. Flight logs and audio recordings made clear that a Russian pilot was bombing Qalaat al-Madiq at that time. Experts on the capabilities of the Russian and Syrian air forces have also told The Times that only Russian planes typically carry out night strikes.

Syrian ground observers recorded Russian warplanes above Qalaat al-Madiq at 12:09 a.m., 12:14 a.m. and 12:33 a.m., matching the times that Mr. Al-Hamwi reported the first three strikes.

LOCATION	PROVINCE	AIRCRAFT TYPE	AIRCRAFT CATEGORY	HEADING	LOCAL TIME
Ma'ret Hurma	Idlib	Drone	Drone	Circling	11:45:36 p.m.
Jabal Shahshabo	Idlib	Drone	Drone	Circling	11:54:36 p.m.
Jabal Shahshabo	Idlib	Russian	Fixed Wing	North East	12:06:23 a.m.
Strikes begin on Qalaat al-Madiq: 12:07 a.m.
Madiq Castle	Hama	Russian	Fixed Wing	Circling	12:09:42 a.m.
Madiq Castle	Hama	Russian	Fixed Wing	Circling	12:14:51 a.m.
Hmemim Airbase	Lattakia	Russian	Fixed Wing	South East	12:22:56 a.m.
Madiq Castle	Hama	Russian	Fixed Wing	Circling	12:33:09 a.m.
Jabal Shahshabo	Idlib	Russian	Fixed Wing	East	12:36:26 a.m.
Tah	Idlib	Drone	Drone	Circling	12:36:54 a.m.
Zmar	Aleppo	Ilyushin 76	Fixed Wing	South West	12:38:34 a.m.

The fourth and fifth airstrike reports — those most likely to be the attacks on the school and hospital compound — also matched observations of Russian warplanes over Qalaat al-Madiq at 1:11 a.m. and 1:24 a.m.

LOCATION	PROVINCE	AIRCRAFT TYPE	AIRCRAFT CATEGORY	HEADING	LOCAL TIME
Zmar	Aleppo	Ilyushin 76	Fixed Wing	South West	12:38:34 a.m.
Tal Tuqan	Idlib	Russian	Fixed Wing	Circling	1:08:48 a.m.
Zmar	Aleppo	Russian	Fixed Wing	North West	1:08:51 a.m.
Possible first strike on Hospital 111 and school area: 1:11 a.m.
Zmar	Aleppo	Russian	Fixed Wing	Circling	1:11:30 a.m.
Madiq Castle	Hama	Russian	Fixed Wing	Circling	1:11:57 a.m.
Zmar	Aleppo	Russian	Fixed Wing	Circling	1:15:34 a.m.
Tal Tuqan	Idlib	Russian	Fixed Wing	North	1:17:52 a.m.
Zmar	Aleppo	Russian	Fixed Wing	Circling	1:23:13 a.m.
Madiq Castle	Hama	Russian	Fixed Wing	Circling	1:24:03 a.m.
Tal Tuqan	Idlib	Russian	Fixed Wing	South West	1:27:15 a.m.
Jarjnaz	Idlib	Russian	Fixed Wing	South West	1:28:03 a.m.
Jabal Shahshabo	Idlib	Drone	Drone	Circling	1:28:22 a.m.
Jabal Shahshabo	Idlib	Russian	Fixed Wing	South West	1:28:38 a.m.
Ma'rrat al-Nu'man	Idlib	Russian	Fixed Wing	South West	1:28:39 a.m.
Possible second strike on Hospital 111 and school area: 1:31 a.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	Russian	Fixed Wing	South East	1:33:12 a.m.
Ma'rrat al-Nu'man	Idlib	Russian	Fixed Wing	North East	1:34:14 a.m.
Ma'ret Hurma	Idlib	Russian	Fixed Wing	West	1:38:49 a.m.

Cockpit recordings indicate Russian responsibility for the strikes. We know that Russian Pilot 44 was active over Qalaat al-Madiq at that time because he had received latitude and longitude coordinates that point to this location in the town.

Russian Pilot 44 receives coordinates

12:21:10 a.m.

CONTROL

“944 one more coordinates adjustment.”

PILOT 44

“I am seeing a big difference in minutes.”

12:21:46 a.m.

CONTROL

“35 25 18,46 … [36] 23 23,79 Level 211.”

At 11:54 p.m, Pilot 44 tells his dispatcher that “it will start raining” soon. It appears unlikely this was a reference to the weather — which was dry.

Pilot 44 prepares attack

11:54:47 p.m.

PILOT

“It will start raining, five minutes.”

Over the next half an hour, Pilot 44 launches three weapons at the same time that Mr. al-Hamwi, the journalist, and other local sources report airstrikes. Russian pilots follow a consistent pattern: they calculate the minute they will strike, and then confirm to ground control that a weapon has been launched.

At 11:56 p.m., Pilot 44 calculates a strike for the “fifth minute,” meaning 12:05 a.m. At that time, he says “sent,” a term Russian pilots use to confirm the release of a weapon.

Pilot 44 confirms the first strike is launched at 12:04 a.m.

11:56:36 p.m.

PILOT

“5th minute.”

12:04:04 a.m.

PILOT

“Sent.”

At 12:13 a.m., the pilot launches his second airstrike, just before the journalist Mr. al-Hamwi tweets about a second attack.

Pilot 44 confirms second strike at 12:13 a.m.

12:08:05 a.m.

PILOT

“14th minute.”

12:13:07 a.m.

PILOT

“4 sent.”

And a third strike at 12:20 a.m, just five minutes before Mr. al-Hamwi reports a third attack from the ground.

Pilot 44 confirms third strike at 12:20 a.m.

12:15:16 a.m.

CONTROL

“44 repeat.”

PILOT

“21st minute.”

12:20:02 a.m.

CONTROL

“21st minute. Working with one stamp.”

After this time, there are no Russian cockpit recordings that correspond to the times of 1:11 a.m. and 1:31 a.m. — the strikes most likely to have damaged the hospital, school and education offices.

Gaps in the cockpit tapes are not unusual. The Times has translated and decoded months of Russian pilot recordings. We have heard pilots switching to different radio frequencies, and sometimes the audio recordings fail because of technical difficulties.

Because we know Russian Pilot 44 was bombing Qalaat al-Madiq less than an hour before the school strike, however, and flight logs show only Russian warplane activity above the town near the time of the attack, the Russian Air Force is the most likely culprit.

Satellite image by Maxar Technologies, via Google Earth

Rakaya Primary Health Care Center

DATE May 3, 2019

SUSPECT Syrian Air Force

Reports from a charity, local news media activists and flight logs suggest that a Syrian helicopter attack damaged the facility.

The health center provided free pediatric and gynecology services to people from Rakaya Sijneh and nearby villages in Idlib Province. Each month, it served nearly 2,000 people, according to Syria Relief and Development, the United States-based charity that supported it.

No injuries or casualties were reported in the attack, because operations had been suspended a few days earlier “due to the significant increase of aerial bombardment” in the area, the charity told The Times in an email.

WHERE

The health facility is located in the center of Rakaya Sijneh, a village in the southern countryside of Idlib. On May 3, the town was under the control of armed opposition groups and the nearest front line was around seven miles away.

Rakaya Primary Health Center is located in the center of the village, as seen in this undated photo.Rakaya Village, via Facebook

WHEN

The American charity said that the center was damaged at noon by a barrel bomb that exploded around 50 feet away.

Few other reports corroborate the time. But Orient News, a Dubai-based pro-opposition channel, tweeted at 4:02 p.m . local time that the facility had been bombed.

“#Urgent | The health center in Rakaya village south of Idlib was put out of service due to bombing #Syria #Orient”@OrientNews, via Twitter

Photos published by a British-based monitoring group and verified by The Times confirm that damage was caused inside and outside of the health center. And satellite imagery analysis confirmed that the external damage was caused between late April and May 4, around the time of the attack.

A suspected barrel bomb attack damaged Rakaya Primary Health Center on May 3, 2019.Syrian Network for Human Rights

The Times verified this photo of damage to the health center’s exterior.Syrian Network for Human Rights

WHO

The attack on the health center happened in early May, when Rakaya was under near daily bombardment by Russian and Syrian forces.

Syria Relief and Development, the American charity, as well as the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations and the Syrian Network for Human Rights all reported that Syrian helicopters had dropped at least one barrel bomb near the health center.

At 11:50 a.m., around 10 minutes before the strike was reported, flight spotters recorded a Syrian Mi-8 helicopter, a type commonly used to drop barrel bombs, above the nearby town of Maarat Hurma. It was headed southeast — in the direction of Rakaya, which is around 3.5 miles southeast of Maarat Hurma.

LOCATION	PROVINCE	AIRCRAFT TYPE	AIRCRAFT CATEGORY	HEADING	LOCAL TIME
Jabal Al-Zawye	Idlib	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	Circling	11:46:57 p.m.
Kafranbel	Idlib	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	Circling	11:48:39 p.m.
Hbit	Idlib	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	North East	11:50:27 p.m.
Ma'ret Hurma	Idlib	Mi-8 (Hip)	Helicopter	South East	11:50:48 p.m.
Hbit	Idlib	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	Circling	11:51:56 p.m.
Bdama	Idlib	Drone	Drone	Circling	11:57:51 p.m.
Ma'ret Hurma	Idlib	Drone	Drone	South	11:58:17 p.m.
Approximate time of Rakaya Primary Health Care Center attack: 12:00 p.m.
Jabal Shahshabo	Idlib	Drone	Drone	North	11:01:53 p.m.
Hama Military Airbase	Hama	Yak 130 (Mitten)	Fixed Wing	North	11:03:58 p.m.
Jabal Al-Zawye	Idlib	Drone	Drone	Circling	11:06:10 p.m.

The Russian Air Force was not spotted in the area around the time of the attack, and cockpit recordings of Russian pilots did not indicate any activity at the time the strike was reported.

The absence of Russian activity combined with other evidence — including satellite imagery, flight observations and reporting by three organizations — suggests that a Syrian military helicopter was most likely behind it.

Satellite image by Maxar Technologies, via Google Earth

Nayrab Palestine Refugee Camp

DATE May 14, 2019

SUSPECT Opposition militants or pro-Syrian government forces

The camp was most likely shelled by accident. It’s unclear who was responsible.

Four children were among the 10 people killed when rockets hit the Nayrab Palestine Refugee Camp near Aleppo on May 14, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Another 30 people were injured.

The attack forced the relief agency to suspend six schools that served 3,000 children.

WHEN

Rockets hit residential buildings around 7:14 p.m., witnesses said, as families were preparing to break their Ramadan fast. The United Nations agency confirmed the time, as did a witness who live streamed the aftermath.

The Times verified these witness photos of the strikes.

A rocket strike on Nayrab Palestine Camp was photographed at dusk on May 14, 2019.. Image via Facebook/alnyrab.

The attack happened on the eve of an annual commemoration of what Palestinians call the “catastrophe,” or “nakba,” marking the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948. The Nayrab camp has existed since that time.

WHERE

The densely populated camp is home to around 18,000 people in a government-controlled area near a Syrian military airport. Opposition fighters targeted the airport with rockets a week earlier, according to the research firm I.H.S. Markit.

The Times confirmed that rockets hit two locations in the camp, but we were unable to determine what direction they had come from.

A plume of dust and smoke rises over Nayrab Palestine Camp after a rocket strike on May 14, 2019.. Image via Hawar News Agency

WHO

Analysts at I.H.S. Markit and the Carter Center, which monitors the Syrian conflict, told The Times the attack had most likely not been deliberate, because belligerents were not known to occupy the camp. Opposition forces trying to attack the Syrian airbase again may have overshot, or errant missiles may have been fired from the military base.

The Times has not yet been able to attribute blame.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights blamed opposition militants linked to Al Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, while Syria’s state news agency, SANA, blamed “unspecified insurgents.” The pro-opposition Shaam News Network reported that the rockets “had been accidentally launched by Iranian Forces at Aleppo's 80th Brigade Army base,” and not by insurgents.

Satellite image by Maxar Technologies, via Google Earth

Kafr Nabudah Primary Health Care Center and Surgical Unit

DATE May 7, 2019

SUSPECT Syrian Air Force or Army

The health facilities were destroyed when the town was pummeled for days. Syrian government forces were probably responsible.

The surgical unit was supported by the Hama Health Directorate, an opposition group that oversees health care in insurgent-held parts of Hama province. According to the World Health Organization, it performed an average of 32 surgeries and 767 outpatient consultations per month before it was attacked.

The health center was supported by the Syrian American Medical Society, a humanitarian group known as SAMS that is based in the United States.

WHERE

The health center and surgical unit were located on the northwestern end of Kafr Nabudah and served a community of around 16,000 people, according to the World Health Organization. The health center was located about 275 meters to the east of the surgical unit, down the street.

The Kafr Nabudah Primary Health Center and Surgical Unit were located on the northwestern end of the town, which was close to a front line.Satellite image by Maxar Technologies, via Google Earth

Kafr Nabudah was one of several towns located on a front line between Syrian government forces and armed insurgent groups, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the National Liberation Front.

WHEN

In late April and early May, the Syrian government and its Russian allies began a major offensive aimed at retaking territory in the last insurgent-held parts of Hama and Idlib provinces.

On May 1, predawn ground shelling by Syrian government troops damaged the surgical unit, a dispensary, and an office and ambulance dispatch center of the Syrian Civil Defense. All of the facilities were located near one another.

The shelling injured a nurse, damaged the surgical unit and dispensary, and partially destroyed the Civil Defense building, according to a report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights. A second round of shelling that day damaged a Civil Defense car and an ambulance as they tried to respond to the first attack, the network said.

Over the following days, indiscriminate shelling and bombing of Kafr Nabudah intensified as Syrian government forces advanced on the town and battled insurgent groups in surrounding villages.

Videos posted by the Syrian Army unit known as the Tiger Forces show its members participating in the assault on Kafr Nabudah in the first week of May 2019.Syrian Tiger Forces, via Facebook

At least two videos show Syrian government helicopters dropping barrel bombs on different locations within Kafr Nabudah in the days before its capture.

This video, which The Times edited for length, shows a Syrian Air Force helicopter dropping a barrel bomb on Kafr Nabudah.Salah al-Sheikh

And a review of satellite imagery shows widespread damage across Kafr Nabudah from April 29 to May 10, as Syrian government forces assaulted and captured it.

Four satellite images taken on April 29, May 2, May 7 and May 10 show how attacks by the Syrian Army and Air Force caused destruction across large swaths of Kafr Nabudah, including the approximate locations of the health facilities.Planet Labs

Because doctors, journalists, activists and people opposed to the Assad government fled Kafr Nabudah in the days before its capture on May 8, the Hama Health Directorate was not able to document the destruction of the surgical unit, the agency told The Times. Similarly, SAMS and activists were not able to document the health center’s destruction.

Given the multiday assault on Kafr Nabudah and the indiscriminate nature of the shelling, it was not possible to independently confirm the exact date the two health care facilities were hit. But it is highly likely they were destroyed between May 1 and May 8.

WHO

Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group that has documented attacks on health care facilities in Syria, provided The Times with three images and a video taken after the capture of Kafr Nabudah showing government forces raising the Syrian flag above the dispensary and the surgical unit.

After the town was captured, a Syrian Army soldier spray-painted “Kafr Nabudah Post Office” on the wall of the former Kafr Nabudah Surgical Unit.Physicians for Human Rights

In addition to the videos showing Syrian government barrel bombing of Kafr Nabudah, the government’s 25th Special Mission Forces Division, more commonly known as the Tiger Forces, posted numerous videos documenting their participation in the fight to seize Kafr Nabudah and nearby towns. The videos show the Tiger Forces and their commanders appearing to direct artillery and airstrikes on Kafr Nabudah and using rocket launchers on a nearby town.

In one video, Zein al-Abidin Darwish, a well-known, one-eyed commander in the Tiger Forces, stands in the center of the ruins of Kafr Nabudah after its capture, symbolically stepping on the ground to mark his forces’ victory and referring to the city’s former inhabitants as “sons of whores.”

Syrian Tiger Forces, via Facebook

Finally, Syrian government Mi-8 attack helicopters and Yak-130 fighter-bomber jets were spotted a total of 19 times over Kafr Nabudah on May 7 and May 8, suggesting they were also highly active in the attacks, in addition to ground forces. Ground observers also logged three Russian jets over the city between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on May 8, and two Su-24 jets, which could have been flown by Syrian or Russian pilots.

Satellite image by Maxar Technologies, via Google Earth

National Hospital in al-Suqaylabiyah

DATE May 26, 2019

SUSPECT National Liberation Front, an armed opposition group

Opposition militants who bragged about shelling the area were probably responsible for damaging a hospital.

The National Hospital provides services to the people of al-Suqaylabiyah and the surrounding countryside, according to the hospital’s director.

WHERE

For years, al-Suqaylabiyah has sat on a front line dividing Syrian government forces from opposition militants, who have repeatedly shelled the town, causing extensive damage and injuries.

The hospital was reportedly damaged when dozens of rockets hit the town on May 26, according to several news and official reports.

Basel Naser, via Google Maps

A pro-government television report showed damage to the hospital compound. The nearby Younes al-Aji School and civilian homes were featured in other reports of the shelling. The Times verified that they are within a mile of the hospital.

There are conflicting reports about whether the attack caused fatalities. Deaths were reported by the Russian Defense Ministry, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), the pro-government Syrian News Channel and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. But later reports mentioned only two injuries, including to a hospital staff member.

WHEN

The attack happened in the afternoon of May 26, the Syrian News Channel said. That is the only time estimate The Times found.

Hours later, at 11:44 p.m. local time, a pro-government news outlet tweeted that “terrorist attacks by rockets” resulted in the injury of a nurse and the destruction of the hospital’s emergency department, a claim later repeated by others.

“A nurse wounded and destruction in the emergency department, as a result of terrorist attacks by rockets on Al-Suqaylabiyah National Hospital in Hama. #hawa_alsham”@lahawaalsham, via Twitter

WHO

A coalition of opposition groups shelled al-Suqaylabiyah and other towns on May 26 during a counteroffensive to retake nearby Kafr Nabudah. The groups included Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the dominant rebel group in the area, and the Turkish-backed National Liberation Front.

A militia within the National Liberation Front claimed on May 26 that it had killed Syrian and Russian soldiers when it shelled their positions in al-Suqaylabiyah. Some news media repeated that claim, as did opposition supporters on Telegram, a popular messaging app in Syria.

The militants posted videos showing members using what appear to be 122-millimeter artillery shells and a multiple rocket launcher.

National Liberation Front, via YouTube

Weapons remains filmed in al-Suqaylabiyah (below) resemble the 122-millimeter rockets that militants claimed to use.

Alleged weapon remnants were shown on Syrian state-run TV. The remains resemble parts of rockets fired by multiple rocket launch systems.Syrian Arab News Agency, via YouTube

Even if the N.L.F. intended to attack legitimate military targets, multiple rocket systems are not precise. They target a general area, and are indiscriminate when fired at densely populated areas like al-Suqaylabiyah.

The combination of opposition-affiliated news media statements, suspected weapon remnants, witness statements and damage throughout the town suggest that rockets fired by one or more armed opposition groups caused the damage and injuries reported at the National Hospital.

It is possible, given their claims and other evidence, that the N.L.F. is responsible. The N.L.F. did not respond to a request for comment.

Broad Destruction,
Narrow Inquiry

The seven incidents selected by the United Nations comprise a small number of the widespread attacks in 2019 on facilities that are meant to be safeguarded. Medical and human rights groups worry that no one will be held accountable.

The Times’s finding that the United Nations has shared with military forces operating in Syria the precise location of at least 29 sites that have come under attack raises questions about whether the system designed to protect those sites has failed.

Russian pilots bombed four hospitals in a 12-hour period in May. And one of those same hospitals again in November. None of these attacks is among those currently being investigated by the United Nations.

Russia Bombed Four Syrian Hospitals in 12 Hours.

In interviews with The Times, leaders of relief groups that support health facilities criticized the narrow scope of the inquiry.

“We don't think that’s adequate,” said Dr. Mufaddal Hamadeh, president of the Syrian American Medical Society. “Some sites really do not represent the true story.”

One notable attack not yet being investigated, Dr. Hamadeh said, was on a major hospital in Maarat al-Numan. In November, after the inquiry was established, pro-Syrian government forces were also suspected of bombing a camp for displaced people in Qah, in the Aleppo countryside. Its location, too, was shared by the United Nations, but the attack is not currently on the inquiry’s list.

The inquiry is continuing, and investigators may yet broaden its scope.

Khaula Sawah, vice president of the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations in the United States, said that if governments and the international community did not “hold the perpetrators accountable for what they do, they will continue their work, they will escalate their actions.”

Cover images: Syrian Network for Human Rights, Maxar Technologies via TerraServer, Ariha Today.

Contributed Reporting: Masha Chaityn, John Ismay, Alexandra Koroleva, Logan Mitchell, Hwaida Saad, Haley Willis.

Graphics: David Botti and Drew Jordan.

Video Editing: Dmitriy Khavin. Translation: Abeer Pamuk. Additional Editing: Jared Miller. Executive Producer: Mark Scheffler. Thanks: Ben Hubbard and Eric Nagourney.

Produced by Malachy Browne, Gabriel Gianordoli, and Whitney Hurst.

Russia Pilots Bomb Hospitals And Civilians In Putin War Crimes Syria Strategy

2020-01-19T05:27:00.000-06:00

https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/100000006818506/russia-bombs-syria-civlians.html (Video, Audio)

‘Sent Candy’: Cockpit Tapes Show Russian Pilots Bombing Syrian Civilians

By Evan Hill, Christiaan Triebert, Dmitriy Khavin, Malachy Browne and David Botti•December 1, 2019

A Times investigation used cockpit recordings to show for the first time how

Russian pilots attacked civilians in Syria this summer, killing dozens.

"'Sent Candy': Cockpit Tapes Show Russian Pilots Bombing Syrian Civilians"by Evan Hill, Christiaan Tribert, Dmitiry Khavin, Malachy Browne and David Botti, The New York Times, 1 December 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/100000006818506/russia-bombs-syria-civlians.html (Video, Audio)

Copyright 2019-2020 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The New York Times Content)

GOP Scam II Richest Banks Corporations Rip-Off Americans $6.5+Trillion More

2020-01-16T22:54:00.000-06:00

Credit...The Heads of S

GOP Lets Super-Rich Banks Corps Rip Off Americans For More Cash $6.5 Tillion More From Trump Administration Mnuchin Treasury Pals

As the Treasury Department prepared to enact the 2017 Republican tax overhaul, corporate lobbyists swarmed — and won big.

Credit...The Heads of State

By Jesse Drucker and Jim Tankersley

30 December 2019

The overhaul of the federal tax law in 2017 was the signature legislative achievement of Donald J. Trump’s presidency.

The biggest change to the tax code in three decades, the law slashed taxes for big companies, part of an effort to coax them to invest more in the United States and to discourage them from stashing profits in overseas tax havens.

Corporate executives, major investors and the wealthiest Americans hailed the tax cuts as a once-in-a-generation boon not only to their own fortunes but also to the United States economy.

But big companies wanted more — and, not long after the bill became law in December 2017, the Trump administration began transforming the tax package into a greater windfall for the world’s largest corporations and their shareholders. The tax bills of many big companies have ended up even smaller than what was anticipated when the president signed the biconsequence is that the federal government may collect hundreds of billions of dollars less over the coming decade than previously projected. The budget deficit has jumped more than 50 percent since Mr. Trump took office and is expected to top $1 trillion in 2020, partly as a result of the tax law.

Laws like the 2017 tax cuts are carried out by federal agencies that first must formalize them via rules and regulations. The process of writing the rules, conducted largely out of public view, can determine who wins and who loses.

Starting in early 2018, senior officials in President Trump’s Treasury Department were swarmed by lobbyists seeking to insulate companies from the few parts of the tax law that would have required them to pay more. The crush of meetings was so intense that some top Treasury officials had little time to do their jobs, according to two people familiar with the process.

The lobbyists targeted a pair of major new taxes that were supposed to raise hundreds of billions of dollars from companies that had been avoiding taxes in part by claiming their profits were earned outside the United States.

The blitz was led by a cross section of the world’s largest companies, including Anheuser-Busch, Credit Suisse, General Electric, United Technologies, Barclays, Coca-Cola, Bank of America, UBS, IBM, Kraft Heinz, Kimberly-Clark, News Corporation, Chubb, ConocoPhillips, HSBC and the American International Group.

Thanks in part to the chaotic manner in which the bill was rushed through Congress — a situation that gave the Treasury Department extra latitude to interpret a law that was, by all accounts, sloppily written — the corporate lobbying campaign was a resounding success.

Image

Credit...Jon Elswick/Associated Press

Through a series of obscure regulations, the Treasury carved out exceptions to the law that mean many leading American and foreign companies will owe little or nothing in new taxes on offshore profits, according to a review of the Treasury’s rules, government lobbying records, and interviews with federal policymakers and tax experts. Companies were effectively let off the hook for tens if not hundreds of billions of taxes that they would have been required to pay.

“Treasury is gutting the new law,” said Bret Wells, a tax law professor at the University of Houston. “It is largely the top 1 percent that will disproportionately benefit — the wealthiest people in the world.”

It is the latest example of the benefits of the Republican tax package flowing disproportionately to the richest of the rich. Even a tax break that was supposed to aid poor communities — an initiative called “opportunity zones” — is being used in part to finance high-end developments in affluent neighborhoods, at times benefiting those with ties to the Trump administration.

Of course, companies didn’t get everything they wanted, and Brian Morgenstern, a Treasury spokesman, defended the department’s handling of the tax rules. “No particular taxpayer or group had any undue influence at any time in the process,” he said.

Racing for a Win

Ever since the birth of the modern federal income tax in 1913, companies have been concocting ways to avoid it.

In the late 1990s, American companies accelerated their efforts to claim that trillions of dollars of profits they earned in high-tax places like the United States, Japan or Germany were actually earned in low- or no-tax places like Luxembourg, Bermuda or Ireland.

Google, Apple, Cisco, Pfizer, Merck, Coca-Cola, Facebook and many others have deployed elaborate techniques that let the companies pay taxes at far less than the 35 percent corporate tax rate in the United States that existed before the 2017 changes. Their playful nicknames — like Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich — made them sound benign.

The Obama administration and lawmakers from both parties have tried to combat this profit shifting, but their efforts mostly stalled.

When President Trump and congressional Republicans assembled an enormous tax-cut package in 2017, they pitched it in part as a grand bargain: Companies would get the deep tax cuts that they had spent years clamoring for, but the law would also represent a long-overdue effort to fight corporate tax avoidance and the shipment of jobs overseas.

“The situation where companies are actually encouraged to move overseas and keep their profits overseas makes no sense,” Senator Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, said on the Senate floor in November 2017.

Republicans were racing to secure a legislative victory during Mr. Trump’s first year in office — a period marked by the administration’s failure to repeal Obamacare and an embarrassing procession of political blunders. Sweeping tax cuts could give Republicans a jolt of much-needed momentum heading into the 2018 midterm elections.

To speed things along, Republicans used a congressional process known as “budget reconciliation,” which blocked Democrats from filibustering and allowed Republicans to pass the bill with a simple majority. But to qualify for that parliamentary green light, the net cost of the bill — after accounting for different tax cuts and tax increases — had to be less than $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

The bill’s cuts totaled $5.5 trillion. The corporate income tax rate shrank to 21 percent from 35 percent, and companies also won a tax break on the trillions in profits brought home from offshore.

To close the gap between the $5.5 trillion in cuts and the maximum price tag of $1.5 trillion, the package sought to raise new revenue by eliminating deductions and introducing new taxes.

Shifting Money

Two of the biggest new taxes were supposed to apply to multinational corporations, and lawmakers bestowed them with easy-to-pronounce acronyms — BEAT and GILTI — that belie their complexity.

BEAT stands for the base erosion and anti-abuse tax. It was aimed largely at foreign companies with major operations in the United States, some of which had for years minimized their United States tax bills by shifting money between American subsidiaries and their foreign parent companies.

Instead of paying taxes in the United States, companies send the profits to countries with lower tax rates.

The BEAT aimed to make that less lucrative. Some payments that companies sent to their foreign affiliates would face a new 10 percent tax.

The other big measure was called GILTI: global intangible low-taxed income.

To reduce the benefit companies reaped by claiming that their profits were earned in tax havens, the law imposed an additional tax of up to 10.5 percent on some offshore earnings.

The Joint Committee on Taxation, the congressional panel that estimates the impacts of tax changes, predicted that the BEAT and GILTI would bring in $262 billion over a decade — roughly enough to fund the Treasury Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Cancer Institute for 10 years.

Sitting in the Oval Office on Dec. 22, 2017, Mr. Trump signed the tax cuts into law. It was — and remains — the president’s most significant legislative achievement.

Built-In Loopholes

From the start, the new taxes were pocked with loopholes.

In the BEAT, for example, Senate Republicans hoped to avoid a revolt by large companies. They wrote the law so that any payments an American company made to a foreign affiliate for something that went into a product — as opposed to, say, interest payments on loans — were excluded from the tax.

Let’s say an American pharmaceutical company sells pills in the United States. The pills are manufactured by a subsidiary in Ireland, and the American parent pays the Irish unit for the pills before they are sold to the public. Those payments mean that the company’s profits in the United States, where taxes are relatively high, go down; profits in tax-friendly Ireland go up.

Because such payments to Ireland wouldn’t be taxed, some companies that had been the most aggressive at shifting profits into offshore havens were spared the full brunt of the BEAT.

Other companies, like General Electric, were surprised to be hit by the new tax, thinking it applied only to foreign multinationals, according to Pat Brown, who had been G.E.’s top tax expert.

Mr. Brown, now the head of international tax policy at the accounting and consulting firm PwC, said on a podcast this year that the Trump administration should bridge the gap between expectations about the tax law and how it was playing out in reality. He lobbied the Treasury on behalf of G.E.

“The question,” he said, “is how creative and how expansive is Treasury and the I.R.S. able to be.”

An Exhaustive Lobbying Campaign

Almost immediately after Mr. Trump signed the bill, companies and their lobbyists — including G.E.’s Mr. Brown — began a full-court pressure campaign to try to shield themselves from the BEAT and GILTI.

The Treasury Department had to figure out how to carry out the hastily written law, which lacked crucial details.

Chip Harter was the Treasury official in charge of writing the rules for the BEAT and GILTI. He had spent decades at PwC and the law firm Baker McKenzie, counseling companies on the same sorts of tax-avoidance arrangements that the new law was supposed to discourage.

Starting in January 2018, he and his colleagues found themselves in nonstop meetings — roughly 10 a week at times — with lobbyists for companies and industry groups.

The Organization for International Investment — a powerful trade group for foreign multinationals like the Swiss food company Nestlé and the Dutch chemical maker LyondellBasell — objected to a Treasury proposal that would have prevented companies from using a complex currency-accounting maneuver to avoid the BEAT.

The group’s lobbyists were from PwC and Baker McKenzie, Mr. Harter’s former firms, according to public lobbying disclosures. One of them, Pam Olson, was the top Treasury tax official in the George W. Bush administration. (Mr. Morgenstern, the Treasury spokesman, said Mr. Harter didn’t meet with PwC while the rules were being written.)

This month, the Treasury issued the final version of some of the BEAT regulations. The Organization for International Investment got what it wanted.

Helping Foreign Banks

One of the most effective campaigns, with the greatest financial consequence, was led by a small group of large foreign banks, including Credit Suisse and Barclays.

American regulators require international banks to ensure that their United States divisions are financially equipped to absorb big losses in a crisis. To meet those requirements, foreign banks lend the money to their American outposts. Those loans accrue interest. Under the BEAT, the interest that the American units paid to their European parents would often be taxed.

“Foreign banks should not be penalized by the U.S. tax laws for complying” with regulations, said Briget Polichene, chief executive of the Institute of International Bankers, whose members include many of the world’s largest banks.

Banks flooded the Treasury Department with lobbyists and letters.

Late last year, Mr. Harter went to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and told him about the plan to give the banks a break. Mr. Mnuchin — a longtime banking executive before joining the Trump administration — signed off on the new exemptions, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A few months later, the tax-policy office handed another victory to the foreign banks, ruling that an even wider range of bank payments would be exempted.

Among the lobbyists who successfully pushed the banks’ case in private meetings with senior Treasury officials was Erika Nijenhuis of the law firm Cleary Gottlieb. Her client was the Institute of International Bankers.

In September 2019, Ms. Nijenhuis took off her lobbying hat and joined the Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy, which was still writing the rules governing the tax law.

Some tax experts said that the Treasury had no legal authority to exempt the bank payments from the BEAT; only Congress had that power. The Trump administration created the exception “out of whole cloth,” said Mr. Wells, the University of Houston professor.

Even inside the Treasury, the ruling was controversial. Some officials told Mr. Harter — the senior official in charge of the international rules — that the department lacked the power, according to people familiar with the discussions. Mr. Harter dismissed the objections.

Officials at the Joint Committee on Taxation have calculated that the exemptions for international banks could reduce by up to $50 billion the revenue raised by the BEAT.

Over all, the BEAT is likely to collect “a small fraction” of the $150 billion of new tax revenue that was originally projected by Congress, said Thomas Horst, who advises companies on their overseas tax arrangements. He came to that conclusion after reviewing the tax disclosures in more than 140 annual reports filed by multinationals.

Mr. Morgenstern, the Treasury spokesman, said: “We thoroughly reviewed these issues internally and are fully comfortable that we have the legal authority for the conclusions reached in these regulations.” He said Ms. Nijenhuis was not involved in crafting the BEAT rules.

He also said the Treasury decided that changing the rules for foreign banks was appropriate.

“We were responsive to job creators,” he said.

Heading to the Hill

The lobbying surrounding the GILTI was equally intense — and, once again, large companies won valuable concessions.

Back in 2017, Republicans said the GILTI was meant to prevent companies from avoiding American taxes by moving their intellectual property overseas.

In the pharmaceutical and tech industries in particular, profits are often tied to patents. Companies had sold the rights to their patents to subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. The companies then imposed steep licensing fees on their American units. The sleight-of-hand transactions reduced profits in the United States and left them in places like Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands.

But after the law was enacted, large multinationals in industries like consumer products discovered that the GILTI tax applied to them, too. That threatened to cut into their windfalls from the corporate tax rate’s falling to 21 percent from 35 percent.

Lobbyists for Procter & Gamble and other companies turned to lawmakers for help. They asked members of the Senate Finance Committee to tell Treasury officials that they hadn’t intended the GILTI to affect their industries. It was a simple but powerful strategy: Because the Treasury was required to consider congressional intent when writing the tax rules, such explanations could sway the outcome.

Several senators then met with Mr. Mnuchin to discuss the rules.

One lobbyist, Michael Caballero, had been a senior Treasury official in the Obama administration. His clients included Credit Suisse and the industrial conglomerate United Technologies. He met repeatedly with Treasury and White House officials and pushed them to modify the rules so that big companies hit by the GILTI wouldn’t lose certain tax deductions.

In essence, the “high-tax exception” that Mr. Caballero was proposing would allow companies to deduct expenses that they incurred in their overseas operations from their American profits — lowering their United States tax bills.

Other companies jumped on the bandwagon. News Corporation, Liberty Mutual, Anheuser-Busch, Comcast and P.&G. wrote letters or dispatched lobbyists to argue for the high-tax exception.

After months of meetings with lobbyists, the Treasury announced in June 2019 that it was creating a version of the exception that the companies had sought.

An Implied Threat

Two years after the tax cuts became law, their impact is becoming clear.

Companies continue to shift hundreds of billions of dollars to overseas tax havens, ensuring that huge sums of corporate profits remain out of reach of the United States government.

The Internal Revenue Service is collecting tens of billions of dollars less in corporate taxes than Congress projected, inflating the tax law’s 13-figure price tag.

This month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calculated that the United States in 2018 experienced the largest drop in tax revenue of any of the group’s 36 member countries. The United States also had by far the largest budget deficit of any of those countries.

In the coming days, the Treasury is likely to complete its last round of rules carrying out the tax cuts. Big companies have spent this fall trying to win more.

In September, Chris D. Trunck, the vice president for tax at Owens Corning, the maker of insulation and roofing materials, wrote to the I.R.S. He pushed the Treasury to tinker with the GILTI rules in a way that would preserve hundreds of millions of dollars of tax benefits that Owens Corning had accumulated from settling claims that it poisoned employees and others with asbestos.

The same month, the underwear manufacturer Hanes sent its own letter to Mr. Mnuchin. The letter, from Bryant Purvis, Hanes’s vice president of global tax, urged Mr. Mnuchin to broaden the high-tax exception so that more companies could take advantage of it.

Otherwise, Mr. Purvis warned, “the GILTI regime will become an impediment to U.S. companies and their ability to not only compete globally as a general matter, but also their ability to remain U.S.-headquartered if they are to maintain the overall fiscal health of their business.”

The implied threat was clear: If the Treasury didn’t further chip away at the new tax, companies like Hanes, based in Winston-Salem, N.C., might have no choice but to move their headquarters. .

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/business/trump-tax-cuts-beat-gilti.html?

GOP Scam 2 Richest Banks Corps Grab $6.5-+ Trillion More From Americans

2019-12-31T13:49:00.000-06:00

Credit...The Heads of S

GOP Lets Super-Rich Banks Corps Rip Off Americans For More Cash $6.5 Tillion More From Trump Administration Mnuchin Treasury Pals

As the Treasury Department prepared to enact the 2017 Republican tax overhaul, corporate lobbyists swarmed — and won big.

Credit...The Heads of State

By Jesse Drucker and Jim Tankersley

30 December 2019

The overhaul of the federal tax law in 2017 was the signature legislative achievement of Donald J. Trump’s presidency.

Corporate executives, major investors and the wealthiest Americans hailed the tax cuts as a once-in-a-generation boon not only to their own fortunes but also to the United States economy.

Image

Credit...Jon Elswick/Associated Press

Racing for a Win

Ever since the birth of the modern federal income tax in 1913, companies have been concocting ways to avoid it.

The Obama administration and lawmakers from both parties have tried to combat this profit shifting, but their efforts mostly stalled.

The bill’s cuts totaled $5.5 trillion. The corporate income tax rate shrank to 21 percent from 35 percent, and companies also won a tax break on the trillions in profits brought home from offshore.

To close the gap between the $5.5 trillion in cuts and the maximum price tag of $1.5 trillion, the package sought to raise new revenue by eliminating deductions and introducing new taxes.

Shifting Money

Two of the biggest new taxes were supposed to apply to multinational corporations, and lawmakers bestowed them with easy-to-pronounce acronyms — BEAT and GILTI — that belie their complexity.

Instead of paying taxes in the United States, companies send the profits to countries with lower tax rates.

The BEAT aimed to make that less lucrative. Some payments that companies sent to their foreign affiliates would face a new 10 percent tax.

The other big measure was called GILTI: global intangible low-taxed income.

To reduce the benefit companies reaped by claiming that their profits were earned in tax havens, the law imposed an additional tax of up to 10.5 percent on some offshore earnings.

Sitting in the Oval Office on Dec. 22, 2017, Mr. Trump signed the tax cuts into law. It was — and remains — the president’s most significant legislative achievement.

Built-In Loopholes

From the start, the new taxes were pocked with loopholes.

Because such payments to Ireland wouldn’t be taxed, some companies that had been the most aggressive at shifting profits into offshore havens were spared the full brunt of the BEAT.

Other companies, like General Electric, were surprised to be hit by the new tax, thinking it applied only to foreign multinationals, according to Pat Brown, who had been G.E.’s top tax expert.

“The question,” he said, “is how creative and how expansive is Treasury and the I.R.S. able to be.”

An Exhaustive Lobbying Campaign

The Treasury Department had to figure out how to carry out the hastily written law, which lacked crucial details.

Starting in January 2018, he and his colleagues found themselves in nonstop meetings — roughly 10 a week at times — with lobbyists for companies and industry groups.

This month, the Treasury issued the final version of some of the BEAT regulations. The Organization for International Investment got what it wanted.

Helping Foreign Banks

One of the most effective campaigns, with the greatest financial consequence, was led by a small group of large foreign banks, including Credit Suisse and Barclays.

Banks flooded the Treasury Department with lobbyists and letters.

A few months later, the tax-policy office handed another victory to the foreign banks, ruling that an even wider range of bank payments would be exempted.

In September 2019, Ms. Nijenhuis took off her lobbying hat and joined the Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy, which was still writing the rules governing the tax law.

Officials at the Joint Committee on Taxation have calculated that the exemptions for international banks could reduce by up to $50 billion the revenue raised by the BEAT.

He also said the Treasury decided that changing the rules for foreign banks was appropriate.

“We were responsive to job creators,” he said.

Heading to the Hill

The lobbying surrounding the GILTI was equally intense — and, once again, large companies won valuable concessions.

Back in 2017, Republicans said the GILTI was meant to prevent companies from avoiding American taxes by moving their intellectual property overseas.

Several senators then met with Mr. Mnuchin to discuss the rules.

Other companies jumped on the bandwagon. News Corporation, Liberty Mutual, Anheuser-Busch, Comcast and P.&G. wrote letters or dispatched lobbyists to argue for the high-tax exception.

After months of meetings with lobbyists, the Treasury announced in June 2019 that it was creating a version of the exception that the companies had sought.

An Implied Threat

Two years after the tax cuts became law, their impact is becoming clear.

Companies continue to shift hundreds of billions of dollars to overseas tax havens, ensuring that huge sums of corporate profits remain out of reach of the United States government.

The Internal Revenue Service is collecting tens of billions of dollars less in corporate taxes than Congress projected, inflating the tax law’s 13-figure price tag.

In the coming days, the Treasury is likely to complete its last round of rules carrying out the tax cuts. Big companies have spent this fall trying to win more.

The implied threat was clear: If the Treasury didn’t further chip away at the new tax, companies like Hanes, based in Winston-Salem, N.C., might have no choice but to move their headquarters. .

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/business/trump-tax-cuts-beat-gilti.html?