Why U.S. Intelligence Agencies Must Adapt or Fail

From Amy Zegart and Michael Morell, at Foreign Affairs, "Spies, Lies, and Algorithms":

“The U.S. intelligence community can develop the best strategy for intelligence in a new technological era, but if it ever loses its reputation for objectivity, nonpartisanship, and professionalism, it will lose its value to the nation.”https://t.co/mJb3jaXcO5

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) May 21, 2019

For U.S. intelligence agencies, the twenty-first century began with a shock, when 19 al Qaeda operatives hijacked four planes and perpetrated the deadliest attack ever on U.S. soil. In the wake of the attack, the intelligence community mobilized with one overriding goal: preventing another 9/11. The CIA, the National Security Agency, and the 15 other components of the U.S. intelligence community restructured, reformed, and retooled. Congress appropriated billions of dollars to support the transformation.

That effort paid off. In the nearly two decades that U.S. intelligence agencies have been focused on fighting terrorists, they have foiled numerous plots to attack the U.S. homeland, tracked down Osama bin Laden, helped eliminate the Islamic State’s caliphate, and found terrorists hiding everywhere from Afghan caves to Brussels apartment complexes. This has arguably been one of the most successful periods in the history of American intelligence.

But today, confronted with new threats that go well beyond terrorism, U.S. intelligence agencies face another moment of reckoning. From biotechnology and nanotechnology to quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI), rapid technological change is giving U.S. adversaries new capabilities and eroding traditional U.S. intelligence advantages. The U.S. intelligence community must adapt to these shifts or risk failure as the nation’s first line of defense.

Although U.S. intelligence agencies have taken initial steps in the right direction, they are not moving fast enough. In fact, the first intelligence breakdown of this new era has already come: the failure to quickly identify and fully grasp the magnitude of Russia’s use of social media to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. That breakdown should serve as a wake-up call. The trends it reflects warrant a wholesale reimagining of how the intelligence community operates. Getting there will require capitalizing on the United States’ unique strengths, making tough organizational changes, and rebuilding trust with U.S. technology companies.

A WARNING SIGN

Russia’s multifaceted “active measures” campaign ahead of the 2016 election was designed to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, sow divisions in American society, and boost public support for one presidential candidate over another. Much of this effort did not go undetected for long. Almost immediately, U.S. intelligence agencies noticed Russian cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the sharing of stolen information with platforms such as WikiLeaks, and attempts to penetrate state and local voting systems. Pointing to these events, intelligence officials warned President Barack Obama well before the election that the United States was under attack.

Yet the intelligence agencies missed Russia’s most important tool: the weaponization of social media. Studies commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of a Russian “troll farm” show that the social media operation designed to undermine the U.S. electoral process may have begun as early as 2012 and was well under way by 2014. But although U.S. intelligence officials knew that Russia had used social media as a propaganda tool against its own citizens and its neighbors, particularly Ukraine, it took them at least two years to realize that similar efforts were being made in the United States. This lapse deprived the president of valuable time to fully understand Moscow’s intentions and develop policy options before the election ever began.

In October 2016, one month before the election, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, took the unusual step of issuing a public statement about Russia’s interference in the election. Even then, the full extent of the Russian effort eluded U.S. intelligence; the statement did not mention social media at all. Johnson later stated that Russia’s social media operation “was something . . . that we were just beginning to see.” Likewise, Clapper wrote in his memoir that “in the summer of 2015, it would never have occurred to us that low-level Russian intelligence operatives might be posing as Americans on social media.” Indeed, the intelligence community did not understand the magnitude of the attack, which reached more than 120 million U.S. citizens, until well after the election. The Senate Intelligence Committee noted in 2018 that its own bipartisan investigation “exposed a far more extensive Russian effort to manipulate social media outlets to sow discord and to interfere in the 2016 election and American society” than the U.S. intelligence community had found even as late as 2017.

It was with good reason that the intelligence agencies did not have their collection systems trained on social media content within the United States, but Russia’s social media attack was carried out by Russian nationals operating on Russian soil. They were assisted by several Russian intelligence operatives sent to the United States in 2014, with the express goal of studying how to make Moscow’s social media campaign more effective. Whether the Kremlin tipped the balance in a close presidential race will never be known. What is clear, however, is that Russia’s nefarious use of social media went undetected by U.S. intelligence for too long and that this failure is just a preview of what lies ahead if the intelligence community doesn’t adapt to today’s rapid technological breakthroughs...

Keep reading.

Malcolm W. Nance, The Plot to Hack America

FWIW, at Amazon, Malcolm W. Nance, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election.

The Democrats' 'Russian Descent'

This is good, from Kim Strassel, at WSJ, "Tactics in the Trump probe are starting to look a lot like McCarthyism":

Democrats have spent weeks making the case that the Russia-Trump probes need to continue, piling on demands for more witnesses and documents. So desperate is the left to keep this Trump cudgel to hand that Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats have moved toward neo- McCarthyism.

If that sounds hyperbolic, consider an email recently disclosed by the Young Turks Network, a progressive YouTube news channel. It’s dated Dec. 19, 2017, and its author is April Doss, senior counsel for the committee’s Democrats, including Vice Chairman Mark Warner.

Ms. Doss was writing to Robert Barnes, an attorney for Charles C. Johnson, the controversial and unpleasant alt-right blogger. Mr. Johnson’s interactions with Julian Assange inspired some in the media to speculate last year that Mr. Johnson had served as a back channel between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. There’s still no proof, but in July the Intelligence Committee sent a letter requesting Mr. Johnson submit to them any documents, emails, texts or the like related to “any communications with Russian persons” in a variety of 2016 circumstances, including those related to “the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign.”

Mr. Barnes seems to have wanted clarification from Ms. Doss about the definition of “Russian persons.” And this would make sense, since it’s a loose term. Russians in Russia? Russians in America? Russians with business in the country? Russians who lobby the U.S. and might be affected by the election—though not in contact with campaigns?

Ms. Doss’s response was more sweeping than any of these: “The provision we discussed narrowing was clarifying that the phrase ‘Russian persons’ in [the committee letter] may be read to refer to persons that Mr. Johnson knows or has reason to believe are of Russian nationality or descent” (emphasis added).

If this stands, Democrats will have gone far beyond criminalizing routine government contacts with Russians, which is disturbing enough. Trump transition and administration officials have been smeared and subjected to exhaustive investigation merely for doing their job, which includes interacting with Russian officials or diplomats. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has spent the past year having to justify why, as a U.S. senator, he shook hands with the Russian ambassador. The running joke in today’s Washington is that one risks a subpoena merely for ordering a salad with Russian dressing.

But the definition in the Doss letter potentially takes all this much further. It could be that Ms. Doss was simply trying to prevent a recalcitrant witness from evading legitimate requests. But it could mean you are now officially under suspicion by the U.S. government—subject to requisitioning your emails and texts or getting your own subpoena—if your parents or even great-great-grandparents were Russkis. By some estimates, the Russian-American community is more than three million strong, and quite a few of them are Mr. Warner’s congressional colleagues, including Bernie Sanders.

This comes from a Democratic Party that supposedly rejects group-based discrimination. Substitute the words “Arab or Arab background” into a hypothetical Republican version of the letter, and the left would melt down—not without reason.

The Doss letter suggests this is of a piece with the Democrats’ manic effort to keep the Trump-Russia investigations going, no matter what. As Republican congressional leaders have hinted that their probes may be wrapping up, the left’s demands and tactics have become ever more desperate. The Washington Post this past weekend ran a piece straight out of House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff’s talking points, regurgitating complaints that Chairman Devin Nunes has run an incomplete probe. The accusation inspired House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy to quip that Mr. Schiff’s desired witness list is “pretty much every character in any Dostoevsky or Tolstoy novel.”

The House Intelligence committee has collected nearly 300,000 documents, conducted 67 transcribed witness interviews, and issued 18 subpoenas. It’s held 11 hearings, taken 164 hours of testimony, and reviewed 5,251 pages of that testimony. It’s spent 346 days investigating Russian meddling. The country deserves the committee’s final recommendations as to how to avoid further Russian interference, especially given we are again in an election year...

Hat Tip: RCP.

Journalists Spreading Lies and Degrading Democracy

It's Glenn Greenwald, at the Intercept, "Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That are False":

Four viral claims spread by journalists on Twitter in the last week alone that are false: https://t.co/KrkOFYztQH by @ggreenwald

— The Intercept (@theintercept) November 5, 2017

There is ample talk, particularly of late, about the threats posed by social media to democracy and political discourse. Yet one of the primary ways that democracy is degraded by platforms such and Facebook and Twitter is, for obvious reasons, typically ignored in such discussions: the way they are used by American journalists to endorse factually false claims that quickly spread and become viral, entrenched into narratives, and thus can never be adequately corrected.

The design of Twitter, where many political journalists spend their time, is in large part responsible for this damage. Its space constraints mean that tweeted headlines or tiny summaries of reporting are often assumed to be true with no critical analysis of their accuracy, and are easily spread. Claims from journalists that people want to believe are shared like wildfire, while less popular, subsequent corrections or nuanced debunking are easily ignored. Whatever one’s views are on the actual impact of Twitter Russian bots, surely the propensity of journalistic falsehoods to spread far and wide is at least as significant.

Just in the last week alone, there have been four major factually false claims that have gone viral because journalists on Twitter endorsed and spread them: three about the controversy involving Donna Brazile and the DNC, and one about documents and emails published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. It’s well worth examining them, both to document what the actual truth is as well as to understand how often and easily this online journalistic misleading occurs...

Keep reading.

Julian Assange's Nihilism (VIDEO)

From Sue Halpern, at the New York Review, "The Nihilism of Julian Assange":

Sue Halpern reviews ‘Risk,’ Laura Poitras’s documentary portrait of Julian Assange https://t.co/tgEwRkGF1q

— NY Review of Books (@nybooks) June 20, 2017

About forty minutes into Risk, Laura Poitras’s messy documentary portrait of Julian Assange, the filmmaker addresses the viewer from off-camera. “This is not the film I thought I was making,” she says. “I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I thought they were not part of the story. I was so wrong. They are becoming the story.”

By the time she makes this confession, Poitras has been filming Assange, on and off, for six years. He has gone from a bit player on the international stage to one of its dramatic leads. His gleeful interference in the 2016 American presidential election—first with the release of e-mails poached from the Democratic National Committee, timed to coincide with, undermine, and possibly derail Hillary Clinton’s nomination at the Democratic Convention, and then with the publication of the private e-mail correspondence of Clinton’s adviser John Podesta, which was leaked, drip by drip, in the days leading up to the election to maximize the damage it might inflict on Clinton—elevated Assange’s profile and his influence.

And then this spring, it emerged that Nigel Farage, the Trump adviser and former head of the nationalist and anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP) who is now a person of interest in the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, was meeting with Assange. To those who once saw him as a crusader for truth and accountability, Assange suddenly looked more like a Svengali and a willing tool of Vladimir Putin, and certainly a man with no particular affection for liberal democracy. Yet those tendencies were present all along.

n 2010, when Poitras began work on her film, Assange’s four-year-old website, WikiLeaks, had just become the conduit for hundreds of thousands of classified American documents revealing how we prosecuted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis, as well as for some 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables. All had been uploaded to the WikiLeaks site by an army private named Bradley—now Chelsea—Manning.

The genius of the WikiLeaks platform was that documents could be leaked anonymously, with all identifiers removed; WikiLeaks itself didn’t know who its sources were unless leakers chose to reveal themselves. This would prevent anyone at WikiLeaks from inadvertently, or under pressure, disclosing a source’s identity. Assange’s goal was to hold power—state power, corporate power, and powerful individuals—accountable by offering a secure and easy way to expose their secrets. He called this “radical transparency.” Manning’s bad luck was to tell a friend about the hack, and the friend then went to the FBI. For a long time, though, Assange pretended not to know who provided the documents, even when there was evidence that he and Manning had been e-mailing before the leaks.

Though the contradictions were not immediately obvious to Poitras as she trained her lens on Assange, they were becoming so to others in his orbit. WikiLeaks’s young spokesperson in those early days, James Ball, has recounted how Assange tried to force him to sign a nondisclosure statement that would result in a £12 million penalty if it were breached. “[I was] woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign,” Ball wrote. Assange continued to pester him like this for two hours. Assange’s “impulse towards free speech,” according to Andrew O’Hagan, the erstwhile ghostwriter of Assange’s failed autobiography, “is only permissible if it adheres to his message. His pursuit of governments and corporations was a ghostly reverse of his own fears for himself. That was the big secret with him: he wanted to cover up everything about himself except his fame.”

Meanwhile, some of the company he was keeping while Poitras was filming also might have given her pause. His association with Farage had already begun in 2011 when Farage was head of UKIP. Assange’s own WikiLeaks Party of Australia was aligned with the white nationalist Australia First Party, itself headed by an avowed neo-Nazi, until political pressure forced it to claim that association to be an “administrative error.”

Most egregious, perhaps, was Assange’s collaboration with Israel Shamir, an unapologetic anti-Semite and Putin ally to whom Assange handed over all State Department diplomatic cables from the Manning leak relating to Belarus (as well as to Russia, Eastern Europe, and Israel). Shamir then shared these documents with members of the regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who appeared to use them to imprison and torture members of the opposition. This prompted the human rights group Index on Censorship to ask WikiLeaks to explain its relationship to Shamir, and to look into reports that Shamir’s “access to the WikiLeaks’ US diplomatic cables [aided in] the prosecution of civil society activists within Belarus.” WikiLeaks called these claims rumors and responded that it would not be investigating them. “Most people with principled stances don’t survive for long,” Assange tells Poitras at the beginning of the film. It’s not clear if he’s talking about himself or others...

I've never liked nor respected Assange, who I consider an enemy.

But note how Halpern gets the basic background wrong: That "graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis" was actually a video of anti-American journalists embedded with Iraqi insurgents armed with RPGs. The Apache took them out in self-defense, following strict rules of engagement. That story's been totally debunked. But as with most other things in the news, the initial lie becomes the official truth for the radical left. That's why you can never let your guard down.

Keep reading, FWIW.

The Left's Disgraceful Drive to Overturn the 2016 Election

From Pat Buchanan, at Town Hall, "The Impeach-Trump Conspiracy":

Pressed by Megyn Kelly on his ties to President Trump, an exasperated Vladimir Putin blurted out, "We had no relationship at all. ... I never met him. ... Have you all lost your senses over there?"

Yes, Vlad, we have.

Consider the questions that have convulsed this city since the Trump triumph, and raised talk of impeachment.

Did Trump collude with Russians to hack the DNC emails and move the goods to WikiLeaks, thus revealing the state secret that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was putting the screws to poor Bernie Sanders?

If not Trump himself, did campaign aides collude with the KGB?

Now, given that our NSA and CIA seemingly intercept everything Russians say to Americans, why is our fabled FBI, having investigated for a year, unable to give us a definitive yes or no?

The snail's pace of the FBI investigation explains Trump's frustration. What explains the FBI's torpor? If J. Edgar Hoover had moved at this pace, John Dillinger would have died of old age.

We hear daily on cable TV of the "Trump-Russia" scandal. Yet, no one has been charged with collusion, and every intelligence official, past or prevent, who has spoken out has echoed ex-acting CIA Director Mike Morrell:

"On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all. ... There's no little campfire, there's no little candle, there's no spark."

Where are the criminals? Where is the crime?

More.

And ICYMI, at Amazon, Patrick J. Buchanan, Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.

Max Boot, the Perpetually Unhappy Camper

Honestly, if I was Max Boot, I'd just focus on writing books and academic scholarship. Since the nomination (and then election) of Donald Trump, Boot's been publishing one piece after another bemoaning all the old institutions to which he had ties, first it was the GOP itself, now it's Fox News.

He's really pathetic. And that's the saddest thing. I used to find him interesting. I used to respect him. Now look what's happened. All because of President Trump. I don't know. Chalk it up to "Trump Derangement Syndrome."

In any case, here's Boot, at Foreign Policy, "The Seth Rich ‘Scandal’ Shows That Fox News Is Morally Bankrupt":

.@MaxBoot: Fox News has allowed itself to become a sensationalist information weapon for the Kremlin. https://t.co/mIkK8Ecz1y

— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) May 22, 2017

The network I once respected as a necessary antidote to liberal media now peddles craven lies and Russian disinformation.

It was just a coincidence, but a telling one, that Roger Ailes died on May 18 just as the television powerhouse that he created, the Fox News Channel, was propagating a conspiracy theory involving a Democratic National Committee staffer named Seth Rich, whose murder in Washington, D.C., last summer remains unsolved.

If you don’t watch Fox News, read Breitbart or the Drudge Report, or listen to Rush Limbaugh, you likely don’t have any idea who Seth Rich was. If, however, you are a devotee of those dubious news sources, you have been fed a grab bag of unsubstantiated allegations designed to make you think that Rich was murdered by some kind of Democratic Party cabal for having revealed the party’s secrets to WikiLeaks.

These spurious insinuations have been put forward (before being largely recanted) by a sometime Fox News contributor named Rod Wheeler. Never mind that Rich’s family, the Washington police force, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, among others, have debunked these conspiracy theories, showing there is no evidence that Rich was a WikiLeaks source, much less that his murder has anything to do with the stolen Democratic Party emails. Sean Hannity, one of the last of the old guard hired by Ailes to rule prime time, nevertheless devoted three separate segments of his show last week to the “DNC murder mystery.” On Sunday morning, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was pushing the same allegation about Rich’s “assassination” on Fox & Friends. Lou Dobbs has spouted these theories on Fox Business Network, too.

Fox’s tasteless conspiracy-mongering has been denounced by the Rich family, which wants the far-right to stop exploiting their son’s tragic death, but it has found support in an unlikely quarter. Ever happy to play the troll, the Russian Embassy in London tweeted: “‪#WikiLeaks ‪informer Seth Rich murdered in US but MSM was so busy accusing Russian hackers to take notice.”

I'm not up on the Seth Rich story, and that's not by accident. I personally stay away from conspiracy theories. That said, I distinctly remember Julian Assange saying, at the time of Rich's death, that he suspected that his sources were putting their lives in danger. I don't recall him conceding that Seth Rich had leaked documents to WikiLeaks. He simply said that powerful people had an invested interest in making those leaks stop. Assange and WikiLeaks (one and the same, as far as I know) have stated consistently that they do not divulge the names of their sources. But that's about as far as I'll go.

Oh, well, that, and Max Boot is a special snowflake neocon wienie.

BONUS: At the New York Times, "How the Murder of a D.N.C. Staff Member Fueled Conspiracy Theories."

The Media Bubble is Real

It's real, bro.

At Politico, "The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think":

This is why @SalenaZito was so effective this cycle when few other journos were: https://t.co/gbQfUfcis0

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) April 25, 2017

How did big media miss the Donald Trump swell? News organizations old and new, large and small, print and online, broadcast and cable assigned phalanxes of reporters armed with the most sophisticated polling data and analysis to cover the presidential campaign. The overwhelming assumption was that the race was Hillary Clinton’s for the taking, and the real question wasn’t how sweeping her November victory would be, but how far out to sea her wave would send political parvenu Trump. Today, it’s Trump who occupies the White House and Clinton who’s drifting out to sea—an outcome that arrived not just as an embarrassment for the press but as an indictment. In some profound way, the election made clear, the national media just doesn’t get the nation it purportedly covers.

What went so wrong? What’s still wrong? To some conservatives, Trump’s surprise win on November 8 simply bore out what they had suspected, that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly in the tank for Clinton all along. The media, in this view, was guilty not just of confirmation bias but of complicity. But the knowing-bias charge never added up: No news organization ignored the Clinton emails story, and everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache that WikiLeaks served up buffet-style. Practically speaking, you’re not pushing Clinton to victory if you’re pantsing her and her party to voters almost daily.

The answer to the press’ myopia lies elsewhere, and nobody has produced a better argument for how the national media missed the Trump story than FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who pointed out that the ideological clustering in top newsrooms led to groupthink. “As of 2013, only 7 percent of [journalists] identified as Republicans,” Silver wrote in March, chiding the press for its political homogeneity. Just after the election, presidential strategist Steve Bannon savaged the press on the same point but with a heartier vocabulary. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” Bannon said. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no fucking idea what’s going on.”

But journalistic groupthink is a symptom, not a cause. And when it comes to the cause, there’s another, blunter way to think about the question than screaming “bias” and “conspiracy,” or counting D’s and R’s. That’s to ask a simple question about the map. Where do journalists work, and how much has that changed in recent years? To determine this, my colleague Tucker Doherty excavated labor statistics and cross-referenced them against voting patterns and Census data to figure out just what the American media landscape looks like, and how much it has changed.

The results read like a revelation. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too.

The “media bubble” trope might feel overused by critics of journalism who want to sneer at reporters who live in Brooklyn or California and don’t get the “real America” of southern Ohio or rural Kansas. But these numbers suggest it’s no exaggeration: Not only is the bubble real, but it’s more extreme than you might realize. And it’s driven by deep industry trends...

Pretty interesting.

And notice above that nice shout-out Bethany Mandel gives to Salena Zito.

Keep reading, in any case.

Massive WikiLeaks C.I.A. Hacking Dump Reveals Spy Secrets, Possible Espionage on Americans (VIDEO)

I just don't know what to think anymore.

Absolutely nothing is safe these days from cyberhacking, and what's worse, the C.I.A. may well have been involved in domestic espionage, which is prohibited by statute. Either that, or other operators using the same technology.

In any case, at the New York Times, "WikiLeaks Releases Trove of Alleged C.I.A. Hacking Documents":

WASHINGTON — WikiLeaks on Tuesday released thousands of documents that it said described sophisticated software tools used by the Central Intelligence Agency to break into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions.

If the documents are authentic, as appeared likely at first review, the release would be the latest coup for the anti-secrecy organization and a serious blow to the C.I.A., which maintains its own hacking capabilities to be used for espionage.

The initial release, which WikiLeaks said was only the first part of the document collection, included 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments, the group said. The entire archive of C.I.A. material consists of several hundred million lines of computer code, it said.

Among other disclosures that, if confirmed, would rock the technology world, the WikiLeaks release said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

The source of the documents was not named. WikiLeaks said the documents, which it called Vault 7, had been “circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”

WikiLeaks said the source, in a statement, set out policy questions that “urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the C.I.A.’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency.” The source, the group said, “wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”

The documents, from the C.I.A’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, are dated from 2013 to 2016, and WikiLeaks described them as “the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.” One former intelligence officer who briefly reviewed the documents on Tuesday morning said some of the code names for C.I.A. programs, an organization chart and the description of a C.I.A. hacking base appeared to be genuine.

A C.I.A. spokesman, Dean Boyd, said, “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”

WikiLeaks, which has sometimes been accused of recklessly leaking information that could do harm, said it had redacted names and other identifying information from the collection. It said it was not releasing the computer code for actual, usable cyberweapons “until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the C.I.A.’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed, disarmed and published.”

Some of the details of the C.I.A. programs might have come from the plot of a spy novel for the cyberage, revealing numerous highly classified — and in some cases, exotic — hacking programs. One, code-named Weeping Angel, uses Samsung “smart” televisions as covert listening devices. According to the WikiLeaks news release, even when it appears to be turned off, the television “operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the internet to a covert C.I.A. server.”

The release said the program was developed in cooperation with British intelligence...

Keep reading.

And watch, at CNN:

Russian Hackers and American Hacks

At WSJ, "The CIA that misjudged Putin for years is now sure of his motives":

Finally, a MSM outlet reports facts not speculation... Russian Hackers and American Hacks https://t.co/fan2SJVXbl via @WSJ

— Diane Piette (@DianePiette1) December 12, 2016

Somewhere in the Kremlin Vladimir Putin must be laughing. The Russian strongman almost certainly sought to undermine public confidence in American democracy this year, and as the Obama Administration leaves town it is playing into his hands.

That’s the real story behind the weekend reports that U.S. intelligence services have concluded that Russia intervened to assist Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The stories are attributed to “senior administration” officials who won’t go on the record but assert murky details that are impossible to verify without seeing the evidence.

Mr. Trump is denouncing the claims with his usual subtlety, but he has a point about their timing and nature. “I don’t want anyone hacking us,” Mr. Trump said on Fox News Sunday, while blaming the leaks on Democrats. “I think it’s ridiculous” and “I don’t believe it.”

Democrats are still in shock from their defeat, and many want to add the Kremlin to FBI Director James Comey, fake news and the Electoral College as excuses that cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s victory.

The new information in these latest stories is less about new intelligence than it is a judgment about Russian motives. Other sources who have seen the intelligence say there’s strong evidence that actors linked to high-level Russian officials hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) website. The Russians then posted them on sites they set up or handed them to WikiLeaks, though even the WikiLeaks transfer isn’t known for sure. The Administration made public the conclusion about the DNC hack months ago.

The difference now is that the intelligence community is said to have concluded with “high confidence” that the Russians did the hacking to help elect Mr. Trump. But we’re told the evidence for this conclusion is far from definitive, and multiple intelligence services offered no such judgments when briefing the House Intelligence Committee on the election-related hacks last week.

The New York Times cites claims from its sources that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee website but then didn’t leak any documents. But other sources say that while it’s clear the Russians were probing the RNC website, it isn’t clear they penetrated it enough to grab emails. This is in contrast to the months the Russians spent roaming through the DNC site. We’re also told that there’s no definitive intelligence about who hacked Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. His emails posted on WikiLeaks were arguably more politically damaging than those from the DNC.

Still more.

Asra Nomani: Why I Supported Donald Trump (VIDEO)

This woman is awesome. Brave and awesome.

At the Washington Post, "I’m a Muslim, a woman and an immigrant. I voted for Trump":

A lot is being said now about the “silent secret Trump supporters.”

This is my confession — and explanation: I — a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman “of color” — am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I’m not a “bigot,” “racist,” “chauvinist” or “white supremacist,” as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some “whitelash.”

In the winter of 2008, as a lifelong liberal and proud daughter of West Virginia, a state born on the correct side of history on slavery, I moved to historically conservative Virginia only because the state had helped elect Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States.

But, then, for much of this past year, I have kept my electoral preference secret: I was leaning toward Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Tuesday evening, just minutes before the polls closed at Forestville Elementary School in mostly Democratic Fairfax County, I slipped between the cardboard partitions in the polling booth, a pen balanced carefully between my fingers, to mark my ballot for president, coloring in the circle beside the names of Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence.

After Hillary Clinton called Trump to concede, making him America’s president-elect, a friend on Twitter wrote a message of apology to the world, saying there are millions of Americans who don’t share Trump’s “hatred/division/ignorance.” She ended: “Ashamed of millions that do.”

That would presumably include me — but it doesn’t, and that is where the dismissal of voter concerns about Clinton led to her defeat. I most certainly reject the trifecta of “hatred/division/ignorance.” I support the Democratic Party’s position on abortion, same-sex marriage and climate change.

But I am a single mother who can’t afford health insurance under Obamacare. The president’s mortgage-loan modification program, “HOPE NOW,” didn’t help me. Tuesday, I drove into Virginia from my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va., where I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration.

Finally, as a liberal Muslim who has experienced, first-hand, Islamic extremism in this world, I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the “Islam” in Islamic State. Of course, Trump’s rhetoric has been far more than indelicate and folks can have policy differences with his recommendations, but, to me, it has been exaggerated and demonized by the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, their media channels, such as Al Jazeera, and their proxies in the West, in a convenient distraction from the issue that most worries me as a human being on this earth: extremist Islam of the kind that has spilled blood from the hallways of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai to the dance floor of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

In mid-June, after the tragic shooting at Pulse, Trump tweeted out a message, delivered in his typical subtle style: “Is President Obama going to finally mention the words radical Islamic terrorism? If he doesn’t he should immediately resign in disgrace!”

Around then, on CNN’s “New Day,” Democratic candidate Clinton seemed to do the Obama dance, saying, “From my perspective, it matters what we do more than what we say. And it mattered we got bin Laden, not what name we called him. I have clearly said we — whether you call it radical jihadism or radical Islamism, I’m happy to say either. I think they mean the same thing.”

By mid-October, it was one Aug. 17, 2014, email from the WikiLeaks treasure trove of Clinton emails that poisoned the well for me. In it, Clinton told aide John Podesta: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL,” the politically correct name for the Islamic State, “and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”

The revelations of multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation from Qatar and Saudi Arabia killed my support for Clinton...

More.

Why Trump Won

From VDH, at the Hoover Institution:

Throughout the course of the 2016 election, the conventional groupthink was that the renegade Donald Trump had irrevocably torn apart the Republican Party. His base populism supposedly sandbagged more experienced and electable Republican candidates, who were bewildered that a “conservative” would dare to pander to hoi polloi by promising deportations of illegal aliens, renegotiation of trade agreements that “ripped off” working people, and a messy attack on the reigning political correctness.

It was also a common complaint that Trump had neither political nor military experience. He trash-talked his way into the nomination, critics said, which led to defections among the outraged Republican elite. By August, a #NeverTrump movement had taken root among many conservatives, including some at National Review, The Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal. Many neoconservatives who formerly supported President George W. Bush flipped parties, openly supporting the Clinton candidacy.

Trump’s Republican critics variously disparaged him as, at best, a Huey Long or Ross Perot, whose populist message was antithetical to conservative principles of unrestricted trade, open-border immigration, and proper personal comportment. At worse, a few Republican elites wrote Trump off as a dangerous fascist akin to Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler.

For his part, Trump often sounded bombastic and vulgar. By October, after the Access Hollywood video went viral, many in the party were openly calling for him to step down. Former primary rivals like Jeb Bush and John Kasich reneged on their past oaths to support the eventual Republican nominee and turned on Trump with a vengeance.

By the end of the third debate, it seemed as if Trump had carjacked the Republican limousine and driven it off a cliff. His campaign seemed indifferent to the usual stuff of an election run—high-paid handlers, a ground game, polling, oppositional research, fundraising, social media, establishment endorsements, and celebrity guest appearances at campaign rallies. Pundits ridiculed his supposedly “shallow bench” of advisors, a liability that would necessitate him crawling back to the Republican elite for guidance at some point.

What was forgotten in all this hysteria was that Trump had brought to the race unique advantages, some of his own making, some from finessing naturally occurring phenomena. His advocacy for fair rather than free trade, his insistence on enforcement of federal immigration law, and promises to bring back jobs to the United States brought back formerly disaffected Reagan Democrats, white working-class union members, and blue-dog Democrats—the “missing Romney voters”—into the party. Because of that, the formidable wall of rich electoral blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina crumbled.

Beyond that, even Trump’s admitted crudity was seen by many as evidence of a street-fighting spirit sorely lacking in Republican candidates that had lost too magnanimously in 1992, 2008, and 2016 to vicious Democratic hit machines. Whatever Trump was, he would not lose nobly, but perhaps pull down the rotten walls of the Philistines with him. That Hillary Clinton never got beyond her email scandals, the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation wrongdoing, and the Wikileaks and Guccifer hackings reminded the electorate that whatever Trump was or had done, he at least had not brazenly broken federal law as a public servant, or colluded with the media and the Republican National Committee to undermine the integrity of the primaries and sabotage his Republican rivals...

More.

One thing you don't hear as much these days is how folks said they liked Trump because they wanted a fighter. They wanted someone who would fully push back against the left. That's what I always loved about Trump and I saw in him a chance to destroy radical progressivism. I'm happy to say it's a new day. We might not get everything we want, but there's no denying it's a new era in American politics, and the radical left has been badly sidelined.

Even if that's just for four years that's good enough to help preserve our country for decades. Leftists are again going to have to go back to the drawing board to mount a sustained power grab to match this last eight years. It's glorious.

The Cyberwarfare Election

I was already thinking about this, as I was considering how I was going to analyze the 2016 election in my upcoming classes.

It's not just cyberwarfare as a political issue, but also a factor impinging directly on the campaigns, such as all the WikiLeaks revelations and accusations of Russian political influence.

In any case, the New York Times, "Under the Din of the Presidential Race Lies a Once and Future Threat: Cyberwarfare":

MANCHESTER, N.H. — The 2016 presidential race will be remembered for many ugly moments, but the most lasting historical marker may be one that neither voters nor American intelligence agencies saw coming: It is the first time that a foreign power has unleashed cyberweapons to disrupt, or perhaps influence, a United States election.

And there is a foreboding sense that, in elections to come, there is no turning back.

The steady drumbeat of allegations of Russian troublemaking — leaks from stolen emails and probes of election-system defenses — has continued through the campaign’s last days. These intrusions, current and former administration officials agree, will embolden other American adversaries, which have been given a vivid demonstration that, when used with some subtlety, their growing digital arsenals can be particularly damaging in the frenzy of a democratic election.

“Most of the biggest stories of this election cycle have had a cybercomponent to them — or the use of information warfare techniques that the Russians, in particular, honed over decades,” said David Rothkopf, the chief executive and editor of Foreign Policy, who has written two histories of the National Security Council. “From stolen emails, to WikiLeaks, to the hacking of the N.S.A.’s tools, and even the debate about how much of this the Russians are responsible for, it’s dominated in a way that we haven’t seen in any prior election.”

The magnitude of this shift has gone largely unrecognized in the cacophony of a campaign dominated by charges of groping and pay-for-play access. Yet the lessons have ranged from the intensely personal to the geostrategic...

Keep reading.

New WikiLeaks Podesta Emails Spark Accusations of Democrat Party Satanism

I saw some weird tweets earlier today with some strange pictures with a woman holding a bloody animal skull, featured alongside Hillary Clinton's "I'm with Her" logo. I didn't think much of it, other than it looked a little, er, unusual.

Well, now I see what the fuss was.

See the Guardian U.K., "Marina Abramović mention in Podesta emails sparks accusations of satanism."

Marina Abramović mention in Podesta emails sparks accusations of satanism https://t.co/dVndszCX0H

— Guardian US (@GuardianUS) November 4, 2016

Hmm, bizarre seems too mild here.

But see Katie Pavlich, at Town Hall, "No, John Podesta's Spirit Cooking Dinner Wasn't About Devil Worship":

Calm the hell down everyone, "Spirit Cooking" is name of a MoMA featured cookbook, not about Satan https://t.co/wQLNJ4z8Qz

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) November 4, 2016

@KatiePavlich The editor's note on this is one of my favorite things of the year. #deepregrets

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) November 4, 2016

Oh 2016. Thank goodness you'll soon be over.

The internet is in a panic today over an email published by Wikileaks and belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The email shows Podesta's brother, Tony Podesta, forwarding an email to John Podesta asking if he can come to a dinner. The dinner is described in the forwarded portion of the email, which is an email from artist Marina Abramovic to Tony Podesta expressing excitement over hosting a "Spirit Cooking" dinner at her home.

Because of the "Spirit Cooking" reference, a number of right-wing websites have rushed to condemn Podesta as a cult involved, blood sucking, hair eating devil worshipper. Twitter is ablaze with satanic images.

First off, we have no proof Podesta did or did not attend the dinner. Second, this dinner was about a "cookbook" and weird art, not devil worship.

Marina Abramovic is an artist (a strange, extreme artist) and published a "cookbook" called Spirit Cooking in 1996. The "cookbook" was featured at New York City's MoMa art museum. She was hosting a dinner at her home promoting the "cookbook" and invited the Podestas....

The dinner likely included a real dinner and Abramovic giving a presentation of her "art." Watch at your own risk here.

Abramovic is into "art" that involves bodily fluids, but that doesn't mean John Podesta is and again, there isn't proof he attended the dinner.

Everyone needs to calm down the hell down, pun intended.

This post has been updated with additional information for clarifying purposes. The "cookbook" is recipes of thoughts, not traditional food recipes. The author deeply regrets ever diving into this topic.

Assessing the Fallout From the Comey Effect

Well, I think a number of folks who liked Hillary may have second thoughts, and if that's as much as a percentage point or more in some states, it could make a difference.

But let's see.

Here's Larry Sabato et al., "The Comey Effect":

Crystal Ball: New Electoral College map. AZ/FL/OH to Toss-up https://t.co/HRDHetpcwz pic.twitter.com/dZ5FAQ5Z68

— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) October 31, 2016

FBI director throws a curveball into the presidential race with a week to go; Clinton slips in ratings but retains clear edge.

The purest version of the “October surprise” is a political bombshell that no one sees coming. In the closing days of the craziest campaign in modern history, we have just been witnesses to an October surprise so pure it would qualify for an Ivory Soap commercial (“99 and 44/100 percent pure”). When FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to certain members of Congress about a new development in the long-running Hillary Clinton email mess, the resulting earthquake could be picked up by a seismograph.

There are very legitimate questions about whether Director Comey was right or wrong to do what he did. It’s indisputable that Comey broke normal FBI practice in order to comment publicly on an incomplete, ongoing investigation. Moreover, Comey violated longstanding FBI standards that prohibit announcements within 60 days of an election that would influence the public’s choice. Just 11 days before Nov. 8, Comey took an unprecedented step that could affect the outcome of an election for president and Congress. The vagueness and ambiguity of his letter to some senior members of Congress guaranteed a leak to the press within five nanoseconds, and invited the rankest speculation from Clinton’s opponents.

To the extent that Clinton loses ground this week, and falls behind in battleground states where she had been leading, we will call this “the Comey Effect.” Similarly, if Comey’s decision results in Republicans holding onto the Senate and losing fewer House seats because he has invigorated their “checks and balances” argument, we will also attribute this to the Comey Effect.

The all-emails-all-the-time media coverage has already had an impact on the presidential race. Polls were tightening a bit before this, mainly due to some reluctant Republican partisans returning home at the end to their party’s ticket. We also need to remember something that has defined this race: The candidate in the spotlight, except for the convention period, has generally suffered in the polls. After the conclusion of the third debate, the focus seemed to move back to Clinton, as negative headlines about the Affordable Care Act and the daily trickle of sometimes embarrassing emails from WikiLeaks’ John Podesta treasure trove accumulated. This took the focus off of Donald Trump and put it on Clinton — and the Comey Effect has kept the spotlight on her. That the Democrats have struck back so hard against Comey, with some even calling for his resignation, indicates the seriousness with which they are treating this new development in the race.

Republicans will thrill to the Comey Effect. Democrats will heatedly denounce it. Yet it is real and impossible to ignore, and the FBI director’s extremely controversial move must be noted in the Crystal Ball, and maybe even in the history books.

Still, Clinton remains the clear favorite in the race, and there were not immediate signs that the overall race dramatically changed as a result of the Comey Effect. However, the race may have been getting closer anyway...

Keep reading.

Julian Assange Belongs in Jail

Marc Thiessen nails it with this piece, "Wikileaks is no hero":

Wikileaks is no hero. @marcthiessen: https://t.co/nGrJz8ElJL

— AEI Foreign Policy (@AEIfdp) October 28, 2016

Winston Churchill once said that “if Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” So it’s not surprising that many conservatives are thrilled to see WikiLeaks and the Clinton campaign at war, as Julian Assange releases emails exposing the duplicity and potential self-dealing of the Clinton machine and the blurred line between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.

But in our excitement, let’s not forget: Julian Assange is no hero. He is the devil.

Some conservatives seem to have lost sight of this. Rudy Giuliani recently said, “I find WikiLeaks very refreshing.” And Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) declared on Twitter, “Thank God for Wikileaks — doing the job that MSM WON’T!”

These conservatives seem to have forgotten that before Assange was revealing Clinton campaign emails, he was serially leaking stolen, classified national security information that has endangered the United States and its allies across the world. In 2010, WikiLeaks dumped more than 76,000 unredacted, secret U.S. intelligence documents into the public domain, including the identities of at least 100 Afghans who were informing on the Taliban. At the time, Assange admitted in an interview that his leaks might harm innocent people (“collateral damage, if you will,” he declared) and that WikiLeaks might get “blood on our hands,” but this was a price he was willing to pay for transparency.

In the years that followed, Assange continued his serial disclosures of stolen U.S. secrets. He released a troveof classified documents on Guantanamo Bay detainees, an unredacted archive of more than a quarter-million secret U.S. diplomatic cables, classified CIA documents exposing how CIA operatives maintain cover while traveling through airports, secret details of European military operations to intercept refugees traveling from Libya to Europe, and top-secret documents describing National Security Agency intercepts of foreign government communications, among others.

The cost of WikiLeaks’s disclosures to our national security is unfathomable. As former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden has put it, “We will never know who will now not come forward, who will not provide us with life-saving information” because of WikiLeaks, “but we can be certain that the cost will be great. And foreign intelligence services, with whom we have established productive and legitimate partnerships, will ask, ‘Can I trust the Americans to keep anything secret?’ ”

For these and other crimes, Assange should be in jail. But instead, he is being given sanctuary by the left-wing, anti-American government of Ecuador. Moreover, let’s not forget that Assange is attacking Hillary Clinton not because he thinks she is a corrupt liberal, but because he believes that she is too interventionist. “She’s palled up with the neocons responsible for the Iraq War,” Assange recently told Megyn Kelly, “and she’s grabbed on to this kind of neo-McCarthyist hysteria about Russia.” Assange wants the United States to pull back from Iraq and Afghanistan and stop criticizing Russian President Vladi­mir Putin — not exactly conservative priorities.

While the conservative embrace of Assange is troubling, the hypocrisy displayed by some in the media in not fully covering WikiLeaks’s Clinton revelations are equally galling. They had no problem reporting on WikiLeaks’s revelations of highly classified national security information, falling over themselves to publish what amounts to espionage porn. But according to the Media Research Center, between Oct. 7 and Oct. 13, “the morning and evening news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC dedicated 4 hours and 13 minutes to discussing the recent allegations of sexual misconduct surrounding Donald Trump’s campaign,” while “the continual release of the WikiLeaks emails from top Hillary staff [got] a comparatively puny 36 minutes of coverage .” That is a ratio of 7 to 1. And much of that meager coverage has been focused not on the revelations themselves, but on how the emails were hacked and leaked.

The Clinton campaign has a clear strategy for tamping down coverage of WikiLeaks — to paint the revelations as an assault on American democracy...

Still more.

Forget the F.B.I. Cache; the Podesta Emails Show How America is Run

From the interesting Thomas Frank, at the Guardian U.K., "WikiLeaks’ dump of messages to and from Clinton’s campaign chief offer an unprecedented view into the workings of the elite, and how it looks after itself":

The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.

The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.

They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.

Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by sorting through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been a Washington power broker for decades. I admit that I feel uncomfortable digging through this hoard; stealing someone’s email is a crime, after all, and it is outrageous that people’s personal information has been exposed, since WikiLeaks doesn’t seem to have redacted the emails in any way. There is also the issue of authenticity to contend with: we don’t know absolutely and for sure that these emails were not tampered with by whoever stole them from John Podesta. The supposed authors of the messages are refusing to confirm or deny their authenticity, and though they seem to be real, there is a small possibility they aren’t.

With all that taken into consideration, I think the WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty...

Well, he's on to something here, no doubt.

The Podesta emails, and all the salacious, scandalous, and unsurprisingly outrageous revelations therein, should be getting near non-stop coverage on the television and cable networks, and should be leading the newspaper headlines each and every morning.

I'm glad Frank's laying it out like it really is. Others have said virtually the same thing about this unaccountable political class (Angelo Codevilla, for one), although it's refreshing to see this coming from the far-left Guardian U.K.

In any case, more here.

Democrat Donna Brazile Shared Second Debate Question with Clinton Campaign, Hacked Email Indicates

These ghouls literally make me sick.

At WSJ:

A second hacked email has surfaced that appears to show Democratic consultant Donna Brazile sharing a debate question with Hillary Clinton‘s campaign in advance of a March primary debate.

Ms. Brazile—then a CNN contributor and Democratic Party official—warned one day before a March primary debate hosted by CNN in Flint, Mich., that a question would come “from a woman with a rash.”

“Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the [people] of Flint,” Ms. Brazile wrote in an email addressed to Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri and campaign chairman John Podesta.

The email was stolen from Mr. Podesta’s inbox and posted by the website WikiLeaks. Ms. Brazile currently is the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee.

The Clinton campaign has declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of the stolen emails and has pointed to possible links to the Russian government as evidence of foreign tampering in the election...

And it's no wonder huge numbers of Donald Trump supporters say the system's rigged, and they expect rioting if not a revolution if Hillary's elected.

It's going to be rough out there on election night.

Still more.

WikiLeaks Dumps Mean Hillary's Presidency Would Be Tainted from Day One

It's John Fund, via Instapundit.

A Clinton White House will be corruption central, and it'll keep congressional investigators busy. See WaPo, "House Republicans are already preparing for 'years' of investigations of Clinton."

The Economist Special Report on Russia: Putinism

"Ominous" is the word folks are using to describe this cover at the Economist.

Here's the report, "The threat from Russia: How to contain Vladimir Putin’s deadly, dysfunctional empire."

WikiLeaks sees the conspiracy there, a poorly veiled anti-Semitic conspiracy. Nasty:

The new sober cover of the Economist, which is controlled by Lynn de Rothschild, Clinton's "loyal adoring pal" https://t.co/oTCspy3ddR pic.twitter.com/KuRRfEELLJ

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 22, 2016