By Lambert Strether of Corrente.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Readers will recall my view that the distinctive competence of the modern political party is control over the ballot: Who gets listed on it, how and when it gets cast (and who gets to cast it), how it is counted, and the validity of the count[1]. In the modern era, since Bush v. Gore (2000), this question of validity (\u201ccertification\u201d) has assumed increasing importance, and since Trump (2016\u2014), the \u201cintelligence community\u201d (IC) [2] has become increasingly involved with it, under the aegis of preventing \u201celection interference.\u201d (This effort is closely allied with the \u201cCensorship Industrial Complex,\u201d with its notions of misinformation and disinformation.)<\/p>\n Readers will also recall my view that the modern political party is in fact quite hard to put a boundary around, but that the Democrat Party can be thought of as a network that includes<\/a> electeds, funders, vendors, apparatchiks, NGOs, miscellaneous mercenaries, most of the press, and the dominant figures in the intelligence community (all, of course, centered on the ballot, as above). <\/p>\n This post started out, and I really hoped was going to end up as, a simple listing of the intelligence agencies (\u201cspooks\u201d, OED sense 2<\/a>[3]) involved with \u201celection integrity<\/a>.\u201d[4] However, in the collective, trackless Gish Gallop<\/a> that is our contemporary discourse, \u201cForeign Malign Influence Center\u201d was suddenly all over the field<\/a>, and I had to add material to cover it, which is interesting and revealing, as we shall see.<\/p>\n The institutional fluidity of the Democrat Party allows events like the following to take place. From Politico (2020), \u201cHunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say<\/a>\u201c:<\/p>\n More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden\u2019s son \u201chas all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.\u201d<\/p>\n The letter, signed on Monday, centers around a batch of documents released by the New York Post last week that purport to tie the Democratic nominee to his son Hunter\u2019s business dealings. Under the banner headline \u201cBiden Secret E-mails,\u201d the Post reported it was given a copy of Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop hard drive by President Donald Trump\u2019s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said he got it from a Mac shop owner in Delaware who also alerted the FBI.<\/p>\n While the letter\u2019s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them \u201cdeeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case\u201d and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin\u2019s hand at work.\/p><\/p>\n \u201cIf we are right,\u201d they added, \u201cthis is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Later, of course, it turned out that the letter was not quite as spontaneous (\u201cdozens of former intel officials \u201c) as we had first supposed. From the Wall Street Journal (2023), \u201cThe Hunter Biden Laptop Disinformation Is Exposed<\/a>\u201c:<\/p>\n Now we have this deposed transcript with [Michael Morell, former acting CIA director] in front of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, and he says that three days after the Post story broke, he got a call from Antony Blinken who was at that time, a senior age, the Biden campaign, who is now Secretary of State, saying, \u201cWhat\u2019d you think of this story?\u201d And the way the letters put it is that while he apparently called, mostly is just gathering Morell\u2019s reaction to it. Morell acknowledged that prior to Blinken\u2019s call, he didn\u2019t have any intent to write this statement. After Blinken\u2019s call, he got all the rest of the intelligence officials together and put it out there. The Biden campaign also apparently helped strategize its release in terms of who it went to in the press. And so the bottom line is, this letter that supposedly was this automatic response from some of these officials that they felt they needed to set the record straight. In fact, the Biden campaign had been involved in the genesis of this statement, which it then went on to use to refute any of the claims that were out there.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Summarizing, the letter was arranged by the Biden campaign, through its then campaign operative, Anthony Blinken, and the spooks were only too happy to co-operate (supporting Gramsci\u2019s concept, if I summarize correctly, that the State (the CIA) and civil society (the Biden campaign) are only separable as objects of study, and in fact are two aspects of a single ruling class).<\/p>\n Given the above, therefore, in what follows we need to disabuse ourselves from the notion that intelligence officials are in any way politically neutral. Many, perhaps most, of them are; but when a perceived emergency coincides with the appropriate permission structure \u2014 say, the election of a \u201cHitler\u201d \u2014 the professional integument bursts asunder, and party is revealed (rather like the chestbuster scene in Alien<\/em>, except with 50 former senior aliens[5]).<\/p>\n In this post, then, I\u2019ll first present that simple list; if and when any of them appear in the news, at least we\u2019ll have a scorecard that lists the players. Then I willl dig into the \u201cForeign Malign Influence Center.\u201d I\u2019ll conclude with some more speculation on the structure of the Democrat Party.<\/p>\n Spooks Involved with \u201cElection Integrity\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Let me caveat that this list is the result of some reasonably persistent searching. I can\u2019t claim to have found every Federal intelligence agency involved with election integrity (and I didn\u2019t even look at the states (or the localities; looking at you, NYPD<\/a>)). Nor can I claim that I understand the org chart, let alone the real<\/em> relationships). In any case, here they are (and there are rather a lot):<\/p>\n DHS<\/em><\/strong> (Department of Homeland Security). From their Election Security page: <\/p>\n We recognize the fundamental link between the trust in election infrastructure and the confidence the American public places in basic democratic function. A secure and resilient electoral process is a vital national interest and one of our highest priorities at the Department of Homeland Security.<\/p>\n We are committed to working collaboratively with those on the front lines of elections \u2013 state and local government, election officials, federal partners and the vendor community \u2013 to manage risks to election infrastructure. We will remain transparent as well as agile to combat and secure our physical and cyber infrastructure against new and evolving threats.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n DHS has a sub-agency, CISA<\/a> (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency):<\/p>\n CISA\u2019s services are available at no cost to the state and local government and officials. All services we provide are available upon request and are strictly voluntary, CISA only provides services when requested by state and local election officials.<\/p>\n Key areas of our services<\/a> include the following:<\/p>\n Additional Resources<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n FBI <\/em><\/strong> (Federal Bureau of Investigation). From the Election Crimes and Security page<\/a>:<\/p>\n Fair elections are the foundation of our democracy, and the FBI is committed to protecting the rights of all Americans to vote.<\/p>\n The U.S. government only works when legal votes are counted and when campaigns follow the law. When the legitimacy of elections is corrupted, our democracy is threatened.<\/p>\n While individual states run elections, the FBI plays an important role in protecting federal interests and preventing violations of your constitutional rights.<\/p>\n An election crime is generally a federal crime if:<\/p>\n The ballot includes one or more federal candidates<\/p>\n<\/li>\n An election or polling place official abuses their office<\/p>\n<\/li>\n The conduct involves false voter registration<\/p>\n<\/li>\n The crime intentionally targets minority protected classes<\/p>\n<\/li>\n The activity violates federal campaign finance laws<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n And from Election Crimes and Security<\/a>:<\/p>\n The FBI is the lead federal agency responsible for investigating foreign influence operations. In the fall of 2017, Director Christopher Wray established the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States.<\/p>\n Foreign influence operations have taken many forms and used many tactics over the years. Most widely reported these days are attempts by adversaries\u2014hoping to reach a wide swath of Americans covertly from outside the United States\u2014to use false personas and fabricated stories on social media platforms to discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.<\/p>\n Other influence operations by adversaries include:<\/p>\n ODNI<\/em><\/strong> (Office of the Director of National Intelligence)<\/p>\n From the FMIC (\u201cForeign Malign Influence Center\u201d home page, \u201cWe Lead The IC\u2019s Efforts to Protect The United States From Foreign Malign Influence<\/a>\u201c:<\/p>\n We mitigate threats to democracy and U.S national interests from foreign malign influence (FMI) by managing the Intelligence Community\u2019s (IC\u2019s) collection resources, building partnerships, and advancing strategic analysis, while protecting the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.<\/p>\n FMIC serves as the primary U.S. Government organization for integrating intelligence pertaining to foreign malign influence (FMI), including on election security. FMI is defined as subversive, undeclared, coercive, or criminal activities by foreign governments, non-state actors, or their proxies to affect another nation\u2019s popular or political attitudes, perceptions, or behaviors to advance their interests.<\/p>\n To address the persistent and dynamic threat from foreign malign influence, the FMIC team engages with colleagues from a wide variety of institutions, including other IC agencies, the wider U.S. Government (including law enforcement and diplomatic elements), the private sector, civil society, and the academy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n (More on the FMIC below.) Non-IC Federal actors include DOJ<\/a> (United States Department of Justice), the EAC<\/a> (United States Election Assistance Commission), and FEMA<\/a> (Federal Emergency Management Agency). For those who have long memories, I should also mention Fusion Centers<\/a>, which Obama used to suppress Occupy<\/a>. Washington D.C.\u2019s Fusion Center is interesting, because it seems to be operating with a national scope. WaPo, \u201cAs midterms near, D.C. fusion center watches for political violence<\/a>\u201c:<\/p>\n As the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election approach, analysts at D.C.\u2019s fusion center are scanning social media and browsing the dark corners of the internet, looking for threats against election officials in battleground states and large rallies that could turn violent.<\/p>\n D.C. has had a fusion center \u2014 where analysts gather threat-related information and distribute it to other local, state and federal agencies \u2014 since 2012, but will soon break ground on a new facility in the Navy Yard area. The new facility\u2019s Emergency Operations Center is about 9,000 square feet \u2014 three times the size of the previous facility \u2014 and will have larger, better-equipped conference rooms, officials said.<\/p>\n For the midterms, [Christopher Rodriguez, the Director of D.C.\u2019s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency], said the city has contacts with the other 79 fusion centers in the country\u2026 <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Now let\u2019s turn to FMIC, in detail.<\/p>\n The \u201cForeign Malign Influence Center\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n The New Yorker\u2019s David D. Kirkpatrick, \u201cThe U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference<\/a>\u201d begins with local color:<\/p>\n The Intelligence Community Campus-Bethesda, a vast office complex covered in vertical panels of maroon siding and mirrored glass, sits on a cliff overlooking the Potomac, surrounded by a forty-acre lawn and a tall wrought-iron fence. Roughly three thousand employees of various United States spy agencies work there. About two dozen of them are assigned to the Foreign Malign Influence Center\u2014the command hub of the battle to protect the Presidential election from manipulation by foreign powers. The center, which opened in 2022, is responsible for deciphering, and defeating, surreptitious efforts to rig or tilt the American vote. The October before an election is the busy season.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And the story begins with an interview:<\/p>\n Jessica Brandt, a forty-year-old newcomer to the intelligence world, is the center\u2019s first director. Before her appointment, last year, she\u2019d spent her career writing research papers at Washington think tanks, most recently on \u201cdigital authoritarianism\u201d\u2014the way dictators use technology to control or manipulate people, at home and abroad. At a thirty-seat conference table in the center, we talked about her move from theory to practice. Now that Brandt has access to classified intelligence, she knows as much as anyone about how foreign powers are trying to tamper with American elections.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cWriting research papers at Washington think tanks\u201d seems curiously vague for a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter<\/a>, especially one who started his career as a fact checker<\/a>. So who is Jessica Brandt? From her bio at JustSecurity<\/a>:<\/p>\n Jessica Brandt (@jessbrandt) is Head of Policy and research at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. She is a David Rockefeller Fellow of the Trilateral Commission and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Let\u2019s stop our knees from jerking at the mention of the Trilateral Commission and the CFR, and ask: What is the Alliance for Securing Democracy? (From Brandt\u2019s CV, she was at both ASD and GMF<\/a> 2019-21, immediately after<\/em> the events I am about to relate.) From the German Marshall Fund<\/a> (GMF):<\/p>\n The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a nonpartisan initiative housed at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, develops comprehensive strategies to deter, defend against, and raise the costs on autocratic efforts to undermine and interfere in democratic institutions. ASD has staff in Washington, D.C., and Brussels, bringing together experts on disinformation, malign finance, emerging technologies, elections integrity, economic coercion, and cybersecurity, as well as Russia, China, and the Middle East, to collaborate across traditional stovepipes and develop cross-cutting frameworks.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n More to the point<\/a>:<\/p>\n The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) is a political advocacy group formed in July 2017.<\/p>\n The organization is chaired and run primarily by former senior United States intelligence and State Department officials.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n (In other words, when Kirkpatrick writes that Brandt is \u201ca forty-year-old newcomer to the intelligence world,\u201d he\u2019s just wrong.) Even more to the point<\/a>, ASD created the notorious Hamilton 68 Dashboard. From Matt Taibbi, interviewed by Chris Hedges, in \u201cHamilton 68: How former intelligence officials and Democratic operatives conspired to manufacture \u201cRussiagate\u2019<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n [TAIBBI:][T]he shortcut version of this story is that after Trump won the election, Chris, there was immediately a series of stories coming from different directions saying that the election was illegitimate, that Trump had been assisted by Russians, that there was some kind of collusion going on, and that there was disinformation in the news media that had been amplified by Russian accounts that Trump\u2019s own accounts and hashtags and tweets had been amplified by Russian forces. And then formally in, I believe it was August of 2017, this group Hamilton 68 came out. It\u2019s an outgrowth of both the German Marshall Fund and a think tank called the Alliance for Securing Democracy. And it was basically a tool designed to be used by reporters and academics that \u201ctrack Russian disinformation\u201d by monitoring accounts that were called linked, \u201clinked to Russian influence activities online.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, they never disclosed what was on this list or what they were actually tracking, and it was only by accident looking through some Twitter files, emails that we find this big conversation where internally Twitter is saying, we\u2019ve got the list. We\u2019ve reversed engineered it, and they\u2019re not Russians. These are mostly ordinary people. Out of 644 accounts, only 36 of them began in Russia, and most of the rest of them, from what I\u2019ve found, were ordinary people, a lot of them right leaning, but some of them on the left, too. So it was a fraud. It was a big gigantic media fraud<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And Taibbi writes, in \u201cMatt Taibbi: Move Over, Jason Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud<\/a>,\u201d hammering home the partisan connections:<\/p>\n Hamilton 68 was and is a computerized \u201cdashboard\u201d designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure \u201cRussian disinformation.\u201d It was the brainchild of former FBI agent (and current MSNBC \u201cdisinformation expert\u201d) Clint Watts, and backed by the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan think-tank. The latter\u2019s advisory panel includes former acting CIA chief Michael Morell, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, former Hillary for America chair John Podesta, and onetime Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And:<\/p>\n This was not faulty science. It was a scam. Instead of tracking how \u201cRussia\u201d influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming. As Roth put it, \u201cVirtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Now let\u2019s return to Brandt\u2019s CV<\/a>. I have examined her two-and-one-half pages of \u201cSelect Recent Publications.\u201d Of the eight articles that might have reasonably have mentioned the Hamilton 68 project \u2014 Mueller\u2019s investigation is over. Russia\u2019s election meddling isn\u2019t<\/a> (2019), How global efforts to limit disinformation could infringe speech<\/a> (2019), How Not to Handle Security Threats to Our Elections<\/a> (2019), Defending 2020<\/a> (2021), How Democracies Can Win an Information Contest Without Undercutting Their Values<\/a> (2021), and When democracies employ repressive technology, what are the repercussions?<\/a> (2023) \u2014 none did, whether pre-Taibbi, as a success, or post-Taibbi, as a debacle. A strange omission for ASD\u2019s Head of Policy and Research! And a question that surely Kirkpatrick might have asked?<\/p>\n (Tantalizingly, ASD\u2019s Wikipedia\u2019s page has a \u201cSee also\u201d entry<\/a> for Propornot, which, aided by Marty Baron\u2019s WaPo, attacked Naked Capitalism in 2018. ProporNot, however, which looks like a crude and early version of Hamilton 68, seems to be a creature of The Atlantic Council<\/a>, not ASD, although its definitely spook-adjacent<\/a>. See Yves on Propornot here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n The bottom line is that Brandt walks, as it were, both sides of the the street: She may very well be a spook defending the country against election-related foreign malign information, but she has also been intimately involved with spook-adjacent and -filled institutions that created<\/em> and weaponized domestic<\/em> malign information that smeared US citizens, civilians, exercising their First Amendment rights, on behalf of one political party, and so far as I can tell without a moment of self-reflection. If she took any responsibility for the debacle, her CV certainly doesn\u2019t show it. And yet all that goes unquestioned in Kirkpatrick\u2019s piece, which we must now sadly characterize as \u201cpuff.\u201d Down the memory hole it goes!<\/p>\n Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n So now ASD\u2019s Jessica Brandt is taking point for election integrity at ODNI\u2019s Foreign Malign Influence Center; what she comes up with will surely be not without interest, especially in the event of a Trump victory. In that case, one might wonder whether questions about the validity of the balloting could be raised, particularly if foreign malign influence were to be \u201cassessed,\u201d as with RussiaGate. I am sure we will all follow Brandt\u2019s career with interest, now that The New Yorker has introduced her to a broader public. I make no predictions, but I do indicate possibilities. These people, after all, have form.<\/p>\n I said I\u2019d speculate a bit on the structure of the Democrat Party, which seems to be top-of-mind with a variety of people. Eric Raymond, of open source software fame, has this to say<\/a>:<\/p>\n I think it\u2019s because the Democratic fraud machine isn\u2019t a single organization with a unitary command structure. It\u2019s decentralized in order to be deniable \u2013 a bunch of little, relatively localized criminal conspiracies run by GOTV operatives and corrupted partisan bureaucrats, a stochastic network the DNC funds but deliberately doesn\u2019t control or coordinate. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And from Roger Kimball in The Spectator<\/a>:<\/p>\n By \u201cthe Syndicate\u201d (what I sometimes call \u201cthe Committee\u201d), I of course mean the shadowy board of overseers that controls the Democratic Party and, by extension, the administrative apparatus that governs us. No one knows exactly who sits on this board. I suspect that even those who, in retrospect, we can see have occupied senior positions in its ranks are often uncertain about their place in the hierarchy. <\/p>\n Elsewhere, I have invoked C.S. Lewis\u2019s idea of \u201cThe Inner Ring\u201d to explain the dynamics of this phenomenon. In every social organization, Lewis noted, there exist two hierarchies. One is an official and public hierarchy. The other is covert. The names of its members are \u201cnot printed anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it\u2026 It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n I think Raymond has the right structure but the wrong scale; and Kimball has the right scale but the wrong structure. A \u201cstochastic network\u201d makes sense to me, but at the national level (though to be fair, Raymond is talking about election fraud, typically local); and \u201cthe Inner Ring\u201d that \u201cgoverns us\u201d makes sense, too, but there is no single board. The phrase \u201cemergent Flex-Net\u201d popped into my head, but that is a post for another day.<\/p>\n NOTES<\/strong><\/p>\n [1] Note that the Electoral College can be considered a form of balloting, too.<\/p>\n [2] There is, amusingly, a government site called \u201cThe Intelligence Community<\/a>,\u201d which includes 18 agencies, but has no About page. The page has an ODNI logo on it, so I assume that\u2019s who runs it.<\/p>\n [3] Sense 3<\/a>: \u201cA derogatory term for a black person.\u201d That\u2019s not my intent. My impression is that this usage is now fading (Merriam-Webster<\/a> leaves it out.) I\u2019ve been using \u201cspook\u201d to mean intelligence operative for some time, and that usage seems never to have given offense. And I\u2019ve never been able to come up with a better term. In any case, LeCarr\u00e9 has been said<\/a> to have used it<\/a>.<\/p>\n [4] Never eat at a place called \u201cMom\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n [5] None of whom were ever reprimanded, and many of whom are still making bank on national television.<\/p>\n\n
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