Don't Do The Crime
If You Can't Do The Time ...
The news from MAGA world last week in Georgia has been beyond grim. First Sidney Powell gets a sweetheart plea deal that permits her to keep her law license. John Eastman’s padawan learner, Kenneth Chesebro, is forced into a self preservation flip the next day by this, but with a felony that could end his legal career. I’m personally really curious about what Scott Hall, the first to plead out, might have shared about David Bossie, but it will be somewhere between functionally forever and never when that finally drops.
I updated the MAGA graph I’ve been keeping since September of 2020 and there’s a new thing in the Maltego Samples Dropbox. Every person who has acted as a CHS - a Confidential Human Source, is tagged with “ CHS” - all 28 of them and their connected entities are in Sample-2023-10-22-all-28-CHS.mtgl. This screen shot began as that set, but I focused on the people mentioned in the Emptywheel analysis of Mike Flynn’s Pardon.
Boris Epshteyn is there because he was at the RNC presser disaster the day before the even worse Drippy Rudy presser the next day. He kisses Trump’s ass, assuring him everything is rosy, while chasing away the actual lawyers who were trying to mitigate the damage. Timothy Parlatore tore into him in a public interview after parting ways with Trump, which is HIGHLY unusual. Those red lines are the places where breaches will happen first, and like a sinking submarine, once one bulkhead lets go you can expert the rest will join it in quick succession.
TOOKC:
We’re now three weeks into this twelve week period and my life has been such that I have had almost no time to write about The Online Operations Kill Chain, as I had intended. I haven’t given up, I’ve just had an “operations technical” problem in front of me that’s eating my brain. I’m having to get deeper into Wireshark after not doing much with protocol analyzers since 2011, and I’m simultaneously cramming Zed Attack Proxy along with it. Wordpress is the most common CMS in use, and as such it’s got a galaxy of hazards. I’m just trying to seal up ONE instance of it and I think I’m ready to suggest they migrate their back end processes to something less insecure.
The value of the MAGA meltdown graph in terms of influence ops is that it’s an enormous hydra of spin, a cloud of democracy threatening efforts to lie in a plausible enough fashion so as to make changes in election results. If you look at the events between the 2020 election and the January 6th Capitol Siege, the external “in the news” contours were visible at the time, and now the machinations in the background are starting to be revealed.
Conclusion:
Those of you who are Millennials and younger might not be familiar with the source of the title of this post - it’s lyrics from the theme for Baretta, a late 1970s detective show. David Toma is forgotten now, even by my generation, but his real life adventures as a police detective in Newark were the inspiration for what was then top quality prime time drama.
If you’re watching the MAGA meltdown unfold now, don’t get sick of it and tune out, because this is the stuff of documentaries and TV drama for the next fifty years … assuming our democracy survives and such things can actually be produced.
But there are degrees of attentiveness, and I’ve been pursuing this as an autistic circumscribed interest.
The thirty nine months of squirreling away documents, poking around in them with Open Semantic Search, and keeping that graph have permitted me to land two solid hits. There’s an article in a paper of record that happened because a reporter asked me to check a couple things, and I pointed out a whole episode they had otherwise missed. The other hit is more recent, I have not yet seen it in the news, but I know that it’s going to come, just because of the names of those involved.
I’m starting to get the feeling that the combination of Alvin Bragg, Leticia James, Fani Willis, and Jack Smith are going to set off a cascade of failure. Marcy Wheeler isn’t publishing a graph, but she’s got a fairly complete one in her head, as evidenced by this post on Mike Flynn’s pardon. Many others are paying close attention as well, intellectually I know I can let this slip a bit, and focusing on other things will not be abandoning my post. But getting to the point of just skimming relevant articles without opening Maltego is going to take some effort.