Russia’s new “useful idiots”; RT’s journalistic ethics; FBI & spying, and more
It’s time to get the FBI out of the spy business (John R. Schindler, Observer)
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is one of the finest law enforcement agencies on earth—perhaps the finest. While no sprawling bureaucracy of tens of thousands of special agents, analysts and support personnel, scattered around 56 field offices nationwide, is without its malcontents and missteps, the FBI’s overall reputation is one of honesty, dedication and professionalism, deservedly so. Given its role as America’s top law enforcement agency, the Bureau has been a lightning rod for criticism since its founding 110 years ago. Historically, most of the criticism of the FBI has come from civil libertarians and the Left, whereas more recently attacks on the Bureau have shifted to stemming from the Right, specifically fans of the Trump administration, who in an unhinged fashion have compared the FBI to Nazis and the KGB. The Bureau’s top critic today is President Donald Trump himself, who ever since his inauguration has waged an ugly public campaign against the FBI, regularly accusing it of irregularities and worse in its investigation of his secret Kremlin connections. The other day Trump took to Twitter, as he so often does, and raged at the FBI again, accusing it of having a “representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president… If true—all time biggest political scandal!” If true, indeed. This is a grave accusation, and it’s false on its face. the president seems not to understand that if anyone connected to him went to the FBI to report his or her concerns about ties to Russia, that’s a very different story than the Bureau planting someone inside the Trump campaign.
What’s important in the Senate Judiciary Committee transcripts (Quinta Jurecic, Lawfare)
On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a batch of transcripts and materialscollected from nine witnesses whom the committee interviewed over the course of its investigation into Russian election interference—specifically, its investigation into the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting that Donald Trump, Jr. attended hoping for compromising information on Hillary Clinton. But though the document dump takes up thousands of pages, the signal-to-noise ratio is low. The details offered by the documents are damning in the same way that the Trump Tower story was already damning: they show an effort by Russian cut-outs to establish connections with the Trump campaign and a campaign eager to take them up on their offer, if not all that adept in doing so.
Getting to the bottom of the Trump Tower meeting (Kate Brannen, Just Security)
There are more than afew of the discrepancies in people’s stories that stood out as I made my way through the trove of documentsreleased last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The varying tales, along with Donald Trump Jr.’s severe lapses in memory, and the changing cover-up stories that emerged when the story first brokein July 2017, leave you with the nagging feeling that you still don’t have the complete story about what happened in that conference room in Trump Tower that fateful summer before Donald Trump won the election.
Contempt of Congress, contempt by Congress (Asha Rangappa and Jed Shugerman, Just Security)
Congressmen Devin Nunes’s (R-Calif.) and Mark Meadows’s (R-N.C.) are demanding classified documents from the Department of Justice relating to the Mueller investigation. Nunes has requested that the DOJ reveal the identity of a key source in the Russia probe, despite the DOJ’s objection that providing this information would place the source in danger. Nunes nevertheless has issued subpoenas to the DOJ and is threatening Attorney General Jeff Sessions with contempt charges and impeachment if he doesn’t comply. Meadows and Nunes have grounded their aggressive requests in Congress’ constitutional oversight authority over the Executive Branch, and the Trump administration has endorsed their efforts. Though they may not realize it, in doing so they are undermining the core constitutional argument asserted by President Trump and his allies against the Russia investigation.
Election hacking puts focus on paperless voting machines (Christina A. Cassidy, AP)
As the midterm congressional primaries heat up amid fears of Russian hacking, roughly 1 in 5 Americans will be casting ballots on machines that do not produce a paper record of their votes. That worries voting and cybersecurity experts, who say lack of a hard copy makes it difficult to double-check results for signs of manipulation.
Alarm at Kaspersky software discounts for British forces (Mark Hookham and Richard Kerbaj, Times)
A Russian cyber-security firm at the center of spying fears has targeted more than 140,000 British military personnel and police officers with big discounts on computer software. Members of the UK armed forces, police and other emergency services are being offered 50% off Kaspersky Lab antivirus software in exclusive rewards schemes. The revelation has alarmed security officials who fear the firm’s products could be used by the Kremlin to spy on the British military and police.