By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
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 (“certification”) has assumed increasing importance, and since Trump (2016—), the “intelligence community” (IC) [2] has become increasingly involved with it, under the aegis of preventing “election interference.” (This effort is closely allied with the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” with its notions of misinformation and disinformation.)
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 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).
This post started out, and I really hoped was going to end up as, a simple listing of the intelligence agencies (“spooks”, OED sense 2[3]) involved with “election integrity.”[4] However, in the collective, trackless Gish Gallop that is our contemporary discourse, “Foreign Malign Influence Center” was suddenly all over the field, and I had to add material to cover it, which is interesting and revealing, as we shall see.
The institutional fluidity of the Democrat Party allows events like the following to take place. From Politico (2020), “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say“:
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’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
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’s business dealings. Under the banner headline “Biden Secret E-mails,” the Post reported it was given a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said he got it from a Mac shop owner in Delaware who also alerted the FBI.
While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work./p>
“If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
Later, of course, it turned out that the letter was not quite as spontaneous (“dozens of former intel officials say“) as we had first supposed. From the Wall Street Journal (2023), “The Hunter Biden Laptop Disinformation Is Exposed“:
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, “What’d you think of this story?” And the way the letters put it is that while he apparently called, mostly is just gathering Morell’s reaction to it. Morell acknowledged that prior to Blinken’s call, he didn’t have any intent to write this statement. After Blinken’s 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.
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’s 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).
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 — say, the election of a “Hitler” — the professional integument bursts asunder, and party is revealed (rather like the chestbuster scene in Alien, except with 50 former senior aliens[5]).
In this post, then, I’ll first present that simple list; if and when any of them appear in the news, at least we’ll have a scorecard that lists the players. Then I willl dig into the “Foreign Malign Influence Center.” I’ll conclude with some more speculation on the structure of the Democrat Party.
Spooks Involved with “Election Integrity”
Let me caveat that this list is the result of some reasonably persistent searching. I can’t claim to have found every Federal intelligence agency involved with election integrity (and I didn’t even look at the states (or the localities; looking at you, NYPD)). Nor can I claim that I understand the org chart, let alone the real relationships). In any case, here they are (and there are rather a lot):
DHS (Department of Homeland Security). From their Election Security page:
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.
We are committed to working collaboratively with those on the front lines of elections – state and local government, election officials, federal partners and the vendor community – 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.
DHS has a sub-agency, CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency):
CISA’s 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.
Key areas of our services include the following:
- Cybersecurity Advisors and Protective Security Advisors, regionally located personnel who offer state and local governments, as well as private sector partners, immediate and sustained assistance, coordination, and outreach to prepare for and protect from cyber and physical threats.
- Cybersecurity Assessments, such as Cyber Hygiene Scanning, Risk and Vulnerability Assessment, and Cyber Resilience Reviews.
- Detection and Prevention, such as Cyber Threat Hunting and Enhanced Cyber Services.
- Information Sharing and Awareness, such as National Cyber Awareness System alerts and advisories, and the Homeland Security Information Network portal.
- Incident Response, provides 24/7 intrusion analysis in response to cyber incident.
- Training and Career Development, including the Federal Virtual Training Environment (FedVTE) cybersecurity training, and National Initiative for Cybersecurity Careers and Studies Catalog.
Additional Resources
FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). From the Election Crimes and Security page:
Fair elections are the foundation of our democracy, and the FBI is committed to protecting the rights of all Americans to vote.
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.
While individual states run elections, the FBI plays an important role in protecting federal interests and preventing violations of your constitutional rights.
An election crime is generally a federal crime if:
The ballot includes one or more federal candidates
An election or polling place official abuses their office
The conduct involves false voter registration
The crime intentionally targets minority protected classes
The activity violates federal campaign finance laws
And from Election Crimes and Security:
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.
Foreign influence operations have taken many forms and used many tactics over the years. Most widely reported these days are attempts by adversaries—hoping to reach a wide swath of Americans covertly from outside the United States—to use false personas and fabricated stories on social media platforms to discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.
Other influence operations by adversaries include:
- Targeting U.S. officials and other U.S. persons through traditional intelligence tradecraft
- Criminal efforts to suppress voting and provide illegal campaign financing
- Cyber attacks against voting infrastructure, along with computer intrusions targeting elected officials and others
ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence)
From the FMIC (“Foreign Malign Influence Center” home page, “We Lead The IC’s Efforts to Protect The United States From Foreign Malign Influence“:
We mitigate threats to democracy and U.S national interests from foreign malign influence (FMI) by managing the Intelligence Community’s (IC’s) collection resources, building partnerships, and advancing strategic analysis, while protecting the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.
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’s popular or political attitudes, perceptions, or behaviors to advance their interests.
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.
(More on the FMIC below.) Non-IC Federal actors include DOJ (United States Department of Justice), the EAC (United States Election Assistance Commission), and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency). For those who have long memories, I should also mention Fusion Centers, which Obama used to suppress Occupy. Washington D.C.’s Fusion Center is interesting, because it seems to be operating with a national scope. WaPo, “As midterms near, D.C. fusion center watches for political violence“:
As the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election approach, analysts at D.C.’s 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.
D.C. has had a fusion center — where analysts gather threat-related information and distribute it to other local, state and federal agencies — since 2012, but will soon break ground on a new facility in the Navy Yard area. The new facility’s Emergency Operations Center is about 9,000 square feet — three times the size of the previous facility — and will have larger, better-equipped conference rooms, officials said.
For the midterms, [Christopher Rodriguez, the Director of D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency], said the city has contacts with the other 79 fusion centers in the country…
Now let’s turn to FMIC, in detail.
The “Foreign Malign Influence Center”
The New Yorker’s David D. Kirkpatrick, “The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference” begins with local color:
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—the 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.
And the story begins with an interview:
Jessica Brandt, a forty-year-old newcomer to the intelligence world, is the center’s first director. Before her appointment, last year, she’d spent her career writing research papers at Washington think tanks, most recently on “digital authoritarianism”—the 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.
“Writing research papers at Washington think tanks” seems curiously vague for a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, especially one who started his career as a fact checker. So who is Jessica Brandt? From her bio at JustSecurity:
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.
Let’s 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’s CV, she was at both ASD and GMF 2019-21, immediately after the events I am about to relate.) From the German Marshall Fund (GMF):
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.
More to the point:
The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) is a political advocacy group formed in July 2017.
The organization is chaired and run primarily by former senior United States intelligence and State Department officials.
(In other words, when Kirkpatrick writes that Brandt is “a forty-year-old newcomer to the intelligence world,” he’s just wrong.) Even more to the point, ASD created the notorious Hamilton 68 Dashboard. From Matt Taibbi, interviewed by Chris Hedges, in “Hamilton 68: How former intelligence officials and Democratic operatives conspired to manufacture “Russiagate’”
[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’s 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’s 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 “track Russian disinformation” by monitoring accounts that were called linked, “linked to Russian influence activities online.”
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’ve got the list. We’ve reversed engineered it, and they’re 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’ve 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
And Taibbi writes, in “Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jason Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud,” hammering home the partisan connections:
Hamilton 68 was and is a computerized “dashboard” designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure “Russian disinformation.” It was the brainchild of former FBI agent (and current MSNBC “disinformation expert”) Clint Watts, and backed by the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan think-tank. The latter’s 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.
And:
This was not faulty science. It was a scam. Instead of tracking how “Russia” 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, “Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”
Now let’s return to Brandt’s CV. I have examined her two-and-one-half pages of “Select Recent Publications.” Of the eight articles that might have reasonably have mentioned the Hamilton 68 project — Mueller’s investigation is over. Russia’s election meddling isn’t (2019), How global efforts to limit disinformation could infringe speech (2019), How Not to Handle Security Threats to Our Elections (2019), Defending 2020 (2021), How Democracies Can Win an Information Contest Without Undercutting Their Values (2021), and When democracies employ repressive technology, what are the repercussions? (2023) — none did, whether pre-Taibbi, as a success, or post-Taibbi, as a debacle. A strange omission for ASD’s Head of Policy and Research! And a question that surely Kirkpatrick might have asked?
(Tantalizingly, ASD’s Wikipedia’s page has a “See also” entry for Propornot, which, aided by Marty Baron’s 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, not ASD, although its definitely spook-adjacent. See Yves on Propornot here.)
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 and weaponized domestic 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’t show it. And yet all that goes unquestioned in Kirkpatrick’s piece, which we must now sadly characterize as “puff.” Down the memory hole it goes!
Conclusion
So now ASD’s Jessica Brandt is taking point for election integrity at ODNI’s 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 “assessed,” as with RussiaGate. I am sure we will all follow Brandt’s 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.
I said I’d 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:
I think it’s because the Democratic fraud machine isn’t a single organization with a unitary command structure. It’s decentralized in order to be deniable – 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’t control or coordinate.
And from Roger Kimball in The Spectator:
By “the Syndicate” (what I sometimes call “the Committee”), 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.
Elsewhere, I have invoked C.S. Lewis’s idea of “The Inner Ring” 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 “not printed anywhere.”
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… 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.
I think Raymond has the right structure but the wrong scale; and Kimball has the right scale but the wrong structure. A “stochastic network” makes sense to me, but at the national level (though to be fair, Raymond is talking about election fraud, typically local); and “the Inner Ring” that “governs us” makes sense, too, but there is no single board. The phrase “emergent Flex-Net” popped into my head, but that is a post for another day.
NOTES
[1] Note that the Electoral College can be considered a form of balloting, too.
[2] There is, amusingly, a government site called “The Intelligence Community,” which includes 18 agencies, but has no About page. The page has an ODNI logo on it, so I assume that’s who runs it.
[3] Sense 3: “A derogatory term for a black person.” That’s not my intent. My impression is that this usage is now fading (Merriam-Webster leaves it out.) I’ve been using “spook” to mean intelligence operative for some time, and that usage seems never to have given offense. And I’ve never been able to come up with a better term. In any case, LeCarré has been said to have used it.
[4] Never eat at a place called “Mom’s.”
[5] None of whom were ever reprimanded, and many of whom are still making bank on national television.