Lawfare Article and Podcast Debates

Great Debates
#1

I believe that we have a few people who regularly read/listen to the content over at Lawfare. Their website has no place for one to comment, debate, nor offer any feedback so instead I would like to do so here.

Seeing as they post multiple articles per day and not everything is worth talking about (and, because this is GD), the expectation is not that we randomly comment, abstractly, about every single thing they produce. Rather, you should only raise an article or podcast for discussion if you have some debate (i.e. critique) of that material.

The standards for linking should be the same as anything else:

  1. Post the link.
  2. Give a short description of the link.
  3. Don’t break their copyright by copying and pasting over huge swathes of text. By all means, copy a few sentences if that’s the best way to provide a summary, but don’t exceed that.

And of course: Have a topic of debate!

#2

A new post reviews the Steele Dossier to decide whether or not it holds up against information that we know has been verified by Mueller and/or the DOJ. Overall, they conclude that it has done pretty well:

The Steele Dossier: A Retrospective

However, while I don’t disagree that Trump’s people were (likely) doing naughty things with Russia, nor do I disagree that much of the Dossier looks pretty decent (particularly around Carter Page’s movements), I take complaint with their analysis of Steele’s description of the hacking of the DNC.

In the article, they quote the Dossier, where it describes how a Russian Oligarch has pressured some hackers into hacking the DNC and then they compare that to the GRU attack on the DNC.

While, yes, technically that does involve “hacking the DNC”, there’s no strong link between those two descriptions.

Let’s say that you’re a dishonest investigator and you’ve been asked to make Trump look bad, by tying him to Russia, and you’re willing to simply BS up some materials, then you might first ask yourself who all Trump’s Russian compatriots might attack. That will lead you to “hacking the DNC”. From there, coming up with some plausible sounding story like a privately motivated Oligarch makes sense. But it would also not be what actually happened.

While, yes, the DNC was hacked it was not hacked in the way that Steele described. Saying that he is right when the methodology is completely wrong seems unreasonable.

#3

…I’m struggling to understand your line of reasoning here. Can you directly quote the part of the dossier that you are talking about?

#4

“Over the period March-September 2016 a company called [redacted] and its affiliates had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct “altering operations” against the Democratic Party leadership. Entities linked to one [redacted] were involved and he and another hacking expert, both recruited under duress by the FSB, [redacted] were significant players in this operation.”

The GRU is not a company and no one who works for the GRU, that we know of, works under duress.

#5

…I think Steele knows enough about Russia that he wouldn’t describe the GRU as a “company.” I’m not sure you’ve correctly identified who [redacted] actually is.

#6

That’s my point.

The writers of the Lawfare article have identified this statement about a “company” as the GRU. I am making the point that they’re going beyond reasonable inferences to confirm the validity of the Steele Dossier. The GRU is not a company, nor has Mueller or anyone else identified any company involved in hacking that was using duress to source its hackers. Wikileaks didn’t hack anyone nor was there any duress. The IRA was a propaganda outfit, wasn’t involved in any hacking (I don’t believe), and all of their workers were happily employed.

How the authors of the Lawfare article came to include the quoted text about a company holding hackers under duress to something that the investigators have uncovered, I do not understand.

The part that they have quoted gives greater credence to the idea that Steele made everything up than it does that he had some insider information from Russia.

#7

…the writers of the Lawfare article did not do this.

“Made everything up?” Are you serious? I was struggling to understand where you were coming from before: I’m at a complete loss now.

#8

I thought GRU had blackmailed some hackers into doing their dirty work.

Not just that, there may have been something in the dossier about eastern european hackers being blackmailed into doing the FSBs dirty work.

#9

Directly copied from the article:

"The dossier reports:

Over the period March-September 2016 a company called [redacted] and its affiliates had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct “altering operations” against the Democratic Party leadership. Entities linked to one [redacted] were involved and he and another hacking expert, both recruited under duress by the FSB, [redacted] were significant players in this operation. […] The indictment of 12 officers of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) corroborates these allegations from Steele’s sources."

I don’t believe that I’m misreading anything. It’s their explicit statement. Do you see that as saying something else?

I would prefer that Steele was correct in everything and I believe that he probably reported everything as he was told it. I’m not arguing that he was making anything up.

But there is the viewpoint that he was just paid to invent stuff against Trump. And it’s important that those who would want to defend Steele are reasonable about what is “verifiable” in the document. If you are clearly bending over backwards to make it fit, your credibility plummets and it gives ammo to those who would attack Steele by pointing out that how the libtards over at Lawfare are talking about things being verified when we know for a fact that Steele was describing something which didn’t occur.

Everyone loves to cherry pick. Something like the Lawfare article is an easy target with which to attack Steele because they have isolated just a few sub-items and written a short piece about them. The Lawfare article is the sort of thing that an opponent of Steele would choose as a point of attack, knowing that most readers will just read the Lawfare article and not the full dossier.

If they have isolated parts of the dossier that are clearly wrong, it paints the entire dossier as being wrong, even though the dossier itself is a collection of materials from different sources, each with (presumably) different levels of access and reliability.

#10

Interesting, though it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the 2016 US Election.

Plausibly, Steele’s source heard about that and somehow got it and the DNC hack confused. Of course, there’s no reason for us to believe that to be the case, beyond hopes and dreams, minus further information about who the source is and what sort of information they would be likely to know.

#11

Yes you are misreading. Also you cut a paragraph out of the middle of the quote and the last sentence of your quote is the first sentence of a much larger paragraph. Some of those things you cut out include allegations from Steele’s sources that are corroborated by GRU indictment.

Lawfare is saying both the Steele Dossier and the GRU Indictment describe a Russian effort to hack high ranking Dems and the DNC and disseminate that stolen information via Wikileaks. This is the meat of what is corroborated. You cut out pretty much everything about Wikileaks in your quote including a the part where you left out a paragraph in the middle.

Steele describes a company and hackers under duress doing this while the indictment says this was done by the GRU using a variety of means. These are not contradictory.

At no point does Lawfare imply that the company described by Steele is the GRU.

#12

…their explicit statement was not “have identified this statement about a “company” as the GRU”: it was “The indictment of 12 officers of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) **corroborates **these allegations from Steele’s sources.” They then went onto cite the indictment which includes the sentence:

“3. Starting in at least March 2016, the Conspirators used a variety of means to hack the email accounts of volunteers and employees of the U.S. presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton (the “Clinton Campaign”), including the email account of the Clinton Campaign’s chairman.”

It seems pretty clear to me that the writers of the Lawfare article haven’t said what you think they said.

They aren’t “bending over backwards” to make things fit. I think you are reading into that sentence more than what they actually said.

:: looks around ::

I don’t see anyone (apart from you) using the Lawfare article to attack Steele. So maybe if you stopped using the Lawfare article to attack Steele then you won’t have anything to worry about. And even if there was someone (or even a group of people!) who cherry-picked the Lawfare article as a cite to say that it says something that it doesn’t, so what?

I still don’t understand your point.