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{ fdd.org } ~ “The fax will set you free!” Years ago, that was such a hopeful rallying cry. I was among those convinced that exciting, new technologies would defeat tyrants and censors...When the facsimile machine, an invention of the 19th century (look it up) came into widespread use in the 1980s, it seemed to be the sharp point of a freedom-friendly technological spear. A fax machine could do in minutes what it had taken Soviet dissidents weeks to achieve with a typewriter: make a copy of a forbidden book and transport it from one place to another. Years later, of course, there was the advent of the even more revolutionary internet, followed by social media and other developments that promised to bend the arc of history toward liberty. You know what’s happened since: Tyrants have learned to use high technology to spread disinformation while, in totalitarian countries, censors have become adept at repressing truthful information they find inconvenient. We all know there was Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. But only some of us grasp what the Kremlin intended – and still intends – to achieve. “The Russian government’s goal is to weaken our country – to diminish America’s global role,” Fiona Hill, a Russia expert who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents explained in congressional testimony last year. President Vladimir Putin and the Russian security services, she added, “deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives. When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each other, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy.” The Wall Street Journal took a serious look at some Russian disinformation efforts last week. A piece headlined, “How Russia Today Skirts High-Tech Blockade to Reach U.S. Readers,” revealed the mechanisms by which Mr. Putin’s propaganda is packaged by such operations as RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik and then laundered into legitimate American online media outlets. And though RT reluctantly complied with a 2017 U.S. Justice Department demand that it register as a “foreign agent,” it’s still carried by such major U.S. television cable and satellite networks as Comcast, Dish Network and DIRECTV. Shouldn’t these networks clearly disclose that to viewers? If they don’t, aren’t they assisting the Russian propagandists? Is anyone in Congress interested? American audiences are not the only Kremlin targets. RT and Sputnik broadcast to dozens of countries in about 30 languages. What got me thinking about all this was an email I received last week from a journalist friend living in Kyiv. “We have a critical situation here in Ukraine where Putin-allied or friendly oligarchs own half the TV stations,” he wrote. “They are spewing anti-US, anti-EU propaganda 24/7. Eventually, it will take a toll on public opinion.” One example: Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Russian media have been propagating the lie that the U.S. maintains military biolabs  in Ukraine, and that these labs have been spreading diseases. The People’s Republic of China also blatantly slanders the U.S. As my FDD colleague Craig Singleton noted in a recent report, Beijing’s “well-funded propaganda machine operates across platforms including television, radio, print media, and social media. Some efforts are unambiguously linked to the Chinese government, while others are structured to hide Beijing’s hand.” According to a White House report issued earlier this year: “In 2015, China Radio International was revealed to control 33 radio stations in 14 countries via shell entities.” Every two years since 2001, the Beijing-owned China News Service has hosted “The World Chinese Media Forum.” Last year, it was attended by more than 400 overseas media representatives closely aligned with Beijing. There’s a bigger picture: The propagation of disinformation in traditional and social media, including the use of bot and troll accounts as well as blogs and websites with fake or uncertain attribution, are all weapons deployed in the “hybrid wars” Moscow and Beijing are waging against the U.S. and the West. Other hybrid warfare tactics include cyberattacks, boosting extremist political parties, and “encouraged protests.” China’s rulers also may be using more direct methods to impact election outcomes. Cleo Pascal, another FDD colleague, wrote in India’s Sunday Guardian last week about a recently released independent report: “Fraud in South Korea’s April 2020 Elections: It Probably Happened and is a Big Deal for the United States.” Written by Grant Newsham, a retired Marine Corps colonel and former reserve head of intelligence for Marine Forces Pacific, the report details “some of the alleged methods used,” including “Electronic Counting Machines (ECM) and/or attached computers containing Huawei components.” Huawei, of course, is a Chinese multinational technology company that advances Beijing’s “military-civil fusion” policies. Huawei executives deny that. If you believe them, there’s a bridge in Hong Kong I can sell you. The result, Ms. Pascal writes, “was a massive, surprising win for President Moon Jae-in’s party in an election with results that seemed so statistically improbable that the former head of the highly prestigious Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology said, ‘either God did it or it was rigged.’” Ms. Pascal adds that Beijing also has “a track record of attempting to manipulate elections in Taiwan, and buying influence with voter groups, politicians and political parties in countries from Australia to Zambia.” The election in South Korea, however, “seems to involve direct technological infiltration.” What will it take to defend Americans and American allies from hybrid warfare including disinformation offensives and high-tech falsification of election results? Lots of work by a list of U.S. government agencies that, for the most part, have not been up to the task in the past.   https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2020/10/14/weaponizing-technology/

{ washingtonexaminer.com } ~ Another Justice Department top dog finds himself in President Trump’s doghouse over the Russia investigation...Attorney General William Barr is stuck between liberals who accuse him of being a Trump flunkie and MAGA enthusiasts who share the president’s view that there needs to be criminal charges against individuals responsible for the Trump-Russia investigation. Barr loyalists insist that the attorney general, who previously held the same office in George H.W. Bush’s administration, has been consistent. When it comes to both obstruction of justice allegations against the president and investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia affair, he has held a high standard for corrupt intent and bringing charges against public servants for actions committed while performing their jobs. U.S. Attorney John Durham has been investigating the origins of the Russia inquiry at Barr’s request. This investigation is now seen as unlikely to result in criminal charges against high-level officials, and Durham’s report is no longer expected before the presidential election. Longtime conservative legal activist Larry Klayman has called Barr an “establishment disgrace” who is “taking a cowardly dive” with an investigation he calls a “DOJ sham.” Tom Fitton, president of the conservative-leaning group Judicial Watch, has publicly pressed Durham to speed up his investigative work and release a report. “I just don’t understand what he’s been doing,” Fitton said. “In general, I think Bill Barr has done an excellent job as AG,” said conservative strategist Chris Barron. “However, as it regards the foundations of the Russia hoax, more should have been done to make sure the American voters have all the facts before November. And let’s be honest, if Trump loses, President scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden shelves this investigation on day one.” But the most searing criticism has come from Trump himself. "I'm not happy with all of the evidence I have, I can tell you that. I'm not happy," he told Newsmax TV. And he has put the blame squarely on the attorney general’s shoulders. “Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes, the greatest political crime in the history of our country, then we’ll get little satisfaction unless I win,” Trump told Fox Business. “Because I won’t forget it. But these people should be indicted. These are people who spied on my campaign. And we have everything. And I say, 'Bill, we’ve got plenty, you don’t need anymore. We’ve got so much.'” Trump has declined to commit to retaining Barr as attorney general if he wins a second term...  https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/barr-in-the-middle-maga-angry-about-no-indictments-while-liberals-say-hes-a-trump-hack?utm_source=WEX_News%20Brief%20-%20YouTube%20_10/16/2020&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WEX_News%20Brief&rid=5261 

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{ washingtonexaminer.com } ~ Democratic presidential nominee scumbag drumbling lips liar-Joe Biden’s town hall may have been a quiet, subdued affair compared to President Trump’s, but with an almost double-digit average polling lead, that’s unlikely to hurt his advantage 19 days before the election...scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden did make news during his calm, two-hour town hall with ABC. The two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator admitted it was a mistake to support the 1994 crime bill, maligned for its disproportionate impact on minority communities. He promised to clarify his position on court-packing before Nov. 3, depending on how the Senate handled Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation vote. And he tentatively backed a coronavirus vaccine mandate. But that paled in comparison to the first 15 minutes of Trump’s frenetic, one-hour town hall on NBC. During the starting quarter of his event, Trump insisted he didn’t “remember” taking a COVID-19 test before his opening debate against scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden, doubled down on his assertion that the country was “rounding the corner” regarding the pandemic, got into a testy exchange with host Savannah Guthrie over a question concerning white supremacy, and refused to denounce the QAnon conspiracy theory. Yet ceding the political spotlight to Trump is a strategy that has helped scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden maintain an average lead of 9.8 percentage points with an electorate that seems to be pining for less chaotic times, according to RealClearPolitics. scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden’s opening question came from a Democrat curious about what he would've done differently from Trump’s response to the outbreak had he been in the White House. The second query, from a former Trump supporter who’s now undecided, was whether he would make a COVID-19 vaccine mandatory. “It depends on the state of the nature of the vaccine when it comes out and how it's being distributed,” he said. “We should be thinking about making a mandate.”Reading from a cue card, he also fielded a question on his tax plan from another Republican. ABC host George Stephanopoulos followed up on whether scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden would postpone his tax cut proposal, given the economic pressure created by the virus. “I’ve got to get the votes,” he said of Congress. “We're a democracy, we need consensus." When pressed again by Stephanopoulos on whether it was a mistake to have drafted and pushed for the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, he replied: “Yes, it was.” scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden spent much of the primary distancing himself from the legislation’s unpopular provisions covering, for example, mandatory sentences, while contextualizing it in the “law and order” political environment of the 1990s. "The mistake came in terms of what the states did locally,” he added Thursday...

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{ foxnews.com } ~ Two of the questioners at the ABC town hall featuring Democratic presidential candidate scumbag drumbling lips liar-Joe Biden on Thursday had ties to high-profile Democrats...including one questioner who previously worked as a speechwriter in the scumbag/liar-nObama administration. The queries came as President Trump, hundreds of miles away, was engaging in his own parallel town hall being aired on NBC. The ABC town hall was hosted by George Stephanopoulos, who was a communications director for the scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton White House and who has been a political journalist since 2002. One of the questioners at the ABC-hosted event was Nathan Osburn, a former speechwriter for the scumbag/liar-nObama White House. Osburn specifically worked for the Office of Public Affairs at the Commerce Department under the scumbag/liar-nObama/scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden administration and at the Small Business Administration. Osburn's profession was listed as "communications" on the ABC town hall graphic and his city was listed as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Osburn was quoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year as "a former scumbag/liar-nObama administration speechwriter" who had created a "Philly for socialist-Pete group" aimed at boosting former Democratic presidential primary candidate socialist-Pete Buttigieg. And the LGBTQ Victory Institute listed Osburn as a senior speechwriter for the Small Business Administration in an article praising the scumbag/liar-nObama/scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden administration for its LGBTQ hiring practices. "Amy Coney Barrett's being pushed through at the last minute, even though millions have already voted. So what do you think about ideas from people like socialist-Pete Buttigieg and others to put in place safeguards that will help ensure more long-term balance and stability?" Osburn asked scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden. "And what do you say to LGBTQ Americans and others who are very worried right now about erosions of their rights and our democracy as a whole?" scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden, during the exchange that followed that question, was asked point-blank by Stephanopoulos whether voters deserve to know his stance on court-packing, and scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden reversed his previous stance of refusing to say what that position is before Election Day. He told the moderator that he would take a specific stand on that issue depending on how Republicans handle the ongoing confirmation effort of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett...  https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-town-hall-questioners-former-obama-speechwriter-wife-pennsylvania-democrat

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{ headlineusa.com } ~ Instead of the expected debate between President Donald Trump and Democrat scumbag drumbling lips liar-Joe Biden, television viewers were left Thursday with what ABC’s David Muir called “split-screen America.”...scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden participated in a 90-minute town hall from Philadelphia on ABC, while NBC News went ahead with its hourlong Trump session in Miami — despite protests from Hollywood stars and others who criticized the network for forcing viewers to choose because the two events were held at the same time. Trump faced constant grilling with questions drawn seemingly from the scumbag drumbling lips liar-Biden campaign’s playbook, from Savannah Guthrie of the “Today” show, who pressed him on his personal experience with COVID-19, his finances and his alleged support of conspiracy theories. In addition to her own sharp questioning, Guthrie would often follow up queries made by audience members to nail down a point. She challenged Trump about some of the specific beliefs of the QAnon group, Trump supporters who believe he’s the man to save the country from “deep state” pedophiles. Trump said he didn’t know anything about them. “I just told you,” Guthrie replied, obviously unbelieving his answer. She also wondered why Trump would retweet a false theory by someone on the Internet that the United States didn’t really kill Osama bin Laden. “You’re the president,” she said. “You’re not like somebody’s crazy uncle who can just retweet anything.” Guthrie’s performance sharply divided social media users between those who thought she was effective in confronting Trump and those who found her too combative. According to Fox News: Viewers who tuned into the Peacock Network expected to hear questions from voters. However, Guthrie spent most of the first 20 minutes grilling Trump on masks and White supremacy.  That didn’t sit well with many observers. “How long will NBC go before giving an actual voter the chance to ask a question?” asked pollster Frank Luntz, who later called the “town hall” descriptor of the program “false advertising.” “A third of the way into the NBC town hall and NO questions from the PEOPLE!!!” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany exclaimed...  https://headlineusa.com/trump-ends-up-debating-savannah-guthrie-biden-not-challenged-on-nypost-stories/?utm_source=HUSAemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=HUSAemail