Paranoid, dangerous and easily duped

Trump's own mysterious "Steele Dossier" has been leaked.

Sometimes when you hear people in the Trump administration, or congressional Republicans, or conservative media, muttering about “deep state” conspiracies against Trump or whole agencies planting dirt on POTUS while thwarting his will, it’s hard to know if they believe this stuff or are simply putting one over on credulous MAGA people who will believe anything about Trump’s many enemies.

But Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker have published a report suggesting that at least within the Trump White House, believe in outlandish conspiracy theories has been widespread.

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And there were earlier reports that “Trump aides” or people in Trump’s circle had hired an Israeli firm — which Ronan Farrow identified as Black Cube — to get dirt on [Obama aides Ben] Rhodes and [Colin] Kahl in connection with Trump’s goal of reversing the Iran deal.

It seems that perhaps the Trump people and/or their Black Cube friends were not only taken in by but blew up to fantastic proportions Rhodes’s own boasts about manipulating journalists during the Iran fight in a famous 2016 New York Times Magazine profile of the foreign policy staffer, which aroused widespread derision at the time. Apparently Black Cube believed it all, or wanted its client or clients to believe it

  New York Magazine

Following are exerpts from the New Yorker article.

In early 2017, some of Donald Trump’s advisers concluded that they faced a sophisticated threat responsible for “coordinated attacks” on the new Administration. They circulated a memo, titled “The Echo Chamber,” which read like a U.S. military-intelligence officer’s analysis of a foreign-insurgent network. Instead of being about enemies in a distant war zone, however, the network described in the memo consisted of former aides to President Barack Obama.

The memo claimed that the “communications infrastructure” that the Obama White House used to “sell Obamacare and the Iran Deal to the public” had been moved to the private sector, now that the former aides were out of government. It called the network the Echo Chamber and accused its members of mounting a coördinated effort “to undermine President Trump’s foreign policy” through organized attacks in the press against Trump and his advisers. “These are the Obama loyalists who are probably among those coordinating the daily/weekly battle rhythm,” the memo said, adding that they likely operated a “virtual war room.” The memo lists Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national-security adviser to President Obama, as “likely the brain behind this operation” and Colin Kahl, Vice-President Joe Biden’s former national-security adviser, as its “likely ops chief.”

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The memo is unsigned and undated, and Trump Administration officials familiar with it offered conflicting accounts of who authored it and whether it originated inside or outside the White House.

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Some of the same conspiracy theories expressed in the memo appear in internal documents from an Israeli private-intelligence firm that mounted a covert effort to collect damaging information about aides to President Obama who had advocated for the Iran deal. In May, 2017, that firm, Black Cube, provided its operatives with instructions and other briefing materials that included the same ideas and names discussed in the memo. The Black Cube documents obtained by The New Yorker referred to Rhodes and Kahl, arguing that they were using allies in the media to undermine the Trump Administration.

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The New Yorker identified the firm as Black Cube, an organization that Harvey Weinstein had hired to collect information on women accusing him of sexual abuse and journalists trying to expose the allegations. Black Cube has declined to answer questions about who hired it to collect damaging information on Rhodes and Kahl, citing client confidentiality. In a statement, the firm said that “Black Cube does not get involved in politics, and has no relation whatsoever to the Trump administration, to Trump aides, to anyone close to the administration, or to the Iran Nuclear deal. Black Cube is not aware of the documents mentioned in this article, neither their contents.” [...] [T]he memo, circulated at senior levels in the White House, shows just how deeply the Echo Chamber conspiracy theory had penetrated business and politics, and suggests a commonality of interests between Black Cube’s unidentified client and parts of the Trump Administration.

Whether those behind the memo had any connection to Black Cube’s work remains unclear.

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Conspiracy theories of this kind appear to have thrived in the Trump White House, which was divided into factions that often used media leaks to undermine their rivals and compete for influence with the President.

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The Black Cube documents show a similar focus on the lines of communication between Obama-era officials and the press. The firm compiled a list of nine reporters and commentators it claimed were part of the Echo Chamber, including The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the New York Times’ Max Fisher, and NBC News’s Andrea Mitchell.

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Black Cube also assembled a list of six additional journalists and commentators it described as being “close to Rhodes vessels of his message.” Operatives approached targeted individuals to elicit potentially damaging statements about Rhodes and Kahl. At least one of those conversations, with a commentator on the list, Trita Parsi, was secretly recorded. Operatives also used false identities and front companies to try to dupe targets, including Rhodes’s and Kahl’s wives, into unwittingly sharing information.

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The memo also claims that other former Obama Administration officials are part of the Echo Chamber. Jake Sullivan, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, is identified as one of the leaders of the Echo Chamber.The former Obama Administration officials Tommy Vietor, Ned Price, Jon Favreau, Jon Finer, and Dan Pfeiffer are all listed as “likely operations officers.”

  The New Yorker

What strikes me as especially nutty in all this is that the memo consistently makes its claims as "likely" and "probably". Not only does it not offer any evidence of proof, it just says these are probably the guys who are probably trying to undermine Trump.

Of course, it doesn't mean there was no such effort, but it makes it a lot easier to dismiss the claim.

In a statement, Rhodes described the memo as “a bizarre effort to validate ‘deep state’ conspiracy theories” and said that, “given Trump’s many efforts to intimidate and malign his critics, it’s worth asking how his White House and outside enablers acted on this strange memo.”

Well, for one, Trump screamed over and over that Obama was wiretapping him.



One author of the article, Ronan Farrow, discusses the information with Wolf Blitzer here.

The memo itself as reproduced in this article: