Friday, September 15, 2023
Pentagon Taps Disinformation Researcher Who Applauded Censorship of Hunter Biden Laptop Story
Lisa Kaplan has worked with former Biden disinformation czar Nina Jankowicz
The Defense Department in May inked a contract with a tech firm run by Lisa Kaplan, a disinformation researcher who said Twitter’s decision to block links to the New York Post’s October 2020 story about the troubled first son was a "good move." On Twitter and in the press at the time, Kaplan applauded what she called the social media giant’s "efforts … to address disinformation, making it so that people can't share a link known to be false."
Kaplan’s support for the censorship of a legitimate news story could raise concerns about the reliability of her work for the Pentagon. According to government spending records, the Pentagon awarded a $72,321 contract this year to Kaplan’s firm, LCK Strategies, for a software tool that tracks global disinformation campaigns. That follows a $49,328 contract to LCK Strategies in 2021 to build a "machine learning tool" to detect and "mitigate" disinformation. LCK Strategies, which Kaplan launched in 2019, also operates under the name Alethea Group.
The company claims it provides "unrivaled intelligence on disinformation networks" through its software tool, called Artemis. The tool "conducts multi-channel analysis across a broad array of online content, including forums, social media and other resources to proactively identify and investigate disinformation online."
The contract is the latest example of the Biden administration relying on disinformation researchers who have called for censorship of legitimate news stories or themselves promoted disinformation. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security hired researcher Nina Jankowicz to lead its Disinformation Governance Board, ostensibly launched to combat disinformation related to Russia’s war on Ukraine and the U.S.-Mexico border crisis. Republicans questioned the board’s mandate after it emerged that Jankowicz claimed the release of Hunter Biden’s emails was part of a "Russian influence op."
No evidence has emerged to support that claim. Instead, Hunter Biden abandoned his laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. The FBI authenticated the laptop in late 2019, according to government documents released earlier this year.
Kaplan’s assertion that the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden was "known to be false" has likewise been debunked. The Post had reported that Biden’s laptop included an email from a Ukrainian business partner in May 2015 thanking him for a dinner event with then-Vice President Joe Biden in Washington, D.C. While the Biden campaign initially disputed that Joe Biden attended the event, a longtime Hunter Biden business associate told Congress last month that the dinner occurred.
It is perhaps no surprise that Jankowicz and Kaplan have worked together in the past. Alethea Group hired Jankowicz in 2021 as its director of external engagement, to "educate the public about the impact of disinformation on public safety, public health, and the functioning of...
The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1507
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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #2204
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
Thursday, September 14, 2023
IRS Whistleblower Gives Congress More Documents, Boosting His Credibility And Busting The DOJ’s
Shapley’s handwritten notes bolster his earlier testimony and debunk an FBI agent’s counterclaim that Weiss had not said he lacked authority to charge Hunter Biden.
On Monday, IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley provided congressional oversight committees nine new documents related to the botched Hunter Biden investigation, according to a letter sent Wednesday morning to the House Judiciary Committee. The letter also contained a redacted 10th new document: the handwritten notes Shapley took during the Oct. 7, 2022, meeting in which Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss allegedly announced to his team that he was “not the deciding official on whether charges are filed” against Hunter Biden.
Those handwritten notes further bolster Shapley’s earlier testimony about the meeting and debunk counterclaims by the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore field office that Weiss had not said he lacked authority to charge Hunter Biden. What the other nine documents reveal, however, remains to be seen.
“Yesterday the Washington Post published a story reportedly based on a transcript it obtained of the Committee’s interview of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent in Charge Thomas J. Sobocinski,” the letter from Shapley’s Empower Oversight attorneys to the House Judiciary Committee opened. Sobocinski was one of seven attendees at the Oct. 7, 2022, meeting, in which — according to Shapley’s previous testimony, corroborated by an email he sent following the meeting — Weiss said he was “not the deciding official” on whether to charge Hunter Biden and that he had been denied special counsel authority to charge the president’s son in D.C. or California.
As The Federalist reported earlier Wednesday based on its review of the transcript of Sobocinski’s interview, “Sobocinski claimed he did not remember Weiss saying he had sought (and been denied) special counsel status or that Weiss had represented that he was ‘not the deciding official.’” Further, “according to Sobocinski, had Weiss said either of those things, he would have remembered it,” with the FBI agent implying Shapley’s claims were false.
According to the transcript, Sobocinski tried to discredit Shapley’s testimony and the email he had sent following the October meeting by stressing that Shapley had not drafted the email during the meeting and thus the notes were not really “contemporaneous” with Weiss’s supposed...
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