“Dr. Navarro contends that he has no statutory duties under the PRA. … This position would defeat the entire purpose of the statute, i.e., to ensure that Presidential records, as defined, are collected, maintained and made available to the public,” wrote Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. “The PRA makes plain that Presidential advisors such as Dr. Navarro are part and parcel of the statutory scheme in that they are required to preserve Presidential records during their tenure so that they can be transferred to [the National Archives and Records Administration] at the end of an administration.”
Navarro argued that the personal-account provision didn’t apply to messages he received, only to those he sent, but the judge dismissed that contention.
“All the emails in Dr. Navarro’s personal email account, whether created or received, are therefore subject to being assessed as potential Presidential records if they arose out of his employment in the administration,” she wrote.
An attorney for Navarro did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The tone of Kollar-Kotelly’s 22-page opinion was brutal, but the lawsuit is far from Navarro’s biggest legal worry. He is facing a trial in the coming months on two criminal, misdemeanor charges of contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas from the special House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s role in fomenting doubt about the 2020 presidential election results.
Despite his role as a trade adviser, Navarro drew the attention of congressional investigators because in his final weeks in the White House, he shifted his focus toward efforts to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results. He prepared a report based on discredited claims of fraud and worked with longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon and GOP lawmakers to strategize ways to object to the results on Jan. 6, 2021.
Navarro argued in the lawsuit that he should not have to turn over the disputed emails because the government might seek to use them against him in the criminal case, but the judge also saw no merit in that position.
“Producing these pre-existing records in no way implicates a compelled testimonial communication that is incriminating,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote. She ordered Navarro to turn over “forthwith” about 200 to 250 messages his lawyers have already deemed likely presidential records. She gave the two sides 30 days to sort out a protocol to find other official records in Navarro’s personal account.
The Justice Department is set to make a key filing in Navarro’s criminal case next week, explaining why the department concluded that Navarro is not immune from a congressional subpoena even though he was serving as a top adviser to Trump in the White House in the weeks before and after Jan. 6, 2021.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
But Howell said Perry had taken an “astonishing view” of his immunity that would effectively put members of Congress above the law and free of political consequences for their actions. She ordered him to disclose 2,055 of the documents he sought to withhold — including all 960 of his contacts with members of the executive branch, which she said are entitled to no constitutional protection at all. Some 161 items, she said, were proper to withhold.
“What is plain is the clause does not shield Rep. Perry’s random musings with private individuals touting an expertise in cybersecurity or political discussions with attorneys from a presidential campaign, or with state legislators concerning hearings before them about possible local election fraud or actions they could take to challenge election results in Pennsylvania,” Howell wrote in her 51-page December opinion.
Investigators have long scrutinized Perry’s contacts with Trump, as well as with Jeff Clark, a top Justice Department aide who Perry pushed Trump to install as attorney general in the waning weeks of his administration. Clark was seen by Trump and his allies as sympathetic to his bid to overturn the 2020 election results. The Jan. 6 select committee subpoenaed Perry to testify about his efforts but he refused to appear before the panel.
Prosecutors homed in on Perry last year, seeking his contacts with top figures connected to Trump, including Clark and attorney John Eastman, an architect of Trump’s last-ditch bid to remain in power despite losing reelection. And in August, Perry’s phone was seized by FBI agents while he was traveling with family.
Thus far, however, investigators have not had access to any of the records because, last month, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to stay Howell’s ruling. On Thursday, those judges heard both public and private arguments about the dispute. The stay remains in place as the appeals court considers whether to leave Howell’s ruling in place, set it aside or modify it in some way.
The judges — Karen Henderson, Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao — appeared skeptical of the Justice Department’s position and the breadth of Howell’s ruling, although they discussed her stance only in broad strokes and the details of her opinions remained under seal until Friday.
But the appeals panel’s ultimate leanings remained unclear at the conclusion of the public argument session Thursday. The appeals judges seemed most concerned by Howell’s determination that Perry’s outreach about Jan. 6 was not protected by the speech or debate clause because he was not acting with formal House approval.
That determination was a centerpiece of Howell’s ruling, which she said was rooted in longstanding precedent.
“No matter the vigor with which Rep. Perry pursued his wide-ranging interest in bolstering his belief that the results of the 2020 election were somehow incorrect — even in the face of his own reelection — his informal inquiries into the legitimacy of those election results are closer to the activities described as purely personal or political,” Howell said.
Perry’s communications with the White House and the Justice Department appear to be at the center of one of the investigations now being headed by special counsel Jack Smith, who has been probing the pressure put on DOJ officials to express public concern about unsubstantiated election fraud claims in the 2020 election.
That pressure culminated in an effort to have Trump dismiss acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and install Clark, then the assistant attorney general for environment and natural resources, as acting attorney general. However, after almost every senior Justice Department official threatened to resign, Trump abandoned the plan.
Howell, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said Perry’s claim that his communications with the executive branch should be off limits to investigators to protect legislative branch confidentiality made little sense.
“The entire premise of Rep. Perry’s claim for privilege over these communications would turn the Clause’s foundational purpose on its head,” wrote Howell, who is set to turn over the chief judge’s position to a colleague next month. “Given the Clause’s purpose to protect Congressional members from untoward interference from the Executive Branch with legislative matters, Rep. Perry’s reliance on the Clause to shield his multi-pronged push for Executive Branch officials to take more aggressive action is not only ironic but also must fail as beyond the scope of the Clause.”
The dispute over access to Perry’s cell phone has drawn the House itself into the fray. Lawyers for Speaker Kevin McCarthy — authorized by a bipartisan vote of House leaders — weighed in earlier this month with a 6,000-word brief that remains sealed. Howell noted in her unsealed filings Friday that the chamber weighed in “at Perry’s request.”
Howell also dinged Perry for what she described in another unsealed filing — this one in November— for appearing to “slow-walk” his review of the items on some 10,000 documents contained on the phone FBI agents seized. She ordered him to pick up the pace of his review from about 250 documents per day to 800.
The three-judge appeals court panel decision on Perry’s bid for speech-or-debate protection for his communications may not be the final word. Either the Justice Department or Perry could ask the full bench of the D.C. Circuit to take up the issue or seek to get the Supreme Court to intervene.
What documents would be protected — and what wouldn’t be
Howell analyzed batches of documents that Perry sought to withhold and broke them down into categories:
— Contacts with members of Congress and aides about legislation and votes would be protected from review by investigators, since they’re integral to his legislative responsibilities.
— Communications with colleagues and staff about internal House Freedom Caucus business would also be protected, since it’s a group of lawmakers focused on the House agenda.
— Internal House GOP leadership newsletters would not be protected, Howell said, because they were almost entirely political in nature, offering talking points or describing upcoming events, not things central to the legislative process.
— Communications about Perry’s press coverage or media strategy are not protected, Howell determined, because they’re primarily political.
— Contacts with fellow members of Congress and aides about 2020 election fraud and legal challenges to the vote are not protected because they’re “purely political,” Howell ruled.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Four weeks before a pivotal presidential election in Nigeria, an Israeli private operative specialising in political “black ops” was preparing his trip to the country. On 17 January 2015 the man, who used the alias “Jorge”, emailed Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy he was coordinating with on a covert plan to manipulate Africa’s largest democracy.
“Friends, hi, I will be on the ground tomorrow for couple days … Who is best to meet there[?]” he asked. “Low profile as we came in on a special visa and we are watched closely (which is part of our plan 🙂 anyway we need better understanding of the current status, improve communication and coordinate plans, we want to run by you a couple things that we might execute if the stars align. so plz, in very limited circulation, who is best to meet, and whats his/her position, and contact info.”
Jorge, or “J”, as he signed off many of his emails, was operating separately to Cambridge Analytica. But his group was coordinating with, and working alongside, the British political consultancy, which shared a secret mission to help re-elect Nigeria’s then president, Goodluck Jonathan.
On Wednesday, Jorge was unmasked by the Guardian and its media partners as Tal Hanan, a hacking and disinformation specialist operating from an industrial park 20 miles outside Tel Aviv. He calls his group “Team Jorge”, and claims it has worked covertly on more than 33 “presidential-level” election campaigns on behalf of clients.
The reply to Hanan’s email asking who to meet in Nigeria was sent by Brittany Kaiser, a young Cambridge Analytica employee who later featured prominently in the Netflix documentary The Great Hack, about the company’s Facebook data scandal.
She copied in the firm’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, and several other internal and external partners who would be coordinating with one another on the covert campaign to re-elect Jonathan and discredit his rival, the then opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari. “If you are on the ground please meet with SCL [Cambridge Analytica] Nigeria team,” she told Hanan.
Kaiser, who was 26 and based in London, was far from the only person at Cambridge Analytica involved in email exchanges with Team Jorge over the Nigeria campaign. She told the Guardian that her “sales” role at the company meant that she was not involved in any “operational matters with Jorge” in Nigeria in 2015.
Cambridge Analytica and Team Jorge were, she said, working “separately but in parallel” in Nigeria for the same client. “I sent some emails to put everyone in contact with each other and sort out who was doing what as time was short.”
The exchange was one of dozens of emails leaked to the Guardian and Observer that shed light on the covert coordination between Cambridge Analytica and Team Jorge in Nigeria. There is no suggestion that Jonathan knew of either Cambridge Analytica or Team Jorge’s ultimately failed attempts to get him re-elected.
But the emails reveal the covert methods that were used to boost his electoral fortunes and the ways in which two teams specialising in the dark arts of political persuasion liaised with one another, with meetings in London, the Swiss resort of Davos and the Nigerian capital, Abuja. Communications appear to have occurred on encrypted Hushmail accounts, or special devices used for secure phone calls.
Perhaps most significantly, they provide the answer to a mystery that has endured since 2018, when the Guardian and Observer first reported how an “Israeli contractor” had supplied Cambridge Analytica staff working on the Nigerian election with confidential material apparently stolen from the Buhari campaign.
The report was subsequently discussed at length during a UK parliamentary inquiry. The identity of the unnamed Israeli contractor who purloined Buhari’s confidential data has – until now – remained unknown.
‘Team Jorge’ unmasked: the secret disinformation team who distort reality – video
Dark arts of political persuasion
Hanan appears to have been involved in the dark arts of political persuasion since 1999 without being detected. That changed on Wednesday, when the Guardian and other media outlets published undercover footage filmed by three reporters who met Hanan while posing as potential clients.
The trio captured Hanan as he gave presentations, slideshows and pitches about the election-influencing services that Team Jorge could deliver to people wealthy enough to afford them. The undercover footage records Hanan demonstrating hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts to gain intelligence that could be used against a political adversary.
Quick Guide
About this investigative series
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The Guardian and Observer have partnered with an international consortium of reporters to investigate global disinformation. Our project, Disinfo black ops, is exposing how false information is deliberately spread by powerful states and private operatives who sell their covert services to political campaigns, companies and wealthy individuals. It also reveals how inconvenient truths can be erased from the internet by those who are rich enough to pay.The investigation is part of Story killers, a collaboration led by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters.
The eight-month investigation was inspired by the work of Gauri Lankesh, a 55-year-old journalist who was shot dead outside her Bengaluru home in 2017. Hours before she was murdered, Lankesh had been putting the finishing touches on an article called In the Age of False News, which examined how so-called lie factories online were spreading disinformation in India. In the final line of the article, which was published after her death, Lankesh wrote: “I want to salute all those who expose fake news. I wish there were more of them.”
The Story killers consortium includes more than 100 journalists from 30 media outlets including Haaretz, Le Monde, Radio France, Der Spiegel, Paper Trail Media, Die Zeit, TheMarker and the OCCRP. Read more about this project.
Investigative journalism like this is vital for our democracy. Please consider supporting it today.
Hanan did not respond to detailed requests for comment but told the Guardian: “To be clear, I deny any wrongdoing.”
The undercover footage recorded him talking about having worked extensively in Africa, and his presentations included brief references to the 2015 Nigerian election.
In a slideshow called “What we do” he showed a slide with the heading “Wrecking havoc during African election day”, followed by a screengrab from a newspaper article that appeared in Vanguard, a reputable media outlet, which reported how, on election day, leaders in Buhari’s All Progressives Congress party (APC) discovered their phones were rendered useless because they were bombarded with calls.
Lai Mohammed, who was the opposition APC chief spokesperson during the 2015 election, appears to have been a target. Now a minister for information in the Nigerian government, his aide recalled the incident.
“We were at the party’s situation room in the morning of the presidential election, only to discover that his phone line had been blocked,” the aide said. “He could neither receive nor make calls, and that was very serious because he was the live wire of the opposition.”
During his presentation, Hanan showed the undercover reporters another slide featuring an image of women in Muslim attire who were sitting outside a Nigerian polling station. Suggesting Team Jorge had secured the publication of a story about women being excluded from the polling station, Hanan told the reporters he had “created a big scandal”, adding: “They extended the election, which was our objective.”
The Nigerian presidential election, which had been due to be held on 14 February, was indeed postponed. The six-week delay was linked to alleged security concerns over the Boko Haram insurgency. The announcement about the delay was made by Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission on 8 February.
One of the leaked emails between Hanan and Cambridge Analytica suggests he had advance information about that postponement.
“I have received strong indication that the elections will not take place on the 14th, and that plans are made to postponed them in few weeks,” Jorge wrote on 7 February, the day before the official announcement, saying the information came from “a top source” and adding: “Plz be carful circulating it.”
Other emails suggest Team Jorge produced YouTube video content to support Jonathan’s campaign and shared it with Cambridge Analytica, which in turn asked the Israeli outfit to help promote its videos on the platform.
However, it is the elliptical references to Team Jorge sourcing “information” for use by Cambridge Analytica that raise most questions.
‘Our clients must see results’
The different roles for Cambridge Analytica and Team Jorge in Nigeria are laid out in the emails. The British consultancy was tasked with securing coverage by international media during the election that would benefit Jonathan’s election campaign, and discredit Buhari.
Team Jorge was responsible for “opposition research”, or finding the material that could be leveraged to undermine Buhari. When one staffer met “Joel”, another Team Jorge operative, in Switzerland in January, the imminent poll in the west Africa country was apparently on the agenda.
They emailed Joel: “We can meet in our apartment or a restaurant here to discuss what we can accomplish for Nigeria in the short term.”
In another exchange, Joel said he would be the main point of contact to Cambridge Analytica and suggested the two sides “synchronise on a regular basis”, adding: “There will be a lot of info which we’ll have to share.” Cambridge Analytica provided Joel with a Hushmail account – projectliaison@hushmail.com – and introduced him to the consultancy’s staff in Abuja.
Cambridge Analytica, which worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for the White House, would later be forced to close amid the fallout over revelations it had harvested 87m Facebook user profiles to help target political advertising. But in 2015, the company was much more low-profile – one of many western political consultancies that sought to monetise its services on developing world elections.
Team Jorge and Cambridge Analytica were not the only forces seeking to help get Jonathan re-elected. One leaked email lists “Jorge’s Team” among four entities working in partnership on the Nigeria project: “We are working separately but must collaborate together in order to maximise our effectiveness. Our clients must see results.”
Two days later, some at Cambridge Analytica appeared to harbour concerns about whether Hanan’s team was pulling its weight.
One staffer asked: “What are Jorge and Joel doing? Now is the time to deliver, I am now led to believe by Jorge that we would not get anything from them until a few days before the election. This is too late for our client … As you are aware they are being paid to do opposition research, and as of yet we have received nothing of substance.”
The same staffer added: “The two secure phones that we are to purchase from Jorge (have not seen invoice) do not work and we spoke to them about this last week, these are very expensive and so far we have had no use from them at all.”
It is not clear from the emails what exactly Cambridge Analytica expected Team Jorge to do on the campaign or how the Israelis would do it. What is clear is that staff at the British consultancy anticipated the Israelis would be providing a package of information.
In another email, a staffer working on the campaign asked a colleague for “an email address for Jorge”, whom she wanted to contact “for some assistance in sourcing information for the campaign”. The reply copied “Jorge and Joel for coordination” and added: “I believe the package will arrive this coming week for you.”
In the end, it appears that Team Jorge’s information was transferred to Cambridge Analytica at a meeting at the London office.
An account of what happened next was given by Kaiser to a parliamentary committee three years later. She told MPs that the Israeli contractor – now known to be Team Jorge – visited Cambridge Analytica’s offices in Mayfair.
“They came to the office for maybe an hour one day, and plugged something into a computer to show some pieces of information that they had obtained from the opposing campaign,” she said.
That included, she added, a video from inside Buhari’s campaign meetings, apparently filmed by a mole planted by the Israeli team. She recalled being “shocked” and “surprised”, “because they were actually sitting there with the candidate campaign manager and other high-level individuals on the campaign. I had never seen that before from campaign consultants.”
The Israeli contractors had also obtained documents, some of which Kaiser told the MPs were then leaked to the press. She told the parliamentary committee that she had found the activities of the Israeli contractor “concerning” but stressed: “I did not know what they were up to until it had already been done.” When asked for the name of the Israeli team behind the black ops campaign, she replied: “I don’t remember, to be honest.”
Tal Hanan.
Get in touch
Two months after Jonathan lost the presidential election in Nigeria, Cambridge Analytica was again considering working with its Israeli partners.
Nix, the Cambridge Analytica chief, emailed Kaiser a question. “What is Jorge’s (from Israel black ops co) surname please and also the name of his company[?],” he asked. Kaiser replied: “Tal Hanan is CEO of Demoman International.”
Nix did not respond to questions from the Guardian, other than to say the newspaper’s “purported understanding is disputed”.
Kaiser told the Guardian that her parliamentary testimony had been a “daunting experience”, adding: “I didn’t remember the name of the Demoman company when asked.” She said that she had no prior knowledge of the methods Team Jorge would end up using in Nigeria.
“Clearly, the making of a political sausage is not pretty in many of its aspects, and I understand how those who have not seen and experienced it at close quarters could look at what are regarded as ordinary political behaviours in democracies around the world and hold a position of moral criticism,” Kaiser added. “But I do not believe that criminality (with some notorious exceptions) is rampant.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Could office emails go the way of the fax machine and the rolodex? They have not joined those workplace dinosaurs yet, but there were signs of evolutionary change at the annual gathering of business leaders in Davos this week, where tech bosses said emails were becoming outdated.
The chief executive of the IT firm Wipro, which employs 260,000 people worldwide, said about 10% of his staff “don’t even check one email per month” and that he used Instagram and LinkedIn to talk to staff.
“They’re 25, they don’t care. They don’t go on their emails, they go on Snapchat, they go on all these things,” said Thierry Delaporte. Anjali Sud, the chief executive of video platform Vimeo, said at the summit emails were “outdated”.
Delaporte’s comments, reported by the Daily Telegraph, referred to Gen Z professionals – typically people born after 1997 – but according to one UK business owner, it cuts across all generations.
“If I want something done quickly, I rarely rely on email myself,” says Farhad Divecha, owner and managing director of London-based digital marketing agency Accuracast. “I tend to send a [Microsoft] Teams message, or even WhatsApp if it’s really urgent. I might send an email with details, but over the past three to five years I’ve learned that email’s just not good enough if you want something done quickly.”
He adds that some clients with Gen Z employees preferred to bypass email, using alternatives such as the messaging service Slack. “It’s not uncommon to have clients with more Gen Z employees tell us: ‘let’s take the discussion on Slack because we tend not to use email much’,” he says.
Email has many rivals that offer messaging services. Instagram is used by more than 2 billion people a month, LinkedIn has 875 million members, Snapchat has more than 360 million daily users and 2 billion people are on WhatsApp. Microsoft’s Teams platform is also popular, with more than 270 million users.
But email is not going away and its use continues to grow. The total number of business and consumer emails sent and received each day will exceed 333bn in 2022, says the tech research firm Radicati, which represents a 4% increase on the previous year – and will grow to more than 390bn by 2026. More than half the world’s population, 4.2 billion, uses email, according to Radicati.
“We don’t feel email is dying,” says the research firm’s CEO, Sara Radicati. One major source of growth in email use comes from the consumer sphere, such as emails related to online purchases. Also, an email account is needed for all sorts of online activity, such as setting up social media accounts and buying goods.
Radicati acknowledges, nonetheless, that in the world of work, social media and instant messaging are playing a role alongside email. “Email tends to be used for official communications, while more interpersonal, casual communication is finding its way through social media and instant messaging”, she says.
Professionals who spoke to the Guardian described a mixed approach to email use. Jordan, 28, a project manager in the construction industry from Bristol, says there was a split between formal and informal communications at work: “I use emails purely to talk about formal things that need to be written down. That’s in terms of agreements or anything like that. But for anything that is remotely informal, I move straight over on to Teams.”
Tracy, 29, a scientific researcher from London, says she often checks her personal email “for keeping track of things like theatre tickets or other purchases”. At work, she has a separate email address “which I draft out and use very formally” but also uses instant messaging on Teams for quick checkups with colleagues. She adds that she “never” uses text or social media to contact colleagues in the workplace.
Gen Z workers who contacted the Guardian also said they used work emails regularly. “I generally check personal emails once a day and work emails regularly between 9 and 6,” says Matthew, 23, a human rights paralegal based in London. Meanwhile, Owen, 25, a programmer from Aberdeen, says: “Like any professional environment, my workplace uses email. Were I asked to check something like Instagram at work, I would expect some kind of wrongdoing was taking place.”
For one expert, the Davos comments reflect a constant of professional life: relentless technological and cultural change. Emails were frowned upon by the “telephone and letter” generation, says Thomas Robinson, senior lecturer at Bayes Business School in London. But a shift happened anyway.
“We can partner up with younger generations and add our experience to that, partner up with that community, or we can make enemies of the future. But thinking you can hold back techno-cultural change is for the birds,” he says.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
