Powerful video from the Black Eyed Peas and Jennifer Hudson for Biden.
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How the Iran news actually undermines one of Trump’s biggest lies
There’s a lot to scrutinize about John Ratcliffe’s big announcement about Iran and Russia, but an important piece of news about it is getting lost: Without doing so directly, President Trump’s own director of national intelligence actually debunked one of the president’s biggest lies about the election.
Much discussion of Ratcliffe’s remarks to the media has focused on his claim that Iran is sending fake threatening emails to voters — purportedly from the right-wing extremist Proud Boys — to help Trump. As many have noted, the idea that this benefits Trump makes little sense on its face.
But Ratcliffe also said something else in his Wednesday evening comments that is oddly getting overlooked: He indirectly but unequivocally confirmed that the claims that Trump has been making about voter fraud, particularly in vote-by-mail, are false.
In that way, this affair actually demonstrates just how low Trump has sunk in trying to corrupt the election: validating Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in the integrity of the voting is a line that even Ratcliffe, who’s widely seen as a devoted Trump loyalist, won’t cross.
The centerpiece of Ratcliffe’s announcement was that Iran — and Russia, which was mysteriously downplayed — has obtained voter data enabling Iran to send emails to voters that were faked to seem like right-wing efforts to menace them into voting for Trump.
Ratcliff noted that this was “designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump.”
The idea is that these emails are supposed to associate Trump with right-wing efforts to intimidate voters, harming him politically. But as Democrats noted, too little is known about the scheme to conclude that this was the conscious aim.
But the other thing Ratcliffe said about Iran is really important. Here it is:
Iran is distributing other content to include a video that implies that individuals could cast fraudulent ballots, even from overseas. This video, and any claims about such allegedly fraudulent ballots, are not true.
You don’t say, DNI Ratcliffe. By the way, who else has been making such claims about fraudulent ballots?
Why, Trump has, of course. And so has his attorney general, William P. Barr. And so has the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
The wretched meaning of this is further underscored by the video that Iran has allegedly circulated. It’s not available now because Twitter suspended the account where it had been posted.
But The Post viewed the video:
The video, which was reviewed by The Washington Post, shows Trump making disparaging comments about mail-in voting, followed by a logo with the name of the Proud Boys. It then documents what was made to appear as a hack of voting data in an effort to produce a fraudulent ballot.
So, to be as clear as possible, this video circulated by Iran, which Ratcliffe has denounced for spreading false information about voter fraud, features Trump himself making such claims.
Indeed, claims that Ratcliffe here denounces as disinformation from a hostile foreign power — that balloting fraud is a serious problem, including from overseas, which necessarily means vote-by-mail — are ones that the president of the United States and his attorney general make on a regular basis.
These false assertions are absolutely central to Trump’s endgame in this election. He has insisted that because of mail-vote fraud, the election cannot render a legitimate outcome in which he loses. And he’s openly telegraphed that he’ll use this idea to try to invalidate untold numbers of ballots.
What’s more, Barr has also echoed these falsehoods. Barr has repeatedly hyped bogus instances of voter fraud and has insisted that mail voting is susceptible to foreign counterfeiting of ballots.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. has stated as fact that “millions” of mail ballots will inevitably be faked as part of a scheme to steal the election from his father, and has even used this to mobilize Trump supporters for a sustained struggle over the results.
Yet now Trump’s own DNI has flatly stated that all this is nonsense.
Trump is a disinformation superspreader
I ran this by Joshua Geltzer, the senior counterterrorism director at the National Security Council from 2015 to 2017. He noted that Ratcliffe, perhaps without realizing it, has now badly complicated Trump’s ability to make this claim going forward.
“Ratcliffe himself just put this in a bucket of falsity, despite Trump being the one to say it all the time,” Geltzer told me.
Trump’s appearance in the video spread by Iran shows that “foreign actors don’t need to cook up disinformation,” Geltzer continued. “They just need to amplify the president of the United States.”
“Then when his own cabinet talks about foreign disinformation, they’re actually talking about things the president has said,” Geltzer noted.
On top of all this, Ratcliffe also confirmed that this disinformation about voter fraud is designed to “cause confusion, sow chaos and undermine your confidence in American democracy,” as he told reporters.
Trump says this stuff constantly. But now his own DNI has confirmed that it’s actively harmful to the national interest.
“He’s saying the circulation of precisely this sort of claim that Trump makes all the time is bad for American democracy and for the United States,” Geltzer concluded.
Trump will surely make these claims countless more times going forward, including at the final debate. Perhaps the moderator might consider asking Trump what he thinks about his own DNI’s assertion that they’re disinformation, and that they’re bad for our country.
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Cross posting (on the campaign trail w/ Trump)
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Yeah…ok then. Other news seems worse mostly because it makes not a shred of difference and they are not altering Pence’s schedule.
Taking out their other ‘wrecking ball’ Pence and his viral load that is coming is just part of the deal with this group.
The Washington Post: Top Stories | Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, tests positive for the coronavirus
A fresh coronavirus outbreak in the White House has infected two of Vice President Pence’s top advisers and a third person who is on his staff, officials said late Saturday night, though officials said Pence tested negative and plans to continue his heavy schedule of campaign travel.
Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff, who is among the administration’s fiercest skeptics of coronavirus restrictions, tested positive for the coronavirus Saturday afternoon, has experienced symptoms and begun isolation, officials said.
NYTimes: Members of Pence’s Inner Circle Test Positive for Coronavirus
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The New Hampshire Union Leader, the conservative-leaning Manchester-based newspaper, endorsed Joe Biden for president on Sunday.
Why it matters: It’s the first time the paper has endorsed a Democrat for president in over 100 years, after it broke from more than a century of backing Republicans to endorse libertarian Gary Johnson over President Trump in 2016.
- Biden has aggressively targeted New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton won narrowly in 2016.
- The endorsement came hours before Trump was set to visit the state on Sunday
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The editorial board does not lightly indict a duly elected president. During Mr. Trump’s term, we have called out his racism and his xenophobia. We have critiqued his vandalism of the postwar consensus, a system of alliances and relationships around the globe that cost a great many lives to establish and maintain. We have, again and again, deplored his divisive rhetoric and his malicious attacks on fellow Americans. Yet when the Senate refused to convict the president for obvious abuses of power and obstruction, we counseled his political opponents to focus their outrage on defeating him at the ballot box.
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Some good stats for Biden from Pew Research (Oct 5th,2020)
In a poll released this month by the Pew Research Center, 63 percent of Mr. Biden’s supporters said their vote was more a vote against Mr. Trump than a vote for Mr. Biden. At this point, the Biden campaign is probably happy to keep it that way.
(From Lisa Lerer - NYT Politics newsletter)
Pew Research
The Trump-Biden presidential contest
With less than a month until Election Day, Joe Biden maintains his lead over Donald Trump in the presidential race. Today, 52% of registered voters say that if the election were held today, they would cast their vote for Biden; a smaller share of registered voters say they would cast their ballot for Trump (42%). Jo Jorgensen captures 4% of registered voters while Howie Hawkins garners 1% support.
Trump, however, continues to hold an advantage in the share of his voters who say they support him strongly compared with Biden. Today, 68% of Trump voters say they “strongly support” their preferred candidate, compared with 57% of Biden’s voters.
Biden’s strong support has increased over the past two months: In August, 46% of his voters said they strongly support him. Today, a majority of his voters say this (57%).
In the final weeks leading up to Election Day, Biden holds a 10 percentage point lead over Trump among registered voters in the presidential race (52% Biden, 42% Trump). Many of the demographic patterns of support for both candidates are similar to those in the 2016 presidential contest.
Just as was the case four years ago, there is a sizable gender gap in candidate preference: Women voters continue to favor the Democratic candidate for president by 17 percentage points (55% to 39%). This is roughly on par with 2016.
In contrast, men are divided. Today, 49% favor Biden while 45% favor Trump. In 2016, men favored Trump by modest margins in preelection polls, as well as among validated 2016 voters.
There are also sizable gaps by race and ethnicity. White voters prefer Trump to Biden (51% vs. 44%, respectively), though Biden is faring slightly better among White voters in the current race relative to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
And the sizable Democratic advantages among Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters are just as large for Biden as they were in 2016. Biden currently leads Black voters by 81 percentage points, Hispanic voters by 34 points and Asian voters by 53 points. Note: Surveys are conducted in English and Spanish.
Younger voters are by far the most supportive of Biden when comparing voter preferences by age: Voters under 30 support Biden over Trump by 30 percentage points (59% vs. 29%, respectively). Voters ages 30 to 49 also prefer Biden to Trump by a 17-point margin. But voters 50 and older are far more divided: 48% say they currently support or lean toward Trump, while a nearly identical share say they support or lean toward Biden (49%). This marks a shift from 2016 – when Trump held a modest lead over Clinton among voters in these age groups.
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I like this…‘burnt toast’ for Trump.
So in an effort to tune into a clear, crisp radio signal through all the white noise, I interviewed the ultimate expert: Dave Wasserman. He’s one of the very few political seers who predicted—in mid-September of 2016, no less—that Trump might very well lose the popular vote and yet win the electoral college.
After talking with him I came away with the sense that Trump is not just toast, but burnt toast. To use a poker metaphor: In the last election, Trump won by pulling an inside straight. This time he’ll need nothing short of a royal flush—by pulling an ace from his sleeve.
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They were ‘levered’ (T’s favorite word), not leveraged as it should be)
President Donald Trump’s campaign website appeared to fall victim to hackers Tuesday night.
“This site was seized,” read a message that was briefly posted on a page at donaldjtrump.com. The “world has had enough of the fake news spreaded daily” by the president, it continued.
The message said it had information that “discredits” the president and his family, and it demanded cryptocurrency to either release or withhold the information.
The site soon appeared to go offline, and it was restored without the hacked message a short time later.
A spokesman for the Trump campaign, Tim Murtaugh, said the “website was defaced and we are working with law enforcement authorities to investigate the source of the attack.”
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Maybe this ‘hack’ is a bit more of this though…hmmmm
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The Washington Post: 24 former U.S. attorneys — all Republicans — back Biden, saying Trump threatens ‘the rule of law’
Twenty former U.S. attorneys — all of them Republicans — on Tuesday publicly called President Trump “a threat to the rule of law in our country,” and urged that he be replaced in November with his Democratic opponent, former vice president Joe Biden.
“The President has clearly conveyed that he expects his Justice Department appointees and prosecutors to serve his personal and political interests,” said the former prosecutors in an open letter. They accused Trump of taking “action against those who have stood up for the interests of justice.”
The letter, signed by prosecutors appointed by every GOP president from Eisenhower to Trump, is the latest instance of Republicans backing Biden. In August, dozens of GOP national security experts signed a full-page newspaper ad endorsing Biden over Trump.
“He has politicized the Justice Department, dictating its priorities along political lines and breaking down the barrier that prior administrations had maintained between political and prosecutorial decision-making,” their letter says.
The effort was organized initially by Ken Wainstein, a former U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who later served during the George W. Bush administration as assistant attorney general for national security.
A spokesman for the Trump campaign dismissed the letter from the former prosecutors as arrogant and offensive, noting that it is Trump who has the support of police officers and their unions.
“No one should be surprised establishment elitists are supporting Joe Biden,” Hogan Gidley said. In an emailed statement, he noted that the signers did not speak out “when Joe Biden promised to redirect funds away from police. I noticed their worry for politics wasn’t voiced when Joe Biden’s DOJ claimed to be a ‘wingman’ for the Administration, and I must have missed their unease for disunity when Biden refused to condemn his supporters for burning down churches, destroying businesses, and physically assaulting innocent Americans in the streets.”
The letter is signed by former U.S. attorneys from Florida, Minnesota, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and other states. One of the signers, Greg Brower, a former U.S. attorney for Nevada, also served during the first years of the Trump administration as the FBI’s assistant director for congressional affairs.
“I had an up-close view of how the President and the White House dealt with the Justice Department in recent years,” he said in an interview. “It’s clear that President Trump views the Justice Department and the FBI as his own personal law firm and investigative agency,” Brower said. “He made that clear privately — and publicly.”
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Yes, visually it is astounding to most of the country that too many people are clustered unsafely at T rally’s which T sees a a positive. What Biden does for his rallies, separate people to keep them socially distanced is a much better and healthy strategy.
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Perfect music choice, though, for the man who won’t take responsibility.
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We’re now less than a week from Election Day, and even the experts seem to be trying to prepare for every sort of surprise . What has been keeping you up at night as we wait for the counting to begin?
Election Eve insomniacs start with a given: Trump will do everything possible to steal an election that by every empirical sign he cannot win. So when you look at all the anti-democratic options he and his party are considering — a list so large it has spawned a voluminous journalistic literature of horrific what-if scenarios — you do have to prioritize your anxieties.
Back in August, Jeremy Stahl at Slate provided a handy “10 Scariest Election Scenarios, Ranked.” No. 1 was “USPS Sabotage.” A lot of shit has gone down since then. My No. 1 fear in the cold light of Halloween is any attempt at voter suppression involving violence. The Proud Boys are standing back and standing by. So are fellow travelers of the Wolverine Watchmen, who have been charged with the attempted kidnapping of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. So are self-styled militia like the Kenosha Guard, whose Facebook call to arms appeared just before 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two protesters, with the tacit support of the president. More than 15 million guns have been purchased by Americans from March through September in 2020 — a 91 percent increase from the same period in 2019. These arms can be brandished at many polling places to intimidate Americans, especially the people of color whose votes the GOP wants to suppress. They can be used to threaten local officials charged with counting votes. Gun-toting domestic terrorists can steal or destroy ballot drop boxes. They can incite conflicts that will suppress and block turnout in cities. “And all you have to do is move your little finger … and you can change the world,” as John Wilkes Booth sings in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins .
Among my other 3 a.m. waking nightmares this week, the runner-up would be how Trump can once again corrupt and outright violate American law to try to get his way. This has been most succinctly crystallized by Garrett Graff in Politico: “Barr’s Justice Department might seize on real, over-hyped, or imagined questions of fraud or voting irregularities to publicly launch investigations that would help Trump build a narrative of an illegitimate election.” If any of this reaches the courts, we can predict the endgame. In his instantaneously notorious opinion in a Wisconsin voting case this week, Brett Kavanaugh endorsed Trump’s bogus claim that any ballots counted after November 3 are likely to be compromised by fraud. We’ve reached the point where the last hope for stopping a right-wing coup in the Supreme Court may be Chief Justice John Roberts. That’s no hope at all, given that it was Roberts who in 2013 led the majority to castrate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Shelby County v. Holder , the Dred Scott decision of our day.
To keep our sanity, meanwhile, we are entitled to some legitimate hopes even if we don’t want to say them out loud for all the usual superstitious reasons. The polls are likely sounder than in 2016, when they were not as inaccurate (as FiveThirtyEight keeps reminding us) as memory has it. There could be a Biden landslide. For all Trump’s calls to cut off vote counting at midnight on Election Night in such congenitally slow-counting battlegrounds as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, he doesn’t seem to have considered the prospect that he might be behind in either one of them by that extralegal deadline. If he earlier loses Florida, Arizona and/or North Carolina, which tend to count fast, it would be fun to watch him flip-flop and beg desperately to extend the count for weeks in western Pennsylvania. Such ironic humiliations — along with the defeats of the most hypocritical of Vichy Republicans, Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham — may well prove pipe dreams, but we’re still entitled to fantasize a little.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted this week that since the start of COVID-19, Donald Trump’s approval rating has barely moved — if anything, it’s gone up by a couple points — despite more than 225,000 dead Americans. What accounts for its stability?
Trump voters are so loyal that they are happy to give their lives to the cause. Their festive attendance at his superspreader rallies recalls photos of the Jonestown death cult. They dutifully follow their leader’s directive to vote in person even as the pandemic spikes in their own communities. The reductio ad absurdum of this loyalty was visible this week when hundreds turned out at a Trump rally at Eppley Airfield in Omaha — where Trump was in desperate pursuit of a single electoral vote — and found themselves abandoned in the cold and snow when shuttle buses didn’t materialize as promised to return them to satellite parking lots some three miles away. About 30 attendees needed medical attention. Some were carted by ambulance to hospitals where they could then spread any coronavirus contracted at the rally to innocent patients and medical workers. A Trump campaign spokeswoman, Samantha Zager, blamed “local road closures” for this calamity, adding that it’s the campaign’s aim to provide “the best guest experience.” Guest experience! You come for the racism and you stay to get sick.
Don’t overthink this base’s undying fealty. Trump’s loyal troops are the direct descendants of the sizable number of Americans who might have given George Wallace a real shot at the Democratic nomination in 1972 if he had not been sidelined by an assassination attempt after he outdrew his rivals Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern in the early primaries. They are the descendants of those Americans [who trusted Richard Nixon until he fled the White House in a helicopter] (and remained faithful in sizable numbers thereafter). The Trump base is not going away when Trump does. The likes of Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley are already positioning to claim it.
According to an internal report obtained by BuzzFeed News, the Wall Street Journal is focusing on its largely white, male long-term subscribers — avoiding racial issues, holding stories for print — at the cost of its own growth . Will the Journal be able to maintain its relevance?
Frank Rich: The 2020 Election’s Worst-Case ScenarioThis internal report is worth a read: It’s as much a portrait of the more affluent components of Trump’s base as of a newspaper. And despite the effort by the Journal’ s editor Matt Murray to dismiss it as “a months-old draft that contains outdated and inaccurate information,” it actually only dates back to three months ago and appears to be a slickly designed, finished document. What it says is that a journalistic product with a mostly middle-aged, white male audience, dedicated to a print edition and fearful of covering racial issues (let alone attracting a diverse readership), is demographically doomed over time. Nothing will be done about it, of course, as long as the 89-year-old Rupert Murdoch, a print sentimentalist, is in charge. Once he’s gone, one can imagine that his heirs, who may care more about preserving capital than an editorial page’s hard-right ideological purity, will have other plans for the Journal , for now still a valuable property, and the New York Post , a money-sucking monument to Murdoch’s vanity.
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THE COUNTRY that elected Donald Trump in 2016 was unhappy and divided. The country he is asking to re-elect him is more unhappy and more divided. After almost four years of his leadership, politics is even angrier than it was and partisanship even less constrained. Daily life is consumed by a pandemic that has registered almost 230,000 deaths amid bickering, buck-passing and lies. Much of that is Mr Trump’s doing, and his victory on November 3rd would endorse it all.
Joe Biden is not a miracle cure for what ails America. But he is a good man who would restore steadiness and civility to the White House. He is equipped to begin the long, difficult task of putting a fractured country back together again. That is why, if we had a vote, it would go to Joe.
King Donald
Mr Trump has fallen short less in his role as the head of America’s government than as the head of state. He and his administration can claim their share of political wins and losses, just like administrations before them. But as the guardian of America’s values, the conscience of the nation and America’s voice in the world, he has dismally failed to measure up to the task.Without covid-19, Mr Trump’s policies could well have won him a second term (see first Briefing). His record at home includes tax cuts, deregulation and the appointment of benchloads of conservative judges. Before the pandemic, wages among the poorest quarter of workers were growing by 4.7% a year. Small-business confidence was near a 30-year peak. By restricting immigration, he gave his voters what they wanted. Abroad, his disruptive approach has brought some welcome change (see second Briefing). America has hammered Islamic State and brokered peace deals between Israel and a trio of Muslim countries. Some allies in NATO are at last spending more on defence. China’s government knows that the White House now recognises it as a formidable adversary.
This tally contains plenty to object to. The tax cuts were regressive. Some of the deregulation was harmful, especially to the environment. The attempt at health-care reform has been a debacle. Immigration officials cruelly separated migrant children from their parents and limits on new entrants will drain America’s vitality. On the hard problems—on North Korea and Iran, and on bringing peace to the Middle East—Mr Trump has fared no better than the Washington establishment he loves to ridicule.
However, our bigger dispute with Mr Trump is over something more fundamental. In the past four years he has repeatedly desecrated the values, principles and practices that made America a haven for its own people and a beacon to the world. Those who accuse Mr Biden of the same or worse should stop and think. Those who breezily dismiss Mr Trump’s bullying and lies as so much tweeting are ignoring the harm he has wrought.
It starts with America’s democratic culture. Tribal politics predated Mr Trump. The host of “The Apprentice” exploited it to take himself from the green room to the White House. Yet, whereas most recent presidents have seen toxic partisanship as bad for America, Mr Trump made it central to his office. He has never sought to represent the majority of Americans who did not vote for him. Faced by an outpouring of peaceful protest after the killing of George Floyd, his instinct was not to heal, but to depict it as an orgy of looting and left-wing violence—part of a pattern of stoking racial tension. Today, 40% of the electorate believes the other side is not just misguided, but evil.
The most head-spinning feature of the Trump presidency is his contempt for the truth. All politicians prevaricate, but his administration has given America “alternative facts”. Nothing Mr Trump says can be believed—including his claims that Mr Biden is corrupt. His cheerleaders in the Republican Party feel obliged to defend him regardless, as they did in an impeachment that, bar one vote, went along party lines.
Partisanship and lying undermine norms and institutions. That may sound fussy—Trump voters, after all, like his willingness to offend. But America’s system of checks and balances suffers. This president calls for his opponents to be locked up; he uses the Department of Justice to conduct vendettas; he commutes the sentences of supporters convicted of serious crimes; he gives his family plum jobs in the White House; and he offers foreign governments protection in exchange for dirt on a rival. When a president casts doubt on the integrity of an election just because it might help him win, he undermines the democracy he has sworn to defend.
Partisanship and lying also undermine policy. Look at covid-19. Mr Trump had a chance to unite his country around a well organised response—and win re-election on the back of it, as other leaders have. Instead he saw Democratic governors as rivals or scapegoats. He muzzled and belittled America’s world-class institutions, such as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. As so often, he sneered at science, including over masks. And, unable to see beyond his own re-election, he has continued to misrepresent the evident truth about the epidemic and its consequences. America has many of the world’s best scientists. It also has one of world’s highest covid-19 fatality rates.
Mr Trump has treated America’s allies with the same small-mindedness. Alliances magnify America’s influence in the world. The closest ones were forged during wars and, once unmade, cannot easily be put back together in peacetime. When countries that have fought alongside America look on his leadership, they struggle to recognise the place they admire.
That matters. Americans are liable both to over- and to underestimate the influence they have in the world. American military power alone cannot transform foreign countries, as the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proved. Yet American ideals really do serve as an example to other democracies, and to people who live in states that persecute their citizens. Mr Trump thinks ideals are for suckers. The governments of China and Russia have always seen American rhetoric about freedom as cynical cover for the belief that might is right. Tragically, under Mr Trump their suspicions have been confirmed.
Four more years of a historically bad president like Mr Trump would deepen all these harms—and more. In 2016 American voters did not know whom they were getting. Now they do. They would be voting for division and lying. They would be endorsing the trampling of norms and the shrinking of national institutions into personal fiefs. They would be ushering in climate change that threatens not only distant lands but Florida, California and America’s heartlands. They would be signalling that the champion of freedom and democracy for all should be just another big country throwing its weight around. Re-election would put a democratic seal on all the harm Mr Trump has done.
President Joe
The bar to Mr Biden being an improvement is therefore not high. He clears it easily. Much of what the left wing of the Democratic Party disliked about him in the primaries—that he is a centrist, an institutionalist, a consensus-builder—makes him an anti-Trump well-suited to repair some of the damage of the past four years. Mr Biden will not be able to end the bitter animosity that has been mounting for decades in America. But he could begin to lay down a path towards reconciliation.Although his policies are to the left of previous administrations’, he is no revolutionary. His pledge to “build back better” would be worth $2trn-3trn, part of a boost to annual spending of about 3% of GDP. His tax rises on firms and the wealthy would be significant, but not punitive. He would seek to rebuild America’s decrepit infrastructure, give more to health and education and allow more immigration. His climate-change policy would invest in research and job-boosting technology. He is a competent administrator and a believer in process. He listens to expert advice, even when it is inconvenient. He is a multilateralist: less confrontational than Mr Trump, but more purposeful.
Wavering Republicans worry that Mr Biden, old and weak, would be a Trojan horse for the hard left. It is true that his party’s radical wing is stirring, but he and Kamala Harris, his vice-presidential pick, have both shown in the campaign that they can keep it in check. Ordinarily, voters might be advised to constrain the left by ensuring that the Senate remained in Republican hands. Not this time. A big win for the Democrats there would add to the preponderance of moderate centrists over radicals in Congress by bringing in senators like Steve Bullock in Montana or Barbara Bollier in Kansas. You would not see a lurch to the left from either of them.
A resounding Democratic victory would also benefit the Republicans. That is because a close contest would tempt them into divisive, racially polarising tactics, a dead end in a country that is growing more diverse. As anti-Trump Republicans argue, Trumpism is morally bankrupt (see Lexington). Their party needs a renaissance. Mr Trump must be soundly rejected.
In this election America faces a fateful choice. At stake is the nature of its democracy. One path leads to a fractious, personalised rule, dominated by a head of state who scorns decency and truth. The other leads to something better—something truer to what this newspaper sees as the values that originally made America an inspiration around the world.
In his first term, Mr Trump has been a destructive president. He would start his second affirmed in all his worst instincts. Mr Biden is his antithesis. Were he to be elected, success would not be guaranteed—how could it be? But he would enter the White House with the promise of the most precious gift that democracies can bestow: renewal.
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How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge
A 64-page document that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm.”
One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, a fake “intelligence” document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and business in China.
The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.
The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen’s profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator. The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer said that no one by that name had ever worked for the company and that no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches.
One of the original posters of the document, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of it when asked about it and said Aspen does not exist.
Despite the document’s questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing, its claims that Hunter Biden has a problematic connection to the Communist Party of China have been used by people who oppose the Chinese government, as well as by far-right influencers, to baselessly accuse candidate Joe Biden of being beholden to the Chinese government.
The document and its spread have become part of a wider effort to smear Hunter Biden and weaken Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, which moved from the fringes of the internet to more mainstream conservative news outlets.
An unverified leak of documents — including salacious pictures from what President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a Delaware Apple repair store owner claimed to be Hunter Biden’s hard drive — were published in the New York Post on Oct. 14. Associates close to Trump, including Giuliani and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, have promised more blockbuster leaks and secrets, which have yet to materialize.
The fake intelligence document, however, preceded the leak by months, and it helped lay the groundwork among right-wing media for what would become a failed October surprise: a viral pile-on of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.
[
Behind Typhoon
](How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge)
The Typhoon Investigations document was first posted in September to Intelligence Quarterly, an anonymous blog “dedicated to collecting important daily news,” according to its “about” section. Historical domain records show the blog was registered to Albert Marko, a self-described political and economic adviser, who also lists the blog on his Twitter bio. When asked about the provenance of the document, Marko said he received it from Balding.
Balding, an associate professor at Fulbright University Vietnam who studies the Chinese economy and financial markets, posted the document on his blog on Oct. 22, seven weeks after it was initially published.
“I had really not wanted to do this but roughly 2 months ago I was handed a report about Biden activities in China the press has simply refused to cover. I want to strongly emphasize I did not write the report but I know who did,” Balding said in an email.
Balding later claimed to NBC News that he wrote some of the document.
“I authored small parts of the report and was involved in report preparation and review. As a researcher, and due to the understandable worry about foreign disinformation, it was paramount that the report document activity from acknowledged and public sources,” Balding said. “Great care was taken to document, cite, and retain information so that acknowledged facts could be placed in the public domain.”
Balding said Aspen is “an entirely fictional individual created solely for the purpose of releasing this report.” Balding did not name the document’s main author, saying “the primary author of the report, due to personal and professional risks, requires anonymity.”
Balding claimed that the document was commissioned by Apple Daily, a Hong Kong-based tabloid that is frequently critical of the Chinese government. Apple Daily did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to posting the document to his blog, Balding also promoted it in far-right media, appearing on Bannon’s podcast and on “China Unscripted,” a podcast produced by The Epoch Times, a pro-Trump media outlet opposed to the Chinese government.
Balding, an American who taught economics at China’s Peking University HSBC Business School until 2018, is often critical of the Chinese government. He made news this year as a source uncovering a global bulk data collection operation by the Chinese company Shenzhen Zhenhua Data Technology.
Blog posts highlighting the most salacious parts of the document, including articles from the Intelligence Quarterly Blog, Revolver News and Balding’s blog, received 70,000 public interactions — which includes reactions, comments and shares — across Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, according to the social media analysis tool BuzzSumo.
Balding’s blog was the primary driver of virality in conservative and conspiracy communities. The report itself was shared across Facebook and Twitter around 5,000 times, according to BuzzSumo, and more than 80 sites linked back to the blog, which was shared more than 25,000 times on Facebook and Twitter. Hyperpartisan and conspiracy sites like ZeroHedge and WorldNetDaily led the pack.
After the promise of a big reveal one day earlier, the document was also posted on the extremist forum 8kun by Q, the anonymous account behind the QAnon conspiracy theory movement.
On Twitter, the document was pushed by influencers in the QAnon community, as well as by Dinggang Wang, an anti-Chinese government YouTube personality who works for Guo Wengui, a billionaire who fled China amid accusations of bribery and other crimes. Republican Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, tweeted the document to his 2.3 million followers.
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‘Immediately suspicious’
](How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge)
The document gained attention from disinformation researchers in part because of the image of the document’s author.
Elise Thomas, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, first spotted telltale signs of a fake photo when she went searching for Typhoon Investigations’ Aspen on the web. Thomas found a Twitter account for Aspen named @TyphoonInvesti1, which had posted a link to Typhoon’s WordPress page that contained the document on Aug. 15.
The profile picture for Aspen immediately showed signs of being a computer-generated image that can be created by computers and even some websites. Aspen’s ears were asymmetrical, for one, but his left eye is what gave away that he did not really exist. Aspen’s left iris juts out and appears to form a second pupil, a somewhat frequent error with computer-generated faces.
“The most obvious tell was the irregular shape of the irises,” Thomas said. “The profile picture looks pretty convincing in the Twitter thumbnail, but when I popped it up into full view I was immediately suspicious.”
Thomas then consulted with Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at the analytics company Graphika, who noted the other telltale sign of a computer-generated face.
“One of the things he and his team have figured out is that if you layer a lot of these images over the top of one another, the eyes align,” Thomas said. “He did that with this image, and the eyes matched up.”
Other parts of Aspen’s identity were clearly stolen from disparate parts of the web. Aspen’s Facebook page was created in August, and it featured only two pictures, both from his “new house,” which were tracked back to reviews on the travel website Tripadvisor. The logo for Typhoon Investigations was lifted from the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center, a digital literacy nonprofit.
Aspen claimed on his LinkedIn profile to have worked for a company called Swiss Security Solutions from 2016 to 2020. Swiss Security Solutions denied having ever employed anyone named Aspen, and it said it had found fake accounts for two other people pretending to have worked for the company.
“Martin Aspen was never a freelancer or worker of the Swiss Security Solutions. We do not know this person. According to our Due Diligence Software, this person does not exist in Switzerland,” Swiss Security Solutions Chairman Bojan Ilic said, adding that the company has reported the profile to LinkedIn.
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Fake faces
](How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge)
Computer-generated faces have become a staple of large-scale disinformation operations in the run-up to the election. In December, Facebook took down a network of fake accounts using computer-created faces tied to The Epoch Times. Facebook removed over 600 accounts tied to the operation, which pushed pro-Trump messages and even served as moderators of some Facebook groups.
Last month, Facebook removed another batch of computer-generated profiles originating in China and the Philippines, some of which made anti-Trump posts.
Renee DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said computer-created identities are becoming common for disinformation campaigns, in part because they are easy to create.
DiResta, who helped examine a ring of AI-generated faces tied to the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA last month, said computer-generated profile pictures can be used to “build an army of fake people” to artificially support a cause or to make “disinformation operations harder to discover.”
“One of the things that investigators look at to understand the narrative that is spreading is whether the accounts are authentic, whether they’re real,” DiResta said. “If they were to use a stock photo, it confirms something dishonest is likely happening. By using an AI-generated face, you’re guaranteeing you won’t find that person elsewhere on the internet.”
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