Boxes and Doxxes on Parade
Q: What’s similar in these people?
Bruce Reinhart, the judge Trump appointed who looked at the evidence presented and approved the warrant to retrieve National Security documents from Mar-A-Lago.
The FBI agent who helped prepare the request for a warrant.
Judge Reinhart’s courtroom deputy.
The wives and children of these men.
A: Via Rolling Stone: A review of Truth Social postings by Rolling Stone shows Trump supporters have spent the past week doxxing both Judge Bruce Reinhart, the magistrate judge who approved the Mar-a-Lago warrant, and an FBI agent involved in preparing the request, as well as their families. The information includes their purported home addresses, phone numbers, places of worship, private offices, and similar information about the men’s families and junior employees.
Also:
Former Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler posted the name of an FBI agent involved in the preparation of the warrant on Truth Social, as well as the names of his wife and child, their social media accounts, and the school the child attends. Truth Social removed the post by Ziegeler but the verbatim text of the post, complete with contact information for the agent and his family, have spread across Trump’s social media in a series of posts with no apparent attempts at moderation by the company.
When a federal court unsealed the search warrant, the court redacted the names of FBI agents involved. But the names became public when the pro-Trump outlet Breitbart obtained a leaked copy of the warrant and posted an article highlighting the agents’ names. In a move that added fuel to the MAGA doxxing push, Truth Social subsequently issued a push notification to its users that linked out to a third-party news article listing the agents’ names, according to CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan.
A leaked copy? Leaked by who? It didn’t come from the court, the FBI or the DOJ. That leaves Donald Trump or his lawyers or staff who would be the only others with a copy of the warrant.
Another user asked for help to “verify” that the address of a local temple Reinhart attended was correct. (Reinhart’s synagogue has had to cancel services following an outpouring of antisemitic abuse, according to Business Insider.)
As he’s under investigation for inciting the January 6th insurrection effort, the strange former president, the lede for the Rolling Stone article was this:
Former President Donald Trump claims that he “will do whatever” he can to bring down “the temperature” following last week’s FBI’s raid of his Florida home and club, Mar-a-Lago. But even a glimpse of Truth Social — Trump’s social media company — shows that the MAGA website has been a haven for private, doxxed information not only about authorities involved in the federal raid, but also of their families.
So bringing down the temperature is a verbal acknowledgement designed to cover his own ass, but his social media site is ratcheting up the temperature, endangering lives. Endangering the lives of an uninvolved courtroom deputy. And a rabbi and the synagogue congregation.
Unlike other social media sites, Truth Social’s terms of service has no policy against this kind of doxxing. Only after the Rolling Stone article appeared did the site remove some of this information. Which former WH staffer Garrett Ziegler contributed to.
How much more spilled blood does the very strange man want to commit to his dangerous losing ways?
It’s already clear from the testimony provided by Trump Cabinet level appointees and WH staffers that Trump handled classified documents poorly. He’d tear documents in two, flushed some down the toilet, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows burned some in a fireplace, etc.
Bragging, he’d display classified info to foreign leaders and Mar-A-Lago guests then excuse it by pointing out that he had the right to declassify anything on the fly. Which overlooks the fact that the documents revealed what intel services had collected successfully. US intel and Israel intel, at least. And his powers to declassify are not as broad as he claims.
His staff also selectively leaked info to the press whenever he thought there was some political advantage in doing so.
The document gathering was done because some insider - White House or Mar-A-Lago staff - tipped off the FBI. And because Trump expressed concern that they had a ‘rat’ in their midst, that indicates he was aware he had some things hidden that he kept despite a year of negotiations to get all of the documents returned.
Now it’s being floated that the search warrant was overbroad since the FBI gathered some things - like Trump’s passports - that they subsequently returned. In reality, whren people are gathering boxes of documents, it’s not uncommon to find out that the boxes contained a few other items unrelated to the search warrant.
And because it took him several days to mention the passports, it’s very likely he didn’t even know they were gone till the FBI notified him of their imminent return.
Trump’s lawyers are now seeking all the info that was gathered and presented to Judge Reinhart. The DOJ wants that information sealed, as it would expose a confidential source or sources and possibly the names of other decision makers in the DOJ chain of command.
It doesn’t seem very smart to doxx the judge and his family and place of worship, then ask the judge to expose others to similar threats and abuse, but again, this very strange man seems to be unaware of the definition of ‘stupid’.
And out across the land where numerous Trump remora are running for offices in swing states - offices where they can have direct access to ballots and voting processes - this election denier was highlighted today with this headline:
Arizona Republican secretary of state nominee kept 'Treason Watch List' and posted about stockpiling ammunition on Pinterest
It began:
(CNN)The Republican nominee for secretary of state in Arizona is a self-proclaimed member of the far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers who repeatedly shared anti-government conspiracies and posts about stockpiling ammunition on social media.
CNN's KFile team uncovered previously unreported posts from Mark Finchem, an Arizona state representative who won his party's nomination with the endorsement of former President Donald Trump, on several social media websites linked from his since-deleted former Twitter account.
The posts included a Pinterest account with a "Treason Watch List," and pins of photos of Barack Obama alongside imagery of a man clad in Nazi attire making a Nazi salute; Finchem also shared photos of the Holocaust claiming it could happen in the United States.
The Oath Keepers, of which Finchem self-identified as a member since 2014, is an anti-government, far-right militia composed of former and active military and law enforcement that purports to defend the US Constitution. The group is perhaps best known for providing security for the January 6, 2021, "Stop the Steal" rally preceding the Capitol riot. Eleven members, including its leader, were charged by the Justice Department with "seditious conspiracy" related to the Capitol attack.
Finchem, who attended the January 6 rally before the attack on the US Capitol but has denied he participated in the riot and has not been charged with any crimes, campaigned extensively on the false claim the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. If Finchem wins his race against Democrat Adrian Fontes, a former county clerk of Maricopa County, Arizona, Finchem would be tasked with running the state's elections in 2024. In Arizona, the secretary of state is second in line to the governorship.
A few news bytes:
From Reuters today:
(Reuters) - Former President Donald Trump's media and technology company must turn over information about ex-Congressman Devin Nunes' employment as its chief executive officer, a federal judge ruled on Friday.
The ruling stems from a $75 million defamation lawsuit brought by Nunes, a former Republican U.S. Congressman from California, against Hearst Magazine Media Inc and journalist Ryan Lizza.
U.S. Magistrate Judge William Matthewman in West Palm Beach, Florida, ruled that Trump Media and Technology Group Corp has 10 days to comply with the defendants' subpoena and provide information regarding Nunes' employment as CEO. Trump Media owns Truth Social, Trump's social media startup.
Nunes is suing Hearst and Lizza in Iowa federal court over a 2018 Esquire magazine article, which Lizza wrote, that said the Nunes family dairy cow farm had moved from California to Iowa. The judge's ruling addressed Hearst's bid for information that the media defendants want to use to counter Nunes' claim that the article caused him to suffer reputational harm. Hearst and Lizza have denied Nunes' defamation claims.
Trump’s company is not involved in this lawsuit but is trying to block the release of this info.
This guy is clearly in trouble. If guilty as charged, he should face some prison time, which I favor for frauds.
I had to look him up online. A Democrat, he won a squeaker election once, winning by an 862 vote margin out of more than 113,000 votes cast. Then was easily beaten by a large margin in 2021.
From Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Luke Broadwater and Eileen Sullivan at the NY Times:
WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog, who is under criticism for his handling of an investigation into missing Secret Service text messages around the time of the Capitol attack, is refusing to cooperate with congressional demands, even blocking his employees from testifying before Congress, two top Democrats said on Tuesday.
Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the chairwoman of the Oversight Committee, and Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, sent a letter to Joseph V. Cuffari, the Homeland Security inspector general, demanding that his office comply with their requests for documents and transcribed interviews.
“You have refused to produce responsive documents and blocked employees in your office from appearing for transcribed interviews,” the letter said. “Your obstruction of the committees’ investigations is unacceptable, and your justifications for this noncompliance appear to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of Congress’s authority and your duties as an inspector general.”
It does seem pretty fishy that January 5th and 6th texts from Secret Service agents got wiped on those specific days and often where there’s such a smell, there’s fish. It’ll be hard for the IG to provide a justifiable defense to prevent others from testifying.