Reporter for
@rollingstone
. Former Daily Beast/Foreign Policy/Wired. Occasional
@bellingcat
contributor. Talk to me: adam.rawnsley
@gmail
or protonmail dot com.
This 60 Minutes special on the widows and orphans of COVID is crushing. 15 year old summoning the strength to smile on a FaceTime call with his mom because he realized it would be her last memory on earth. A 17 year old promising his sick dad he’d take over the family business.
Rioters admitting to the FBI that they didn't vote in November while also admitting to attacking the Capitol to overthrow other the votes of people who did is so on the nose it feels like screenwriting
Twitter just suspended 16 Twitter accounts that were part of a network of fake personas. Together they spent the last year placing about 90 opeds in +40 different news outlets. Newsmax. Washington Examiner. Jerusalem Post. Real Clear Media.
SCOOP from me and
@swin24
: January 6th committee is planning to request Alex Jones' text messages and emails from the Sandy Hook attorneys after his lawyer accidentally sent years worth of comms to the plaintiffs.
6-7 years ago, if you went around yelling at people “THE CIA MADE MY BEER GAY” you would be politely escorted to a social worker and a possible psych hold. Now it could probably get you a Daily Wire podcast.
New from me: Prosecutors have charged an alleged Colorado militia member, Robert Gieswein, which The Daily Beast has been tracking since he appeared in photos of the riot at the Capitol.
This is hilarious. Twitter shadowbans Bellingcat. Gets caught. Claims it was because they posted a video of the Texas shooting. Small problem: they didn't. Place your bets on what excuse number 2 is gonna be.
The FBI says Gieswein "appears to be affiliated with the radical militia group known as the Three Percenters." Working with
@jsrailton
, we found similar evidence. Here's a picture of Gieswein from his now-deleted Facebook page posing in front of CO Rep Lauren Boebert's bar
Nephew 4 (7 years old) is very into geography. Has discovered the existence of Finland and loves the place. Answer on some schoolwork: “is am special because: I want to protect Finland” 🇫🇮
This is such a wild inversion of roles from the previous rounds of fighting. In 2016, the GRU hacked an artillery calculator app to snag location data on Ukrainian troops trying to do targeting math. Now Russian generals are getting smoked by Ukrainians eavesdropping on them.
I’m about 40 percent convinced he thinks the phrase “mishandling classified information” means “keeping classified information in a messy pile” and not, you know, keeping it when you’re not supposed to. Would explain his outrage over the photo.
New from me: Graphika and
@stanfordio
found a network of accounts linked to the Russian troll factory on Truth Social, Gettr, and Gab. Their most successful posts came from Kid Rock impersonators who got Donald Trump Jr. to repost their content.
Teeth are another sticking point. The algorithm seems to have glitched out on Joe, who wrote for pubs like The Post Millennial, when doing his teeth. Instead of two front teeth and two incisors, he has three (?) front teeth.
Pfizer declined to take Warp Speed money because, according to its CEO, they didn’t want their vaccine to be ransom to American politics. In hindsight that’s looking like a good call.
“Apparently unaware that a public video admission to criminal conduct at the U.S. Capitol could strip him of the right to vote, Mr. Jackson oddly explains that he has “learned a lesson” from not voting in the 2020 presidential election (“because I thought my vote didn’t count”)..
NEW: The pickup truck with a Three Percent militia decal parked at the Capitol on Jan 6. belonged to GOP. Rep. Mary Miller's husband Chris, a state rep in Illinois. Building off research by
@capitolhunters
.
First off: stolen photos. The accounts took photos of real people and passed them off as someone different—without the real people's knowledge or consent. We found about four of those. You can see side by side. They mirrored them, most likely to defeat reverse image searches.
How do we know they're fake? After The Daily Beast presented our findings to Twitter, the company suspended them for violating platform manipulation and spam policies. But there's a whole lot more evidence than that.
Here's a Maxar image of a mass grave in Bucha, where Russia has left behind the bound corpses of civilians shot execution-style among other horrors. The New Republic would like very much for you to believe this is "war propaganda."
Historians are going to point to Trump’s incitement of the Michigan plot against Gov Whitmer as the key bit of 1/6 foreshadowing the way Nixon historians point to the White House plumbers attempts to go after the Pentagon Papers leakers as the beginning of Watergate
Meta found a Chinese troll network hiring anti-Soros protesters, setting up a fake company in London, and shitposting anti-immigrant takes in an apparent (lame) attempt to stir up division in the west. So naturally I applied. They're hiring, folks.
This procedurally-generated video from the Facebook of Robert Gieswein, a Colorado 3% militia member who stormed the Capitol, is accidentally the most damning evidence you'll ever see that Facebook shouldn't exist.
It’s noteworthy that the most worrisome public warning about possible Russian interference—the GRU’s targeting of 200 groups for hacking—was delivered by a private corporation, Microsoft. Not the federal govt.
NEW: Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and intelligence experts are now concerned it may be too late to arm Americans with a clear and consistent assessment of the scale and nature of foreign election interference.
One of the ways we were able to identify Gieswein was from the distinctive "Woodland Wild Dogs" patch he wore on his chest. If you check website registrations, you can find that Gieswein registered websites for the group as well as "Rocky Mountain Oathkeepers"
Some of them appear to have been AI-generated using the kind of artificial intelligence software you see in ThisPersonDoesNotExist. Take "Joseph Labba" here.
The person who deserves the credit for uncovering this is
@marcowenjones
. Marc does great work uncovering disinformation networks and he was the first to spot something wrong with "Lin Nguyen" and "Raphael Badani." Do yourself a favor and follow Marc.
Unless you can specify a law that this leak supposedly broke, this a gross abuse of taxpayer funds and federal law enforcement. Your HR problems are not federal crimes.
BREAKING: Chief Justice John Roberts has directed the marshal of the Supreme Court to launch an investigation into the source of the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, which Roberts verified as an authentic document
You can see him kneeling and looking injured on the night of Jan 5 after involvement in an apparent scuffle in this picture taken by Shannon Stapleton of Reuters
There was also an Instagram account (again, now deleted) in the name of the "Woodland Wild Dogs" that appeared to show Gieswein and associated camping, shooting, and doing tactical exercises
New from me: Rob Minuta, the Oath Keeper ABC identified as doing security for Roger Stone on Jan. 6, was also seen escorting Michael Flynn at the 12/12 Trump rally and Alex Jones at the 11/14 rally.
Fake faces generated by AI are fairly convincing but they do glitch out on some things, like ears and teeth. They seem to have trouble with the ear creases, like Joe here.
We asked a dentist to review the pic and he said it looks off too: “This mouth looks either fake or has some sad dental story behind it...The third tooth from the center does not look real to me. If you compare it with the canine on the other side it is obvious."
Most instructive tweets on this website today. "On the one hand, this lunatic was pushing lethal misinformation that could get people killed. But on the other hand, he increased traffic and helped make me money. So good dude, high five."
And then there's their bios. A few had LinkedIn pages. Most didn't. My favorite was the author page for "Amani Shah" at
@GVS_News
. Imagine my surprise when I found out she claimed to do "ghostwriting" for The Daily Beast
In the other news, a bear with a box on his head managed to sneak into one of the Turkish military bases and climb onto the tower.
The animal is reported to be safe and managed to descend on its own.
So what else makes them seem off? Well, it's a little weird that so many people who were contributors to two suspicious sites (more on those in a bit) all (except one) had account creation dates in March or April
Most of these fake personas wrote for two websites, The Arab Eye and Persia Now. The sites don't say so but they're linked. Created on the same day. Share a google analytics account. Both at the same IP. Share SSL certs with the same group of other websites.
And as the FBI affidavit notes, his helmet is once again visible at Dominic "Spazzo" Pezzola allegedly smashes through a Capitol window with a police shield
New from me: when the Jan 6 committee wanted to test TikTok’s potential for extremist content rabbitholes, they gave an account to a fictional 41 year old woman. It took 75 mins for the account to be served videos with Nazi content
“We’re up ten points in the polls and on the verge of taking the senate. What’s the next play, Joe?”
“Only one thing we can do, bud. Minorly inconvenience a nobody and pray it works”
I find it odd, if not curious, that the moment I hit “send” on my column that’s highly critical of Joe Biden my Wi-Fi service disconnected. Inexplicably, it will be out all day. Never happened before. Probably just a coincidence. I drove to the local store and sent the column .
Finland’s Prime Minister
@MarinSanna
is in the headlines after a video of her partying was leaked today.
She has previously been criticized for attending too many music festivals & spending too much on partying instead of ruling.
The critics say it’s not fitting for a PM.
Trump calls Pelosi attack a "sad situation," shares conspiracy theory on Chris Stigall show: "Wow, it's -- weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks...The glass it seems was broken from the inside to the out so it wasn’t a break in, it was a break out."
JUST IN: White House NSC coordinator John Kirby says Iranian military personnel were on the ground in Crimea assisting Russian pilots who bombarded Kyiv with Iranian drones on Monday.
"Iran is now directly engaged on the ground," Kirby says.
Would totally watch an HBO show about a group of women who accidentally meet online when they realize their dipshit boyfriends and husbands went to the riot and then join forces to turn their exes and co conspirators in to the FBI
"If you can’t see the election was stolen you’re a moron,” Capitol defendant Richard Michetti texted his ex, who would soon be better known as FBI Witness 1.
Some of them, like "Lisa Moore" and "Joyce Toledano" here have the kind of eerily symmetrical faces you see in images generated by documented networks like this one busted by Graphika/DFR Lab
Ukraine is turning the tables on Russia and firing Iranian ammo at its tormentors after months of being struck by Iranian drones. Unclear where it’s coming from.
My favorite Philly fact is that Patriot Front showed up in their dopey Uhauls in a bunch of cities and got yelled at but they lasted about 5 minutes in the open before they had to run and hide