>>20926169 ICYMI: Ret Adm Rogers, CISO.PN

Link to site of podcast at the bottom

Content:

Today’s chief information security officers (CISOs) may be suffering from a bit of whiplash. From one direction are new rules governing disclosure for incidents involving public companies. From another is the continuing geopolitical unrest adding risk and uncertainty to an already complicated role. And from yet another is the ongoing litany of exposures, threats, and attackers relentlessly targeting businesses.

Last week at the RSA Conference, former National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael S. Rogers sat down for a discussion about the current legal, regulatory and threat landscape adding unprecedented complexity to CISOs regardless of industry.

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“First of all, this is a tough time to be a CISO. Now, remember, tough times also provide plenty of risk but also plenty of opportunity,” said Rogers, who spent decades leading teams responsible for securing large Department of Defense networks against well-resourced actors.

Rogers stressed the need to have solid foundational security practices in place as a starter, understand the fundamental processes that enable organizations to execute their outcomes, and prioritize accordingly.

“Fundamentally you have to be able to deal with people who have deep cybersecurity expertise, deal with others who are key components in executing the organization’s mission, and lastly you have to deal with senior-most leadership in your organization who may have limited knowledge of cybersecurity, but on the other hand are the overseers and allocate resources and make the assessment if it’s working,” Rogers said. “You have to be able to communicate in a language they understand and that’s not the technical side of cybersecurity.”

Rogers also covers the dichotomy between threat actors targeting enterprises, most of whom are criminals versus state-sponsored groups. The APT landscape, however, is concerning for CISOs in critical infrastructure sectors and responsible for cyber-physical systems. The Russia-linked Sandworm APT, for example, is notorious for targeting operational technology (OT) systems in addition to carrying out espionage and misinformation campaigns against Western targets and adversaries.

This includes, Rogers points out,increased collaboration between criminal groups working on behalf of state actorsin some instances.

“As a cybersecurity professional, the lines aren’t clean so you’re going to have to deal with a broader set of scenarios and a broader set of challenges,” Rogers said.

In terms of explicit targeting of critical infrastructure for political and military gain, China’s Volt Typhoon actor has been a focal point for CISOs for some time. The APT has been accused of embedding malicious code in CI networks with the implication of activating during a time of military conflict for example, not only causing destruction on electric or water systems for example, but also sowing chaos among society.

“This is a total change in risk calculus.I’ve never seen a nation state before engage in the emplacement of destructive malware in the critical infrastructure of another nation,” Rogers said, adding that previous intrusions from Russian or Chinese actors had been more in the vein of reconnaissance of network structures and security practices.

“They didn’t seem to be interested in manipulation of any software, implanting of any devices, or in any way in pre-cursoring destructive activity.What we’re seeing with Volt Typhoon is that the PRC has made a totally different decisionand now has decided ‘We want to emplace capability that we can activate in crisis or conflict and use it to cause to execute destructive action against core infrastructure within the U.S. that will generate benefit for us at a time and place of China’s choosing.’That is a big game changer.”

https://nexusconnect.io/podcasts/nexus-podcast-adm-michael-rogers-on-geopolitics-and-defending-critical-infrastructure?utm_campaign=%5BSocial%5D%20Nexus%20Podcast%3A%20Adm.%20Michael%20Rogers%20on%20Geopolitics%20and%20Defending%20Critical%20Infrastructure&utm_content=293634710&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-18252252

COLUMNS, CRIMINAL LAW, LAWYERINGMay 28, 2024

The Closing: Trump’s Final Argument Must Be Clarity to Chaos in Merchan’s Courtroom

(Warning long one, posting full article).1/4

Below is my column in the New York Post on theclosing arguments scheduled for todayin the trial of former President Donald Trump. Thecolumn explores the key elements for a closing to bring clarityto the chaos of Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom.

Here is the column:

With the closing arguments set for Tuesday in the trial of former president Donald Trump, defense counsel are in a rather curious position.

There isstill debate among legal experts as to the specific crimethat District Attorney Alvin Bragg is alleging.

Trump’s lawyers are defending a former president who is charged under a state misdemeanor which died years ago under the statute of limitations. It was then zapped back into life in the form of roughly three dozen felonies by claiming that bookkeeping violations — allegedly hiding payments to Stormy Daniels to ensure her silence about a supposed affair with Trump — were committed to hide another crime.

But what is that second crime?

Even liberal legal analysts admittedthat theycould not figure out what was being allegedin Bragg’s indictment. Now, after weeks of trial, the situation has changed little.

Originally, Bragg referenced four possible crimes, though isnow claiming three: a tax violation or either a state or federal campaign financing violation. The last crime is particularly controversial because Bragg has no authority to enforce federal law and the Justice Department declined any criminal charge. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) did not even find grounds for a civil fine.

Judge Merchan has ruled that the jury does not have to agree on what that crime is.The jury could split into three groups of four on which of the three crimeswere being concealed andMerchan will still treat it as a unanimous verdict.

Thejury has been given little substantive informationon these crimes, and Merchan has denied a legal expert who could have shown that there was no federal election violation.

This case should have beendismissed for lack of evidence or a cognizable crime. The jury will be reminded that the burden is on the government, not the defense.

However, thepresumption of innocence is often hard to discern in criminal cases. Most jurors believe that clients are sitting behind the defense table for a reason. That is why many prosecution offices haveconviction rates in the 80%-90% range.

That presumption is even more difficult to discern when the defendant is named Trump and the jury sits in Manhattan.

Three-legged Stool

A classic closing pitch by lawyers is to use a physical object like a three-legged stool. If any leg is missing, the stool collapses.

In this case, the government needs to show that there was a falsification of business records, that the records were falsified to conceal another crime and that Donald Trump had the specific intent to use such “unlawful means” to influence the election.

Even a cursory review of the evidence shows this case does not have a leg to stand on.

The First Leg: Falsification of Records

The dead misdemeanor that is the foundation for this entire prosecution requires the falsification of business records. It is not clear that there was such falsificationor that Trump has any knowledge or rolein any falsification.

Witnesses testified that Trump would sign checks prepared by others and that the specific checks in this case were signed while Trump was serving as president. Some of these checks, labeled “legal expenses,” were allegedly for attorney Michael Cohen to pay off Stormy Daniels….

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/05/28/the-closing-trumps-final-argument-must-be-clarity-to-chaos-in-merchans-courtroom/

>>20927218

2/4

Most importantly, Jeffrey McConney, the Trump Organization’s retiredcontroller and senior vice-president, testified that it was not Trump who designated these payments as “legal expenses==.” Rather, the corporation used an “antiquated” drop-down menu where any payments to lawyers were designated “legal expenses.” There is a plausible reason why payments to an attorney were listed as legal expenses.

The government also cites the designation of payments to Cohen as part of his “retainer,” which included reimbursement for the payment of the Daniels non-disclosure agreement. However, that designation was the result of discussions between Cohen and former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who is sitting in a jail cell in New York City. The government could have called Weisselberg, but did not.

The government has made a big deal over the fact that retainer agreements are supposed to have written contracts. However, that was the failure of Cohen, who was later disbarred as an attorney.

For a businessman like Weisselberg, monthly payments to an attorney could have seemed perfectly logical. Once again, there was no evidence that Trump knew of how the payments were denoted.

The Second Leg: The Secondary Crime

The government must also show that anyfalsification was done to further or conceal another crime.

This is where the defense needs to bring greater clarity to its own narrative. Trump’s team needs to drive home that a non-disclosure agreement is common in political, business and entertainment circles. The payment of money to quash a story before an election is neither unlawful nor unusual.

Indeed, Keith Davidson, Stormy Daniels’ attorney, described the NDA as routine and said that it was not hush money but a simple contractual transaction:“It wasn’t a payoff. It wasn’t hush money. It was consideration.”

This is where the testimony of DavidPecker, the former publisher of the National Inquirer,was particularly damaging to the government.

Pecker detailed how killing such stories was a common practice at the National Inquirer and that he had done so for Trump for over a decade before he ran for president. He also killed stories for an impressive list of other celebrities, including Tiger Woods, Mark Wahlberg, Rahm Emanuel and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Mechan has allowed the jury to repeatedly hear of “election violations,” whileblocking a legal expert to explain that there is no federal election law violation. The payment of hush money is not a campaign contribution and, again, the federal government not only declined to bring any criminal charge, but found no basis for even a civil fine.

Had he been allowed to testify, Bradley Smith, the former Federal Election Commission (FEC) chairman, would have explained that, even if it were a campaign contribution, it would not have been needed to be filed until after the election — demolishing the notion that this was an effort to influence an election that would have run before any filing had to be made.

The defense has to hammer away on the factthat no one has testified that it was a federal campaign violation.

Various witnesses, including former Trump aide Hope Hicks, testified that Trump was motivated to protect his family from embarrassment. She recounted how Trump even “wanted me to make sure the newspapers weren’t delivered to their residence that morning.”

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/05/28/the-closing-trumps-final-argument-must-be-clarity-to-chaos-in-merchans-courtroom/

>>20927224

3/4

Pecker testified that he previously killed stories about Trump going back over a decade. That included stories that were demonstrably untrue, such as a claim of a doorman that he fathered a child out of wedlock.

In addition to being a married man, Trump was the host of a major television program subject to a scandal clause. He was also an international businessman. Given all of those interests, it is impossible to claim absolutely that the campaign was the reason for the NDA, which was chump change for a billionaire.

Many believe the case is politically motivated.Steven Hirsch

The Third Leg: Criminal intent

The government spent considerable time proving facts not in dispute. There is no dispute that there was a NDA or that Trump signed checks on these payments. It is like repeatedly telling a court that a driver drove 55 miles an hour down a highway and elected to change lanes with a signal. The intent is to convince the jury that somehow proving that an NDA was paid and that an affair occurred is proof of an offense. It is not.

Thesupervisor in charge of processing paymentssaid thatpermissionto cut Cohen’s checks camenot from Trump, but from Weisselberg and McConney. Trump’s White House secretary, Madeleine Westerhout, testified that it was common for Trump to sign checks in the White House without reviewing them.

Theentire basis for the alleged criminal intent is Michael Cohen, a disbarred lawyer and serial perjurer.

Yet even Cohen did not offer a clear basis for showing a criminal intent to use unlawful means to influence the election.

Everything Cohen described could be true and only show a desire to kill an embarrassing story before an election — again, not a crime.

Cohen described the mechanics on the payments, but theonly person who discussed these paymentsin detail with Cohen was Weisselberg.

Even liberal experts on CNN admitted that Cohen was trashed on the stand. Theonly crime that was clearly established in his trial was the grand larceny that Cohenadmitted to under oath (after the statute of limitations had run out). Cohen said that he stole tens of thousands from the Trump corporation, a crime far more serious than the dead misdemeanor or even the felonies alleged against Trump.

However, themost significant testimony by Cohen maybe his latestalleged perjury in front of the jury.

Many of us guffawed when Cohen claimed that he secretly taped Trump to protect him and keep Pecker honest. No one can explain how that could possibly be true. If it were, he would have told Trump. There is nothing in the call that would have any impact on Pecker, andCohen admitted to regularly taping others without telling them.

Another alleged perjury camewith the key telephone call in which Cohen claimed Trump was informed that the Daniels deal was concluded. The defense showed that that 96-second-long call was to Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, in late October 2016. It was preceded and followed by text messages that clearly shows that the conversation was about a teenager harassing Cohen, not the NDA.

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/05/28/the-closing-trumps-final-argument-must-be-clarity-to-chaos-in-merchans-courtroom/

>>20927225

4/4

Other witnesses trashed Cohenas unprofessional, prone to exaggeration, bitter against Trump, at times suicidal over being denied positions like attorney general and simply “a jerk.” Hope Hicks, a former aide to Trump, said that Cohen “used to like to call himself Mister Fix It, but it was only because he first broke it.”

Those were the government’s witnesses.

Cohen’s lack of credibilityand his admitted financial interest in attacking Trump only highlight again the absence of Weisselberg, whom Cohen references repeatedly as the key person making decisions on how these payments were made and described.

If what Cohen said was true, corroboration was sitting a car ride away in Rikers Island. Traffic may be bad but it is not that bad. The only reason not to call Weisselberg was that he would contradict Cohen.

The prosecution preferred to use a serial perjurerwho roughly half of the country views as dishonest as almost the entirety of their case. Even beyond Weisselberg, there is no corroboration for Cohen’s vague allegations on the record.

In the end, this three-legged stool is the very thing that all of us must stand on when accused. Who on the jury would want to stand on this stool with their own liberty at stake?

In the end, the defense needs to be honest with these jurors. The question is whether hatred for this man is enough to ignore the obvious injustice in this case. They may have come to this case with little doubt about Donald Trump,but the question is whether there is not any reasonable doubt about the crimes alleged against him.

In the end, we are all standing on that wobbly stool when thegovernment seeks to convict people without evidence or even a clear crime. If we allow a conviction, it is more than a stool that will collapse in this Manhattan courtroom.

(He’s right if this is allowed and the convict, the NY court system will be more corrupt and/or more prosecutors will use this case to convict others without a crime.)

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/05/28/the-closing-trumps-final-argument-must-be-clarity-to-chaos-in-merchans-courtroom/

28 May, 2024 11:53

Moscow reacts as Biden claims US won Second World War

Such statements are part of “psychological warfare” against Russia, country’s ambassador to Washington DC has said

Moscow is going to fight all attempts at distorting history, the Russian ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov has said, in response to a claim by US President Joe Biden that the US had won the Second World War.

As the US marked Memorial Day on Monday, Biden visited Arlington Cemetery in the capital to pay respects to the fallen US troops and to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. During the ceremony, the president said that the servicemen who are buried at the cemetery had fought in “every major conflict in history” and, among other things, managed to “defeat fascism.” On June 6, 1944, theUS soldiers “took to the beaches of Normandyand liberated a continent andliterally saved the world,” he claimed.

The president’s remarks are part of a campaign by Washington, Ambassador Antonov wrote on Telegram on Monday, which isaimed at “cynical belittlement and even disavowal of the decisive role of the Soviet Union in crushing the fascists” during that conflict, which in Russia is called the Great Patriotic War (June 1941-May 1945).

“There is not a single country in the world that has endured morethan we have in the struggle against Nazi Germany and its satellites.Almost all of Europe fought against the Red Army on the frontsof the Great Patriotic War. These facts cannot be disputed,”he said.

According to the ambassador, the claims by Biden and other US politicians are dictated by the current state of relations between Washington and Moscow. “Such misinformation is part of psychological warfare against Russia. We will fight against it andwill not allow the distortion of history,” the envoy promised.

“We will not let the world forget that our peoplesacrificed 27 million lives [in the fight against the Nazis].. It was Soviet soldiers who hoisted the Victory Banner atop the Reichstag in Berlin==,” Antonov pointed out.

Russia’s foreign ministry also commented on Biden’s claim in a statement on Monday, saying that it “would have been strange to expectthat those who finance the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev and supply it with weapons,would feel gratitude to the peoples of the Soviet Unionfor the victory over Nazism.” By promoting “American exceptionalism,”Washington is actually committing “a betrayal of its own anti-fascist past,” it said.

Former Russian president DmitryMedvedev, who is now the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, told TASS on Tuesday that the statement by 81-year-old Biden about the US winning the Second World Waris “not senile dementia, but a conscious line towards rewriting history. It is a part of a campaign against our country.”

(Bidan and his Admin is evil)

https://www.rt.com/news/598333-biden-ww2-us-antonov/

https://www.rt.com/business/598332-western-firms-backtrack-russia-exit/

Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden

One adviser to major Democratic donors keeps a running list of reasons Biden could lose.

05/28/2024 05:00 AM EDTPOLITICO…KEK

A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.

All year,Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grindthrough the 2024 election. But now,nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.

“You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely.

But Biden’s stubbornly poor pollingand the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said.

“This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end.’”

Despite everything, Trump is running ahead of Biden in most battleground states. He raised far more money in April, and the landscape may only become worse for Democrats, with Trump’s hush-money trial concluding and another — this one involving the president’s son — set to begin in Delaware.

The concern has metastasized in recent days as Trump jaunted to some of the country’s most liberal territories, including New Jersey and New York, to woo Hispanic and Black voters as he boasted, improbably, that he would win in those areas.

While he’s long lagged Biden in cash on hand, Trump’s fundraising outpaced the president’s by $25 million last month, and included a record-setting $50.5 million haul from an event in Palm Beach, Florida. One adviser to major Democratic Party donors provided a running list that has beenshared with funders of nearly two dozen reasons why Biden could lose, ranging from immigration and high inflation to the president’s age, the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris and the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Donors ask me on an hourly basis about what I think,” the adviser said, calling it “so much easier to show them, so while they read it, I can pour a drink.”

The adviser added, “The list of why we ‘could’ win is so small I don’t even need to keep the list on my phone.”

On the day after news broke that Biden had trailed Trump in fundraising last month, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey raised the pressure on donors as she introduced the president to a crowd of 300.

The cluster of fundraising events Biden attended in Boston that day were expected to bring in more than $6 million for his political operation. But Healey said that wasn’t good enough.

“To those of you who opened up your wallets, thank you,” said Healey, a Democrat in her first term. “We’d like you to open them up a little bit more and to find more patriots — more patriots who believe in this country, who recognize and understand the challenge presented at this time.”…

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/28/democrats-freakout-over-biden-00160047

>>20927283

This is too funny, but its only printed because they are alerting the “powers that be” that they are working on replacing Bidan.

PS: that was only a portion of the article

>>20927280

He’s right, Bob Good went home and trashed Trump and when he got caught, he turned into a MAGA supporter overnight. RINOs never change, and the people in his state know he’s a big liar. He told fund raisers he hated Trump and would do everything to block him, to get money. Too many stories out there.

With this announcement the real Bob Good Bad will cone back in full force