LOSSES AND GAINS WITH AVRIL HAINES: From 2013 to 2015, Avril Haines was Deputy Director of the CIA. A respected attorney with lots of experience elsewhere in government including at the White House, she is now an advisor to the Biden campaign. And that has activists and others who The Daily Beast describe as “more left than liberal” in a funk. An unnamed Senate staffer described her involvement as “ominous.” Her crimes? Helping put a legal framework around the U.S. use of lethal drones and accepting the recommendations of an outside accountability board regarding allegations that CIA officers had “spied” on Senate staffer’s investigation of enhanced interrogation. Senator Mark Udall of Colorado seems to be worried about Haines getting a job in a potentially new Biden administration. “If our country is going to turn the page on the dark chapter of our history that was the CIA's torture program, we need to stop nominating and confirming individuals who led this terrible program and helped cover it up.”
IS TIME RUNNING OUT FOR TIK-TOK? Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday that the Trump administration is considering banning the Chinese app Tik-Tok as a “danger to American national security.” Ingraham asked him “Would you recommend that people download that app on their phones?” Pompeo said: “Only if you want your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.” China already got all the good stuff with the OPM hack. Would it be so bad to overload them with countless videos of silly dancing? Wait, that could be used someday for blackmail, at least based on what we’ve seen.
BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO: Remember Paul Erickson, the conservative political operative who was the boyfriend of unregistered Russian foreign agent Maria Butina? Well, Maria is back home living large, but poor Paul was just convicted of defrauding investors in a variety of schemes and sentenced to seven years in federal prison. To be clear – nothing Erickson was charged with had anything to do with Butina. He is a Yale graduate with the University of Virginia Law degree with an apparent penchant for scamming friends, classmates, and family members. Here’s an interesting nugget: as a lawyer, he once represented John Wayne Bobbitt. If you don’t remember who that is, Google him. Hard to believe Maria let Erickson get away.
TRENDS IN TERRORISM: A 37-year-old British woman who converted to Islam was sentenced to 14 years in prison last week for having planned to conduct a suicide bombing at London’s St Paul’s cathedral. Safiyya Amira Shaikh admitted in court that she had intended to conduct the attack and denied that she had gotten cold feet. The only reason she didn’t show up she said was that she was “too stoned” to do so. It might appear to be one of the first recorded cases of lives being saved by illicit drugs. Actually, Shaikh did not get as close as she thought she did to pulling off her mission. The “bombmaker” who provided her with explosives was an undercover officer.
AND ALL THE PRESIDENTIAL M&M’s THEY CAN EAT: Want to find out how much folks working in the White House get paid? The Executive Office of the President is required by law to make an annual public report about who makes what. The most recent report just came out. It is full of famous and not so famous names. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany is, for some reason, listed under her married name: Kayleigh Gilmartin. She makes $183,000 a year to not lie to us. And in an amazing coincidence, her husband’s cousin Chad just landed a job in the press office too (although he nets only $58,200.) Andrew Giuliani, son of America’s former mayor, makes $95,000 as a Special Assistant to the President and Associate Director of Public Liaison. His duties reportedly involve outreach to sports teams. He has experience in that regard. According to a story in the New York Daily News in 2008, Andrew was tossed from the Duke golf team for “throwing an apple in the face of another player, breaking a golf club during a tournament, injuring a teammate and becoming verbally abusive with a coach.” Sounds like good training for today’s politics.
TWO OR THREE OF THESE ARE ACTUALLY GOOD: A website called Stacker has assembled a list of the “100 Best Spy Movies of All Time.” As the pandemic drags on, you may want to work your way through the list. If coronavirus isn’t gone by the time you have counted down to number one – you can start over because you probably won’t remember what you’ve seen by then. There are lots of things to disagree with on the placements on the list (like the 2012 film “Zero Dark Thirty” being as high as #9) but we were pleased to see at #5 the Marx Brother’s 1933 “Duck Soup” – Hail Freedonia.
HARD-HEARTED HANNA: Amazon Prime has just started streaming season two of “Hanna.” Season one of the series told the story of a teenage girl, raised in a forest in Eastern Europe, and taught by her dad to be a spy and kill people in colorful ways. Now in season two, she has allowed herself to be captured by the CIA and she trains with other teenage killers. We’re calling it the “feel-good” series of the summer.
POCKET LITTER: Bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
YOUR CHEATIN’ PURPLE HEART: A Florida man (yeah, that’s a surprise) recently went off on a racist rant. It is a little fuzzy about what set off Joseph Fucheck (yes, that’s really his name.) Fucheck was caught on video pointing a pistol at a Black homeowner, shouting racial slurs and announcing that he was a “35-year former Navy SEAL!” and adding “Go look at my Purple Heart.” As you might imagine, the police paid him a visit and it turns out Fucheck has been pretending to be a SEAL for quite a while. He had a house full of memorabilia – including a Purple Heart that police say he bought somewhere and Purple Heart recipient license plates. The pistol he had been brandishing was a BB gun (known to be the SEAL’s weapon of choice.) He also had what appeared to be an official looking photo with a flag in the background. Fucheck was wearing a naval-type uniform with the SEAL Trident on his chest, and some ribbons arranged in an order that would be non-sensical to anyone with 35 minutes of service time. Oh, and instead of a star on the sleeve of his uniform where one would normally appear, there was a symbol which appears to be that of the Public Health Service (they were naval-type uniforms too.) So, we are thinking that Fucheck might have been part of SEAL Team Sick.
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