Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Welcome! Log in to stay connected and make the most of your experience.

Input clean

Dead Drop: November 3

<p>dead drop</p>

IN THE PICTURE: The big news this week, of course, was the indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and the guilty plea of Trump campaign advisor George Popadopolous. While the administration raced to distance themselves from Popadopolous, the media dug up this March 2016 photo of the 30-year-old energy consultant meeting with Trump, then-Senator Jeff Sessions and about ten other members of Trump’s national security team. So, who are the other folks who made it into the photo? They include: J.D. Gordon, a retired Navy commander who worked on Mike Huckabee and Herman Cain campaigns (and who achieved notoriety while serving as a Pentagon escort for media going to Guantanamo Bay – by filing a complaint against a female Miami Herald reporter for making “abusive and degrading comments of an explicitly sexual nature” to him; her newspaper determined she’d merely cursed him out.) Also in the photo: former DOD Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, once accused of making anti-Semitic remarks while in office – an allegation he termed “lies.”

NOT IN THE PICTURE: On Wednesday, the CIA released nearly half a million additional files from the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Ladin. Among the files was UBL’s personal diary. Handwritten in Arabic, the journal did have a brand name in English – it was called a “Lucky Exclusive” note book. Exclusive, yes. Lucky? Not so much. Some readers kvetched that the Agency did not provide an English translation to accompany UBL’s musings. The data dump did include “79,000 audio and image files” and “10,000 video files.” The release does not include UBL’s personal porn stash which reportedly was among the material scooped up during the raid.

Keep reading...Show less
Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.