TOC Ready Room 22 November 2022: Drive-by edition; Poland missile impact, Biden FBI/Israel, Special Counsel and other Trump

Increasingly, I agree with those who say we need an “audit” of U.S. support to Ukraine.  I put “audit” in quotation marks because a mere audit of the tens of billions flowing to Ukraine – and to military contractors – won’t get the job done.  What’s needed is a wholesale policy scrub of the Biden administration’s handling of the problem.

As always, I begin by affirming that the U.S. needs to support a fight to reverse and end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The U.S. shouldn’t have direct military engagement in the fight, nor should NATO.

But it matters what strategy we’re supporting and how military assistance to Ukraine is executed.

It matters at least as much how the fight in Ukraine is affecting NATO’s security conditions, posture, and unity.

The enterprise highlighted by a timeline on FBI encounters with the Hunter Biden laptop

A 25 July 2022 letter from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray is making the rounds.  In it, the senator informs Garland and Wray that he has received information from “whistleblowers” about biased assessment and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop and related probes in the fall of 2020.  The biased behavior allegedly came from Timothy Thibault, Assistant Special Agent in Charge at the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO), and FBI intelligence analyst Brian Auten.

The whistleblowers came forward in response to a May 2022 letter from Grassley asking for information on Thibault, in light of the special agent’s biased, partisan social media postings.  Grassley sent a letter on the same topic to the DOJ IG, also requesting information.

The timeline on the reported activities of Thibault and Auten is put in a very interesting light by juxtaposition with the known sequence of events surrounding the laptop.  A brief initial summary:

TOC Ready Room 9 April 2022: Russia-Ukraine, Adieu mon status quo; Echoes of info ops dance in our heads

The first order of business in the Ready Room is the state of the status quo six-odd weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Per our RR convention, this won’t be an in-depth look.  But it’s important to point out that the status quo has already changed, in ways that are likely to be irreversible, and that have been flying under the radar up to now.

I think a lot of people realize this is happening, even if they can’t readily think what the specific details are.  Only one border has been breached so far, after all.  NATO hasn’t been drawn into “World War III.”  How bad can it be?

We’ve looked at one detail already:  the immediate failure of NATO’s missile defense linchpin.

Big bank, big bust: Another dot-path connected with Ukraine and the suddenly legitimate laptop

The New York Times’s admission this past week that the Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation has come at an opportune time.  It’s an obscurely opportune time, to be sure.  But it’s opportune nonetheless.

What makes it so is a reminder that the seed money used to start a cybersecurity non-profit called Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), whose interests and personalities rather remarkably replicated those of Russiagate and Alfa-gate in 2015 and 2016, came from an asset forfeiture settlement with the French banking giant BNP Paribas.

Those dots connect.  Some readers already know how. For others, here’s the BNP angle.