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A big indicator appeared on Saturday, in a guise that may be a bit esoteric: a report that defense officials are pushing a proposal to split U.S. Cyber Command off from the National Security Agency, where the two have operated under a dual-hatted commander, the Director of NSA, since 2009. Events are moving too fast to get bogged down in a lot of detail on the threads running through them.  What’s important to understand is that this development is a connection between (a) the early days of Spygate, (b) the massive SolarWinds “hack,” (c) the major personnel moves at the Pentagon right after the November election, and – almost certainly – (d) the widespread indicators of electronic vote-tampering in the election itself. Those who’ve been following along with the analysis of Trump’s post-election operation recognize the headline reference to the “key supporting effort,” from my 4 December article outlining it.  The key supporting effort is an adjunct to Trump’s main effort to, in effect, cure the 2020 vote and restore law and order to America. The gist of the key supporting effort is that it involves intelligence collection, principally through IT/cyber means, on the entities behind the electronic vote-tampering via voting systems in the 2020 election.  Although some of the evidence that justifies this collection has been laid out in court cases, and briefed to state legislatures, this is a separate effort because it’s not about persuading courts to rule or government entities to investigate. Assuming it has been prepared for, this effort is about using the intelligence collected up to now to expose the actors, in appropriate venues, and unite what we know about their activities with what we can demonstrate about the outcomes in vote processing and tabulation across the country. My contention is that we have known more than enough to have been making these preparations, using intelligence surveillance means, since before the election.  President Trump’s Executive Order 13848 of September 2018 was the mechanism to formalize making this a priority of the kind that FISA surveillance can be based on; if U.S. persons as well as foreign actors were involved, their roles could very probably have been unmasked for a legitimate purpose. But FISA surveillance isn’t the only thing E.O. 13848 could justify.  It could also justify cyber operations. Follow the bouncing ball The brief version of the connection thread listed above is as follows. In the days after the 3 November election, a noteworthy development occurred at the Department of Defense.  Secretary Mark Esper left, and was replaced by Chris Miller, a former Army special forces officer, as Acting SECDEF.  A number of other senior replacements were made within a short period, including the addition of Kash Patel (formerly a staffer for Representative Devin Nunes, and a main player in the exposure of the Spygate operation against Trump) as chief of staff to SECDEF Miller, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, whom Michael Flynn brought to the National Security Council in January 2017, but who was edged out by H.R. McMaster that summer.  Cohen-Watnick was made acting Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence in November 2020.  (See the footnote at this post for what Cohen-Watnick was doing for part of the time in between.) That wasn’t the end of the major personnel changes at the Pentagon.  Trump has been replacing virtually all of two defense advisory boards as well.  The scale of these replacements indicates a major shakeup of the Defense Department – as well as hinting at ways the advisory boards may have been used that the taxpayers might not approve of. Having seen how the entire U.S. government has labored to sabotage the Trump administration for the last four years, I assume this is because elements of DOD were untrustworthy on an alarming scale.  (Those who imagine Trump to be a glorified terrorist will naturally take a different view.  However, the media, having gone all-in on Russiagate, and not scrupling to retail an incessant stream of lies about Trump and his administration, while actively suppressing information that contradicts their narrative, are entirely without credibility as regards Trump.) A central assumption here must be that to execute his key supporting effort, Trump needed to clear the decks in the DOD. I stress that this is not because he’s planning to deploy armed force in the U.S.  I never saw that as likely and still don’t. Wikipedia: By Touch Of Light – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link I did wonder if it had something to do with NSA, and with the literal tools – the satellites, computers, network connections, etc. – of national intelligence surveillance, which are largely under the physical and logistic administration of the Department of Defense.  If you need to guarantee access to them, without hindrance or interference, you have to have a full-faith Pentagon across the river. When the SolarWinds hacking story broke this past week, two things became clear.  One, if the intrusion actually began in Mach 2020, it began on the watch of Chris Krebs, the fired head of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) who swore after the 3 November vote that it was a totally secure election. The other thing was a more general one.  Something very big is going on in cyberspace, and by the nature of its targets, it obviously has to do with a national security attack on America.  It didn’t take clarification that a SolarWinds product (not the product involved in the intrusion) was used by Dominion Voting Systems to clarify also that the intrusion is probably connected, if indirectly, to the election and our voting systems as well as to other elements of the national security infrastructure.  (The Blaze has an explainer on which of SolarWinds’ branded software packages – Orion – is currently known to have been affected by the intrusion.  Dominion has been insistent that it has never used Orion, and we can assume that to be true.  However, the public information about the “hack” has come out in such a peculiar form so far that we have no reason to assume no other SolarWinds products have also been implicated.) The circumstances, on the whole, make it likely that U.S. Cyber Command was an important entity in the thread.  Again, both Cyber Command and NSA are DOD entities, and they are both headed by General Paul Nakasone, who took over from Admiral Mike Rogers in 2018. Two salient points before bringing this home.  One, sundance at Conservative Treehouse expressed exactly my sentiments in a post about the SolarWinds hack on 19 December:  that it sure seems strange if an intruder has been in our national systems for nine months and we still can’t give an accounting of what, if anything, has been pilfered or manipulated.  Sundance compares it to bank robbers breaking in and not taking anything. I’m not convinced “the” intruder is either Russia or China, although it could be either one.  More on that in a moment. The other observation is (I promise) the most arcane one you will see in this article.  It’s this.  A couple of days ago, the media made a bit of a point of the fact that one of the agencies penetrated via SolarWinds was the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), in the Department of Energy, which oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. That’s obviously something to be concerned about.  What makes it extra interesting, however, is a connection the media didn’t make.  The former head of the NNSA, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, left her job shortly after the 3 November election, during the same period when the replacements were being made at the Pentagon.  No one seemed to have a handle on why she was leaving. But in early December, she turned up as one of the new appointees to the Defense Policy Board (see link on defense boards, previous section).  She would not be moved from one position of trust to another if she weren’t considered trustworthy; the fact that she was in a job of such exceptional public trust – and the particular job it was (NNSA) – form clues as to just how big is the intrusion being rooted out of our government in these bizarre days. It seems likely she knew about the SolarWinds cyber-intrusion at the time she left the NNSA, and indeed that the intrusion, or whatever/whoever is behind it, is why she left the NNSA. That is speculation, of course.  But again, she wouldn’t be moved to the defense board if she weren’t regarded as trustworthy.