Inner Nixon: Update

The story is getting somewhat wild today: Colin Kahl, the Biden national security adviser named in the Guardian story as one of the people being spied on in a Trump-sponsored effort to discredit the Iran deal, initially reported, like Ben Rhodes, that he hadn't noticed anybody spying on him, but then, as he and his wife talked it over, they remembered something kind of untoward (you should read the whole thread):

Last year, my wife was serving on the fundraising committee of my daughter's public charter school in DC. One day, out of the blue, she received an email from someone claiming to represent a socially responsible private equity firm in the UK. 2/10

— Colin Kahl (@ColinKahl) May 6, 2018

The brilliant Middle East expert journalist Laura Rozen (who some older Netizens may remember as blogger Needlenose, one of the most reliable voices on the Iraq War) was struck by a strange echo in Kahl's story of something you'd think was completely different, the story of the persecution of actress Rose McGowan, as reported in Ronan Farrow's New Yorker story on the Harvey Weinstein sexual violence cases; McGowan was spied on by an Israeli private intelligence agency, called Black Cube—

very similar modus operandi as this, see https://t.co/timfwGadmK @ColinKahl pic.twitter.com/E5NpnnUu6T

— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) May 6, 2018

And the fake British equity firm Black Cube invented as the cover for their interrogators with McGowan, "Reuben Capital Partners", is the same as the firm that interrogated Mrs. Kahl last May:

Fake firm that approached @ColinKahl wife (left). same fake firm per @RonanFarrow that went after weinstein accusers https://t.co/timfwGadmK pic.twitter.com/jmR4DQ9x5X

— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) May 6, 2018

So the same firm, owned and staffed by veterans of the elite Israeli intelligence agencies, using the same techniques and covers, helped Weinstein (a former partner in one of Stephen Bannon's enterprises, for what it's worth which may not be much) to try to intimidate his most formidable accuser, and helped the Trump White House to try to compromise former Obama staffers with a connection to the Iran deal.

And that's not even all: Christopher Wylie, the former research director at (Robert Mercer–owned, sometime Stephen Bannon–run) Cambridge Analytica who blew a number of whistles on the company last March, brought up Black Cube in his testimony: he claimed Cambridge Analytica had hired Black Cube to ratfuck Nigerian presidential elections on behalf of President Goodluck Jonathan, hacking the health records of his opponent Muhammadu Buhari and what I think is worse:

Buhari won election in 2015, but had unsuccessfully run three times before, when Wylie said AggregateIQ [the Canadian subsidiary of Cambridge Analytica's owner] handled the hacked data and also distributed threatening anti-Islamic videos that showed people's throats being cut in an effort to intimidate voters. (New York Daily News)

Black Cube and (the now disbanded) Cambridge Analytica have denied all of this, but, to use a favorite Trump expression, we'll see. If it gets any spookier, I'm calling Ghostbusters.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.