It's A Conspiracy: Ex-CIA Directors Received Money From Burisma

Flopping Aces relates: "Burisma wasn’t just paying off the Bidens. Ex-CIA directors are also on the payroll." He cites news reports which related that Burisma "paid more than $450,000 to a prominent Washington think tank [the Atlantic Council], including picking up the tab for energy-related conferences as part of a campaign to burnish its image in the United States after it was accused by Western officials of corruption." 

    Burisma’s support of the Atlantic Council was detailed last week by the Wall Street Journal, which said the company had given the think tank $100,000 per year for three years starting in 2016. The council lists Burisma as a contributor on its website.

    The Atlantic Council told Yahoo News Tuesday that in addition to the $100,000 given annually by Burisma, the company “also reimbursed speaker travel and event costs, which … amounted to around [$50,000 to $70,000] per year.”

The author also points out that the Atlantic Council included several former CIA directors, including Michael Morell, Michael Hayden, and Leon Panetta. Notably all three endorsed then-candidate Biden and later signed on to the letter claiming the Hunter laptop story was Russian disinformation. 

    Chris Krebs, as CISA censorship czar at DHS, deputized disinformation flagging to the Atlantic Council, whose London-based team censored US opinions about mail-in ballots in 2020. Atlantic Council has 7 living CIA directors currently on its board.

    …That’s not a typo. Seven living CIA directors – Michael Hayden, James Woolsey, Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, Michael Morrell, William Webster & Robert Gates – on the board of the group deputized by DHS to censor your opinions about mail-in ballots during the 2020 election cycle.

Perhaps protecting more than just Biden.  

See also: "DHS Censorship Agency Had Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On ‘Red Mirage, Blue Shift’ Election Events" by Mike Benz, Foundation for Freedom Online (Nov. 9, 2022).

    The key coordinating hub for the government side is an “obscure government agency” named CISA, which is tucked within DHS, and was created by act of Congress in November 2018, nominally to defend America against cybersecurity threats from hostile foreign actors (e.g., Russian hackers).

    CISA’s longform name, the “Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency” has none of the Orwellian overtones of the “Disinformation Governance Board”. CISA took great pains to cloak itself as just a simple, security-focused cybersecurity directorate. CISA’s founding director, Chris Krebs, was fond of telling audiences that CISA was just “The agency that cares so much about security, it’s in our name twice”.

    CISA’s mission was supposed to be cyber security. Not cyber censorship.

    But a funny thing happened on the way to the 2020 election.

    First, on January 6, 2017, outgoing Obama Administration DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson designated “election infrastructure” as being “critical infrastructure” under the purview of DHS protection.

    This designation, born out of unsubstantiated claims that Russia had just stolen, hacked or otherwise materially interfered with the 2016 election, tasked DHS with protecting election-related structure, such as polling places, voting machines and computer systems.

    CISA’s Internet censorship power grew out of interpreting “critical infrastructure” beyond its hard physical meaning to apply to meta-physical concepts. By 2019, “foreign disinformation” on social media was increasingly framed as a “cyber threat” to election infrastructure.

    Through this framing mechanism, CISA’s “cybersecurity” authority morphed into a “cybercensorship” authority. However, this move was initially limited to CISA only targeting “foreign disinformation”, through DHS’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force.

    But when the 2016 election-era “Russian interference” Special Prosecutor’s probe ended in July 2019 with former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s failure to find “collusion” between then-President Trump and outside Russians, DHS and CISA began to change their tunes.

    The entire “countering Russian disinformation on social media” apparatus that had been constructed before July 2019 to censor, throttle and identify “foreign disinformation” was quietly, but entirely, pivoted to focus inward on “domestic disinformation.”

    This “Foreign-To-Domestic Disinformation Switcheroo” on censorship was never widely conveyed beyond DHS doors out to the American people. It was plotted on DHS’s own livestreams and internal documents. DHS insiders’ collective justification, without uttering a peep about the switch’s revolutionary implications, was that “domestic disinformation” was now a greater “cyber threat to elections” than falsehoods flowing from foreign interference.

    This meant that, henceforth, any US citizen posting what DHS considered “misinformation” online was suddenly conducting a cyber attack against US critical infrastructure. That was the legal framework under which DHS – and CISA particularly – drew their jurisdiction.

And:

    Technically speaking, the Atlantic Council is classified as a think tank, widely said to represent NATO’s collective foreign policy interests. It is therefore a “transatlantic” institution, rather than one strictly concerned with the interests of US citizens.

    However, the Atlantic Council represents a powerful faction of the US foreign policy establishment, in the diplomacy, defense and intelligence spheres. It has seven (7) former CIA directors currently serving on its own board of directors (Michael Hayden, James Woolsey, Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, Michael Morrell, William Webster and Robert Gates).

    Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff — Chris Krebs’s old boss when he worked for DHS under the Bush Administration — is also an Atlantic Council director, as are several other major DHS figures. Chertoff was the interim head and review authority for DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board after it was initially put on “pause” for review. It was the Atlantic Council’s “Forward Defense” / “Future Of DHS” blueprint report in September 2020 that formally posited DHS transition from a counterterrorism focus to a focus on “non-kinetic” threats such as social media misinformation. Incidentally, September 2020 is exactly when CISA formally began its censorship partnership with EIP.

    In October 2020, the Atlantic Council hosted a livestream discussion of this new proposed domestic censorship role for DHS with three former DHS Secretaries (and that discussion has some remarkable moments).

    Virtually every senior figure at CISA and across the other EIP entities involved in censoring the 2020 election has directly participated in Atlantic Council events, tying the networks together personally and professionally.

There is a lot more in the article, so be sure to read the whole thing. But what it illustrates, and something I've alluded to before, is that there are a lot of NGOs, think tanks, consultancy companies, and other groups (such as the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center) that carry out government functions, but because they are technically outside the government, are not subject to the normal oversight to which government agencies are subject. A shadow government, if you will.