Exclusive: The Trump Administration May Evict the Press from the White House

Source: Esquire

The upset to the existing order caused by the presidential election has been acutely felt by no one, perhaps, so much it has by the national press. At Donald Trump's press conference on Wednesday, reporters found themselves not only subject to a scolding ("Fake news!" "Disgraceful!&quot but also awakened to the strong suggestion that, at least in tactical terms, the showdown had been won by the president-elect.

The media's sense of dislocation may soon become literal.

According to three senior officials on the transition team, a plan to evict the press corps from the White House is under serious consideration by the incoming Trump Administration. If the plan goes through, one of the officials said, the media will be removed from the cozy confines of the White House press room, where it has worked for several decades. Members of the press will be relocated to the White House Conference Center—near Lafayette Square—or to a space in the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House.

"There has been no decision," Sean Spicer, Trump's press secretary, said about the plan today. But Spicer acknowledged that "there has been some discussion about how to do it."

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a52301/trump-evict-press-white-house/

Well apart from the conflicts of interest,

this is a big fat fold by Trump.

He said he wasn't going ahead with the "expansion" of his multi-million-dollar-losing club because of the Vattenfall experimental wind turbine development off the coast near his golf club. He took his case to the UK Supreme Court to try to get the windfarm stopped, and failed dismally.

The reality was that at the time he was kicking up that fuss, he didn't have enough money to complete the development:

Donald Trump's plan for £750m Scottish golf resort put on hold
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jun/20/donald-trump-golf-resort-scotland

But now, all of a sudden, TrumpCo has the money to go ahead? Go figure.

An Intercept article about "Lifezette" from last November:

These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia

Source: BuzzFeed

A dossier making explosive — but unverified — allegations that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks.

The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians. CNN reported Tuesday that a two-page synopsis of the report was given to President Barack Obama and Trump.

Now BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.

The document was prepared for political opponents of Trump by a person who is understood to be a former British intelligence agent. It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors. The report misspells the name of one company, “Alpha Group,” throughout. It is Alfa Group. The report says the settlement of Barvikha, outside Moscow, is “reserved for the residences of the top leadership and their close associates.” It is not reserved for anyone, and is also populated by the very wealthy.

Read more: https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-trump-has-deep-ties-to-russia

It did get hacked in February 2013.

Proof that, contrary to Trump, it's unlikely a random "14-year-old" phished Podesta's email

Trump cited his BFF Julian Assange's words in the Hannity interview to support his insistence that Russia wasn't responsible for the Podesta hack (and by extension, the DNC hack):

Pwn All The Things @pwnallthethings

Could have hacked? Sure. Did hack? No. Let me go through why not.

So the actual email used to phish John Podesta ended up in the WIkileaks dump. It's here

https://t.co/H6ACVvnOXH
This is a reconstruction of that phishing email. (All of the information is bogus - the mention of Ukraine isn't relevant here)



You can't tell just by looking, but that "Change Password" link doesn't take you to Google. It takes you to Bit.ly.

This link expands to a fake login page (note URL is for a .tk site). This is what Podesta saw when he accidentally gave creds to hackers.



But the hackers screwed up. The hackers weren't hacking one-by-one; so URL contraction wasn't done manually. It was done via the Bitly API.

Using the Bitly API requires you create an account. So the hackers had to create an account. And they forgot to make their account private.

It's no longer possible - the hackers have changed their settings - but before you could simple enumerate ALL of the contracted links.

The Bitly link in John Podesta's email is visible in the Wikileaks dump here https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36355 …



We can ask Bitly to expand it. This is what it says https://bitly.com/1PibSU0+



Those gobble-de-gook strings aren't encrypted. They're Base64 encoded. In this case, it tells us the link was for john.podesta@gmail.com



Why did the hackers include this info? Same reason they contracted links via API. Because they're not hacking 1-by-1. Are hacking at scale.

This information lets their attack server populate fields to look more authentic (it's why it's able to pre-fill Podesta's name and picture)

But it also means this opsec screw up is bad. Bc we can see the links contracted by the account, we can see all of the spearphishing URLs

And the spearphishing URLs tells us the accounts that were targeted.

How many accounts did this "14 year old" hack? About 1800. In 2015.

Who were these accounts? Mil, govt personnel in the West, defence cos, journos critical of govt in Russia etc



Here's a pie chart of some of the accounts the 14 year old hacker hacked outside of Russian sphere of influence



This 14 year old is apparently an avid reader, given how many authors they're hacking. What are their interests? Another pie chart.



(These pie charts by @SecureWorks I should add, from here: https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat-group-4127-targets-google-accounts …)

And which countries is our friendly 14 year old hacker interested in? These ones. Remember. This is 1800 gmail accounts *in 2015 alone*.



Is it possible this was all a 14 year old? Sure. Also possible I'm a bridge salesman, and boy have I got a great deal for you today.

When hackers hack at scale, they reuse infrastructure. They make mistakes. This isn't unusual. You can piece the bits together.

And this isn't even the DNC hack. It's just the Podesta one. And it's only one of many different strands in just the public attribution case