What are the odds that William Taylor, career diplomat and chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Ukraine who supposedly gave bombshell testimony at one of Adam Schiff’s secret hearings this week, spent the decade from 1992 to 2002 working the exact “aid to former Soviet states” portfolio tended by the post-Cold War Eurasia Foundation we met last week?
You probably guess from the rhetorical nature of that question that the odds are 100%. During that decade, Taylor was the State Department’s coordinator of assistance to the Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union. The principal vehicle for non-military aid for the NIS was the State Department’s USAID, which in turn was and is the main funding source of the Eurasia Foundation.
Our previous interest was in the fact that Adam Schiff witness Fiona Hill had worked there, which she did (1999-2000) during the timeframe of Taylor’s stint as the NIS aid coordinator. Hill also served as an adviser to the president of the Eurasia Foundation from 2000 to 2005, and was on the Central Eurasia Project Advisory Board of the Open Society Institute from 2000 to 2006. This is unsurprising, given George Soros’s early involvement in, and continued funding of, the Eurasia Foundation. Any such foundation that got its start in 1992 is pretty much guaranteed to be linked to Soros.
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In 2002, William Taylor shifted colors at State to working transitional aid to Afghanistan, which he did through 2003. What, again, are the odds that while he was doing that, another Adam Schiff witness was also working Afghanistan as the Afghanistan Team Chief for the secretary of defense’s Stability Operations Office, in one of her first jobs at the Pentagon?
You may correctly guess, again, the odds are 100%, and also guess that the official in question is Laura K. Cooper, now director for policy on Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
Ms. Cooper is the witness whose testimony was delayed on Wednesday when House Republicans entered the SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) where Schiff has been holding his unclassified hearings so that he can exclude Republicans from them. (Members have the privilege of SCIF access, but the SCIF can be secured against entry if someone wants to.)
Ambassador Taylor and Ms. Cooper both participated in an Afghanistan-related event at the Middle East Institute in 2004, Taylor as the keynote speaker and Cooper on the panel presentation afterward. This again is unsurprising, since they had been working the same portfolio of transitional assistance to Afghanistan.
Taylor was later the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. He was on the board of trustees of the Eurasia Foundation 2009-2010. And as outlined at Breitbart, Taylor has had a close relationship with the Atlantic Council and the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), which in turn are closely linked with Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that paid a hefty sum to Hunter Biden as a member of its board. (The Atlantic Council receives funding from Burisma.)
Another interesting character we’ve met before, long-time CIA operative J. Cofer Black, is also on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian company. (H/t: Breitbart)
And he was also working the transition in Afghanistan in the period when Taylor and Cooper were both working it.
At the time, Black, who strategized the CIA role in the Afghanistan operation in 2001, had been appointed to the State Department as Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism. It was in that capacity that he was working the transition in Afghanistan after his appointment in 2002, while Taylor was coordinator of U.S. government and international assistance to Afghanistan (and subsequently to Iraq).
Moreover, Black’s job just before moving to State was as the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, the predecessor to today’s National Counterterrorism Center. He held that position from 1999-2002.
Laura Cooper, meanwhile, was during that same time a policy planning officer at the State Department in the Office of Coordinator for Counterterrorism. She moved to the Pentagon in 2001, and would have known Cofer Black when he was the director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center and the Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism. Both roles would have made Black a well-known figure to all policy-making officials handling transnational counterterrorism overseas, and/or terrorism and stabilization issues in specific countries abroad.
Besides the Burisma link, the connections to Black are of interest in part because of Black’s links to John Brennan and Spygate figures Stefan Halper and Steven Schrage (see LU link above).
And, of course, as we saw with Fiona Hill, late of the NSC, her related path takes us to Christopher Steele, Jonathan Winer, Strobe Talbott, Sidney Blumenthal, and Cody Shearer, among others.
It can’t help looking a bit pointed when witness after witness for Schiff’s Ukraine-themed impeachment campaign ended up working Ukraine in the last three years, and keeps having the same network of connections to Spygate figures. Even the most resistant mind at some point will conclude that there’s a real network here, and it’s a lot of people who know each other professionally, have been working in government and “civil society” institutions for years, and are now showing up one by one to try to take out Donald Trump, the duly elected president.
So perhaps, once again, it’s not surprising that the New York Times is coming out with a fresh editorial theme: that there is a “Deep State,” but rest assured, it’s the good guys.
The deep state is alive and well. But it is not the sinister, antidemocratic cabal of [Trump’s] fever dreams. It is, rather, a collection of patriotic public servants — career diplomats, scientists, intelligence officers and others — who, from within the bowels of this corrupt and corrupting administration, have somehow remembered that their duty is to protect the interests, not of a particular leader, but of the American people.
Picking up on the theme, in a thoroughly biased (indeed, arguably part-fictional) op-ed masquerading as “news,” NYT fired this broadside the evening of 23 October:
[O]ver the last three weeks, the deep state has emerged from the shadows in the form of real live government officials, past and present, who have defied a White House attempt to block cooperation with House impeachment investigators and provided evidence that largely backs up the still-anonymous whistle-blower.
There’s a lot more in that self-serving vein:
The House impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump’s efforts to force Ukraine to investigate Democrats is the climax of a 33-month scorched-earth struggle between a president with no record of public service and the government he inherited but never trusted.
Yada yada yada. Read it at your leisure.
I discussed yesterday why we can take leave to differ with whether there is actual “evidence” at all, as claimed by the NYT article, considering that neither the American people nor any substantial number of House Republicans has even been able to see it, much less test and assess it.
But the point here is that the deep state army appears poised to cross a Rubicon: breaking out its flag, and moving from pretense to open warfare.
One way to read this move is as a preemptive one. It’s going to become obvious anyway, so now is the time to paint the picture of the deep state’s maneuvers in the most favorable light. That’s not just about the overt claim that these are the good guys. It’s quite as much about the implication, in NYT’s framing of the matter, that these are a parade of persons who have government service in common, but little else, and have spontaneously decided they simply must speak out.
As with the absurdly polished, footnoted, and wide-ranging “whistleblower’s” brief, however, what we keep finding with the “spontaneous out-speakers” tells a different tale. It’s not uncoordinated spontaneity we see; it’s hyper-preparation, uniform faithfulness to message, and invariable prior connections of longstanding.
There’s no spontaneity here, and certainly no lack of prior connection or lack of central planning. In fact, given how much we already knew about Ukraine’s unique role in Spygate in 2016 (and possibly before), we are justified in asking if Adam Schiff’s witness list is a group of people who were placed in Ukraine-related positions in and after 2017 for a purpose.
I don’t have a decided opinion on that point at the moment. We’d need to know more to form a reliable judgment. But no intel analyst worth his salt would fail to recognize it as a question that needs asking.
One last point before closing: it is neither anti-democratic nor unconstitutional – nor any other enormity against good-faith politics and government – for the people to elect a president who doesn’t want to continue running the executive branch the way an invested political industry wants him to. The core premise of the NYT article is invalid.
Insisting that the operations of the executive branch must continue as they have developed over the last several decades is not being a “good guy.” It’s most definitely not being a constitutionalist or a democrat. It’s being a self-serving partisan of a status quo you have a big personal stake in. One of the chief things we need to discover at some point is just how big that stake is for many of the deep state actors.
Keep your situational awareness up. This operation has just moved into a new phase. It’s virtually certain that nothing coming through the mainstream or leftstream media on this topic will be credible, objective truth in the days ahead. It will be full-blown information warfare.
