White House apparently had a full-blown conspiracy theory of murky origin about Obama officials

The Week ^ | August 24, 2018 | Peter Weber

[2ndDivisionVet]

In the early days of the Trump administration, a memo of uncertain origin circulated at the highest levels of the White House laying out a conspiracy theory about "coordinated attacks" on President Trump's foreign policy agenda from a group of former Obama administration officials, according to a memo obtained by The New Yorker's Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow. The memo, which "reads like a U.S. military-intelligence officer's analysis of a foreign-insurgent network," they wrote, posited that "the communications infrastructure ... used to sell ObamaCare and the Iran Deal to the public ('Echo Chamber') has been shifted from the White House into the private sector."

The unsigned, undated memo dubbed the alleged cabal the Echo Chamber, and while "Trump Administration officials familiar with it offered conflicting accounts of who authored it and whether it originated inside or outside the White House," its content, language, and themes bear remarkable resemblance to internal documents from the Israeli private-intelligence firm Black Cube, Entous and Farrow report.

In May, Farrow and Britain's The Observer uncovered a Black Cube campaign targeting the alleged ring leaders of the "Echo Chamber," Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, plus their families. Black Rock told The New Yorker it "does not get involved in politics" and "is not aware of the documents mentioned in this article, neither their contents."

Rhodes and Kahl called the "Echo Chamber" memo absurd and denied there was any coordinated campaign to undermine Trump. It's "a bizarre effort to validate 'deep state' conspiracy theories," Rhodes told The New Yorker. Entous and Farrow suggest the memo was pushed by Stephen Bannon's White House faction. Incidentally, Iranian-born British entrepreneur Vincent Tchenguiz, one of Black Rock's early driving forces — according to a 2013 Israeli lawsuit uncovered by The Times of Israel — was the largest shareholder in SCL Group, the parent company of Bannon's defunct Cambridge Analytica, from 2005 to 2015. And that, honestly, would make for a much more interesting conspiracy theory.

[Mears]

I like Tyrus too-—a very smart guy.

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[SunkenCiv]

"coordinated attacks" on President Trump's foreign policy agenda from a group of former Obama administration officials

That's truth, not a 'conspiracy theory'. The only successful conspiracy theory running right now is the Russian collusion fiction, which is pushed by Partisan Media Shills 24/7.

[piasa]

according to a memo obtained by The New Yorker's Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow.

There was a guy named Michael Anton in Trump's NSC who under his pen name Publius Decius Mus was getting stroked by the New Yorker in the runup to the 2016 election for his populist writings. His principles apparently were flexible, or he is good at holding his nose, as after the NSC he went to BlackRock which has been pushing climate change bull crap ever since. Or maybe his views haven't changed... he's the guy who put the stuff about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa into Bush's speech during the Nigerflap/Plamenamegame affair.