Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1480970
14 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 5 OCTOBER 2022 WORLD THE select committee had six teams working separately. They were all code-named with dif- ferent colors: Red, Gold, Green, Purple, Orange, and Blue. My operations were distinct from that structure. Part of our work involved providing technical and investigative support for the six other teams. Red focused on the rioters and what we termed "day-of command and control," in oth- er words, coordination among people who engaged in violence at the Capitol on January 6th. This included the activists and conspiracists who planned the Stop the Steal and "Save Amer- ica" protests that drew people to DC that day. The militant groups that took part in the at- tack, namely the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and 1st Amend- ment Praetorian, were also part of this portfolio. The committee was looking at the storming of the building as a military oper- ation. The Red Team handed my telephone team their heaviest workload. We matched names to numbers—and vice versa. We also helped them track the con- nections among the various vio- lent extremist groups. We found plenty. Both my telephony and open-source intelligence team (or OSINT) analysts prepared files on people the committee investigators were set to inter- view. We brainstormed to help them prepare sharp questions and catch potential lies during depositions. Gold Team zeroed in on Trump and his inner circle. This included his family, staff, and informal advisers like Ban- non, Rudy Giuliani, and Gen- eral Flynn. Most folks know those names. They were some of the more hard-core voices in Trump's ear throughout his presidency. But during the elec- tion result challenge, Trump al- so connected with a new wave of conspiracists including the lawyer Sidney Powell and Pat- rick Byrne, the multimillionaire former CEO of internet retailer Overstock.com. My OSINT team drafted deep- dive dossiers on all these major players. In particular, Byrne struck me as an underrated part of the puzzle. I came to view his role as crucial. His Deep- Capture.com website published several documents related to the legal arguments people like Powell and Phil Waldron were making and hinted at their ter- rifying vision for how to achieve victory. The Gold Team also bene- fited from call detail records, or CDRs. By combing through those records, we documented every call we could that came through the White House from, approximately, the start of No- vember 2020 through the end of the following January. Our work showed who was in contact with West Wing staff—and possibly Trump himself. Green Team followed the mon- ey. They tracked the financing of the so-called Stop the Steal movement. This was another area where the CDRs helped prepare investigators for certain interviews. Many folks sitting for a deposition seemed to come down with severe, sudden mem- ory issues when confronted with questions about the finances for campaigns and rallies. Knowing that we could see who they were in touch with was often a quick cure. Green Team also relied on my knowledge of the fund- raising process. During my first meeting with them, I busted out a white board to chart the digital fundraising ecosystem to show how algorithms incentivized the most aggressive Stop the Steal messaging. My OSINT consult- ants also worked with the Green Team to tie some far-right fig- ures to their Bitcoin wallets. The select committee's Green Team showed that Trump's family and inner circle person- ally profited from the events of January 6th. This included Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News personality who was dating Trump's son Don Jr. Evi- dence uncovered by the commit- tee showed Guilfoyle was paid $60,000 to introduce Don Jr. at that day's rally on the White House Ellipse. That's the one where Trump told the crowd to "fight like hell" and march to the Capitol. Guilfoyle urged the crowd to "hold the line." "Look at all of us out here, God-loving, freedom-loving, lib- erty-loving patriots that will not let them steal this election!" she shouted. Her remarks lasted almost ex- actly three minutes. That means her speech cost about $20,000 a minute. Guilfoyle also earned $180,000 from the Trump cam- paign in 2020, according to the HuffPost. That report said Lara Trump, the wife of the former president's second-oldest son, Eric, drew similar payments from the campaign. There were piles of cash associated with the MAGA movement and some of it seemed to go right to Trump's own family. The Purple Team studied the radicalization pipeline. We didn't only want to know what people did when they charged at the Capitol on January 6th. We wanted to know how they got there and who sent them. Purple Team researched the activity of extremist groups and MAGA in- fluencers in the months leading up to the attack. My phone re- cords team worked with Purple extensively to help them request and identify records. Orange Team was tasked with examining the role foreign in- terference played in the Capi- tol attack. Some of America's rivals, namely Russia and Iran, definitely contributed to fueling disinformation in the Stop the Steal space. We saw possible bot networks and coordinated actions with Twitter accounts that formed en masse on the same day. Personalities asso- ciated with English-language, Russian-state media like RT and Sputnik also pushed conspirato- rial themes and hashtags. Still, the loudest and most violent stuff was coming from with- in our own borders. This was America's problem. The last team, Blue, had an es- pecially delicate challenge. They were focused on the apparent failure to adequately protect the Capitol. They were, in part, in- vestigating House Administra- tion, which really meant Pelosi and two of the committee's own members, Jamie Raskin and Zoe Lofgren. Blue team was a talented group, but the sensitivity of their inves- tigation and the multiple mov- ing parts—House leadership, the National Guard, DC and Capitol police, and the Pentagon—cre- Six teams and 'The Monster': the inner workings of the 6 January committee's investigation In an edited excerpt from his new book, 'The Breach,' a committee senior advisor details how investigators sifted through an avalanche of information