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Right-Wing Activists Discussed Wiretapping Seth Rich’s Family, Three People in the Room Say
In depth reporting over at The Daily Beast [thedailybeast.com], again.
A strange set of characters from some of the highest and lowest positions in the American right gathered one morning in September 2017 at an affluent neighborhood outside of Dallas.
One of their topics was responding to online critics of wealthy Texas businessman Ed Butowsky, who had recently been outed as a driving force behind a retracted Fox News story about murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.
The group that gathered at Butowsky’s home included a conspiracy theorist, a Fox reporter fighting for her career[Malia Zimmerman], a former private intelligence contractor married to star journalist Lara Logan, and a Democratic PR operative who lost his business in the face of sexual assault allegations. The group also included Thomas Schoenberger and Manuel “Defango” Chavez, two notorious internet provocateurs who had recently launched a self-proclaimed “elite” company [Shadowbox] that promised to use bots and sow “targeted chaos” to defend its clients online.
As oft we hear here on SoylentNews, "What could possibly go wrong?"
According to some attendees, the solutions discussed at the September get-together went to extremes. Three people who attended the gathering said the group even discussed the possibility of wiretapping and surveilling Rich’s grieving parents.
Um, if you are not the NSA, pretty sure that is, um, illegal.
But the fact that marginal internet characters like Schoenberger and Chavez could be called to a gathering with political players like Butowsky — who enjoys connections to the White House, Fox News, and at least one leading House Republican — offers a glimpse into how conspiracy theories are bleeding into political life. It also raises questions about how far Trump allies will go to vindicate their wild theories about Rich.
Lots of nefarious connections here, right into Qanon and stuff!
While Butowsky describes their work as “reputation management,” Shadowbox internal documents, obtained by The Daily Beast, describe its work more in more aggressive terms. “We address smear assaults head-on by custom-creating shadow ‘bot’ campaigns as a counter strategy,” one pitch read. “We use targeted chaos to confuse your opponents.”
In its internal documents, the company describes itself as “your army” and promises to use “cyber-guerrilla tactics.”
“Where your enemies have lied to paint you as the bad guy, we sow the seeds of doubt and present the counter-narrative that they are, in fact, the villains, and you have been unjustly accused,” the document reads. “We do this through sophisticated use of internet technology, meme creation, PR, and cyber-guerrilla tactics that stop the bleeding and begin to sway public opinion and the media in your favor.”
A second pitch promised to use “deep recon on your competitors (sic) next move.”
Nice work, if you can get it, or if it were remotely real.
Chavez and Schoenberger are notorious figures in the small but intense world of YouTube and Twitter conspiracy theorists, where Pizzagate and QAnon believers share space with others who are just out to cause trouble. Chavez regularly broadcasts the details of internecine internet vendettas to a few hundred viewers on his YouTube channel, while Schoenberger is mired in elaborate feuds that make little sense to anyone outside of them.
They claim to be involved with “Cicada 3301,” a mysterious group behind a set of famous internet puzzles that’s been profiled in Rolling Stone. Chavez has used that connection to suggest, inconclusively, that he’s one of the founders of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
These things never end well.
Butowsky confirmed that he had hired Shadowbox, claiming that he wanted their help in the face of an onslaught of online attacks and threats after his role in Fox’s Rich story was revealed.
Butowsky put both Schoenberger and Chavez up in a Dallas-area hotel, telling The Daily Beast he spent roughly $5,000 renting them rooms for over a month. Chavez compiled a list of Butowsky’s “Top Haters,” including Aaron Rich’s attorney, former New York Times editor-in-chief Jill Abramson, HuffPost reporter Travis Waldron and then-Newsweek reporter Michael Hayden.
“It's time to stop playing around with these guys and play some hardball with your haters,” Chavez wrote in an email to Butowsky.
But Butowsky soon came to believe that Schoenberger and Chavez were less interested in working for their company and more interested in crafting their online personas.
“They just sat in a hotel room and played on Twitter and YouTube all day,” Butowsky said.
Sometimes, just Butt-out-ski-ing is the better part of skullduggery.
