Was Dominique Strauss Kahn Set Up?

Sidney Blumenthal has a conspiratorial mind, much like my own, though we are obviously on opposite sides of the r/K divide. He emailed this article to Hillary, presumably as part of his duties running her private intelligence operation, because he thought it important:

May 14, 2011, was a horrendous day for Dominique Strauss-Kahn… Waking up in the presidential suite of the Sofitel New York hotel that morning, he was supposed to be soon enroute to Paris and then to Berlin where he had a meeting the following day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He could not have known that by late afternoon he would, instead, be imprisoned in New York…

He knew he had a serious problem with one of his BlackBerry cell phones—which he called his IMF BlackBerry… She warned DSK, who was then pulling ahead of Sarkozy in the polls, that at least one private e-mail he had recently sent from his BlackBerry to his wife, Anne Sinclair, had been read at the UMP offices in Paris. It is unclear how the UMP offices might have received this e-mail, but if it had come from his IMF BlackBerry, he had reason to suspect he might be under electronic surveillance in New York. He had already been warned by a friend in the French diplomatic corps that an effort would be made to embarrass him with a scandal. The warning that his BlackBerry might have been hacked was therefore all the more alarming.

At 10:07 AM he called his wife in Paris on his IMF BlackBerry, and in a conversation that lasted about six minutes told her he had a big problem. He asked her to contact a friend, Stéphane Fouks, who could come to his home on the Place des Vosges and who could arrange to have both his BlackBerry and iPad examined by an expert in such matters…

He had finished packing his suitcase just before noon… and then took a shower in the bathroom… According to the hotel’s electronic key records, which were provided to DSK’s lawyers, Nafissatou Diallo, a maid, had entered the presidential suite (room 2806) between 12:06 and 12:07 PM (such records are only accurate to the nearest minute). Ordinarily, cleaning personnel do not enter a room to clean when a guest is still in it. According to DSK’s account, his bags were visible in the foyer when he emerged naked from the bathroom into the interior corridor. At this point, according to his account, he encountered the maid in the corridor by the bathroom…

DNA evidence found outside the bathroom door showed her saliva mixed with his semen… What is known is that DSK called his daughter on his IMF BlackBerry at 12:13 to tell her he would be late [for lunch]…

They had a quick meal, and at 2:15 PM, according to the restaurant’s surveillance cameras, DSK got in another taxi to go to the airport. Almost immediately, he discovered that his IMF BlackBerry was missing. It was the phone he had arranged to have examined for bugs in Paris and it was the phone that contained the earlier text message warning him about the interception of his messages…

Less than two minutes later, the footage from the two surveillance cameras shows Yearwood and an unidentified man walking from the security office to an adjacent area. This is the same unidentified man who had accompanied Diallo to the security office at 12:52 PM. There, the two men high-five each other, clap their hands, and do what looks like an extraordinary dance of celebration that lasts for three minutes…

She stated that she had hid in the hall after leaving the presidential suite, and entered no other room on the twenty-eighth floor until she told another maid about the attack (which was approximately fifteen minutes later).

When asked why she had not used her pass key to go into another room, she said they all had “Do Not Disturb” signs on the door. After her grand jury testimony, prosecutors discovered that this was false when the hotel belatedly provided them with the electronic key records showing that Diallo had entered room 2820 at 12:26 PM, after her encounter with DSK. The same record showed that she had also entered room 2820 prior to her encounter with DSK at a time when the occupant had not checked out and may have been in the room. Why she concealed visiting 2820 was “inexplicable” to the prosecutors, who noted in their motion for dismissal that if she had mentioned her visits to 2820, it would have been declared part of the crime scene and searched by the police. But she did not do so.

Nor were DSK’s lawyers able to find an explanation. When they attempted to learn the identity of the occupant of 2820, Sofitel refused to release it on grounds of privacy. Given Diallo’s conflicting accounts, all that we really know about what happened in the nearby room 2820 is that Diallo went there both before and after her encounter with DSK and then omitted the latter visit from her sworn testimony to the grand jury. We still do not know if there was anyone in 2820 when she entered it again following the encounter with DSK or if, prior to the police arriving, anyone influenced her to omit mention of room 2820.

The Sofitel electronic key record, which the hotel did not turn over to the prosecutors until the next week, contained another unexplained anomaly. Two individuals, not one, entered DSK’s suite between 12:05 and 12:06 PM while he was showering. Each used a different key card entry. The key card used at 12:06 belonged to Diallo; the key card used at 12:05 belonged to Syed Haque, a room service employee who, according to his account, came to pick up the breakfast dishes. If he did so, he would have turned left and gone to the dining room. But Haque has refused to be interviewed by DSK’s lawyers, so his precise movements have not been made public. Since the key cards do not register the time of exit, it cannot be determined from them if both parties were in the room at the same time or, for that matter, at the time of Diallo’s encounter with DSK.

DSK’s BlackBerry, with its messages, is still missing. Investigations by both the police and private investigators retained by DSK’s lawyers failed to find it. While DSK believed he had left it in the Sofitel, the records obtained from BlackBerry show that the missing phone’s GPS circuitry was disabled at 12:51. This stopped the phone from sending out signals identifying its location. Apart from the possibility of an accident, for a phone to be disabled in this way, according to a forensic expert, required technical knowledge about how the BlackBerry worked.

From electronic information that became available to investigators in November 2011, it appears the phone never left the Sofitel. If it was innocently lost, whoever found it never used it, raising the question of by whom and why it was disabled at 12:51. In any case, its absence made it impossible for DSK to check—as he had planned to do—to see if it had been compromised. Nor was it possible to verify from the phone itself the report he received on May 14 that his messages were being intercepted. So we cannot confirm the warning to DSK that he was under surveillance on that disastrous day…

Whatever happened to his phone, and the content on it, his political prospects were effectively ended by the events of that day.

DSK was a leftist shitbag, and this appears to be a French intel op of some sort, but his case is useful to the alt-right as a case study in the shadowy world that sometimes follows politics.

It is a long read, but very engrossing for those who may one day find themselves the target of a machine. Subtle blips pop up on the radar here and there, any one of which by itself would normally have been completely innocent, but which all coalesce together after the fact to let you know that back when you thought you were alone, you were actually surrounded, and everyone else had been in control all along.

He made a couple of errors. First was underestimation of the extent of his problem, and focusing too closely on just the penetration he detected. The moment he found out that his emails had been read, his immediate response was, “My Blackerry was compromised!” He then tried to set up a technical surveillance sweep of his electronics sometime in the future, via means which would almost certainly have been compromised as well.

His immediate response should have been, “Holy shit, I am a target!” His next thoughts should have drifted to how completely he may have been surrounded and for how long, how massively penetrated his semi-secure/semi-denied areas, his insecure areas while out, and his electronics probably were. Then he should have realized the danger that just arose because he possibly had hard evidence of the targeting in his Blackberry – which might yield trackable clues as to who was involved.

That could precipitate action by the surveillance team to neutralize the threat of exposure, if they knew he had found out. His next thought should have been the realization that if he was properly covered by a professional team, they must have found out already that he knew. Indeed, they might even have delayed the text alerting him, giving them hours to set something up to neutralize the threat of exposure that had just opened up with that text message.

He may actually have been allowed to read the text, because his reading it was the first step in a planned series of events designed to eliminate the evidence, and do God-would-only-know-what-else, as well. At that point, you do not call up your favorite TSCM specialist to give them a heads up that you may be coming in sometime in the future to have everything you have scanned and swept. If you are covered, your team is hearing that through the mics against the walls in your room, maybe the mics in other electronics in the room, your phone (itself possibly transmitting), the wireless signal to the tower, if they can decrypt it, the underseas cables leaving the US, and even on the recipient’s end in France via house, home electronics, airwaves, and device, since his wife was probably under coverage in France as well.

At that level, surveillance is no joke. If you see it watching one small thing at that level of politics, they are watching everything, and have several doors into each room of information that they want. My mind would also have drifted to all occupy-able spaces in the immediate vicinity, with the knowledge that at least one could be an observation post, manned and watching me at that very moment. Obviously room 2820 appears to have been it.

Interestingly according to the floor plan at the link, DSK’s door peephole would have had no sightline to that door, or the elevators, allowing 2820 to be used and its occupants to come and go without being observable through DSK’s peephole, while 2820’s peephole had a partial sightline to the elevators. It would have been interesting to hit the elevator button, and see if only the elevators visible to 2820 would have opened and closed on that floor, indicating an effort to keep visual contact on those coming and going. Surveillance camera coverage on that floor would also have been interesting.

If all of those thoughts had flowed through DSK’s head, he might not have alerted surveillance that he took the threat seriously, he might not have called to get TSCM immediately, he might not have set the Blackberry down outside of his sight in an unsecure area like a hotel suite, and it is possible that everything to follow might not have happened at that point.

Had he recognized the danger, he might also have found it an odd coincidence that just as he stepped out of the shower naked, a foreigner in a maid outfit just happened to be standing there, (even though maids aren’t supposed to enter rooms while guest are in them). He might have found it even stranger when instead of leaving she dropped to her knees, and gave him a complementary blowjob, just because. (Intel loves recruiting foreign immigrants from technologically unsophisticated nations, because lacking facebook, twitter, and so on, they do not have a searchable backstory, and thus once deployed are blank slates who can become anyone with just a little internet magic. That is unlike the normal first world teen whose face is plastered all over facebook and twitter, and indeed, whose story appears unusual if they are not plastered all over facebook and twitter going back years.)

Some things are just too coincidental, especially if you are assuming your coverage has ears in your hotel room, and knows what you are doing minute by minute. As when FBI HRT hit Binney’s house just as he was in mid-shower, so they could physically drag him out of the shower at gunpoint wet and naked, unusually perfect timing can be a decent sign you have a problem.

Once the Blackberry went missing, he should have immediately thought that there was no way that was coincidental. It was all happening around him, the question then was, what is next?

For DSK, it was a few months of legal problems, and a ruined reputation. But all things considered, he was lucky it wasn’t far worse. If he was covered to that degree, by a team with control of the staff, it could easily have ended with him laying dead over his breakfast, the apparent victim of a Breitbart-esque heart attack moments after finishing his spicy breakfast sausage.

Honestly, I am increasingly realizing why our governments are so corrupt, and why the honest politician who isn’t sold out is such a rare commodity. If you don’t have the cash to run your own first class counter-intel outfit, you are at the mercy of the machine.

In that world, only the machine-owned properties survive.