Jankowicz, DHS officials scheduled meeting with Facebook security chief
Records obtained by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) show that Nina Jankowicz — the executive director of the now disbanded Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Disinformation Governance Council — and other DHS officials planned to meet Facebook (now known as Meta) Chief Security Officer Nathaniel Gleicher, who held that position when the company took down the New York Post report on Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop from hell’ in the run-up to the 2020 election.
Hawley recently obtained DHS documents showing email correspondence between employees, including Jankowicz, regarding the Disinformation Governance Council and its steering group. While Hawley noted in a letter to Mayorkas that previous whistleblower documents “revealed that the Council was engaging with Twitter on possible censorship activities,” the trove of heavily redacted documents he obtained last week indicates that Jankowicz and officials from other groups within DHS were planning to meet Gleicher last April.
On March 31, Sandra Luff — a registered lobbyist for Facebook, according to Open Secrets, and her director of public policy for the executive branch, according to Legistorm — emailed the DHS Undersecretary for Strategy, Policy and the plans, Robert Silvers, regarding the organization of a meeting. Although the unredacted portions of the email do not explicitly say who from Facebook would be involved in such a meeting, she concluded the email with a short biography of Gleicher.
On April 4, a woman named Becky Moore emailed Silvers on behalf of Facebook “regarding the possibility of finding time on your calendar” when Gleicher was expected to be in town later in the week and early in the week. next.
Silvers copied Jankowicz, Senior Assistant General Counsel for Cyber Issues Jen Daskal, and Brandon Wales, whom Silvers identified as the “Ukrainian crisis response coordinator,” in the email.
Daskal then emailed Moore, stating that she was removing Silvers from email correspondence “given the conflict” and expressed to him and Jankowicz and Wales’s desire to meet Gleicher. The three officials were scheduled to meet with the Facebook official and other DHS staff on the afternoon of April 7 — and even communicated about it the same day. While it seems like the reunion most likely happened based on the available information, it’s unclear if it actually happened.
According to Gleicher’s LinkedIn, he’s been Facebook’s security policy officer since January 2018. His employment timeline shows he served as security officer when the company restricted the distribution of the Posts Hunter Biden’s ‘Laptop from Hell’ story in October 2020.
As Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast over the summer, the FBI sounded the alarm to Facebook about the potential for “Russian propaganda” ahead of the election:
“The FBI, I think, came up to us — members of our team — and said, ‘Hey, uh, just so you know, you should be on high alert,'” Zuckerberg said. “There was the – we thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We were warned that there will basically be some sort of dumping ground of – it’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.
On Oct. 14, 2020 — the day the post report was published — Gleicher retweeted a thread he posted in August regarding the company’s recent “Coordinated Inauthentic Takedowns” that were “linked to Russian actors.”
“It’s a good reminder that threat actors – including from Russia – will continue to try to manipulate public debate around the world and in the United States, including trying to get journalists to do their amplification for them,” he added. Lily the specific tweet he quoted on October 14.
“Given this morning’s news cycle, it’s a good time to kickstart this again,” Gleicher wrote in the retweet, seemingly alluding to the Posts report on “the laptop from hell”.
Given this morning’s news cycle, it’s a good time to kick this off: https://t.co/qMQLksPKwk
— Nathaniel Gleicher (@ngleicher) October 14, 2020
As the technology news firm Protocol reported on October 14, 2020, in the run-up to the election, Gleicher was warning anyone about possible Russian “hack and leak” operations. [would] Listen.”
It is unclear whether the communication between the FBI and Facebook took place before Gleicher’s August warning. On October 19, 2020, a number of former intelligence officers wrote an open letter claiming that the laptop story had “all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation”, but the editor of Breitbart News Politics Emma-Jo Morris, who broke the story at the New York Posthad already checked the contents of the laptop before the story was published, as reported by Breitbart News.
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