The MAGA world started getting confusing in the weeks before the 2020 election, so I started a Maltego graph. I had no idea it would balloon to almost 1,300 articles and 5,200 entities, but here we are. I have made this public in the past but I don’t put it in our Maltego Samples folder, mostly because I find it challenging on a twelve core 128GB workstation. If you want the full monte just email me, this is all public information, the only secret sauce here was having the patience to track it all.
There are two primary modes in which I use Maltego - the first is using my licensed commercial version and the transforms(queries) that come with it. The second is just for note taking, which you can do with the free Community Edition. The sort of things were doing in the fourth quarter of 2023 are almost all in that latter category - we’ll find things that are too complex to hold in our heads, or we’ll be getting an associate to do some recon and we want them to send us back a graph that we can review.
Today’s change is a good example of how my use has changed over the last three years. First I did a lot of reading and hand drawing, then later if the content seemed familiar I let the commercial IBM Watson NER(Named Entity Recognition) transform read the article, then I’d check for new names. Earlier this year I got a DocumentCloud account and it has a workable transcription tool, so I’ve been using that to save YouTube videos as text, and then using those URLs as I would any news article. There are 47 court documents and transcripts in my MAGA Metldown Maltego project there.
Today’s entry is a real zinger - it’s Harry Litman talking about Bernie Kerik, who is trying to avoid an appearance in the Georgia RICO trial(s), as well as demanding a consolidated Georgia/USDOJ immunity deal. If you click the DocumentCloud link and look for Related Article that is the actual YouTube video. The reason I’ve started doing this is that the news stories became repetitive to me, and I kept noticing little tidbits in the videos where a panel would be discussing a person. There were all these facts that had not made it into articles, but they were the connective tissue needed to tie the story together.
There are two important things I got out of Litman’s video. The first is that Kerik was present in Mark Meadows’ office with Phil Waldron and two unidentified Pennsylvania legislators on November 25th, 2020. It is VERY rare that I will put something SPECULATIVE into this graph but in this case Litman had something that was plausible, and the very definition of “big if true”.
Nothing shows Congressman Scott Perry was there, but he is second only to Meadows in terms of the coup plot. You can see the incidents in a cloud around him - he was pushing Italygate, he was texting Meadows on January 5th/6th, he got a contempt referral from the J6 Committee, and he’s one of five who spoke to Cassidy Hutchinson about a pardon. Not showing on the graph is that he was present in the Oval Office coup planning meeting on December 21st, then back again the next day by himself. He is one of the nine who had their phones seized by search warrant and he is the only one to wiggle out of that by going to appellate court. He is a key node in this graph and if Kerik puts him in the room and in context, we could see a huge blowout in terms of defense plans.
That graph has occasionally served as a means to assist reporters in confirming things among the maelstrom of events. As recently as the morning before I wrote this something else I found has been handed to someone who will make it public. The DOJ has link analysis tools that support geospatial and temporal data. I have Sentinel Visualizer, but this project has been so deeply Maltego for so long I would only move it if someone were paying me.
So there you have it. Kerik was instrumental in the coup plot, and it contained many episodes of information operations tactics that were employed in an attempt to legitimize the scheme. This is exactly the sort of thing you might need to do when teasing apart a malign operation that threatens our democracy.
Here’s the final graph I used in the video:
Actual Maltego Link Analysis