A Tangled Web: Michael Flynn, the Russian-Israeli Nexus, and a GRU-backed Coup in Montenegro

This article covers Michael Flynn’s various connections to the Israeli private intelligence industry, as well as his involvement in potential voter suppression activities.

It is the second installment of the series “Michael Flynn, Information Operations, and the Search for Hillary’s Missing Emails.”

The first article describes the biography of Michael Flynn, from the War on Terror, to his connections with Russia, to his support of the Trump campaign.

This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available .

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —As Michael Flynn’s public profile during the 2016 election as a Trump supporter grew, he took on additional consulting jobs and advisory board positions with several private companies, some with connections to Russia.In February of 2016, Flynn joined the advisory board of Brainwave Science, which developed technology designed to measure brainwaves to determine whether a subject under interrogation was lying.One of Brainwave’s two main directors, an Indian engineer named Sabu Kota, pleaded guilty in 1996 to attempting to . According to prosecutors, Kota, whose name was only removed from Brainwave’s website after news of his activities surfaced in the press in late 2016, had been involved in a spy ring attempting to sell sensitive technologies .As part of a deal in which he testified against another defendant, he was .In May of 2016, Flynn was .The Luxembourg-based spyware and private intelligence company is an offshoot of NSO Group, a technology conglomerate founded by veterans of the elite signals intelligence branch of the Israeli military Unit 8200.

NSO Group gained notoriety after developing sophisticated surveillance software used by the Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates to track the regime dissidents, .

According to Reuters, in 2017 the FBI started an investigation into NSO Group for possible computer crimes against American citizens and companies and .

A year earlier, Flynn began consulting for Francisco Partners, a San Francisco-based private equity firm that acquired NSO Group in 2014 and has a track record of investing in surveillance companies that sell their .Scott Stedman has reported that OSY Technologies did work for the Moscow-based law firm Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners (EPAP), and that EPAP was operating as a stand-in for Oleg Deripaska.

Vladimir Putin and Oleg Deripaska

[NOTE: The original source for the above claim was an article written by the reporter Scott Stedman for his late publication Forensic News entitled “Israeli Spy Companies Show Critical Link Between Flynn, Deripaska, and Senate Intelligence Committee Target Walter Soriano,” published by Forensic News on June 16th, 2020.

Stedman was sued for defamation by Walter Soriano, a former Israeli military intelligence officer, in the United Kingdom.

Fifteen press freedom organizations the suit as a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) law suit.

As part of a settlement, the article was removed from the internet.

It is the opinion of the author, who cannot independently establish the validity of claimed link between Deripaska and EPAP, that Soriano utilizes expensive and time consuming litigation for the purposes of intimidation.

I have decided to include Stedman’s reporting, which I deeply respect, with this disclaimer.]

The claim that Deripaska was a client of Soriano’s .Oleg Deripaska is a billionaire Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin, the Russian intelligence establishment, and alleged ties to organized crime. He had a business relationship with the chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort.

Read my in-depth article about Deripaska and how his relationship with Paul Manafort began here.

Manafort offered Deripaska private briefings upon being hired, and met with the Russian intelligence officer and Deripaska-associate Konstantin Kilimnik and provided him with internal campaign polling data.

Read my article about the Manafort-Deripaska-Kilimnik nexus during the 2016 campaign here.

The head of EPAP’s Moscow branch, Elena Kuznetsova, previously worked for Deripaska’s aluminum giant Rusal.The firm’s founder, Dmitry Afanasiev, worked for a Deripaska-owned company for fourteen years. EPAP has a tight relationship with the Russian state and has even worked for Vladimir Putin in an individual capacity.Another of EPAP’s namesake founders, Nikolai Egorov, .Yet another namesake founder, Stanislav Puginsky, was chosen by convicted Russian agent Marina Butina and her handler, Alexander Torshin, to attend the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast .In the larger NSO Group corporate structure, OSY Technologies is the parent company of yet another surveillance firm called Circles, which specializes in exploiting weaknesses in global mobile phone networks that allow for calls, texts and geolocation to be monitored.Curiously, the founders of the hacking firm Circles, Boaz Goldman and Nadia Ropleva, also work at a cyber security firm supposedly defending against some of the very activities Circles engages in called FloLive.Stedman has pointed out that two individuals with ownership stakes in FloLive, Shlomo Rechtschaffen and Doron Cohen, are the personal lawyer and business partner respectively of the former Israeli military intelligence officer Walter Soriano.

Former Israeli military intelligence officer Walter Soriano

Soriano, an associate of Benjamin Netanyahu’s, is known to have worked with Oleg Deripaska in the past and appears to have been involved in the effort to silence the Belorussian escort Nastya Rybka, who was connected to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

Read my desciption of the Nastya Rybka affair here.

One potential connection between Flynn and Soriano leads through Richard Frankel, described by ABC News as a “friend” of Flynn’s, who went to work for Soriano’s company USG Security in early 2016.

Michael Flynn, VizSense, and Colt Ventures

Another individual who the Committee requested Soriano provide information on any and all communications he may have had with was Darren Blanton, a Texan venture capitalist, biotech investor and founder of Colt Ventures.During the 2016 election, Blanton was in regular contact with Steve Bannon and frequently visited Trump Tower.

Darren Blanton appearing on Steve Bannon’s podcast the War Room.

Colt Ventures was an investor in VizSense, a Dallas-based social media and “micro-influencer” company that provided the Trump campaign with $200,000 worth of services in the final month of the campaign, opaquely described as “data management services.”What exactly these services were remains a mystery.Stranger still, the Trump campaign paid the money to Colt Ventures, which then remitted a portion of it to VizSense, raising questions as to whether the Trump campaign attempted to conceal its relationship with VizSense or .VizSense was founded in 2015 by former Navy SEAL Jon Iadonisi and a nuclear engineer and former submariner named Tim Newberry.

On its website, VizSense promised to “weaponize your brands influence” through “military-grade influencer marketing and intelligence services.”Iadonisi’s experiences watching terrorist recruitment videos in Iraq taught him the power of social media and viral content.

“We know of a lot of bad guys who were killing my friends, and they were really good at making viral videos,” Iadonisi said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. “.”

Both Iadonisi and Newberry are closely connected to Flynn.Flynn served with Iadonisi in Iraq and has described him as “one of the best problem solvers I have ever worked with” and “an incredible asset for any organization.”Iadonisi worked with the CIA in his capacity as a SEAL.Starting in August of 2016, Tim Newberry served as CEO of the Flynn Intel Group subsidiary FIG Cyber.VizSense itself was a spin off another Iadonisi and Newberry joint project called White Canvas Group, a technology company described as “a privatized DARPA” with expertise in social media, cyber operations and digital influence.

Flynn Intel Group rented office space from White Canvas Group, where both .

“Social media is a new form of signals intelligence,” Flynn told The Wall Street Journal in one of his final interviews as Director of DIA in 2014. At that time, with Flynn’s encouragement, the US military and intelligence community was investing heavily into various methods of collecting and examining .

In July of 2016, Jon Iadonisi spoke with Flynn about the critical role “influencers” would play in the upcoming election. Flynn then put Iadonisi in contact with the Trump campaign, hoping to connect him with “whomever is .”On August 18th, Iadonisi began discussions with Trump campaign’s digital director Brad Pascale, providing him with examples of VizSense’s work, offering an example of a “persuasion campaign using organically created content to drive a conversation … using influencers to spread the message.”Iadonisi explained to Parscale that the “same technique can be used in politics, where the content and influencers are surgically designed to deliver a political message to a specific audience, creating a digital bonfire of conversation.”Later, in mid-September, Iadonisi sent Steve Bannon a proposal titled “Trump_Campaign_Proposal_9 _9 _16.pdf.”Bannon asked his friend and Colt Ventures owner Darren Blanton to meet with Iadonisi and review the proposal.At this point, Iadonisi connected Blanton with Michael Flynn.On September 14th, Iadonisi provided Blanton with a $769,000 proposal in three parts consisting of installation and set-up, analysis and tasking from the Trump campaign and conducting operations.Iadonisi promised that VizSense could “[d]etermine critical voting districts…focus the voter support team … efforts,” as well as “[a]ssess online sentiment/narratives according to each [critical voting district],” and “[p]rovide an executive summary about prominent narratives and proposed offensive operations needed to mobilize Trump voters in each [critical voting district].”While this initial offer was rejected after the campaign decided to use Brad Parscale’s team, Blanton continued to pursue the Trump campaign on VizSense’s behalf.In an email to Steve Bannon, with Flynn cc’d, Blanton wrote that Cambridge Analytica’s director of product Matt Oczkowski “[h]as a team of data scientists and they sit right outside of [Dan Scavino’s] door.”Scavino was Trump’s director of social media.Blanton continued, “I spoke to them and think that they have a good grasp to work with us if Steve [Bannon] is ok with that?”Bannon replied by telling Blanton to listen to Oczkowski but not to commit to him. Blanton continued to pursue Bannon, writing him another email that day with the subject line “Did call on foreign voters this is the week they request ballots. Got to act quick.”In it, Blanton wrote to Bannon that he “spoke to Jesse at [GOP] about foreign voters and have a strategy. He’s getting me as many digital addresses as he can find. We need to send out a video request from [then-candidate Trump] via social [media] to ask for their votes.”It is unclear who “Jesse” is, but he appears to have been involved with the Republican Party’s outreach on behalf of Trump to eligible American voters living overseas.“According to our expert in the UK these are some sample tweets that will move the needle to get votes with the millions of American citizens living overseas,” Blanton wrote to deputy Trump campaign manager David Bossie the next day, September 30th. “We can also monitor how they are resonating with influencers once we get approval to use our tools.”

David Bossie

Bossie had made his name investigating the Clinton’s in the 1990s as a Republican House and Senate staffer and later became infamous for his role in the conservative group Citizens United, which pursued legal actions that led to a landmark Supreme Court decision deemed corporations were people and .In an email from October 2nd with the subject line “Re: Give us the go ahead and we will start feeding you intel on what the Chatter is on social and infographics to feed through our campaign funnels,” Blanton wrote to Bannon, Flynn and Parscale, asking about messaging on “other mediums like Facebook,” and whether “any of those tweets on [o]verseas voters got launched?”The next day, Bannon suggested that Blanton contact David Bossie about a proposal that he and Flynn had produced.Blanton wrote to Bossie asking about his availability and suggested that “Flynn can tell you about [the proposal] .”

iVote Israel and a Coup in Montenegro

Screen shot from the Senate

Curiously, the part of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about Colt Ventures and VizSense contains a subsection entitled “[REDACTED] and Overseas Voters.”

The section is redacted in its entirety but for a single footnote that directs readers to an article by the outlet Balkan Insight.

The article describes an October 2016 coup attempt in Montenegro by the Russian-backed opposition party, the Democratic Front (DF). The attempt was assisted by Russian military intelligence, the GRU.Montenegrin prosecutors believed that a British-Israeli political consultant named Aron Shaviv, who was working for the DF, .

Aron Shaviv

While there is no publicly available information on what Shaviv or the events in Montenegro have to do with Colt Ventures or VizSense, the redacted section of the report follows a description of Darren Blanton’s interest in targeting overseas voters with social media.A brief analysis of Shaviv and his activities in Montenegro reveal a remarkable nexus of key figures, both Russian and members of the Trump campaign, who were also involved in the American election which took place less than a month after the Montenegrin coup attempt.Prior to becoming involved in politics, Shaviv served as a captain in the Israeli Defense Forces and, according to an online bio from his website that he later took down, as a “.”He got his start in politics in 2006 , a center right party founded by the Soviet-born Israeli Avigdore Lieberman that originally represented primarily Russian-speaking, secular Israelis.

Read my article on Russian corruption and organized crime in Israel that contains a description of Lieberman’s connections to Russia here.

Lieberman has been investigated for potentially receiving illegal bribes from individuals close to Putin and from individuals suspected of links to organized crime, .Cherney is allegedly a high level associate of the Moscow-based .

Read my description of Cherney and his relationship with Oleg Deripaska and the Izmaylovskaya Bratva here.

Following his work with Yisrael Beiteinu, Shaviv established a political consulting firm and worked for right wing candidates across Central and Eastern Europe, including in Ukraine, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovakia and, later, Montenegro.

He worked on both the campaign’s of Israel’s Likud Prime Minister Bibi Nentanyahu and .Shaviv’s mentor, Arthur Finkelstein, arranged for a political merger .A key plank of Netanyahu’s 2015 campaign masterminded by Shaviv was to convince far right Israeli voters that a vote for a right wing party other than Likud would .Shaviv credits Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum .Finkelstein was a massively influential Republican political strategist who was instrumental in Netanyahu’s 1996 electoral victory who was also considered .

Arthur Finkelstein with Benjamin Netanyahu

George Birnbaum, whose career intersected with Paul Manafort’s work in Ukraine, introduced Rick Gates to the Israeli private intelligence company Psy Group via Eitan Charnoff.

Read my in-depth article about the Israeli private intelligence industry and the company Psy Group’s proposed work for the 2016 Trump campaign here.

In addition to being a project manager for Psy Group, Charnoff was also the head of iVote Israel, an ostensibly non-partisan group dedicated to increasing absentee .During the 2016 election, both Democratic and Republican voters in Israel complained that .

The author suspects, but cannot prove, that the title of the redacted section of the Senate Intelligence Committee report in question is in fact “[iVote Israel] and Overseas Voters.”

iVote Israel was at one time led by Eitan Charnoff, who also worked at the Israeli private intelligence company Psy Group.During the 2016 election, Erik Prince organized a meeting between Donald Trump Jr., the founder of Psy Group Joel Zamel, and a man named George Nader who was representing the interests of Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates.

Read my indepth description of this meeting here.

iVote Israel’s former campaign strategist was none other than Aron Shaviv, the same Shaviv who worked on behalf of the pro-Kremlin Democratic Front (DF) opposition party in Montenegro, which is described in the footnote within the redacted section of the Senate Intelligence Report.The Montenegrin coup brings together a number of disparate threads relating to the Russian interference in the 2016 US election and figures within the Trump campaign.The coup in Montenegro took place less than a month before the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

While certain details of the October 2016 alleged coup attempt remain controversial, international investigators from Bellingcat have confirmed that the GRU officers Eduard Shishmakov and Vladimir Popov (aka Vladimir Nikolaevich Moiseev) were involved in the plot.

The GRU executed the 2016 hack-and-leak operation against the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.The Montenegrin coup plot was directly supported by Oleg Deripaska, who had major business interests in the country. Deripaska had hired Paul Manafort to promote his interests in Montenegro as far back as 2005.

Oleg Deripaska’s mansion in Montenegro

During the 2016 election, Manafort was the chairman of the Trump campaign, offered to provide Deripaska with private campaign briefings upon being hired, and met with and provided internal polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, an alleged Russian intelligence officer .According to the US Treasury Department, Victor Boyarkin, the former GRU officer who later worked on behalf of Deripaska and chased down Manafort over his debts to the oligarch, was also involved in providing funding for the DF.

Former Russian military intelligence officer and Deripaska employee Viktor Boyarkin

Despite the placement of the fully redacted “[iVote Israel] and Overseas Voters” section, with its reference to Aron Shaviv, in the part of the Senate Intelligence Committee report describing the activities of Colt Ventures and VizSense, there is no public information linking either company to iVote Israel or to the events in Montenegro.Nor is there any publicly available information linking either company to Aron Shaviv, who hasn’t been accused of any involvement in the 2016 US election.The analysis of iVote Israel, Aron Shaviv and the events surrounding the coup attempt in Montenegro is useful insofar as they appear to serve as a nexus of intersecting relationships between individuals involved with the Trump campaign and Russians involved in the 2016 US election interference effort coming together in the context of a yet another national election being interfered with by agents of the Kremlin.Many of these parties can be seen in the Senate Intelligence Committees letter to Walter Soriano, requesting he provide his communications with Oleg Deripaska, Victor Boyarkin, Konstantin Kilimnik, Paul Manafort, Erik Prince, Darren Blanton, Michael Flynn, and numerous individuals linked to Israel and the Israeli private intelligence industry.

Screenshot of Senate Intelligence Committee to Walter Soriano

Michael Flynn, VizSense, Colt Ventures and African American Voter Suppression

On October 8th, 2016, just a few days after Darren Blanton had inquired with Bannon, Flynn, Parscale and Bossie about a proposal regarding overseas voters, Michael Flynn sent Brad Parscale a contract from Colt Ventures outlining its proposed work for the Trump campaign.It was a key moment in the campaign, the day before the Access Hollywood tape had come out with a critical Presidential Debate about to take place.Flynn wrote that “we have already begun work on the priorities” that Parscale had previously identified.He explained to Parscale that the “first priority is to immediately … support the influence component of the upcoming debate, learn from it and continue to provide value by helping to increase voter awareness and sentiment in support of [Trump].”Between October 8th-9th, VizSense appears to have engaged in a social media campaign around the second presidential debate that focused on denigrating Hillary Clinton and attacking former President Bill Clinton as a “rapist,” a not-so-subtle means of deflecting attention away from Trump’s own sexual indiscretions.On the evening of October 10th, Blanton wrote to Donald Trump Jr. that “[w]e stirred up a shit load of positive traffic and [social media narratives] with Gen. Flynn and my team.”That same day, Flynn wrote to Bannon touting the results of VizSense’s work showing that in the even days before the debate the Twitter activity around the theme “Bill Clinton is a [r]apist” amounted to 123.8 million impressions, which went up to “177.5 million impressions” during the course of the two-day VizSense campaign.Flynn, urging Bannon to get the campaign to sign the contract he sent to Parscale, wrote that “[t]he mission peaked on Twitter at exactly the calculated time — during the debate.”On October 14th, Flynn argued to Blanton and Iadonisi that the campaign’s messaging should portray Hillary Clinton as “soft on cybersecurity” and that she would “put our nation’s secrets again at risk if she ever gets into the [White House].”Blanton agreed, writing “[t]hat is so true and we need to virally distribute all these wiki leaks and take advantage of the cultural shift in the way people communicate. . . . We need to be the source and chef to prepare the wiki info to eat! It just needs to be researched and then broke down into bites so that the [sic].”

In mid-October, Steve Bannon put Blanton and Iadonisi in touch with Bruce Carter, an African American political activist who had previously supported Bernie Sanders but had switched to supporting Trump after being convinced by Dustin Stockton, a writer at Breitbart News.

Bruce Carter

Carter created the group Trump For Urban Communities, which he later claimed was tasked by the Trump campaign with getting African American voters to either switch their vote to Trump or to sit out the election entirely.

Carter ultimately put together a $160,000 proposal for the group, and to facilitate funding Bannon put him in contact with Blanton.Blanton and Iadonisi met with Carter at a Starbucks across the street from the Dallas Country Club. Carter later recalled that Blanton and Iadonisi were joined by a third as yet unidentified military veteran who owned a Blackwater-like paramilitary services company.Blanton told Carter that he would provide him with funding while Iadonisi would amplify his message on social media. Blanton ultimately did provide some level of funding for Carter’s activities, though not as much as Carter initially asked for.On October 19th, during the events surrounding the third and final Presidential Debate in Las Vegas, Blanton introduced Carter to Michael Flynn, Erik Prince and Rebekah Mercer.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump for Urban Communities engaged in a “Don’t Vote Early” campaign.

After Trump’s victory, Blanton and Bannon cut ties with Carter, who claims .It seems clear that Bruce Carter was cynically, if willingly, exploited by surrogates of the Trump campaign to depress the African American vote, a decisive constituency within the Democratic electoral coalition.Of the 4.4 million fewer Democrats that turned out for Hillary than had for Obama, .Here we can see nexus in strategy, if nothing else, between many of the central players discussed in this book.Arthur Finkelstein had long understood that with such a large proportion of the electorate already decided, certain campaigns could be won by getting your opponents supporters not to vote, a strategy he described as “.”Finkelstein’s “rejectionist voting” theory is now deeply embedded in the electoral strategy of both the American and Israeli right wing.In a , a political consultant for Netanyahu named Srulik Einhorn wrote that a campaign manager has four goals.After listing the first three, he writes “[t]he fourth, more elusive goal is to persuade the other side’s voters not to go to the polls. This may sound awful, but it is just as legitimate a political goal as attempting to persuade voters to cross sides. Every individual must decide for themselves whether to go out and vote or not.”The Russian online and social media propagandists at the Internet Research Agency seemed to understand this well, and targeted African Americans with messages explicitly meant to demoralize and depress voter turnout.

Read my description of the Internet Research Agency and its voter suppression efforts during the 2016 election here.

In the days before the election, a senior official in the Trump campaign told Bloomberg that the campaign had “.”

The groups targeted included idealistic white liberals, young women and African Americans.The article showed that Trump’s digital operation in San Antonio, known as “Project Alamo” and run by Brad Parscale, specifically targeted African American voters with specially tailored anti-Hillary radio spots and Facebook non-public “dark posts” that the campaign could control which users could see.

“We know because we’ve modeled this,” the senior Trump official explained to Bloomberg regarding the purpose of these efforts. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

While Darren Blanton and Jon Iadonisi’s interactions with Bruce Carter of Trump for Urban Communities are an established fact, whether VizSense actually promoted the group or was involved in the Trump campaign’s wider voter suppression activities is unknown.

On November 2nd, a week before the election, Iadonisi sent Michael Flynn an email with the subject line “Cuba Project.”It contained a presentation under the heading “COLT TEAM,” that outlined a social media influence campaign codenamed “OP Havana Spring” that intended to “[c]onvert Cuban-American and Latinos from Miami into Trump Supporters.”The campaign promoted an October 21st Trump rally that occurred in Havana, Cuba across social media declared that “1.8 million impressions” and “6,182 mentions [were] generated in just 2 and a half days.”VizSense created hashtags to promote the event and identified the specific Twitter users who were influential in making the news of the rally go viral.The exact services VizSense provided to the Trump campaign, beyond promoting the idea that Bill Clinton was “rapist” on social media around the second debate and “OP Havana Spring,” remains a mystery.Colt Ventures initially billed the Trump campaign $650,000 for the services VizSense performed, though the final payment was eventually negotiated down to $200,000. These sums would seem to be far too high for only two social media campaigns.Blanton later claimed that the payment was for a get-out-the-vote effort promoted by VizSense, with a small amount of it covering Blanton’s .Stranger still, the payment went to Colt Ventures as opposed to VizSense itself, which, despite having performed the services being paid for, was never listed by the Trump campaign as a third party vendor, which may be a violation campaign finance law.The payment to Colt Ventures was reported to the Federal Election Commission as being for “.”During this timeframe, Darren Blanton was engaged in a business relationship with a Russian pharmaceutical executive named Alexey Repik, who had met with Vladimir Putin on multiple occasions, including as late as October 2016.

Vladimir Putin with Alexey Repik

In the fall of 2016, negotiations were underway for a venture fund backed by Repik’s company R-Pharm and the Russian government to invest in a California-based biotech company called Bonti.Blanton’s Colt Ventures was an investor in the company. Blanton and Repik met in San Francisco to discuss the deal, which closed on January 4th, 2017.Repik and his wife were later seen attending Trump’s inauguration with Blanton.

Alexey Repik and his wife at the 2016 inauguration of Donald Trump

In 2011 Repik was asked by the Russian news outlet Vedomosti about rumors that he had ties to the FSB, to which he replied, in what he later described as a joke, “It’s nice to feel like a simpleton .”

The FSB is Russia’s domestic intelligence agency.In addition to Bonti, Repik is an investor in another San Francisco-based startup called Grabr.Another investor in the company was the billionaire, Russian oligarch Konstantin Nikolaev. Nikolaev is an investor in a gun manufacturer operated by his wife that provides sniper rifles to the Russian National Guard and answers directly to Putin.He also is a key investor in a Russian satellite imagery firm that has a contract with the FSB that allows it to handle classified materials.Nikolaev partially funded the activities of the convicted Russian intelligence operative Marina Butina while she was in the United States.

Source:

Curiously, Nikolaev’s son Andrey was in communication with Darren Blanton .The content of their communications is not publicly known.