A college classmates I spoke with; one says that “I genuinely believe there’s something wrong with her. She lacks a moral compass and [demonstrates] elements of a sociopath.”

“The only thing she loves or values in this world is power. Anyone she attaches to in her life is simply a pawn to feed her addiction to it.” After all, even Goebbels was a ladies’ man. Accounts from her high school and college years bring into focus a woman with charm and energy—she had YOLO tattooed inside her lower lip—but it was always trained toward power. These people recall how Waldman cut corners, employed dirty, even illegal tricks, and laughed as she got away with it. Accounts from more recent colleagues add detail to the portrait—one not of a counterbalance to Miller, but rather of a powerful reinforcement. A Washington media flack who’s rapidly ascended—from Capitol Hill to the Department of Homeland Security to the vice president’s office—she can display a bright, even friendly manner, but behind the scenes, acquaintances say she can be ruthless and underhanded, and at times has seemed callous about the suffering of others.

The Department of Homeland Security has compiled “intelligence reports” about the work of American journalists covering protests in Portland, Ore., in what current and former officials called an alarming use of a government system meant to share information about suspected terrorists and violent actors.

Over the past week, the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis has disseminated three Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies and others, summarizing tweets written by two journalists — a reporter for the New York Times and the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare — and noting they had published leaked, unclassified documents about DHS operations in Portland. The intelligence reports, obtained by The Washington Post, include written descriptions and images of the tweets and the number of times they had been liked or retweeted by others.

Some of the leaked DHS documents the journalists posted and wrote about revealed shortcomings in the department’s understanding of the nature of the protests in Portland, as well as techniques that intelligence analysts have used. A memo by the department’s top intelligence official, which was tweeted by the editor of Lawfare, says personnel relied on “FINTEL,” an acronym for financial intelligence, as well as finished intelligence “Baseball cards” of arrested protesters to try to understand their motivations and plans. Historically, military and intelligence officials have used such cards for biographical dossiers of suspected terrorists, including those targeted in lethal drone strikes.

Some of the leaked DHS documents the journalists posted and wrote about revealed shortcomings in the department’s understanding of the nature of the protests in Portland, as well as techniques that intelligence analysts have used. A memo by the department’s top intelligence official, which was tweeted by the editor of Lawfare, says personnel relied on “FINTEL,” an acronym for financial intelligence, as well as finished intelligence “Baseball cards” of arrested protesters to try to understand their motivations and plans. Historically, military and intelligence officials have used such cards for biographical dossiers of suspected terrorists, including those targeted in lethal drone strikes.

When rumors of the secret arrests started spreading, few were alarmed. Maybe unidentified security forces were grabbing young people off the streets and shoving them into unmarked cars—who could say. But they must have had a good reason. Those arrested must have been terrorists, or at least radical leftist troublemakers. The government said it was legal.
And anyway, those arrested wouldn’t be gone forever, people figured. It wasn’t like a person could just disappear.

Snip:
Between 1976 and 1983, somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 Argentinians, as well as a smaller number of foreigners, were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by government agents.
Many of those hustled off the streets and into Ford Falcons at gunpoint were taken to secret government prisons.

Snip:
The few actual leftist revolutionaries were effectively wiped out in the first year of the campaign. Most of those killed by the regime were students, labor unionists, writers, journalists, and other ordinary citizens who had asked too many questions about where their children and neighbors had gone. Officials lied and made jokes; they told distraught parents their children must be on vacation. The leader of the junta, Gen. Jorge Videla said: “The disappeared are just that: disappeared. They are neither alive nor dead. They are disappeared.”

Snip: The junta called it la guerra sucia, the Dirty War, to give it a patina of military legitimacy. But it wasn’t a war. It was one-sided terrorism by a state against its citizens, aimed at crushing political opposition and dissent.

The NYPD said it arrested the person for criminal mischief and "making graffiti.