February 15, 2022

Fox News is mangling Special Counsel John Durham's latest Trump-Russia filing

Fox News is mangling Special Counsel John Durham's latest Trump-Russia filing

by Peter Weber, Senior editor
The Week, Tue, February 15, 2022

On Friday night, Special Counsel John Durham filed a pretrial motion on possible conflicts of interest by the lawyer representing Michael Sussmans, a cybersecurity lawyer Durham has charged with allegedly lying to the FBI. But he also "slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump," Charlie Savage writes in Monday's New York Times.

Trump and allied media organizations say Durham's filing, as Fox News' Brooke Singman put it in a widely cited early report, shows that lawyers for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign "paid a technology company to 'infiltrate' servers belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House, in order to establish an 'inference' and 'narrative' to bring to government agencies linking Donald Trump to Russia." Those claims were repeated Monday on Fox News' daytime news and prime time opinions shows.

"But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news," the conclusions "based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation," Savage writes. Gabriel Malor, a lawyer who writes for several conservative media outlets, lays out a few specific points on Durham's filing, including that it never uses the word "infiltrate" or accuses the Clinton campaign of ordering Sussmans or anyone else to pass the tech company's analysis of DNS data to the FBI or CIA.

Savage summarizes the competing narratives from Durham and the cybersecurity experts who compiled the contested DNS data, adding that the right-wing mischaracterizations "involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims." Lawyer Marcy Wheeler, who writes at Emptywheel, has a lot more detail about Durham's filings and Kash Patel's involved role in this story.

CONTINUES…

https://news.yahoo.com/fox-news-mangling-special-counsel-064744668.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

Kash Patel, Putin’s Puppet’s Puppy’s bone.

February 11, 2022

Why would they do that?

The Goal of Wholesale Surveillance



The goal of wholesale surveillance, as (Hannah) Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

Chris Hedges, The Last Gasp of American Democracy

February 10, 2022

Jan. 6 investigators find gaps in Trump White House call logs.

Wonder who Dimdonnie was conspiring with?

I wonder if Dimdonnie was taking orders on the phone or giving them.

February 9, 2022

Hal Rogers, NAZI Cheap Crook

Who’s the most cringe member of the Ky Congressional delegation? We have a new winner.

BY LINDA BLACKFORD
Lexington Herald-Leader, FEBRUARY 09, 2022 12:14 PM

Excerpt…

What money, you ask? In 2020, John Cheves wrote yet another story about Rogers’ various and lucrative political organization, including a PAC that pays Rogers’ wife $3,000 a month for “event planning.” Also, Cheves found the PAC had paid $18,000 so far for Tracy Rogers, the congressman’s daughter-in-law, and $36,000 so far for Bob Mitchell, his longtime friend and former district director who retired from Rogers’ office in 2012.” In 2011, the Center for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found that Rogers, also known as the “Prince of Pork,” the longtime chair of the House Appropriations Committee, had funneled more than $236 million in federal funds since 2000 to a web of nonprofit groups he created in Kentucky, benefiting him, his family and his associates.

Politicians are not supposed to funnel money to associates or tell their colleagues to kiss their ass. Then again, they’re also not supposed to support or foment lies about election fraud and riots in the U.S. Capitol. Then again, this is the Kentucky delegation.

Source:

https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/linda-blackford/article258206483.html

February 8, 2022

"That's Hitler!," Bannon thought.

Steve Bannon thought Trump looked like Hitler as he descended the escalator at his 2016 campaign debut: book

Jake Lahut
Business Insider, Feb. 8, 2022

* A new book from New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters details the origins of the 2016 Trump campaign.

* Steve Bannon, an early Trump advisor, was reminded of a Nazi propaganda film on announcement day.

* Peters writes that Bannon's immediate reaction to Trump's golden escalator ride was "That's Hitler!"

When Donald Trump rode a golden escalator down to announce his presidential candidacy in 2015, the carefully choreographed scene before TV crews reminded a soon-to-be Trump advisor of scenes from one of the most effective propaganda films ever made.

"That's Hitler!, Bannon thought, as the opening scene of Leni Riefenstahl's seminal work of Nazi propaganda, 'Triumph of the Will,' flashed through his mind," New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters writes in his new book, "Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted."

In his notes on sourcing — which involved interviews with over 300 people, mostly while Trump was still in office — Peters explains that quotes presented in italics and in the past tense indicate "material from interviews conducted with the author on-the-record."

Continues…

https://www.businessinsider.com/bannon-thought-trump-resembled-hitler-on-his-escalator-ride-book-2022-2

February 4, 2022

Shed No Tears for Jeff Zucker, Trump's Great Enabler

At NBC and CNN, Zucker was key to Trump’s rise

by Eric Alterman
The American Prospect / Altercation, Feb. 3, 2022

I have to say I’m amused by all the crocodile tears being shed for Jeff Zucker’s forced resignation from CNN. Obviously, he is gone for reasons other than the ones being given; that was a slap-on-the-wrist sort of violation for a network president. (My out-of-the-bleachers guess would be that it is directly related to Chris Cuomo’s suit against CNN.) CNN whiners should be ashamed of themselves for defending him. Yes, he’s not as bad as the criminal whorehouse operator, Roger Ailes. (That’s how they get you: "Defining Deviancy Down" …) But his reign at CNN had one crucial world historical impact: the promotion of Donald Trump and his brand of entertaining fascism to the U.S. and the world. As for CNN, it was the network’s refusal to distinguish between what its journalists know to be true and what they know to be a lie for the benefit of those who depend on it for news.

The following paragraph is drawn from my 2020 book Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse:

Trump’s fame was mostly confined to Manhattan-based gossip writers and broadcasters until 2004, when he teamed up with the television producer Mark Burnett to create The Apprentice. Jeff Zucker, an NBC executive who later moved on to CNN in time for the 2016 campaign, gave the program the green light. "The show was built as a virtually nonstop advertisement for the Trump empire and lifestyle," according to a 2016 Trump biography. Naturally, it was a lie from start to finish. The Apprentice was filmed in his offices in Trump Tower, but, as one of the show’s producers told a reporter from The New Yorker, "We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise." According to a supervising editor on the show, the producers’ "first priority on every episode … was to reverse-engineer the show to make it look like his judgment had some basis in reality."

Trump entered the presidential race in November 2015 at a moment when the always tenuous line between "entertainment" and politics was rapidly and purposely being erased. And it was around this time that the same Jeff Zucker landed the top job at CNN. "The idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way," he told a reporter. And just as sports broadcasters hire hosts who can make boring games sound interesting, and keep the audience entertained regardless of their level of expertise, so, too, Zucker chose pundits with no discernible qualifications save their willingness to sing the praises of Donald Trump. He hired Jeffrey Lord, a journeyman conservative author who repeatedly compared Trump to Martin Luther King Jr., and Kayleigh McEnany, an attractive young law student who consistently argued that Trump "doesn’t lie," but that instead, "the press lies." (McEnany was rewarded for these arguments with an appointment in 2017 as the Republican National Committee spokesperson, and, two years later, for the same position in Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, before becoming Trump’s presidential press secretary, also in 2020.) According to Zucker’s preferred metric, these hires were more than justified. "Everybody says, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you have Jeffrey Lord or Kayleigh McEnany,’" he said. "But you know what? They don’t know who Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are"—as if this somehow justified their lies and the lunatic conspiracy theories they passed along to viewers.

Zucker even proved willing to hire Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, in June 2016, not long after an incident in which Lewandowski was charged with misdemeanor battery following his physical attack on a female reporter whose question he did not like. (The charges were later dropped, though not before Lewandowski was accused by another Trump supporter of sexual assault.) Lewandowski had lost an internal power struggle within the Trump campaign, and with it his job. Such a hire would not normally be considered unusual in the incestuous world of cable TV commentary, but in this case, Lewandowski had signed a nondisclosure agreement that contained a nondisparagement clause before leaving the campaign. That meant he was legally enjoined from saying anything that might reflect badly on Trump—even if it was truthful. Zucker did not care. Truth was not the metric: Ratings were. (In September 2019, Lewandowski testified before the House Judiciary Committee investigating impeachment and admitted, "I have no obligation to be honest to the media because they’re just as dishonest as anybody else." He was booked on CNN that same night.)

Owing to the strong ratings that Trump-themed programming earned the network during the election season, Zucker constantly pressured his staff to keep the focus on Trump’s campaign. CNN was happy to broadcast the candidate’s lies unmediated and uninterrupted, whether they were offered on the phone, in live interviews, or during rallies. According to the nonpartisan fact-checking site PolitiFact, which investigated 158 statements Trump had made on the campaign trail before June 2016, 78 percent of those statements were false, mostly false, or "pants on fire." Only about 3 percent of the statements it investigated were judged to be entirely true. The other 19 percent were half true or mostly true.

Continues…

https://americanprospect.activehosted.com/index.php?action=social&chash=ab1a4d0dd4d48a2ba1077c4494791306.1331&s=bb6bef2a4b7e3fbe7fcc8d721fca4907

And going by past experience: Whoever comes at CNN next will be worse.

February 3, 2022

Ask him, "What did Putin tell Trump in secret?"

They spoke without aids, stenographers or record keeping at least 16 times.

If any critical faculties remain, it could get his mind right.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/10/04/trump-has-spoken-privately-with-putin-least-times-heres-what-we-know-about-conversations/

February 2, 2022

What BKliban said.

February 1, 2022

GOP and NAZIs go way back.

The CIA’s Worst-Kept Secret:

Newly Declassified Files Confirm United States Collaboration with Nazis

Pried loose by Congress, which passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act three years ago, a long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the cold war--the CIA's use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a clandestine war on the Soviet Union and other leftist movements

May 1, 2001
Martin A. Lee
Originally in Foreign Policy In Focus

“Honest and idealist … enjoys good food and wine … unprejudiced mind …”

That’s how a 1952 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessment described Nazi ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS think tank involved in planning the Final Solution. Augsburg’s SS unit performed “special duties,” a euphemism for exterminating Jews and other “undesirables” during the Second World War.

Although he was wanted in Poland for war crimes, Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA, which employed him in the late 1940s as an expert on Soviet affairs. Recently released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was among a rogue’s gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S. intelligence agencies shortly after Germany surrendered to the Allies.

SNIP…

“The real winners of the cold war were Nazi war criminals, many of whom were able to escape justice because the East and West became so rapidly focused after the war on challenging each other,” says Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and America’s chief Nazi hunter. Rosenbaum serves on a Clinton-appointed Interagency Working Group (IWG) committee of U.S. scholars, public officials, and former intelligence officers who helped prepare the CIA records for declassification.

Many Nazi criminals “received light punishment, no punishment at all, or received compensation because Western spy agencies considered them useful assets in the cold war,” the IWG team stated after releasing 18,000 pages of redacted CIA material. (More installments are pending.)

These are “not just dry historical documents,” insists former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the panel examining the CIA files. As far as Holtzman is concerned, the CIA papers raise critical questions about American foreign policy and the origins of the cold war.

The decision to recruit Nazi operatives had a negative impact on U.S.-Soviet relations and set the stage for Washington’s tolerance of human rights abuses and other criminal acts in the name of anti-Communism. With that fateful sub-rosa embrace, the die was cast for a litany of antidemocratic CIA interventions around the world.

CONTINUES…

https://ips-dc.org/the_cias_worst-kept_secret_newly_declassified_files_confirm_united_states_collaboration_with_nazis/