gabriel sherman

1119 TAG tukr on impeach defense (plus hanity and ingram core of fox that keeps base from collapse?)

AN 2 25

Last month, U.S. Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who has on rare occasions stood up to Donald Trump, cast the deciding—and, to some, unexpected—vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Now, a report reveals that Tillis says the FBI had informed him of “credible” death threats before his vote. This revelation has led some to question whether he voted under duress, while others accuse him, and other Republicans, of caving to pressure.

“In private,” Vanity Fair‘s Gabriel Sherman reports, “Republicans talk about their fear that Trump might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don’t rubber-stamp his actions.”

“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former Trump official told Sherman.

“Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about ‘credible death threats’ when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary,” Sherman reported. “According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. (When asked for comment for this story, a spokesperson for Tillis said it was false that the senator had recommended the book in that capacity. The FBI said it had no comment.)”

In his article at Vanity Fair, Sherman serves up numerous other examples detailing the threats of violence Republican lawmakers have allegedly been facing. On social media, he writes, “GOP Senators and House members are scared of being murdered by Trump supporters if they don’t support Trump. This is fascism in America.”

It’s not the first death threat Tillis received, and some critics say that if Senators can’t do the job they were elected to do, and swore an oath to perform, they should quit.

Some responded to this post from Sherman:

IFrame Content

“I was also scared for my life when I came forward with harassment allegations against Fox News’ Roger Ailes —- but I still did the right thing. Courage isn’t easy. Most Republicans still need to figure that out,” wrote former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, who became one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World.

John Jackson is a veteran and former Republican who says he fought in Ukraine for nine months, thanks in part from motivation he got from Ronald Reagan.

“There are millions of children in Ukraine who go to school under missile attacks, daily,” Jackson wrote, in response to Sherman’s social media post. “They are far braver than our politicians. If U.S. Senators aren’t willing to risk life and limb to perform their Constitutional duties, they should resign.”

“This is exactly what Trump was counting on when he pardoned everyone for the 6 January insurrection,” noted Jonathan Z. Ludwig, an Associate Professor of Russian at Oklahoma State University.

Others responded to the article in general.

Tim Marksman, an editor for Wired, writes that “there are a lot of legislators, academics, activists, journalists, medical workers etc. who follow their conscience in their work despite death threats and despite not having the protections afforded members of Congress.”

“I have long believed that not enough has been written about how GOP members have felt physically intimidated by Trump supporters,” noted attorney George Conway. “It doesn’t excuse their cowardice, but it still deserves more attention.”

Senator Tillis’s vote to confirm came after an event that had given Hegseth’s critics hope he would not be confirmed.

“Before Senator Thom Tillis voted to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, he worked with accusers to make the case against him in a bid to get G.O.P. leaders to scrap the vote altogether,” The New York Times reported last week, noting how Hegseth’s nomination had been “teetering on the brink of defeat on the Senate floor.”

“Turning to a group of North Carolina lawmakers who were flying with him to survey storm damage in their state, Mr. Trump noted Mr. Tillis’s impending defection and posed a question: Which of them wanted his endorsement for a primary challenge to the senator next year?” the Times added.

“Tillis personally assured Danielle Hegseth in a call on Jan. 19, witnessed by two other people, that if she signed the statement testifying that she believed her former brother-in-law Pete Hegseth has an alcohol abuse problem and was abusive to his second wife, it would carry weight, and potentially move three votes-his own, along with the votes of Sens. Susan Collins (R., Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska),” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Tillis voted to confirm. Two weeks later, in a rare social media post, the Republican Senator from North Carolina proudly posted photos of his impending trip with the President aboard Air Force One:

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an 5 24

attorneys representing former President Donald Trump have sent a cease-and-desist letter to the producers of the fictionalized biopic The Apprentice, which depicts a younger Trump in an unflattering manner.

Variety reported Friday that the independently produced film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, drew the attention of the Trump legal team due to one scene in particular. That scene reportedly shows Trump sexually assaulting his first wife, Ivana, based on an account she gave in a 1990 divorce deposition that she later retracted in 2015. The cease-and-desist letter warned filmmakers to not seek theatrical distribution in the U.S.

"This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire," said Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung.

READ MORE:[Ivana Trump's Bedminster burial site might be a secret tax windfall, experts say

In an official statement, the producers of The Apprentice insisted that "the film is a fair and balanced portrait of the former president."

"We want everyone to see it and then decide," filmmakers said in response to the cease-and-desist letter.

According to Variety, the film also shows Trump taking amphetamines to lose weight, undergoing plastic surgery and liposuction as well as cutting deals with the mafia to build his real estate empire. Sebastian Stan plays Trump, and Jeremy Strong — known for his Kendall Roy character on the HBO show "Succession" — plays his mob-connected attorney, Roy Cohn.

The film's script was written by Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabriel Sherman, who covered the Trump administration for the outlet. During a press conference at Cannes, Director Ali Abbasi shrugged off the cease-and-desist letter, and added that he doesn't "necessarily think this is a film [Trump] would dislike."

READ MORE:['Awful day for the defense': tty says Trump lawyers 'struck out' with Costello testimony

"Everybody talks about [Trump] suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know," Abbasi said.

In addition to the former president's legal team, billionaire Dan Snyder — who helped fund production of the movie assuming it would be a flattering portrayal of Trump — is reportedly "furious" about the final result after a screening in February.

Currently, there is no set date for the film's release in the U.S., and there are no distribution deals in place. However, TIME reported that Abbasi hopes to have the film in American theaters by September, just before early voting begins in the 2024 election.

"We have a promotional event coming up called the U.S. election that’s going to help us with the movie," Abbasi said.

Click here to read Variety's report in full.

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gabe S sez 3 are core (wallace and baer outliers?); graphic /crawl text slam label overrides nuance of impeach testimony

https://cpj.org/blog/2018/02/weinstein-blackcube-surveillance-claim-exposes-agg.php

Weinstein-BlackCube surveillance claim exposes aggressive tactics to kill a story

By Avi Asher-Schapiro/CPJ US Correspondent on February 7, 2018

Those with deep pockets can go to great lengths to push back against journalism they find objectionable. Billionaire Peter Thiel deployed a team of lawyers in a move that bankrupted the news site Gawker in 2016--and last month President Donald Trump's lawyers tried to block the publication of an unflattering book. But there's another, much less public, arena where the wealthy can combat unflattering reporting: the world of subterfuge-for-hire, where private investigators work to undermine a story before it's even made public.

In late 2017, the public was privy to a rare glimpse inside this world. Ronan Farrow, in a New Yorker exposé, reported that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner had enlisted a team of private investigators to push back against reporting into dozens of sexual assault and rape allegations against their client. One of the private investigation firms, BlackCube--an outfit staffed with former agents of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad--was ordered in a contract obtained by The New Yorker to "completely stop the publication" of an article critical of Weinstein. BlackCube ultimately failed. But, Farrow's report found, journalists investigating Weinstein at The New Yorker, The New York Times, and New York magazine, and their sources, were approached by undercover agents with fabricated backstories, as part of an elaborate effort to keep Weinstein's alleged sexual misconduct secret.

Weinstein's spokespeople have denied the allegations against him and rejected claims that he tried to "suppress" any journalism. BlackCube has repeatedly insisted that it "applies high moral standards" to all of its work, and in an interview a member of its advisory board expressed regret for its relationship with Weinstein.

While there are no laws against lying to a reporter or their sources, or conducting public surveillance of or pushing embarrassing information about a journalist--as long as that behavior doesn't veer into libel or slander--the Weinstein story raised questions about how far some will go to kill a negative story--and what, if any, ethical and legal guardrails exist to protect journalists

Of course, the use of underhanded tactics to derail a reporter is nothing new. Bethany McLean, a business reporter who broke the Enron story in 2001, recalls receiving multiple phone calls from individuals who said they were potential sources. These calls, she told CPJ, amounted to sloppy sting operations: those on the other line would try to lure her into admitting she wanted to financially benefit from her own reporting--McLean said she assumed she was being taped.

For most reporters, however, pushback usually comes in the form of aggressive public relations firms or, on occasion, threatening letters from their subjects' lawyers. Weathering an undercover operation has not typically been part of a journalists' job description. George Freeman said that in nearly 30 years as a lawyer for The New York Times, he "can barely think of an example" of these tactics. He is now executive director of the independent advisory group the Media Law Resource Center. "Unfortunately, it's becoming less rare in the last couple years," he told CPJ. "And that's what's scary about it"

Subjects of journalistic scrutiny are, of course, entitled to defend themselves. And for those with the resources to do so, there are plenty of techniques that reporters with whom CPJ spoke said they have come to expect, including compiling publicly available information that could reveal a reporter's conflicts of interest, or a dossier of past reporting mistakes.

The Weinstein story revealed a more aggressive toolbox apparently used by private investigators: the impersonation of sources and hiring reporters as agents. Other cases involve deploying aggressive surveillance, and smearing sources or reporters by spreading potentially damaging personal information.

Before Weinstein, another high-profile case alleging attempts to suppress reporting focused on Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News. Ailes' biographer Gabriel Sherman, citing sources inside Fox, alleged that the executive used a portion of Fox's budget to pay for a "Black Room," where PR and surveillances operations against Ailes' perceived enemies--including reporters--were coordinated.

Ailes, who died in May, denied the allegations at the time. On the record, Fox executives insisted to Sherman that they had no knowledge of company money being spent on surveillance or online attacks against reporters.

But, Sherman said, sources inside of Fox told him a different story. "From my own reporting, inside Fox, I know Ailes had hired private investigators to have me surveilled," Sherman told CPJ. "It adds a level of psychological intimidation, if you know your subject has goons out there looking for you." Sherman recalled one particularly chilling incident while he was working on his biography of Ailes: he and his wife noticed a black SUV lurking outside a cabin they were renting--when they tried to approach the car, it peeled out and raced away.

Beyond laws against stalking, assault, and fraud, there's little to prevent the rich and powerful from deploying such tactics to suppress reporting they don't approve of, said Philip Segal, the founder of Charles Griffin Intelligence, a private investigations firm. Segal is an expert on investigative ethics and gives ethics seminars to state bar associations.

He said he believes private investigators should follow strict ethical guidelines and refrain from impersonation tactics. Investigators should not, he said, pay other journalists to gather intelligence for them, unless those reporters are prepared to broadcast that they are not working in their capacity as a reporter.

Getting a clear picture of the scope and breadth of these aggressive private investigations is difficult. "Out of a thousand cases, I'd say one or two involved a reporter," Randy Torgerson, the president of the United States Association of Professional Investigators, an organization with over 600 members, told CPJ.

And, when a reporter is the apparent victim of such an operation, it can be difficult to definitively trace the source. In the BlackCube case, Farrow was able to publish a copy of the firm's contract with Weinstein. But more often than not, obtaining such a document is not possible, leaving reporters with a mixture of circumstantial evidence, suspicion, and the assurances of their own sources.

Lee Fang, an investigative journalist at the Intercept, who has reported for a number of outlets about the sprawling political network funded by the conservative Koch brothers, said he suspects operatives working for the Kochs hacked his private account on the image hosting site Photobucket and circulated an image of him smoking marijuana as a teenager.

The image published by the conservative website the Washington Free Beacon, in a post titled "High Times at The Intercept" that mocked the publication's decision to hire Fang, was taken from a password protected account, Fang said. The Free Beacon was co-founded by Michael Goldfarb, who previously worked as a crisis communications consultant for the Kochs.

Fang told CPJ he can't definitively prove who was behind the hack, but said that his reporting had been flagged by pro-Koch Brothers operatives before, including on a now-defunct website, KochFacts.com, that listed journalists writing critically on the Kochs' political activities.

...

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roger-ailes-fox-donald-trump-2016-conservatism-214076

2x?

much as the Republican Party’s nomination of Donald Trump as president this week, the demise of Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes marks the end of an age.

Toppled by a cascade of sexual harassment charges and said to be nearing the exits at Fox, Ailes will be remembered for undermining the dominant 20th-century model of objective journalism with his defiantly right-wing news channel. But he was equally important in transforming politics itself. Not only did he tutor presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush in the ways of media politics, but he was largely responsible for two of the signal changes in American political culture since the 1960s: the rise of television as a national force and the emergence of cultural populism as a key feature of the Republican Party.

In fact, apart from the presidents he served, he was arguably the single most important figure in the creation of modern conservatism. By fusing television’s power to conjure feelings of anger and resentment to an ideology of cultural populism that demonized liberal elites, Ailes set forth the methods and the message that would help conservative politicians win and maintain power for decades. That is, until Trump, who, this week in Cleveland, officially closed his hostile takeover of the party that Ailes helped build, using the very tactics Ailes had pioneered.

Ailes—whose story is best told in Gabriel Sherman’s invaluable biography The Loudest Voice in the Room—saw the importance of television as a political tool early in his career. He burst onto the political scene as a twentysomething adviser to Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. It was a job he earned after offering the candidate some frank and canny advice about TV on the set of The Mike Douglas Show, where Ailes was a producer. “Television is not a gimmick,” Ailes brashly chided Nixon, “and if you think it is, you’ll lose again.”

Nixon’s success in the 1968 election launched the young Ailes into national politics. Although he didn’t officially join the White House—senior aides like H.R. Haldeman didn’t want Ailes to have the president’s ear—he continued to advise Nixon on television and media strategy. He supervised TV moments like the president’s introduction of Warren Burger as his nominee to the Supreme Court and his call to Neil Armstrong after he walked on the moon. Ailes also encouraged Nixon to practice the politics of resentment that came naturally to him, creating the basic formula used by Reagan, both Bushes and countless lesser conservative politicians: playing on the public’s sense that powerful liberal were getting ahead at the expense of Middle America.

Along with others in the Nixon White House, Ailes also began to change how the public thought about the press, arguing relentlessly that what we now call the mainstream media had an irredeemable liberal bias. From Vice President Spiro Agnew’s fiery speeches in late 1969 to the ongoing White House project of monitoring news coverage for ideological taint, Nixon’s team helped sow the notion that conservative politicians and viewpoints weren’t getting a fair shake in the news coverage—and used the resulting public support this generated as leverage against the press. Ailes fully shared this opinion of the media as slanted. In a memo to top Nixon aides, he even proposed creating a White House television news service that would provide local stations with administration-produced news segments to counterbalance what viewers consumed via regular TV.

Across the country, meanwhile, the political consulting business was catching on—and here, too, Ailes was a pioneer. Candidates for state or national office were coming to depend on a new breed of media wizards, who knew how to cut television ads, build mailing lists and develop lines of attack. Ailes himself began a consulting practice, and after the publication of Joe McGinniss’ Selling of the President 1968—which told the story of Nixon’s media operation in the campaign, with the colorful Ailes in a starring role—that practice took off.

In these pre-internet, pre-cable-news years, candidates and politicians were learning to wage their message wars largely through network television. They crafted emotionally powerful campaign ads and devised clever strategies to win favorable nightly news coverage. An emerging wisdom held that television watchers absorbed their knowledge about public affairs at a gut level, more visceral than newspaper readers, making them especially susceptible to emotional appeals, particularly of the conservative kind.

:{:{:{Partial to these theories, Ailes for the next two decades advocated using the media to draw over to the GOP disaffected Democrats and alienated independents, who were growing in number as the parties themselves weakened. To reach these members of what Nixon called “the Silent Majority,” Ailes and the politicians he advised relied on the cultural populism that was moving closer and closer to the center of conservative ideologyy. Ads and other forms of messaging would emphasize how spineless or elitists liberal politicians were betraying these voters on a host of values-laden issues—often racially charged ones—including crime, drugs, busing, welfare, affirmative action and national security.}:

Ailes also continued to pursue correctives to what he saw as media bias. In the early 1970s, he went to work for a conservative news network called Television News Incorporated, funded by the right-wing beer king Joseph Coors. Like Ailes’ proposed Nixon project, TVN hoped to feed its own right-leaning news segments into the broadcasts that ran on local stations nationwide. (It even used the current Fox slogan, “fair and balanced.”) Ailes hoped to build TVN into a full-fledged network to rival the broadcast giants, but it lost money and folded in 1975. While keeping a hand in other projects, Ailes committed himself to Republican politics.

:{:{The pinnacle of Ailes’ direct political influence came in the 1988 campaign of Vice President George Bush. When the race began, the blue-blooded high-WASP Bush was widely seen as Reagan’s pale imitator. His campaign needed, as Newsweek put it in a cover line, to dispel “the wimp factor.” Warming to the challenge, Ailes, serving as Bush’s media adviser and unofficial strategist, injected anger and fight into Bush’s message and persona by prodding the candidate to go on the attack.}:

After a weak showing in the Iowa caucuses, the effete Bush viciously assailed his main rival, Bob Dole, in the ensuing primaries, and in the fall he shamelessly smeared the cerebral Michael Dukakis, painting the Democratic nominee as soft on crime, unpatriotic and even un-American. An Ailes protégé, Larry McCarthy, developed the infamous Willie Horton ad that highlighted the case of a black inmate furloughed from prison in Massachusetts on a Dukakis-approved plan who proceeded to rape a Maryland woman and assault her husband. Ultimately, Bush overcame a 17-point deficit in the polls to win the election in November by a substantial margin.}:

After the election, Ailes remained an important adviser to Bush. Crucially, in the weeks before the first Gulf War, Ailes convened focus groups to test which messages would most effectively make the case for using military force to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. A memo from Ailes to the president delineated those arguments that worked and those that didn’t, allowing Bush to refine his argument for his televised Oval Office address. In 1992, while assuming no formal position in the reelection campaign, Ailes persuaded Bush to deride Bill Clinton’s patriotism, which the president did by making baseless insinuations about a trip Clinton had taken as a young man to Russia.

Increasingly, however, Ailes—having reached the crest of presidential politics—turned his attentions to the extra-governmental right-wing message machine. He retained his longtime dream of creating an outlet that would provide a conservative alternative to the mainstream media. Early on, he appreciated the emotive power and influence of talk radio, including rising stars like Rush Limbaugh. In 1992, Ailes created and produced a TV show for Limbaugh—it ran until 1996—and he introduced the celebrity radio host to President Bush, who in an effort to shore up his bona fides with the far right invited the two men for a night in the White House. (Bush literally carried Limbaugh’s bags, to much ridicule.)

Limbaugh and a bevy of similar radio and TV hosts operated very much in the Ailesian vein: militant in their ideology, aggrieved in their attitudes, provocative in their rhetoric. Collectively, they began prodding not just liberals but also the GOP establishment, urging them to adopt increasingly extreme stands while also forcing workaday journalists to give respectful attention to far-right arguments that once would have been deemed beyond the pale. Taking these voices and methods from radio to television, Ailes hoped, would not only be a lucrative business prospect but also held the potential to enhance conservative power regardless of who held the White House.

As cable TV grew, Ailes found employment there. He led CNBC for a while, and under NBC’s auspices ran a short-lived network called “America’s Talking,” which tried to bring talk-radio politics to television. But when NBC folded that ill-conceived network to create a new news channel, MSNBC, Ailes chose to join forces with the conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch to create the Fox News Channel, his greatest legacy.

While many news stories focused on Murdoch’s influence, Ailes was always the visionary and guiding hand behind their network. Debuting in 1996, Fox by 2002 had overtaken CNN as the most-watched cable news network. Its key role in defining and promulgating right-wing issues and talking points over the last two presidential administrations—always in the vein of angry, resentful politics that Nixon made central to the modern Republican Party—is today well established. (Despite his role running Fox, Ailes continued to advise Republicans closely, whether dispensing advice to George W. Bush, about the politics of his war on terrorism or coaching vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan in the 2012 campaign.)

:{:{Ailes’ success, politically and commercially, emboldened him. The elevation to stardom of Megyn Kelly, as Jim Rutenberg wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 2015, seemed to herald a hubristic attempt to expand Fox’s viewership beyond the conservative diehards that had made it prosper. Kelly made her name by embarrassing Karl Rove on election night 2012, when he insisted, against the evidence, that Mitt Romney might yet win Ohio and that calling the election for Barack Obama was premature.}:

Later, Kelly surprised Dick Cheney by telling him, “History has proved that you got it wrong in Iraq, sir.” Her willingness to confront Donald Trump over his record of sexist rhetoric in last summer’s Republican debate launched her to new heights of fame, embodying Fox’s bid for broader respectability while also—perhaps paradoxically—highlighting the tension between the real-estate mogul’s assaults on the GOP establishment and the network’s fidelity to the ideological dogmas at the party’s heart.}:

Tellingly, it was apparently when Kelly turned on Ailes this week that his fate was sealed. By informing investigators that he had sexually harassed her some years ago, adding to a lengthening list of female employees with similar stories, she helped to persuade Murdoch to oust the man who built Murdoch’s most lucrative media property. Given changing attitudes about women and sex, the macho and often anti-feminist conservative populism in which Ailes believed so deeply had become increasingly hard to tolerate or justify. The women accusing Ailes aren’t, for the most part, liberal, but their charges are made possible by the triumph of liberal ideas on gender equality.

It’s fitting, too, that Ailes’ demise should come about as Trump assumes leadership of the Republican Party. It was Trump, after all, who proved that Ailes and Fox were not omnipotent in the world of conservative politics. He not only won the GOP nomination with ideologically heterodox positions, at least at selected moments, on trade, Vladimir Putin, the Iraq War, gay rights, taxes on the rich, Social Security and Planned Parenthood; he also openly warred with Fox throughout the primary season—promising, fleetingly, not to go on the network when it treated him unfairly—and if he lost that battle, he won the war.

There’s another irony as well. If Republican regulars opposed Trump for his centrist deviancies, he owes his success in the primaries to the fact that he ran to the right of his rivals on the most salient issues of the campaign—immigration and terrorism. In short, he espoused a variety of the very same brand of politics that Ailes has successfully promoted, and the GOP has prospered with, since Nixon’s day: the substitution of bluster for reason, the angry scapegoating of others, the blind hatred and exaggerated fear of liberals in power, the appeal to traditional conservative values on polarizing social issues. Trump has merely upped the ante.

And where Ailes used Fox News to fulfill his longstanding goal of circumventing the mainstream news outlets, Trump used his own celebrity to circumvent the rules of television altogether—gaining free media by capitalizing on the endless appetite for debate, argument and talk that Ailes had done so much to popularize.

In a way, Donald Trump beat Roger Ailes at his own game. Like so many other revolutions, the conservative revolution now eats its own.