peter schweizer 2 bak

10/19 

see main also new categ hit man

poster boy for punk prestige press, thus escalator see punked

see GOP STEAL ELECTION BANNON CLETA BIRTH TOURISM BS

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primary 11/17 on leverage escalator

no merri

see hannity

proto-hunter biden attack?!

==

netflix doc w/ canned jaron

fronts as presidential historian for RR fluff bks? also another guy in CU?

==

see impeach

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mma

The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous

Right-wing media figures including Steve Bannon, John Solomon, and Cleta Mitchell appear to be weaving together a narrative about interference by China in US elections to justify a national emergency to curtail voting rights

Written by John Knefel

Published 07/02/26

Over the last several weeks, the outlines of a plot have begun to emerge that could signal how President Donald Trump, along with MAGA media figures and activists, could attempt to severely curtail voting rights under the pretext of declaring a national emergency posed by China.

The details of the scheme remain publicly vague, and may not yet come to pass, but the short version looks something like this: First, the White House would declassify and release documents purporting to show foreign interference in U.S. elections, especially by the Chinese Communist Party.

Next, Trump would use that supposed “proof” of a stolen election to declare a national emergency, thereby — according to those pushing this idea — giving him extraordinary powers over the upcoming midterms. That move would serve as a way to advance the anti-voting rights measures in the SAVE America Act, like forcing voters to prove their citizenship, without having to actually pass the law — which Congress, so far at least, appears reluctant to do.

The main players here come not only from the fever swamp backwaters of MAGA media, but also from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the White House. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is a central node, attempting to advance the operation on his War Room podcast, aired on right-wing network Real America’s Voice, long a major source of misinformation about the 2020 election.

The main players here come not only from the fever swamp backwaters of MAGA media, but also from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the White House

Bannon’s RAV colleague John Solomon, whose role in the plot appears to be running the declassification effort, was recently appointed to a White House “task force” into supposed election integrity. Solomon was Media Matters’ Misinformer of the Year in 2019 for his role in laundering misinformation about the Bidens and Ukraine through his opinion columns.

Also in the mix is Peter Schweizer, who founded the Government Accountability Institute with Bannon and has moved from spreading misinformation about the Clintons to claiming that China is taking over the United States by exploiting birthright citizenship.

Then there’s Cleta Mitchell, a right-wing lawyer who was on the January 2021 call when Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough ballots to tip the state his way. She referenced Schweizer in a June 20 appearance on War Room, positively paraphrasing an argument he made on his podcast acknowledging that much of the voting activity he wants to suppress is actually legal.

“Peter Schweizer put it pretty well last week in a podcast that he does with Eric Eggers, and the question they posed is: If fraud is made — if election fraud is made legal, is it still fraud?” Mitchell asked. “Because what's happened in California over the last decade is that the far-left Democrat, socialist, Marxists, communists have completely upended every vestige of election integrity.” (Bannon had teed her up by referencing the Los Angeles mayoral primary, claiming without evidence: “They stole it right in front of our face and laughed at us the entire time.")

Video

Citation

From the June 20, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Mitchell is supported by a loose array of election deniers who have called on Trump to issue an executive order to seize “king-like powers” over voting systems, supported by the national emergency decree.

Bill Pulte, the newly installed acting DNI, and his recently appointed chief of staff, former Republican National Committee official Christina Norton, also appear to figure heavily into the plan. On June 20, Bannon said Pulte’s role at DNI is “to get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election.” Ten days later, Bannon described Norton as “one of the top election fraud people in all of the RNC” and said Pulte is “signaling where he's going on this” with her hiring, adding that “my understanding is that there is going to be real revelations about the stealing of the 2020 election."

The same day, NBC News reported that Solomon’s task force “is gathering thousands of pages of documents from U.S. intelligence agencies, with plans to declassify some of them, so President Donald Trump can amplify new accusations about past elections.” In describing his unpaid role at the White House, Solomon said he will be releasing “some documents, some secrets you should know about when it comes to weaponization, election integrity, other things."

Solomon’s recent media footprint offers clues about what he is likely looking to find, declassify, and present — possibly out of context. The subhead of a May 6 article of Solomon’s states: “The evidence continues to stack up that the U.S. intel community sought to downplay China's actions in 2020 as Trump sought reelection.” Then, during a May 19 interview, he said: “We do know the FBI had grave suspicions that China was trying to rig the election, probably with help from people on the ground, to help Joe Biden specifically."

The Supreme Court’s narrow June 30 decision to protect birthright citizenship could turbocharge the Bannon-Solomon-Pulte scheme, in part by providing fodder for anti-Chinese sentiment on the right. On Solomon’s website, Just The News, an article about the birthright citizenship case referenced Schweizer’s book and hyped the supposed China menace.

Birthright citizenship abuse via birth tourism, when foreign nationals travel to the United States on temporary visas specifically to give birth, is an issue that Trump addressed early in his second term.

Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer detailed this practice extensively in his 2026 book, “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon,” in which he described how China has industrialized the practice on a large scale through an organized industry.

Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute told FactCheck.org that “birth tourism is a very small occurrence – of the 3.6 million U.S. births annually, a tiny fraction is due to foreign women who are not regularly domiciled in the U.S. coming here for the purpose of giving birth to secure U.S. citizenship for their child.”

And as the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind noted: “Consulates have a ton of discretion under existing law to deny someone a visa. And suspicion of birth tourism _has_ served as a reason to deny visas in the past. If the problem is insufficient enforcement, good news, you can solve that problem without changing the law or Constitution!”

Bannon stated plainly on June 29 that Solomon’s “task force” and “also Pulte” would be central to creating a “predicate” for the declaration of a national emergency and subsequent executive order achieving the anti-voting rights goals of the SAVE America Act.

On June 30, Bannon interviewed another of his RAV colleagues, Wayne Allyn Root, who further elaborated what a national emergency declaration could look like.

“Stop talking about the SAVE Act and do a national security emergency for elections, which is the SAVE Act, which contains everything that's in the SAVE Act, Steve, and more and more,” Root said.

Just days earlier, on June 24, Trump canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill to pressure Congress to pass the stalled out SAVE America Act, which he referred to as a “National Emergency."

The “predicate” Bannon is hoping to manufacture could also be for other election initiatives the administration is working on — such as trying to force courts to give the administration access to various state voter rolls — an issue the administration is facing significant resistance to.

Whether this harebrained plot congeals into an active conspiracy to subvert the midterms remains to be seen, but given that Trump has already tried to overturn one election it would be a mistake not to take these rumblings seriously. There may indeed be an emergency — it’s just not the one that Bannon and company are talking about.

---

omfg

news allegedly

Oct 13, 2025jduffusNews From GAI. News About GAIAntifa, Arabella Advisors, George Soros, Neville Roy Singham, Peter Schweizer, Riot Inc., Tides Foundation

GAI President Peter Schweizer joined Mark Levin on Oct. 12, 2025 to expose deep links between radical ideologies, terrorism, and political movements inside the United States.

Appearing on the Fox News show “Life, Liberty, and Levin,” Schweizer detailed how New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has financial and ideological ties to Qatar’s royal family, which once harbored 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Schweizer warned of foreign influence and Islamist infiltration in American politics. In the second half, Schweizer and Levin uncover how billionaire Roy Singham funds Marxist and pro-CCP movements like Antifa through U.S.-based nonprofits. Together, they connect Islamist and Marxist networks working to destabilize America — both financially and ideologically.

[

video fox

omfg

Peter Schweizer EXPOSES the Islamist–Marxist Alliance Threatening America

Oct 13, 2025 #thedrilldown #drilldown #gai

:{‪@Govt_Acct_Inst‬ President Peter Schweizer joins Mark Levin (Oct. 12, 2025) to expose deep links between radical ideologies, terrorism, and political movements inside the United States. Schweizer details how New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has financial and ideological ties to Qatar’s royal family, which once harbored 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He warns of foreign influence and Islamist infiltration in American politics. In the second half, Schweizer and Levin uncover how billionaire Roy Singham funds Marxist and pro-CCP movements like Antifa through U.S.-based nonprofits. Together, they connect Islamist and Marxist networks working to destabilize America — both financially and ideologically. Chap:{ters /maxresdefault.jpg)) Levin Introduces Schweizer’s Explosive Findings /maxresdefault.jpg)) Qatar’s Royal Family and the 9/11 Connection /maxresdefault.jpg)) Mamdani’s Foreign Backers Revealed /maxresdefault.jpg)) Hezbollah, Iran, and Islamist Cheerleaders /maxresdefault.jpg)) Terror Ties Hidden by U.S. Media /maxresdefault.jpg)) Why Islamist Power Grabs Threaten All Americans /maxresdefault.jpg)) Inside the Antifa Roundtable at the White House /maxresdefault.jpg)) Dark Money, Marxism, and the Arabella Network /maxresdefault.jpg)) The Billionaire Roy Singham’s Pro-China Machine /maxresdefault.jpg)) Foreign Funding and Domestic Terrorism Links /maxresdefault.jpg)) Federal Task Force Needed to Stop the Flow /maxresdefault.jpg)) Levin Calls for Action Against Enemy Within /maxresdefault.jpg)) Trump Administration’s Pushback on Radical Networks maxresdefault.jpg)) Schweizer’s Final Warning: The Enemy Within}:

== 🟡g-a-i.org🔵 Instagram: [ / govt_acct_inst](https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbWFkNEFpYXFhUzhxdjU5Q1U2eUJkQVBQQ00xUXxBQ3Jtc0trck1URjMwTzAxWmxhWEgtNEdoX2RlajM1QjVmS3MtTVdnNEE4QnowejU4TGxoSWp1RG1VZHlmM1FkX0swaDVqUk5JNmpicDgtd3N1cVZmRGRxdEtQYmdQZ2R5Q21LXzA3ZmpHNVU1M3V2NXgwZDE0NA&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Fgovt_acct_inst%2F&v=_IdY4rxZVDY)Twitter: https://x.com/Govt_Acct_InstYouTube: / @govt_acct_instRumble: https://rumble.com/c/Govt_Acct_Inst}:

:{:{---}:

transcript

Levin Introduces Schweizer’s Explosive Findings

0:00

Welcome back, America. We're here with

0:01

our dear friend Peter Schweitzer. He

0:03

really is a great investigative

0:05

reporter. He's president of the

0:07

Government Accountability Institute, a

0:09

fantastic group, GI,

0:12

uh you write great books, you write

0:14

great pieces over at Breitbart. Just

0:16

fantastic. Peter, I wanted to get into

0:18

this. You have put out new information,

0:21

you and your group, about who he is,

0:24

what he's doing, who is funding him. And

0:26

before people finish voting in New York,

0:29

and people around the country, you need

0:31

to know exactly who this man is, his

Qatar’s Royal Family and the 9/11 Connection

0:34

family, who's funding him, what he's all

0:36

about. It is pure evil. Peter

0:39

Schweitzer, go. Yeah, Mark, what people

0:42

have to understand is that this election

0:44

for mayor in New York is really a dark

0:47

echo of the 911 terrorist attack. Uh,

0:50

and you wonder what do I mean by that?

0:52

Well, look at the family itself, the

0:55

Mondami family itself. They are joined

0:57

at the hip with the royal family of

1:00

Qatar, the Althani family. Um, they have

1:03

sent them millions of dollars. They have

1:05

funded their projects. So, why does this

1:08

family matter? It matters because uh

1:11

back in 1996, Khaled Shik Muhammad who

1:15

was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks

1:18

was granted sanctuary by this very royal

1:22

family. He was given a no-show job at

1:25

the Ministry of Water in Qatar. And it

1:28

was there that he started planning the

1:30

911 attacks. The FBI was looking for

1:33

him, Mark, because he had been involved

1:35

in in the 1993 World Trade Center

1:39

attack, uh, as well as other terrorist

1:41

attacks. So, the FBI went to the royal

1:44

family and said, "We want this man for

1:46

his involvement in terrorism." What did

1:49

the family do? They hid him and helped

1:51

him to escape. They tipped him off. And

1:54

I would encourage a lot of people to go

1:56

back and look at the statements that

1:57

Louisie Free made back in the day saying

2:00

had they gotten uh Khaled Shake Muhammad

2:04

uh that would have pre prevented future

2:06

terrorist attacks like 911. So this is

2:10

the royal family of Qatar. Why do we

2:13

care about them in the context of

Mamdani’s Foreign Backers Revealed

2:15

Mandami? Well, first of all, there's the

2:17

financial connection that we talked

2:19

about. Millions of dollars bankrolling

2:22

the Mandani family. Second of all, this

2:25

same family is now on social media

2:27

around the world. And what are they

2:29

doing, Mark? They're pushing Mandami's

2:31

campaign. They're pushing his policy

2:34

positions. They're pushing his poll

2:35

numbers. They're encouraging people to

2:37

vote for him to financially support him.

2:40

So, they're cheerleading for him. And

2:42

what did Mumani do in September? Just a

2:45

few weeks ago, he was on Qatari TV. Now,

2:49

what American uh politician running to

2:52

be a mayor of a city goes on Qatari TV?

2:56

Mumani goes on Qatari TV and what does

2:58

he do? He talks about the jihad, the

3:02

verbal jihad as it were. He talks about

3:04

the fact that the United States is under

3:07

uh writing genocide in Israel. This is

3:10

the same family, the Mumamis, by the

3:12

way, who say that Darfur, where 400,000

3:16

Christians were slaughtered by

3:17

Islamists, that was not jihad. This is

3:20

the same family that says that terrorism

3:22

is a western invention. It's not an

3:24

Islamist invention. So you have this

3:27

bizarre situation where a political

3:30

candidate in New York speaks the

3:32

language of jihad uh is financially

3:36

connected to the family that helped the

3:39

911 plotters get away so they could

3:41

bring down the Twin Towers. And it would

Hezbollah, Iran, and Islamist Cheerleaders

3:44

be a tragedy if the Qataris would see a

3:48

occupant of city hall um when they were

3:51

the same people that were involved in

3:53

what happened in 9/11 and bringing down

3:55

the twin towers.

3:56

1993 World Trade Center bombing.

4:00

What's that connection?

4:01

Yeah. So um Kaid Shake Muhammad was one

4:05

of the people that plotted and was

4:06

involved in that. It's when he was on

4:08

the run from that attack that he ended

4:11

up in Qatar. And so the Qatar

4:13

relationship uh has been long with

4:16

terrorism. You've talked about of course

4:18

their ties to Hamas, their ties to

4:20

Hezbollah. I should point out, Mark,

4:22

that in addition to the Qatari

4:24

connection, there are also a lot of

4:26

other uh uh international enemies of the

4:29

United States that are cheering on

4:30

Mandani. Uh for example, the

4:33

international Quran news agency uh which

4:36

is based out of Iran has run glowing

4:39

profiles on Mandami talking about the

4:41

fact that he can win in New York, that

4:44

his policy positions and that his values

4:47

are Islamic in their words. They talk

4:50

about how his strategy is to cultivate

4:52

Muslim votes. So the Iranian news

4:55

agencies are cheering them on. In

4:57

addition to that, there's a news

4:59

publication in Lebanon linked to

5:01

Hezbollah, uh, the terrorist

5:03

organization. They ran a story talking

5:06

about Mumani's rise after he won the

5:08

Democratic nomination in New York. And

5:11

they were thrilled. And it's very

5:13

interesting, Mark, to point out in that

5:15

article, they said if Mandami wins in

5:18

New York and becomes mayor of New York,

5:20

he has a future political career on the

5:22

national stage. among the positions they

Terror Ties Hidden by U.S. Media

5:25

mention he might get to assume is head

5:29

of homeland security. Now, why would a

5:32

terrorist organization like Hezbollah

5:34

want Mani to be head of the Department

5:36

of Homeland Security? Uh I I think the

5:39

evidence is pretty clear.

5:41

You're putting this information out.

5:42

You're now putting it out to millions of

5:44

people nationally. What do you want to

5:45

bet? It's ignored by the New York Times

5:47

in New York, by the New York Daily News

5:50

in New York, by the Associated Press, by

5:53

Reuters and all the rest. You do all the

5:55

footwork, you pull all the the

5:56

investigative data together. What do you

5:59

want to bet this is ignored because they

6:01

want this guy elected?

6:02

Yeah, I think it is going to be ignored.

6:04

And look, there are other financial

6:06

connections. Uh there's an imam wah that

6:09

we talk about. This imam, by the way,

6:11

has three children that last year were

6:15

sentenced to life in prison for their

6:17

involvement in a terrorist attack. He is

6:19

supporting Mum Donnie's campaign in New

6:22

York. Uh, and in 2021, in a interview,

6:25

he actually predicted the rise of a

6:28

Muslim candidate in New York and said

6:30

the time was ready and the time was

6:32

ready for Muslims to seize political

6:34

power in New York. So, uh, they are

6:36

ignoring this. Um the the stakes could

6:39

not be higher. Uh it's not just an issue

Why Islamist Power Grabs Threaten All Americans

6:41

for New Yorkers. It should be an issue

6:43

for all Americans that are concerned

6:45

about our security. We have a candidate

6:47

who speaks the language of jihad and we

6:50

have a candidate whose family is tied to

6:53

individuals or or a family in Qatar uh

6:56

that has been linked to international

6:58

terrorist networks. You know, I get very

7:01

frustrated by hearing people

7:03

in the media, conservatives,

7:06

Republicans, what have you, say things

7:07

like, "Okay, he'll win in New York and

7:10

then they'll never win anywhere else in

7:11

the United States because we'll see how

7:13

he destroys New York." They don't

7:15

understand the thinking of these

7:17

Islamists. That's not the plan. The plan

7:20

is to run people for city council, to

7:22

run people for mayors, to pick off one

7:24

area after another after another. They

7:27

changed the voting system in order to

7:28

get him nominated as a Democrat, even

7:30

though he's a democratic socialist, aka

7:33

Marxist Islamist who hates America and

7:35

hates Jews. This is a dire threat to the

7:38

country and we better wake the hell up

7:40

to this. Welcome back, America. We're

7:42

here with Peter Schwitzer, the president

7:44

of the Government Accountability

7:45

Institute, really a national treasure.

7:48

Uh Peter, your folks were at the round

7:51

table on Antifa and the Antifa movement

7:54

uh that the president held at the White

7:56

House. So important what he's doing

7:58

trying to get to the bottom of these

Inside the Antifa Roundtable at the White House

8:00

radical organizations because they are

8:02

nefarious. They're evil. They're funded

8:04

by dark money, by billionaires, by

8:06

foreign governments.

8:08

And here's Antifa. I talk about the

8:10

fusion of Marxism and Islamism. You just

8:14

spoke about Islamism. Now let's move to

8:16

Marxism. And that would be Antifa. What

8:19

do you know about Antifa?

8:21

Yeah. So, I mean, Antifa, there's not an

8:23

organization per se named Antifa. It's a

8:26

network of radical organizations um that

Dark Money, Marxism, and the Arabella Network

8:30

as you pointed out are Marxist. They're

8:33

often times sympathetic to Islamist

8:35

causes. Uh and as we uh demonstrated in

8:38

our research that we presented to the

8:40

president, uh they are heavily funded.

8:43

Um, some of that funding comes from

8:45

sources in the United States. You have

8:47

advisory firms like Arabella that are

8:49

advising groups like the Tides

8:51

Foundation uh that we point out um have

8:54

sent money to organizations that are

8:57

involved in violent protests. Uh there

8:59

were violent protests down in in

9:02

Atlanta, Georgia around something called

9:04

Cop City uh where the police were trying

9:06

to create a training facility for uh law

9:09

enforcements. Uh the radicals didn't

9:12

want that. So they violently protested.

9:14

They threw Molotov cocktails. Uh they

9:16

engaged in other violent acts. Members

The Billionaire Roy Singham’s Pro-China Machine

9:19

of those organizations um were charged

9:22

uh uh under law for domestic terrorism

9:25

or domestic terrorism related charges.

9:28

Well, those organizations, some of those

9:30

organizations were funded by the Tides

9:32

Foundation. So you have these radical

9:36

progressive groups in the United States

9:38

that are funding in some instances

9:40

violent organizations. And to be clear

9:43

here, Mark, I'm not talking about groups

9:45

that just talk about radical things. I'm

9:47

talking about groups that are actually

9:49

involved in violence in our streets. So

9:52

you have the domestic side. You also

9:54

have the foreign side. Uh Mark, um

9:57

there's a uh American billionaire uh

9:59

named Roy Singum uh who sold his

10:02

business, it was called Thought Works

10:04

for about a billion dollars, moved to

10:07

Beijing, China, which is where he lives

10:09

now. He's very close to the CCP. He

10:13

counts them amongst his friends. He goes

10:15

to Chinese Communist Party events. He's

Foreign Funding and Domestic Terrorism Links

10:18

friends with their propagandists. uh and

10:20

he funds groups in the United States um

10:24

through the so-called people's forum in

10:26

New York. Uh and these are groups like

10:28

the Freedom Road Socialist Organization,

10:30

the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

10:33

And these are pro-Chinese,

10:36

anti-American, and they lead violent

10:38

protests. Uh it could be over Black

10:40

Lives Matter, it could be over uh the

10:43

issues in the Middle East, it could be

10:45

over law enforcement issues, it doesn't

10:47

matter. And so you have these

10:50

organizations that are not organic per

10:52

se. They are funded and they are

10:54

organized. Uh and we think it's

10:57

important not only for the

10:58

administration to know, but to

11:00

investigate them for possible criminal

11:02

conduct because you're an attorney

11:05

better than I am. I'm not an attorney.

11:07

Uh you if you are involved in funding

11:10

entities that you know are engaged in

11:12

criminal conduct, you could potentially

11:15

be charged with a crime for doing that.

Federal Task Force Needed to Stop the Flow

11:17

I don't know if there is, probably is,

11:19

but there ought to be a task force

11:21

looking at all this with Treasury,

11:22

state, the FBI, the IRS, among others.

11:27

Uh, pulling together uh all the uh

11:30

possible legal issues, pulling together

11:33

all the investigative issues, trying to

11:36

attack it from every angle. It's a big

11:38

federal government. It's been used

11:40

against us. It's been used against

11:42

conservative groups. It's been used

11:43

against our president. It's been used

11:45

against Republican members of the

11:46

Senate. How about we put it to good use?

11:49

Um, if we have foreign countries along

11:52

with these billionaires and others who

11:53

are pouring money into this country to

11:55

overthrow us, if we have people dark

11:58

money in the shadows in our country

11:59

doing the same thing and we have uh and

12:02

we know this is going on, we better put

12:04

an end to it or we will cease to exist.

Levin Calls for Action Against Enemy Within

12:06

There's no reason for this. There's

12:07

absolutely no reason. Which is why I'm

12:09

so proud that the president obviously is

12:12

on the ball. what he's saying. He pulls

12:13

it together. He had your group there and

12:15

many others. And you had independent

12:17

journalists who were beaten to a pulp by

12:18

Antifa and so forth. And the mainstream

12:21

media, which isn't mainstream, it's

12:23

leftwing. It's Democrat. It's hostile to

12:25

the country, has essentially covered it

12:27

up. You had Antifa attacking the

12:30

Portland, Oregon

12:33

courthouse, the federal courthouse month

12:36

after month in 2020, still using it for

12:40

target practice. And then you have a

12:41

federal judge out there

12:44

a real whack job in what she wrote

12:46

talking about well you know this kind of

12:48

free speech and so forth and so on this

Trump Administration’s Pushback on Radical Networks

12:51

is this is normal in our country and so

12:53

forth. So we got a big problem here. Any

12:56

final words Peter?

12:57

Yeah we were uh happy to participate in

12:59

the round table. President Trump asked

13:01

us to share our findings with the

13:03

attorney general and with the director

13:04

of the FBI. We are glad to do so and we

13:07

hope that they will put it to good use.

Schweizer’s Final Warning: The Enemy Within

13:09

And I'll just say again, I don't know of

13:10

another president who would be doing

13:12

this, who really gets into the weeds and

13:14

says, "I love our country, Mr. and Mrs.

13:17

America. I got to do what I can to

13:19

protect you." Whether it's law

13:20

enforcement, whether it's ICE, whether

13:22

it's securing the border, whether it's

13:23

building up the military, and here, the

13:26

enemy within. Peter Schweitzer, great

13:29

group, great guy. Thank you for

13:31

everything. Appreciate it. Thank you,

13:33

Mark.

---

===

STUDY: How Sean Hannity helped build the GOP’s collapsing Hunter Biden impeachment case | Media Matters for America

Fox News host Sean Hannity and his House Republican allies spent 2023 trying to manufacture an impeachable offense against President Joe Biden out of their fact-free obsession with the president’s son, Hunter. Hannity’s Fox show aired at least 325 segments about Hunter Biden in 2023, 220 of which featured at least one false or misleading claim, according to an extensive Media Matters review of the program for nine categories of misinformation.

But the Hunter crusade now appears to be collapsing, with Republicans telling reporters that the House may not even vote on articles of impeachment and pointing fingers at House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and his habit of conducting his investigation via right-wing media appearances.

The looming debacle is a black mark for Hannity, who has been fixated on Hunter Biden’s potential to damage his father’s political standing since[ vid]

](https://youtu.be/mo3LpGOFIAY), serving as the key clearinghouse for Hunter allegations and a cheerleader for the resulting impeachment push. Bogus Hunter Biden claims and conspiracy theories have been a fixture on Fox and throughout the broader right-wing media — but Hannity made them part of his program’s core mission.

When House Republicans triumphed in the 2022 elections, Hannity touted their newfound ability to use the investigative process to find how “the big guy himself, Joe Biden,” had “ended up using his crack-addicted son as a bag man” — allegations he promised would lead to Biden’s impeachment. Over the following year, the notorious GOP propagandist provided a ready platform for House investigators to offer up their thin-gruel findings, and would then trumpet those claims over and over again to his viewers.

Hannity’s most frequent guest for his program’s Hunter Biden segments was Comer, who made an eye-popping 43 Hannity appearances to discuss the president’s son last year. Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-MO), the other two members of the House GOP troika overseeing the impeachment investigation, were also among the most-frequent Hannity guests for Hunter Biden discussions in 2023.

The group has assembled a massive trove of Hunter Biden minutiae, full of decontextualized snippets that become buzzwords like “the big guy” and “Hunter’s laptop,” the “FBI 1023 Form” and “the IRS whistleblowers.” The terminology, utterly incomprehensible for anyone without a Ph.D. in Sean Hannity Studies, is somehow meant to add up to “potentially the biggest bribery, money laundering scandal in American history,” as Hannity puts it, in which foreign companies and governments paid Hunter Biden for access to Joe Biden, the son kicked back money to the father, and the father took state action to help his son’s partners.

But no substantive evidence linking Joe Biden to Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings has ever emerged, with several committee witnesses telling investigators they had no knowledge of any wrongdoing or involvement by the president (even as far more direct evidence showed then-President Donald Trump’s own businesses receiving millions from hostile foreign governments while he was in office). The purportedly nefarious Hunter allegations, removed from Hannity’s hothouse atmosphere, wither under tough questions from Democratic members of Congress and journalists at other outlets (and even, somehow, *Fox & Friends’* Steve Doocy).

Comer, Jordan, and Smith constantly return to Hannity’s show precisely because he offers nothing resembling scrutiny of their claims. And their colleagues suggest that the result has been that the investigators got high on the likes of Hannity’s supply. Republicans “have grown tired of Comer’s frequent TV hits on conservative networks like Fox News and Newsmax in which they say he promises bombshell information, but then fails to produce impeachable evidence to meet the bar he himself has set too high,” The Messenger reported last month.

There's still plenty of time for House Republicans to unite for a partisan impeachment. But it now seems plausible that Hannity’s Hunter Biden fixation will go down in history for resulting in the impeachment of Donald Trump — but not that of Joe Biden.

sean Hannity's Hunter Biden obsession, by the numbers

• Media Matters identified and reviewed every Hannity segment about Hunter Biden in 2023 — all 325 of them.

The Fox host averaged more than one segment per night and ran as many as 56 Hunter Biden segments in a single month — August, when Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that he had granted special counsel powers to David Weiss, the Trump-appointed prosecutor who had been investigating Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges.

Media Matters analysts (including myself) reviewed the transcripts of each segment to determine whether they promoted one of nine categories of misinformation (described below).

We found that 220 of the Hannity segments featured at least one of the examples of misinformation, or 68% of the total of 325 segments. In some months, the figure exceeded 80%. (Note that the absence of the particular categories of misinformation we reviewed does not imply that the segments in question were wholly accurate.)

The conspiracy theory that Joe Biden took corrupt action in Ukraine as vice president to benefit his son’s employer was mentioned in 115 segments, for example, while the falsehood that Hunter Biden paid his father half his salary was referenced in 52.

Seventy-one of the 220 Hannity segments about Hunter Biden were monologues by the host. Of those segments, 59 (83%) included at least one of our misinformation categories.

We also identified the guests appearing in segments about Hunter Biden. Comer made the most appearances, with 43. His fellow House investigators were also among the most frequent guests: Jordan had the fourth-most appearances, with 32, while Smith had the seventh-most, with 11.

Other regulars featured inHannity’s Hunter Biden segments included Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett (40 appearances), right-wing journalist John Solomon (37), New York Post columnist Miranda Devine (15), and former Trump impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz (12). Fox contributor and former Trump White House aide Kellyanne Conway, former Trump acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) rounded out the top 10 with 10 appearances each.

• ## The Ukraine conspiracy theory
• Hannity’s show aired at least 115 segments in 2023 promoting the falsehood that then-Vice President Joe Biden corruptly pressured the Ukrainian government during a December 2015 meeting to fire its then-prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, for conducting a probe into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat at that time. Of those 115 segments, 28 were Hannity monologues.

The Fox host and his House Republican allies have treated these claims as the heart of a Biden impeachment push — even though it was thoroughly debunked during Trump’s first impeachment. Here’s Jordan trying to lay the theory out after Hannity asked him for the “four facts that never change” following a September impeachment inquiry hearing:

• > JIM JORDAN: Hunter Biden gets put on the board of Burisma. Fact No. 2, he’s not qualified to be on the board, he’s said so himself. Fact No. 3, Burisma executives ask him to weigh in and relieve the pressure. Fact No. 4, Joe Biden does just that, weighs in, relieves the pressure, and that last fact is entirely consistent with what the confidential human source told the FBI and they recorded in the 1023 form. And then the final fact is the Justice Department tried to sweep it under the rug. Sean, this is a tale as old as time, politician takes action that benefits his family financially, and then they try to conceal it. That is as old as the hills, and that is exactly what it looks like played out.

• This account is totally incomprehensible to someone who isn’t steeped in the deep lore of the Hannity archives. It’s also a version of facts which requires the witting or unwitting involvement of a wide array of figures on multiple continents and contradicts the narrative of Shokin’s firing established by the testimony of several U.S. officials appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents, government documents, and contemporaneous and more recent reporting.

In reality, U.S. policy called for firing Shokin, who was viewed as unwilling to prosecute corruption by U.S. diplomats, foreign governments, international bodies, and Ukrainian anti-corruption groups, and his office had not been actively investigating Burisma at the time Vice President Biden sought his removal.

• ## The Biden “shell companies”
• We identified 89 segments in 2023 in which Hannity or his associates suggested that Hunter Biden used an array of “shell companies” for shady and nefarious purposes. They often insinuated that the “shell companies” were a mechanism for laundering money from foreign sources. Of those 89 segments, 20 were Hannity monologues.

Here are some examples:

• > - Hannity, May 12, 2023: “Now, according to an ongoing investigation from the House Oversight Committee, there are over 20 shell companies we learned about this week, mostly formed during Biden's time as VP. … Why were all of these Bidens allegedly now receiving payments from foreign nationals funneled through multiple shell corporations as James Comer is claiming?”

Kevin McCarthy to Hannity, August 7, 2023: “I don't know of any other family that puts together in government 20 shell companies while you're the vice president of America.”

Hannity, December 6, 2023: “According to the House Ways and Means Committee and Jason Smith, Scherwin was the architect of the Biden family's systems of shell corporations. They have identified dozens of them used to distribute foreign funds. These were not real businesses as far as James Comer is concerned.”

• This allegation appears to originate with Comer, who claims his committee identified “20-plus shell companies that the Bidens have created to launder the money they were receiving from foreign nationals down to their personal bank account” and regularly uses the terminology on Hannity’s show and elsewhere.

But The Washington Post found that the Oversight staff memo actually identified only a single “named ‘shell’ company,” which the partners had quickly decided to dissolve; “virtually all” of the other entities “had legitimate business interests” or “clearly identified business investments.”

• ## The Burisma bribe
• Hannity’s show aired at least 85 Hunter Biden segments in 2023 promoting the dubiously sourced and wholly unproven notion that Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch who controlled Burisma, paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden. This is an extension of the Ukraine conspiracy theory with all the problems detailed above, in addition to its own issues, but nonetheless is treated credulously by the Fox host. Of those 85 segments, 28 were Hannity monologues.

In May 2023, Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) put out a joint statement demanding the release of “an FBI-generated FD-1023 form” which showed that Biden “allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national.” As The Washington Post reported:

• > That allegation was based on an FBI interview of an informant who had spoken with Mykola Zlochevsky, founder of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. If validated, it would mark not only a significant legal violation on the part of Biden, but the first time that Comer’s breathless efforts to tie Biden to foreign payments was actually demonstrated.

It was not validated. Comer and Grassley — who were already familiar with an FBI form detailing the contents of the interview — spent a few weeks demanding that the FBI release the interview to the public. The FBI, concerned both about putting the informant at risk and about making public unsubstantiated claims, decided to offer a redacted version of the memo for legislators to see. Comer and Grassley then started complaining about the redactions as they demanded more people be able to see the interview. Eventually, Grassley just went ahead and released a lightly redacted version on social media.

• The document Grassley released in July indicates that the FBI informant said that Zlochevsky told them “it costs (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden” to help Burisma.

Hannity provided breathless coverage of the FD-1023 allegations, culminating the night Grassley published it. “There are now real and growing concerns that your president, the president of our country, is compromised,” Hannity said, arguing that through the form, Joe Biden had been “very credibly accused of public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before.”

Hannity crony Jarrett, in a subsequent segment, accused Joe Biden of “extortion” as well as “conspiracy, violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” “money laundering, tax fraud, not to mention racketeering,” and “bribery and treason,” which he stressed “are impeachable offenses in addition to being felonies. So, you know, this is a blockbuster scandal that could doom Biden's presidency.”

But as the Post recounted, the House GOP reviews of the finances of Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and other Biden family members and associates have not found a trace of the purported $5 million payment to Joe Biden or the $5 million payment to Hunter Biden, raising the prospect that the Zlochevsky claim was “part of what the informant identified as a tendency in the region for business executives to brag — as Zlochevsky may have been doing about his purported connections and savvy.”

• ## Hunter Biden’s purported admission that he gave “half” his “salary” to his dad
• At least 52 of the segments on Hannity alluded to a 2019 text message Hunter Biden sent his daughter to suggest that he had admitted handing over a large portion of the profits from his business dealings to his father. In the message, Hunter Biden said, “don’t worry unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.” Of those 52 segments, 28 were Hannity monologues.

“Did Joe profit from his son's shady international business deals?” Hannity asked in May. “Now, based on texts and emails from Hunter's laptop from hell, there is evidence that appears to show that Hunter complained bitterly about having to hand over half his salary to ‘Pops.’”

But a New York Times investigation revealed the interpretation provided on Hannity’s show is wildly incorrect. “Rather than referring to money Hunter Biden received from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma or from a venture with a Chinese partner, Hunter Biden was alluding to his financial support for his own children and his school days, when his father allowed him to keep half the paycheck from part-time jobs but asked that he turn over the other half to help pay for room and board,” the paper reported.

• ## The $20 million foreign entities supposedly paid “the Bidens”
• At least 45 Hannity segments reference the Comer-promoted claim that foreign sources paid $20 million to “the Bidens and their associates.” This is often shortened as the money going to “the Bidens” or “the Biden family.” Of those 45 segments, nine were Hannity monologues.

“Now, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer says the Bidens overall have taken in tens of millions of dollars from foreign entities in Russia, Ukraine, China, Kazakhstan, Romania and many other countries,” Hannity said in September, demanding that the White House “explain what the Bidens did to earn all of this money, tens of millions of dollars.”

But when The Washington Post reviewed the Oversight Committee’s staff memo, the Post found that two-thirds of the money had gone to Biden business partners who were not members of the family. The paper reported that the committee had identified “about $23 million in total payments from foreign sources. Of that, nearly $7.5 million can be fairly attributed as going to ‘Bidens,’ but virtually all of it went to Hunter Biden. No money has been traced to Joe Biden.”

• ## Joe Biden as “the big guy” who got “10 percent”
• At least 43 Hannity segments about Hunter Biden suggested malfeasance by referencing a 2017 email in which Hunter Biden business associate James Gilliar suggested that a 10% stake in a business deal would be “held” by Hunter “for the big guy,” presumably Joe Biden. Of those 43 segments, 21 were Hannity monologues.

“Bribery, corruption allegations against the big guy, Joe Biden himself swept under the rug,” Hannity complained in June. “The country is in serious trouble. It will only get worse if your big guy wins reelection.”

But as the Times noted, none of this ever came to pass: Gilliar “told The Wall Street Journal in 2020 that his suggestion never went anywhere. The former vice president did not get involved with their business, and the proposed deal never produced any profit for anyone to split. … In an interview with the F.B.I., Rob Walker, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, described suggestions of getting Hunter’s father involved with the business as ‘wishful thinking.’”

• ## Joe Biden purportedly “sitting” in with Hunter’s Chinese business associate
• At least 39 segments referenced a 2017 WhatsApp message Hunter Biden sent a potential Chinese business partner in which he stated, “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to know why the commitment has not been fulfilled.” Of those 39 segments, 14 were Hannity monologues.

Hannity and his cronies regularly cite this message as evidence that Joe Biden was an active participant in Hunter’s foreign business dealings. Hannity said in June the message shows that while Joe Biden has denied involvement with Hunter Biden’s business dealings, “it appears Joe is a critical part of that business.” In a representative August monologue, Hannity said the message shows Joe Biden is “potentially, even likely compromised when it comes to China.”

But Hunter Biden business associate Devon Archer has testified that while they attempted to sell an “illusion of access,” Joe Biden played no substantive role in their operations. The Times reported regarding the WhatsApp message: “Democrats have argued it is more likely an example of Hunter Biden’s bluster than an accurate statement of Joe Biden’s involvement in a shakedown. A lawyer for Hunter Biden says he does not remember sending the message. The president has denied he was present at the time.”

• ## The false claim that Joe Biden received laundered money from his brother
• At least 13 segments promoted the false GOP claim that Joe Biden’s receipt of $240,000 from his brother James constituted money laundering from foreign business sources. Of those 13 segments, three were Hannity monologies.

In fact, as the Times notes, evidence shows “Joe Biden had first loaned money to his brother before being repaid.”

• ## When Jim Biden worked with Hunter’s “father alone.”
• Three segments included the false suggestion that a 2018 text to Hunter Biden in which his uncle, James Biden, wrote, “I can work with you father alone !! We as usual just need several months of his help for this to work,” was a reference to their business dealings. One of the segments was a Hannity monologue.

In fact, as the Times pointed out, “another text in the chain makes clear James Biden was referring to working with Joe Biden to get help for Hunter Biden as he struggled to keep up with his bills, get sober and find a place to live.”

• ## Methodology

• Media Matters searched transcripts in the Nexis database for all original episodes of Fox News Channel's Hannity for either of the terms “Hunter” or “Biden” from January 1, 2023, through December 31, 2023.

We included segments, which we defined as instances when Hunter Biden was the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion of Hunter Biden. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed Hunter Biden with one another.

We then reviewed the identified segments for whether any Fox personality or guest made any of the following false GOP claims at least once:

• > 1. Suggesting that a Hunter Biden message referring to “half [his] salary” meant Hunter regularly gave his father, President Joe Biden, half of any ill-gotten gains.

2. Suggesting that the phrase “10 percent for the big guy” in messages with an associate meant Hunter Biden gave his father a stake in his business dealings.

3. Suggesting that the message from James Biden, President Biden's brother, that he “can work with [Hunter's] father alone” referred to business dealings.

4. Suggesting that loan repayments of $240,000 from James to President Biden were actually money laundering.

5. Suggesting that Hunter's invoking President Biden with a business partner was meant to apply pressure for a payment rather than simply bluster on part of Hunter.

6. Suggesting that President Biden took illicit action to benefit Hunter in business dealings with the Ukrainian company Burisma Holdings Limited.

7. Suggesting that an FBI informant claimed Burisma's founder sent President Biden a $5 million bribe.

8. Suggesting that foreign sources have paid “the Bidens and their associates” $20 million.

9. Suggesting that Hunter used “shell companies” to launder money from foreign sources.

//

1. ### Hunter Biden, David Weiss, and the right’s perpetual bad-faith scandal machine

08/14/23 2:36 PM EDT

2. ### Fox News is dragging the GOP into an inane, inevitable impeachment of Joe Biden

09/06/23 10:31 AM EDT

3. ### After disastrous first impeachment hearing, House GOP chairs retreat to Hannity

09/29/23 12:12 PM EDT

---

---}:

mma mg 1 24

After years of convoluted attempts by Republicans and right-wing media to somehow prove that China had compromised President Joe Biden via his son Hunter Biden’s business interests, Democrats revealed on Wednesday that China directed millions of dollars straight to Donald Trump’s businesses while he was serving as president.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee detailed the transactions in an extensive new report titled “White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump.” Based on records obtained through litigation, the report finds that the government of China and two state-owned entities spent at least $5,572,548 at Trump Tower in New York City and the Trump International Hotels in Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas, Nevada.

The report also finds that “the ability of Trump family businesses to secure trademarks in China improved markedly and rapidly after Trump entered office,” describes these payments and similar ones to Trump-owned businesses from other countries as unconstitutional “foreign emoluments,” and links the payments to how “Mr. Trump inexplicably took positions favorable to specific Chinese interests” as president.

As The New York Times noted in its writeup, “the transactions … offer concrete evidence that the former president engaged in the kind of conduct that House Republicans have labored, so far unsuccessfully, to prove that President Biden did as they work to build an impeachment case against him.”

Indeed, the right has tried to damage Biden’s political standing by suggesting that he had been compromised by foreign payments to his son’s businesses since at least 2018, when conservative activist Peter Schweizer tried to repeat his success in damaging Hillary Clinton’s campaign. While such claims have collapsed time and time again, they’ve nonetheless become the heart of Republicans’ ludicrous push to impeach Joe Biden.

They’ve also led right-wing media figures to offer comments that seem comically detached from reality given the direct payments detailed in the Democratic report. Commentators have cited payments to Hunter Biden’s businesses as evidence of “the real Biden crimes, potentially treasonous corruption charges after years of selling Joe Biden's power all over the world, including places like China,” said that “we have to know why and where is the president compromised” given that “more money is flowing into the Bidens' bank accounts from China than all the other countries,” and argued that if Joe Biden “can be compromised by the likes of China,” that would make “Watergate look like a smash-and-grab.”

The right’s inept efforts to paint Joe Biden as compromised by China

The insinuations in Schweizer’s book spawned major lines of attack from Rudy Giuliani, John Solomon, Sean Hannity, and other Trumpists that revolved around the bogus conspiracy theory that Joe Biden had taken corrupt action in Ukraine when he was vice president due to his son’s position with a Ukrainian company. Trump’s obsession with this falsehood led him to try to leverage U.S. military aid to Ukraine to get that country’s president to announce an investigation into the Bidens, yielding Trump’s first impeachment for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in 2019.

The attacks took on new urgency and refocused on Hunter Biden’s business interests in China in the waning days of the 2020 presidential campaign, when Trump and Fox tried to turn disgruntled former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski into a household name. Bobulinski had alleged that Joe Biden had met with him in 2017 as part of a joint business venture involving Bobulinski, Hunter Biden, and Chinese oil company CEFC China Energy Co.

Right-wing outlets desperately trumpeted the Bobulinski story even as less credulous reporting revealed that the venture reportedly “never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals” and corporate records “show no role for Joe Biden,” who denied any role in the business and was in any case neither in public office nor running for one at the time. And Bobulinski himself acknowledged that when they met, Joe Biden did not ask about the proposed deal.

The right’s Hunter Biden push failed to lift Trump to victory in 2020. But they responded with more of the same, spending the first years of Joe Biden’s administration trying to damage his political standing with similar attacks. And when Republicans won the House in 2022, they pledged to follow through with investigations into what Trumpists like Hannity termed the “Biden Crime Family.”

The House Republican investigations produced a series of reports detailing tangential issues to smear Joe Biden that soared on right-wing media outlets and crashed everywhere else.

In one particularly farcical case, House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer alleged that a Hunter Biden business entity “made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden” after it “received payments from Chinese-state linked companies & other shady entities,” which purportedly proved that “Joe Biden knew & benefitted from his family's business schemes."

Fox host Jesse Watters, over onscreen text that read “China Paid Hunter’s Company, Who Then Paid Joe,” said this showed that “China, after being threatened by Hunter, wired millions of dollars to him, and then Hunter started sending his dad payments.” For Hannity, Comer had revealed that “not only did Joe Biden discuss his son's business ventures, but he also received direct payments from one of Hunter's corporations.”

In reality, Joe Biden took over many of his son’s expenses during a period when Hunter was in the depths of drug addiction and Joe Biden was out of office. That included buying his son a truck to use. Hunter Biden made three payments, each for $1,380, to repay his father for the initial payments on the truck before taking over future payments directly.

This was happening at the same time the Chinese government was trying to curry favor with Trump — the sitting president — by making payments directly to the companies he owned and that his sons oversaw. And those revelations from the House Democratic report are the tip of the iceberg as far as corruption during Trump’s presidency is concerned.

While Fox shills like Watters have been contorting the facts to declare Joe Biden “a money laundering operation for foreign nationals,” they’ve curiously missed the massive influence peddling that happened right before their eyes. I wouldn’t hold my breath for that to change — as of posting, Fox had not mentioned the Democratic report.

---

Sean Hannity: People would be furious if Trump and the Trump organization were making millions from China | Media Matters for America

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): To be very honest, I think we're making a big mistake if we don't get to the bottom of this. I cannot, for the life of me, you know, imagine what the media and how the country and the left in this country would be reacting if Donald Trump and the Trump Organization or the Trump family were making tens of millions of dollars from our top geopolitical foes like China and Russia. I can't imagine the left in this country not going insane, but lo and behold, here we are.

Meanwhile:

Donald J. Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his presidency, according to new documents released by House Democrats on Thursday that show how much he received from overseas transactions while he was in the White House, most of it from China.

...

Using documents produced through a court fight, the report describes how foreign governments and their controlled entities, including a top U.S. adversary, interacted with Trump businesses while he was president. They paid millions to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas; Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York; and Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in New York.

...

“By elevating his personal financial interests and the policy priorities of corrupt foreign powers over the American public interest, former President Trump violated both the clear commands of the Constitution and the careful precedent set and observed by every previous commander in chief,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, wrote in a foreword to the report.

Among the countries patronizing Mr. Trump’s properties, China made the largest total payment — $5.5 million — to his business interests, the report found. Those payments included millions of dollars from China’s Embassy in the United States, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Hainan Airlines Holding Company.

---

https://yyy.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/29/bidens-american-muckrackers-red-handed-book-review

no lnx GUK

American muckrakers: Peter Schweizer, James O’Keefe and a rightwing full court press

The author of Clinton Cash takes aim at the Bidens, the founder of Project Veritas stakes a claim for legitimacy. The results are murky – but offer a map for political battles to come

Lloyd Green

Sat 29 Jan 2022 02.00 EST

The official investigation of Hunter Biden’s dealings in China and elsewhere rests in the hands of David Weiss, a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor in Delaware, and the US justice department under Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland. Politically speaking, we now have Red-Handed by Peter Schweizer, who would very much like to help us digest the business past of the 46th president’s troublesome son.

Clinton Cash: errors dog Bill and Hillary exposé – but is there any 'there' there?

Read more

Schweizer’s works include Clinton Cash, a compendium of opposition researchthat helped shape the presidential election in 2016. These days, he is president of the Government Accountability Institute, a think tank funded by the Mercer family,part of the rightwing ecosystem.

Rebekah Mercer chairs the GAI board, a position previously held by Steve Bannon, whom Donald Trump pardoned of fraud charges but who is now under indictment for contempt of Congress. Mercer is also a founding investor in Parler, a rightwing alternative to Twitter and communications vehicle for Trump’s faithful in the run-up to the 6 January insurrection.

The Mercers are mainstays of Breitbart News and once funded James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas – of which, more later. Via Cambridge Analytica, the Mercers helped hijack Brexit. Not surprisingly, Nigel Farage counts the Mercers as allies.

If Republicans recapture the House in November, as expected, most see investigations of Hunter Biden and his father an inevitable sequel. Schweizer has published a roadmap, from sources including Secret Service travel logs, materials from former business associates and that infamous laptop.

Schweizer argues that the rich and powerful have grown too cozy with China, at the expense of their own country. His central contention is that the Biden family garnered approximately $31m from individuals with direct ties to Chinese intelligence.

Hunter Biden has denied wrongdoing. In 2020, Politifact said Schweizer’s claims about Joe Biden did “not add up to a picture” of his “being corrupt or pursuing policies contrary to the national interest”.

Peter Schweizer speaks at CPAC in 2016.]

Schweizer, however, fires shots across the political spectrum. John Boehner, a Republican speaker of the House, and Henry Kissinger, secretary of state to two Republican presidents, are in his sights. So are the Bushes.Chuck Schumer, Mark Warner, Chris Coons and Joe Manchin, all Democratic senators, are praised.

Schweizer lambasts Silicon Valley for enabling China’s rise and turning a blind eye to human rights abuses. Elon Musk and Bill Gates are criticized, Wall Street (prominently Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Black Rock), the National Basketball Association and academe too. Yale University receives particular attention.

Not surprisingly, Schweizer does not consider links to China enjoyed by Trump and his most ardent followers. He ignores, for example, tax records that show Trump International Hotels Management paid more than $188,000 in China while pursuing licensing deals between 2013 and 2015, and maintained a bank account there. [chao taiwan?]

Likewise, Schweizer looks away from Ted Cruz. The Texas senator’s wife is a banker at Goldman. The Cruzes hold direct investments of between $15,000 and $50,000 in the Goldman Sachs China Equity Fund Class P, a mutual fund with positions in Alibaba and Tencent – companies firmly in Schweizer’s sights.

Then again, the Mercers are Cruz donors. In 2016, Cruz’s presidential campaign was a Cambridge Analytica client.

Schweizer calls for a US lobbying ban on companies linked to the Chinese military and Chinese intelligence, and their exclusion from US stock exchanges. He also demands the press pursue big tech involvement with China.

As models for how to resist the Chinese, he holds out Peter Thiel and his company Palantir. Thiel, a rightwing megadonor, gained notoriety when he wrote in 2009 that women and minorities had mucked up democratic capitalism. A Palantir employee planted the concept of data harvesting with Cambridge Analytica.

Hunter Biden, middle, with his half-sister Ashley at Joe Biden’s inauguration in January.]

The scandal that wasn’t: Republicans deflated as nation shrugs at Hunter Biden revelations

Read more

As for China’s territorial ambitions? In another book, Trump was quoted by the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin. If the Chinese were to invade Taiwan, he told a senator, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do”.

It seems unlikely the US could be capable of decoupling its economy from China while avoiding clashes. China’s opacity with regard to Covid does not instill confidence. Schweizer’s book does at least deliver food for thought.

‘Free speech for me …’

If Red-Handed is an amalgam of more than 1,100 footnotes, facts, arguments and innuendos, American Muckraker by James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, is a 288-page exercise in self-reverence.

“The American Muckraker understands that the path to truth involves suffering and sacrifice,” O’Keefe writes. OK. Elsewhere, he compares his plight to that of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Alabama in the late 1950s, as it worked for “equality”. Really. He also repeatedly refers to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian dissident.

What does O’Keefe do for a living? Mostly, he makes sting videos targeting Democrats and progressives. Targets have included Planned Parenthood and a teachers’ union.

Practically speaking, American Muckraker is O’Keefe’s attempt to bolster his claim of being a journalist while re-defining what the media actually is in an era of cold civil war. On that note, he recounts a conversation with Brian Karem after the Playboy White House reporter had a dust-up with a Trump loyalist, Sebastian Gorka.

“I’m on the same team as you,” said O’Keefe. “I respect you guys.”

Really? Project Veritas counts the Donald J Trump Foundation among past donors andErik Prince, former head of the Blackwater private security company and brother of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was involved in its sting operations against Trump adversaries. O’Keefe makes clear he is not keen on a shedding a light on those who fund his work.

James O’Keefe speaks at CPAC in 2021.]

He does have a genuine grievance. In early November 2021, the FBI raided his apartment, handcuffed him in his underwear and seized two phones. He was not arrested.

Reportedly, the feds swooped in connection with the disappearance and unauthorized publication of a diary kept by Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter. Project Veritas never wrote anything on the topic and handed the document over. The justice department had placed the first amendment and O’Keefe’s civil liberties in its crosshairs, notwithstanding a court-ordered warrant.

But that is only part of the story. In 2020, O’Keefe sued the New York Times for libel in connection with its coverage of videos concerning alleged voter fraud in Minnesota. A New York judge refused to dismiss the suit and O’Keefe has obtained an injunction that bars the paper from publishing documents written by a Project Veritas lawyer.

O’Keefe’s mantra might be: “Free speech for me – but not for thee.”

Despite the efforts of Richard Nixon in the case of the Pentagon Papers, prior restraint remains anathema to a free press – as Donald Trump’s late brother, Robert, learned when he failed to block publication of a niece’s tell-all.

Nonetheless, Trump allies are urging the supreme court to reconsider protections afforded to the media under US libel law. Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have indicated they are willing. The fact that the decision in question was rendered by a unanimous court a half-century ago means little. American Muckraker is a book for such troubled times.

Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win is published in the US by Harper. American Muckraker: Rethinking Journalism for the 21st Century is published by Post Hill Press

https://www.npr.org/**2019/10**/09/768556474/how-a-political-hit-job-backfired-and-led-to-trumps-impeachment-peril

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The nation's attention is riveted on the drama unfolding in Washington, where House investigators are assembling evidence for their impeachment inquiry, and President Trump is refusing to cooperate. Our guest, Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green, says that, ironically, Trump's impeachment peril is the unintended result of an effort to help him.

Last spring, a book came out called "Secret Empires: How The American Political Class Hides Corruption And Enriches Family And Friends." Its author was Peter Schweizer, the head of the Government Accountability Institute, a think tank founded by Schweizer and Steve Bannon. The book includes information about Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden and his activities in Ukraine when his father was the vice president.

The book raises questions about possible ethical violations and corruption related to Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine. The book received a lot of attention on Fox News, where it came to the attention of President Trump and led Trump to send Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to pressure the new government there to investigate the claims in Schweizer's book.

Joshua Green notes in a new article how this echoes the playbook that Schweizer and Bannon successfully used with their 2015 book "Clinton Cash," which raised questions about the propriety of Hillary Clinton's financial dealings and those of the Clinton Foundation. It led to investigations by the mainstream media. Joshua Green writes about politics for Bloomberg Businessweek and is the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain." He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies.

DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Joshua Green, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You write that the allegations of corruption involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine were first aired in a book published last year by something called the Government Accountability Institute. What is the Government Accountability Institute?

JOSHUA GREEN: Well, the Government Accountability Institute is registered as a nonpartisan research organization. It was founded in 2012 by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former chief strategist, and Peter Schweizer, who, I believe, is now the president and still works there. And it bills itself as an investigatory outfit that investigates money and politics, corruption and that sort of thing.

DAVIES: Right. Who funds it?

GREEN: Well, we don't know all the funders, but one of its chief funders is Rebekah Mercer, who is part of the Mercer family, headed by Robert Mercer, the former co-chair of Renaissance Technologies, the big hedge fund. The Mercer family was and still is a major right-wing donor to various different causes, big Trump supporters, and a family that has come into the spotlight since Trump's election - also involved in Cambridge Analytica and some of the outfits that became famous and even notorious after the 2016 election.

DAVIES: The funding certainly comes from partisan sources. You know, the co-founder was Steve Bannon. What's interesting, as you write, is that the work - the research that it produced and the books that it produced weren't intended particularly to reach the conservative media or core Republican voters. What was the purpose?

GREEN: Well, the purpose of GAI originally was to, you know, investigate politicians. But given the conservative band of people like Bannon and Schweizer and their funders, the focus often tended to be Democrats. And in my book, I write about howSchweizer and Bannon resolved to go after Hillary Clinton a couple of years before the 2016 election, knowing that she was likely to emerge as the Democratic nominee.

So through GAI and its investigators, its forensic data scientists, you know, they pored over public records, corporate filings, dark Web scrapings to compile, you know, a damning book about Bill and Hillary Clinton in their work through their nonprofit, the Clinton Foundation, that was published about a month before Hillary launched her presidential campaign. And that book, "Clinton Cash," became an instant New York Times [PARTNERSHIP?!]  bestseller and really tarnished Hillary Clinton's image just as she was entering the presidential fray.

DAVIES: And the interesting thing is that, you know, Bannon was not interested in just generating material for the conservative media. It was important that mainstream media draw on this research and, you know, give it their imprimatur tour too.

GREEN: That's exactly right. You know, Bannon's critique of how Republicans deal with the media goes back to the 1990s and Bill Clinton's impeachment, when he thought that Republicans really just wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber and they chased wild rumors and conspiracy theories and really put off ordinary voters. The media didn't listen to them. Voters didn't listen to them. OPPO RESEARCH

So with "Clinton Cash," he resolved to compile factual information that he wanted the mainstream media to pick up and amplify. And so he explicitly was not looking to reach a conservative audience, which is already going to be predisposed to dislike the Clintons, and was aiming to affect the votes in the views of independents and Democrats and the type of people that Hillary Clinton was counting on.It was important to Bannon that GAI's work be picked up and taken seriously by mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News.

DAVIES: And did those mainstream media organizations publish stories based on the research?

GREEN: Yeah, they did. I mean, famously, there was a New York Times story based on Schweizer's reporting. And it revealed this in the story, looking at a Clinton Foundation deal in a Russian-backed company called Uranium One that really took off and, I think, poisoned the public views of Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. And, as Bannon intended, a whiff of corruption attached itself to Hillary Clinton. Of course, that expanded as the media focused on her missing emails and Republicans pushed these ideas. But the book really succeeded in what Bannon had set out to do. And that was to raise doubts about the ethics and morals and fitness for the presidency of Hillary Clinton.

DAVIES: Right. And we should just note that there is nothing at all unusual about credible reporters getting tips and leads and information from partisan sources. They have to, of course, independently verify the information and assess its credibility. Were the books that the Government Accountability Institute writes generally accurate?

GREEN: Well, they were based on facts. And what these investigators did was go out and turn out examples of foreign donors that hadn't been disclosed and examples of behavior by former President Bill Clinton that seemed to be conducted on behalf of donors to the Clinton Foundation.You know, Schweizer's style is not to fabricate or allege illegality. Instead, he uses his reporting to lay out a suggestive timeline that leads readers to a conclusion that, hey, something is dirty here. This reeks of influence peddling. Something is not right. And it raises doubts about the subjects.

DAVIES: So the new book from Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute is called "Secret Empires: How The American Political Class Hides Corruption And Enriches Family And Friends." And it identified Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden as a target for some of the material. What did it find about Joe and Hunter Biden?

GREEN: Well, what it found was that Hunter Biden, the vice president's son, had become a highly paid director at a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma, a position that he didn't have any obvious qualifications for. But he did have a very famous last name, and the owner of the company was interested, I think, in building credibility. Schweizer also took a look at a private equity fund that Hunter Biden became involved in that drew a lot of money from Chinese investors at the same time that Hunter was flying to China on Air Force Two with his father, the vice president.

So in Schweizer's reporting, you know, this is made to look very fishy and possibly illegal and raise doubts about the ethics of Joe Biden and whether or not, you know, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination really belongs in that position or, you know, is in some way corrupt because of his son's business dealings.

DAVIES: No direct evidence that Joe Biden did anything to assist his son in either of those ventures, right? But there's an association.

GREEN: No. No, there isn't. And Bloomberg News, my employer, has done a lot of reporting and has turned up no wrongdoing.Other outlets have taken a look. I mean, what is going on and what Schweizer is good at finding are situations like this where, you know, I think any objective reader would come to the conclusion that, you know, but for Hunter's last name, he would not be in this position. You and I would not be offered a $50,000 a month board seat at a Ukrainian gas company because our father isn't vice president.

So it's the sort of - it's what, you know, Schweizer calls corruption by proxy. There's nothing explicitly illegal, but it's sort of morally corrupt and an indictment of our system in a way that populist Republicans and Democrats like to criticize.

DAVIES: The Clinton book got a ton of mainstream media attention and had an impact on the Clintons themselves. This book, did it get a lot of mainstream attention? Did it hurt harm the Bidens?

GREEN: You know, it really didn't. It came out in 2018, and it kind of came and went. It - you know, it didn't attach itself to Biden. It didn't become - it didn't drive the political news cycle in the way that "Clinton Cash" drove the 2015-2016 presidential news cycle. It got a decent amount of attention in conservative media, but it never really broke out into the mainstream.

You know, and I speculated in my Businessweek piece, a couple of reasons for this - one, Joe Biden wasn't yet a candidate, and so there wasn't that kind of urgency to look into his past. There might have been had the book come out later on. It also didn't focus only on the Biden's; it focused on John Kerry, Barack Obama, the Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.So I think that influenced how it was received. And of course, unlike "Clinton Cash," it wasn't focused on an actual Democratic presidential candidate; it was mainly focused on his son. And so there - it was sort of one degree removed from the primary actors.

I think all these things together help explain why the book didn't really break out until, that is, Donald Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, became infatuated with it, started trying to investigate these things themselves and now has kicked off what has become an entire impeachment proceeding and put the book and the Bidens and Schweizer himself very much in the center of the 2020 presidential news cycle.

DAVIES: So when this book was launched with these stories, what were the ambitions of Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute?

GREEN: Well, I think the ambition was a reprise of what they'd seen with "Clinton Cash," that the mainstream media would look into this stuff and amplify it in the way that they had with the Clinton charges. You know, Steve Bannon, who kind of pioneered this model, has a phrase he likes to use - anchor left, pivot right. And what that means is you want to anchor this reporting on the left and the mainstream media - what Bannon considers the left - get them writing about it and then use the right-wing media to amplify what it is the mainstream media is saying and to kind of dominate the entire mediasphere.

So I think Schweizer and GAI were hoping that "Secret Empires," the Biden reporting, would be anchored in the mainstream media, and the whole process would repeat itself, but that never really happened with the second book.

DAVIES: So what did happen? Why do we know about it now?

GREEN: Well, we know about it now - it got a decent amount of attention in the right-wing media, onFox News, in the New York Post.And of course, some of - you know, one of the most loyal consumers of right-wing media is the president, Donald Trump, who according to reporting watches hours and hours of Fox News every day. So he was exposed to this reporting, exposed to the charges and the insinuations that Schweizer made. He's tweeted about the book. He's tweeted about Schweizer.

And, you know, based on everything we've heard from the whistleblower report, from the White House call transcript that was released at the end of September, Trump and Giuliani took it upon themselves to pick up the phone and try and advance Schweizer's reporting into the Bidens. I mean, essentially, calling the president of Ukraine and saying, hey,I know about this Biden stuff. I want you to look into this. I want you to investigate my political opponent. And, you know, if you don't, we're going to withhold this military aid - setting off all the alarm bells that have now led to the impeachment inquiry.

DAVIES: So it really was the president and Giuliani that took this and ran with it.

GREEN: It really was. I mean, the remarkable thing - a lot of people watch Fox News, watch right-wing media, get upset about the Clintons and the Bidens, but only one of them had the power to pick up the telephone, call the president of the Ukraine and put pressure on him to investigate the Bidens in hopes that they could turn up more damning information about Joe and Hunter Biden, knowing that Joe Biden was very likely to be his Democratic opponent in 2020.

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green about the origins of the story about Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine, which drew interest from President Trump and has now led to an impeachment inquiry. Green is the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain."

So President Trump has said that Joe Biden, when he was vice president - I guess in 2016 - sought to get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired, who was, at that time, investigating the company associated with Hunter Biden, his son - in effect, kind of scotching an investigation into his son by getting the prosecutor fired. What's the truth of this?

GREEN: Well, it is true what Trump says, but it is wildly misleading. Vice President Biden played a central role in overseeing U.S. policy in the Ukraine. But Biden, the Obama administration, Republicans in the Senate, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union were all putting pressure on the Ukrainian government to root out corruption and, particularly, to fire the chief prosecutor at the time, Viktor Shokin, who was not - who was essentially beholden to the oligarchs, was not doing the kind of corruption investigations they wanted.

So Biden threatened to withhold up to a billion dollars in aid from Ukraine if Shokin wasn't fired because he was so deeply corrupt. So Biden and the Obama administration were putting pressure on the Ukraine government to do more investigating of corruption not less, as Trump and his allies are insinuating.

And it's also - I mean, just to be clear, they weren't in - Ukrainian prosecutors were never investigating Hunter Biden. They were investigating an oligarch who owned - who is the co-founder of Burisma, the gas company, on whose board Hunter Biden served.

DAVIES: Right. And is it clear whether, at the time that he was fired,this prosecutor, Victor Shokin, was actually investigating the company?

GREEN: You know, it isn't clear.There have been conflicting reports on this. There does seem to have been an investigation into Burisma. But, you know, they paid a fine. That went away. At no point was Hunter Biden ever implicated in any kind of corruption. And part of what, I think, Trump and Giuliani were trying to do was to reopen this investigation and steer it toward Hunter Biden in hopes that they could find or maybe create damaging material around the Bidens.

DAVIES: There is a new chief prosecutor in Ukraine and was quoted as saying that he had opened an audit of a bunch of old investigations, including one into Burisma Holdings, the company that Hunter Biden was associated with. What does this portend?

GREEN: Well, it's not clear. I mean, one of the things, I think, a lot of people don't understand about the whole Ukraine situation is that Hunter Biden was never investigated by Ukrainian prosecutors. What happened was that they were investigating an oligarch named Mykola Zlochevsky, who co-founded Burisma.And so reopening investigations would be investigations into Burisma Holdings. But they - from what we know, that wouldn't affect or have anything specifically to do with Hunter Biden or his situation there.

One of the things that Trump and Giuliani are pushing for in these text messages and these - in these meetings and phone calls is for Ukrainian prosecutors to go further and specifically investigate the Bidens in hope that they can turn up dirt that can be used in the 2020 presidential campaign.

And as far as we know, there's no basis for investigating anything. There is no evidence that I'm aware of or that anybody has reported that would suggest that there was wrongdoing there.And Schweizer himself, in fact, in the New York Times today, has an op-ed saying that, you know, what transpired actually wasn't illegal under U.S. law. It was unseemly. It might have been unethical - the idea of putting a politician's son on a board as a way of maybe trying to influence the political process - but there was nothing illegal here. And that's very much Schweizer's style is not to allege illegality but to insinuate that there is something corrupt going on there.

And, I think, part of the way that this entire story went sideways and went crashing into this impeachment inquiry is that Trump is very much susceptible to the insinuation that there is something, you know, perfidious going on here and took it upon himself to, you know, push and amplify and even threaten people in hopes of advancing the story.

DAVIES: You mentioned that Peter Schweizer, the author of this book that was funded by the Government Accountability Institute, has an op-ed in The Times. He's arguing that there's a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for an American company operating in a foreign country to engage in, you know, bribery or nepotism to secure favor from governments in which they operate but that there's a big hole in the law in that there's nothing to prevent a foreign government from hiring the family of U.S. officials or creating relationships in order to, you know, create an appearance which helps their business. Does he have a point?

GREEN: I think he's got a perfectly good point. And that's exactly what seems to be going on with Hunter Biden. He had no traditional, professional qualification for the job that he held with Burisma, you know, and that in itself doesn't seem right. I think that is what Schweizer is pointing to.

Now, Trump and Republicans have taken it a lot further, twisting a lot of the facts about what was investigated, what the Obama administration and Biden were pressuring the Ukrainian government to do in 2016. But the basic fact that Hunter Biden was on this board and was probably there for political reasons, because there weren't really any other good reasons for him to be on the board - what Scheizer has pointed out here and what he says in his New York Times op-ed is that what Hunter Biden did was perfectly legal, but that, in itself, is a problem.

GROSS: Joshua Green is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek. After a break, he'll talk with Dave Davies about how the controversy is affecting the Biden campaign and how Trump and his allies are fighting back with counter narratives that paint the president as the victim of Democratic attacks.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green. In a recent column, Green argues that President Trump's impeachment worries are actually the unintended result of an effort to help him. He says Trump picked up on research about Joe Biden developed by a conservative think tank and included in a book last year.

The material was intended to harm Biden's presidential campaign. But when Trump saw the story on conservative media and began urging Ukraine to investigate Biden, he created far bigger problems for himself. Trump is now the subject of an impeachment inquiry into whether he abused the authority of his office. When we left off, Green was talking about an op-ed published in The New York Times by Peter Schweizer, the author of the book with the allegations against Biden.

DAVIES: Are you surprised that The New York Times would publish an op-ed by Peter Schweizer, you know, who got funding from, you know, the Mercers and have a very strong political point of view?

GREEN: Yeah. You know, a little bit, given the controversy it kicked up in 2016 when Schweizer's reporting appeared on the front page - in other words, in the news pages. This piece today is in the opinion section, which I think is a little bit more appropriate for the author and the subject and the claims that he's making.

DAVIES: Right. And just going back to 2016, my understanding is that, you know, the author of the Times' reporting on the Clinton Foundations and the Uranium One story is reporting that they stand by, that they independently investigated all of this and found it credible and newsworthy. Do you disagree?

GREEN: No. I don't disagree with that at all. I mean, part of what made the GAI project so effective is that they didn't do what some conservative authors do, which is to, you know, fabricate or publish rumors. I mean, they're - all of this is based in fact. They certainly put their own spin on those facts. They insinuated that there was maybe more going on than was actually going on. But they really did turn up evidence of unreported donations, of relationships that just didn't seem right that, you know, any legitimate investigative reporter, were he or she to come across this information, would want to look into further. And that's exactly what happened.

So the fact that there is a grain of truth in a lot of what is written is one of the things that makes it so effective and that Bannon and Schweizer understood from the outset would get the mainstream media to pay attention and amplify these charges. I think what happened in 2016 that upsets liberals so much is that, you know, as this stuff was being published in the mainstream media, it was also being amplified and distorted in the right-wing media. And that was having a real effect on Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.

Her reputation was unquestionably tarnished. She was dogged by these charges and allegations. You add in the amplifying voice of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate calling her crooked Hillary and corrupt and I don't think there's any question - but that - it affected voters' views of her in a way that ultimately proved disastrous for Clinton's own candidacy and for Democrats.

DAVIES: One of the things that I think adds to the political potency is that the facts of a lot of these stories are so complicated, that it's really hard for an average reader to sort out what it all means. Was there subsequent reporting on the Uranium One story which cast the Clintons' actions in a different light?

GREEN: Nothing knocked it down. You know, the subsequent reporting - I mean, I think what a lot of Democrats objected to was the fact that this, frankly, partisan outfit and author and right-wing money had produced this information that had made its way onto the front page of The New York Times. And I spoke to the liberal activist David Brock at the time about Schweizer and Bannon. And he shook his head. And he Said, you know, looking at it from their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus - meaning, you know, the intention all along from these guys was to poison the public image of Hillary Clinton. And by getting these charges onto the front pages of The New York Times, they essentially accomplished that mission. I think everything that happened subsequently with Trump's attacks and Clinton's loss in the 2016 election back that up. And this time around, with Joe and Hunter Biden, they were looking to do the same thing.

DAVIES: In the op-ed, the Times doesn't mention Peter Schweizer's association with the Government Accountability Institute or its funders, you know, the Mercers.What do you think of that?

GREEN: You know, if I were running the op-ed page, I think that's something I would've disclosed based on, you know, his background, the political lineage and what we saw in the 2016 presidential cycle.

DAVIES: So is all of this affecting the Biden campaign?

GREEN: You know, it's not clear that it is. I mean, Biden had been on a bit of a downward trajectory before Trump and the Ukraine charges really came into the news cycle. But, you know, he is - he's starting to slip now. I mean, in the latest averages of polls, Elizabeth Warren has nudged ahead of him. So, you know, it's not clear that this is a deadly development for Joe Biden's candidacy, but it certainly isn't helping.

DAVIES: Since the whistleblower complaint emerged, there's been a lot of information and text and the summary of the phone call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine, which has led to this impeachment inquiry, which is clearly picking up steam. I mean, we're going to see, you know, testimony from other players in this including the former ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch. The Trump administration says it is not going to cooperate with this because, you know, it's a witch hunt. Where do you see this going?

GREEN: Well, you know, the irony here is that Trump, by involving himself, you know, essentially made this entire project blow up in his face and committed actions that, at the very least, have launched an impeachment inquiry and I think are very likely to lead to his impeachment in the House whether or not the Senate ultimately chooses to remove him.

But what the whistleblower report showed, what the subsequent text messages that have now been revealed between the U.S. ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, and Bill Taylor, a top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, that show that the U.S. apparently was withholding military aid to help a political campaign, as Taylor put it in his text. That is the quid pro quo that Democrats are alleging. And I think if there is a trial in the House, that's what it's likely to show. And the evidence we've seen so far certainly supports that.

So I think, from an impeachment standpoint, Trump is in real trouble. Whether or not he's ultimately removed from office, we'll see. I'm skeptical. But certainly this isn't the outcome that Schweizer and GAI and I think Trump and Giuliani expected to happen when they started making noise about this over the summer.

DAVIES: Right. Well, the president's defenders are aggressively promoting other narratives. I mean, Giuliani, a couple of weeks ago, was on the ABC weekend show waiving an affidavit from Viktor Shokin, you know, the prosecutor that was fired in 2016, in which alleges that, in fact, he was investigating the company Hunter Biden's - was associated with. There are certainly reasons to doubt his credibility in the eyes of a lot of people. And then, you know, last week, Senator Ron Johnson had a heated exchange with Chuck Todd on "Meet The Press" in which he was arguing that there's all this credible evidence that people in the Ukraine were trying to hurt Trump and help Hillary Clinton in 2016. [RUSSIAN DISINFO] It's a very aggressive strategy to - you know, bringing up other stuff. What do you think the effect will be?

GREEN: Well, I think the intention on the part of Republicans is to muddy the waters and to turn the charges of corruption against Trump that we've seen laid out in the whistleblower report and the text messages - turn them back against the Democrats.

What is troubling to a lot of people is that a lot of these charges are based on discredited conspiracy theories. What Ron Johnson was talking about was a conspiracy theory that Trump and Giuliani have propagated that it wasn't Russia that hacked the Democratic National Committee servers in the 2016 election but Ukraine.That's something that's been knocked down by every intelligence official, U.S. and otherwise, who's looked into this. And yet, this is what's being propagated by Trump.

And I think a lot of Republican politicians, fearful of Trump's wrath and eager to toe the partisan line, have found themselves forced or obligated to repeat these wild charges in a way that bears no relationship to reality but is nonetheless, I think, muddying the waters and shaping public opinion in a way that is intended to mitigate the damage of the charges against Trump.

DAVIES: Is Steve Bannon playing a role in stoking any of these allegations?

GREEN: You know, he really isn't anymore. I mean, Bannon had a very public falling-out with Donald Trump in 2017, where Trump sort of publicly humiliated him and excommunicated him from the Republican Party. He lost his position as the head of Breitbart News, was essentially sent out into the wilderness.

I mean, Bannon is still around on the scene. He is focused more on China these days and trying to, I think, strengthen Trump's resolve to conduct the trade war. Trump did tweet favorably about him a couple of months ago. But there isn't a close relationship there in the way that there was during the presidential campaign.

DAVIES: Yeah. I asked because you wrote a book about Steve Bannon and talked to him a lot. He was also going around Europe trying to kind of build a, you know, nationalist, populist movement. How did that go?

GREEN: Well, it basically failed. I mean, the nationalist movements in Europe weren't really interested in an American political strategist coming in and telling them what to do. They didn't perform nearly as well in the May European parliamentary elections as Bannon and some of the nationalist contingent were hoping for.

And so he's focused mainly these days on kind of beating the war drums against China, going out and publicly defending Trump's aggression against China when it comes to tariffs and the trade war and that sort of thing, and seeking to remain relevant in that way. But so far, there has been no reproach with Trump and the White House, or the Mercer family, for that matter. And so he's off on his own.

DAVIES: You know, looking at the strategy of the Government Accountability Institute with this book, you know, the idea was to kind of repeat the playbook that worked with the Clinton candidacy in 2016, where you develop information, it becomes adopted by the mainstream media and becomes a scandal. And in this case, it seems like another - kind of a different weird thing happened, which is that it turned into a scandal for the president himself when he pursued a theory and then engaged in conduct which has resulted in this impeachment inquiry.

At the same time, Peter Schweizer, the author of the book funded by the Government Accountability Institute, is being quoted. I mean, the story is out there. I wonder how they view this - how it's all worked out.

GREEN:Well, the irony here is that the target was supposed to be the Bidens, not the president. And by the president becoming involved, you know, the original plan has kind of blown up. What may wind up happening - as you say, you know, Biden and these charges are very much in the news. That was part of the intention, even if the negative attention toward Trump wasn't part of the plan. What we could see end up happening is a kind of a murder-suicide where Trump really does take out his strongest Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, only, he winds up, in the process, getting himself impeached.

DAVIES: Well, Joshua Green, thanks so much for speaking with us again.

GREEN: Thank you. It's always a pleasure.

GROSS: Joshua Green is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain."

2020 trump camp is just do-over of 2016, this is spozed to be hillary's emails redux; clearly bizzaroworld inversion of trump nepotism and corruption, see all pols corrupt

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/youre-not-supposed-to-understand-the-hunter-biden-smear-chaos-is-the-point

kos

Acclaimed journalist and historianAnne Applebaumunderstands the universe of propaganda as well as anyone alive today. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she has devoted the past three decades to studying Russia and Eastern and Central Europe, with an emphasis on disinformation and propaganda so acute that she washerself targeted—by a Russian-originated smear campaign in retaliation for her writings about Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea. She now contributes her cache of knowledge toThe Atlantic, among other publications.

For someone so well-versed, analyzing the blatant behavior of propagandist right-wing media outlets such as Fox News is something akin to a chess master analyzing the strategy of Tic-Tac-Toe—simple, and even relaxing. So after watching the antics of Donald Trump during his final debate with Joe Biden, she wrote a piece for *The Atlantic*on Friday that explains what millions of Americans are still shaking their heads in bewilderment about today: the source—and more importantly, the purpose—of Trump's bizarre accusations about Hunter Biden and his allegedly nefarious dealings with certain obscure individuals.

Of course the direct conduits of this nonsense are what we in the sane world regard as the fever swamps of paranoiac right-wing conspiracy thinking, most visibly manifested on the Fox News channel. As Applebaum notes, the actual storyline, spun out of whole cloth, is purposefully designed to be opaque, leading someone trying to divine the actual facts to become frustrated and give up trying to make sense of them. In fact, as her article's title suggests, "You're not supposed to understand the rumors about Biden."

Because the story is not intended to make sense, but to create a fog of doubt.

Just like the fictional legend these same people wove around "Hillary's emails," the Hunter Biden fiction also concerns emails—these ones allegedly kept by a former business partner of Hunter Biden, and miraculously disclosed to a peripheral former and supposed "investigative journalist" named Matthew Tyrmand. Tyrmand, notably, was formerly (and peripherally) associated with the right-wing fraudster and provocateur James O'Keefe.

That piece of critical information would lead most knowledgeable people to immediately shelve the unfounded Hunter Biden scheme in that mental compartment where bad ideas go to eventually die. But the Fox News audience is by definition anything but "knowledgeable people." On that network, the Hunter Biden nonsense is not something analogous to the disappointingly empty caverns of "Al Capone's vault," but rather an ever-opening flower, chock full of conspiracy-thinking goodness.

In releasing the 26,000 emails, Tyrmand and his collaborator, the Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer, are not bringing forth any evidence of actual lawbreaking, or an actual security threat, by either Hunter or Joe Biden. They are instead creating a miasma, an atmosphere, a foggy world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might have happened. They are alsoproviding the raw material from which more elaborate stories can be constructed. The otherwise incomprehensible reference in last night's debate to "the mayor of Moscow's wife," from whom Joe Biden somehow got rich, was an excellent example of how this works.A name surfaces in a large collection of data; it is detached from its context; it is then used to make an insinuation or accusation that cannot be proved; it is then forgotten, unless it gains some traction, in which case it is repeated again.

Applebaum provides some basic background for the uninformed and uninitiated (i.e., normal Americans).

Those who live outside the Fox News bubble and intend to remain there do not, of course, need to learn any of this stuff. Judging by what has been published, the very worst thing that Tyrmand's email cache could reveal (if it is authentic) is that some unattractive people sought to use Hunter Biden's surname and connections to get business deals or score a visit to the White House for their clients. But we already know about Hunter Biden's involvement with unattractive people, and his struggles with addiction; we also know that, under normal circumstances, dozens of people visit the White House every day. On the grand scale of misdeeds committed by politicians and their relatives, this kind of thing barely registers.

Applebaum then helpfully includes a laundry list of Trump's corruption that puts to shame whatever the right hopes to spin out of this email concoction. As readers of Daily Kos, you're more than familiar with these.

But there is a purpose lurking here in the mind of Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch. The first and most obvious? To assist Trump in deflecting attention—for these final 10 days—from his horrific malfeasance in the face of a pandemic whose vicious resurgence is soon likely to be the sole focus of the nightly newscasts. The second reason is to provide a ready well of sludge to draw upon in the seemingly likely event (as Murdoch himself has acknowledged) that the polls turn out to be correct, and Trump loses the election.

They will continue to serve a function after the election as well. If Biden wins, Foxworld will need some way to keep its audience focused on something other than the Cabinet he appoints, the new legislation he passes, and all the other events, decisions, and changes that used to constitute "news." Instead of all that real-life stuff—laws and regulations, statistics and investigations, debates about the economy and health care—the leading figures of the right-wing conspiracy bubble will,over the next months and years, dip into the email caches to keep their followers focused on an alternate reality in which Joe Biden is a secret oligarch, his son is an important figure in the Chinese mafia, and LOL nothing matters. Just as you need to know the backstories of the stars in the DC Comics universe in order to understand the nuances of a Batman movie, six months from now you might also need to know all about Cooney and Archer and the wife of the mayor of Moscow if you want to understand Ingraham's monologues.

Applebaum, a rapt student of propaganda, knows that outside of hosting the inevitable guest appearances (between court dates) that Donald Trump will insist on during the next four years—assuming he loses—the Fox News yappers need something to talk and talk about, and it certainly isn't going to be Republican policies. So this fictional narrative serves the interests both of Fox News—whose main concern is keeping its soon-to-be demoralized audience content and soporific—and also helps to deflect the inevitable horror stories that will be uncovered by a Democratic-controlled Congress investigating the Trump crime family's vast trail of detritus throughout our government.

By talking about Hunter Biden, the Trump family, especially the Trump children, also hopes to deflect attention from their own greatest weakness, namely the amoral, kleptocratic nepotism that they embody like no family ever before in American history...

[...]

None of them can win using ideas anymore, because they don't have any. All they can do is seek attention: gesticulate, wave their arms in the air, shout at the crowd, invent things, and try to attract the fame and attention they feel they deserve, even though they can no longer explain why they deserve it.

Put simply, assuming Joe Biden wins this election, we should all gear up for four long years of Fox News-inspired fantasy programming.

Of course, there's always the mute button.

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7 days ago Schweizer, appearing on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel, said that former Hunter Biden business partner Bevan Cooney provided 26,000 emails to him—the first of which were published late last week in a Breitbart News exclusive investigation by Schweizer and author Seamus Bruner. Cooney is currently serving a sentence in federal prison due to his conviction over ...

Exclusive — 'This is China, Inc.': :{Emails:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Reveal :{Hunter:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: ...

[](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=breitbart%20hunter%20buiden%20email%20lapton%20peter%20schweitzer+site:www.breitbart.com&atb=v31-5__ "Search domain www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/10/16/exclusive-this-is-china-inc-emails-reveal-hunter-bidens-associates-helped-communist-aligned-chinese-elites-secure-white-house-meetings/"):{https://www.breitbart.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/politics/2020/10/16/exclusive-this-is-china-inc-emails-reveal-hunter-bidens-associates-helped-communist-aligned-chinese-elites-secure-white-house-meetings/:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:

Oct 16, 2020In a 2011 email, Hunter Biden's business associates also discussed developing relations with what one called "China Inc." as part of a "new push on soft diplomacy for the Chinese." These emails are completely unconnected to the Hunter Biden emails being released by the New York Post.

Schweizer: More :{Emails:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:, Proof of ... - :{breitbart:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:.com

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Oct 17, 2020Friday on Fox News Channel's "Hannity," Breitbart News senior contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer teased more evidence of a relationship between Hunter Biden and Devon Archer with Russian oligarch Elena Baturina. | Clips

:{Breitbart:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:.com's :{Peter:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Schweizer Says :{Hunter's:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Former ...

[](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=breitbart%20hunter%20buiden%20email%20lapton%20peter%20schweitzer+site:www.spartareport.com&atb=v31-5__ "Search domain www.spartareport.com/2020/10/breitbart-coms-peter-schweizer-says-hunters-former-partner-has-given-him-access-to-26000-emails-providing-details-about-bidens-business-deals/"):{https://www.spartareport.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/2020/10/breitbart-coms-peter-schweizer-says-hunters-former-partner-has-given-him-access-to-26000-emails-providing-details-about-bidens-business-deals/:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:

Schweizer, appearing on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel, said that former Hunter Biden business partner Bevan Cooney provided 26,000 emails to him—the first of which were published late last week in a Breitbart News exclusive investigation by Schweizer and author Seamus Bruner.

NEW BOMBSHELL: :{Email:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Trove Shows :{Hunter:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Biden Arranged WH ...

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SMOKING GUN: Secret Email Reveals Hunter Biden Introduced Joe Biden to Burisma Executive. Cooney claims he was the "fall guy" for the fraud scheme, while Hunter Biden got a pass.

New Bombshell: :{Emails:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Show :{Hunter:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Biden Helped Arrange ...

[](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=breitbart%20hunter%20buiden%20email%20lapton%20peter%20schweitzer+site:townhall.com&atb=v31-5__ "Search domain townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/10/16/hunter-biden-business-partner-turns-over-emails-showing-hunter-arranged-white-house-meetings-n2578257"):{https://townhall.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/10/16/hunter-biden-business-partner-turns-over-emails-showing-hunter-arranged-white-house-meetings-n2578257:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:

Oct 16, 2020The emails were turned over to Peter Schweizer by Bevan Cooney, a former business associate of Hunter Biden who is currently behind bars for a bond fraud investment scheme.

NEW BOMBSHELL: :{Email:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Trove Shows :{Hunter:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Biden Arranged WH ...

[](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=breitbart%20hunter%20buiden%20email%20lapton%20peter%20schweitzer+site:www.sgtreport.com&atb=v31-5__ "Search domain www.sgtreport.com/2020/10/new-bombshell-email-trove-shows-hunter-biden-arranged-wh-meetings-for-ccp-officials/"):{https://www.sgtreport.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/2020/10/new-bombshell-email-trove-shows-hunter-biden-arranged-wh-meetings-for-ccp-officials/:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:

Breitbart said. "These and more explosive never-before-revealed emails were provided to [author Peter] Schweizer by Bevan Cooney, a one-time Hunter Biden and Devon Archer business associate. Cooney is currently in prison serving a sentence for his involvement in a 2016 bond fraud investment scheme."

:{Hunter:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Biden Defector :{Emails:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:: 'Pipeline' to Obama Admin ...

[](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=breitbart%20hunter%20buiden%20email%20lapton%20peter%20schweitzer+site:www.breitbart.com&atb=v31-5__ "Search domain www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/10/20/exclusive-biden-defectors-emails-reveal-hunters-associates-viewed-direct-pipeline-to-administration-as-currency/"):{https://www.breitbart.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/politics/2020/10/20/exclusive-biden-defectors-emails-reveal-hunters-associates-viewed-direct-pipeline-to-administration-as-currency/:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:

5 days agoHunter Biden's business associates spoke candidly in emails about Hunter Biden's role in the business, particularly as it related to foreign ventures, apparently viewing the Biden name as a form of "currency," and bragging that they had a "direct…pipeline" to the Obama-Biden Administration.

Former :{Hunter:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Biden business partner gives 26,000 :{emails:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: ...

[](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=breitbart%20hunter%20buiden%20email%20lapton%20peter%20schweitzer+site:www.washingtonexaminer.com&atb=v31-5__ "Search domain www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/former-hunter-biden-business-partner-gives-26-000-emails-to-breitbart"):{https://www.washingtonexaminer.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/news/former-hunter-biden-business-partner-gives-26-000-emails-to-breitbart:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:

A former business partner of Hunter Biden currently serving a prison sentence for fraud has reportedly released 26,000 emails detailing his business operations with Biden and Devon Archer, another ...

:{Hunter:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Biden Articles - :{Breitbart:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

[](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=breitbart%20hunter%20buiden%20email%20lapton%20peter%20schweitzer+site:www.breitbart.com&atb=v31-5__ "Search domain www.breitbart.com/tag/hunter-biden/"):{https://www.breitbart.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/tag/hunter-biden/:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Tuesday ripped into Big Tech, describing them as "superspreaders" of disinformation in the wake of Facebook and Twitter censoring on their platforms the link to the New York Post report alleging Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, had email correspondence uncovered showing him getting help from his father to obtain a ...

https://www.mediamatters.org/john-solomon/while-gaslighting-country-ukraine-john-solomon-launches-new-gaslighting-website

mma

No media figure has played a larger role in laying the foundation for the current impeachment saga than John Solomon. Solomon worked in lockstep with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and a shady cast of characters to manufacture a disinformation campaign targeting one of President Donald Trump’s political rivals, a campaign that backfired spectacularly and resulted in the president being impeached. Solomon has now announced his latest gaslighting venture -- a new media outlet Just the News -- one day after documents were released that conclusively show Solomon working with a now-indicted associate of Giuliani to advance their disinformation.

Ukraine scandal

Solomon is one of the most critical figures in Trump and Giuliani’s plot to extort the Ukrainian government into meddling in our 2020 election to help the president.

Trump hired Giuliani in late 2018 for his legal team responding to the special counsel Robert Mueller’ investigation into Russian electoral interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. Purportedly as part of this effort, Giuliani worked closely with a team of players to create a two-pronged conspiracy theory that both smeared former Vice President Joe Biden as well as discredit the Mueller report by showing that it was really Ukraine that interfered with our 2016 election.

Giuliani’s team included Solomon, two now-indicted con men Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, and the pro-Trump legal duo (and Fox News fixtures) Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. They worked together to secure interviews with discredited and disgraced former Ukranian prosecutors and government officials to weave a complex conspiracy theory alleging that corrupt Ukrainian officials colluded with equally corrupt American officials to frame Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort in order to discredit Trump and benefit his 2016 political opponent Hillary Clinton. (Manafort is currently serving a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence due to his work in Ukraine.) At the same time, according to their theory, the Ukranian government was also aiding Biden in supposedly getting investigations into the Burisma gas company shut down because his son Hunter served on the board. Through this disinformation campaign, they targeted the then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch whose anti-corruption initiatives in Ukraine put her in the crosshairs of the very Ukranian officials Giuliani needed to concoct this conspiracy theory.

Solomon’s columns at The Hill was the primary vehicle through which they injected this narrative into the public. Giuliani has stated that he “turned my stuff over to John Solomon,” but as more information about their work comes to light, Solomon’s involvement appears more direct. Instant messages recently released by the House Intelligence Committee show Parnas working as an intermediary between Solomon and at least two of the corrupt Ukranian prosecutors used to support this conspiracy, Yuri Lutsenko and Viktor Shokin. Giuliani appears to have made a deal with Lutsenko: If Lutsenko gives them dirt on Biden, he’ll get Yovanovitch fired.

At the same time, the messages show Parnas serving as an intermediary for Solomon to interview Lutsenko, even appearing to send him advanced copies of Solomon’s columns prior to publication. ProPublica reported that Parnas even was in the control room when Solomon interviewed Lutsenko for The HillTV. Solomon’s resulting columns set the stage to make public a behind-the-scenes smear campaign targeting Yovanovitch and Biden. Parnas played a similar role in facilitating interviews between Solomon and Viktor Shokin, the disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor who was fired in 2016 as a result of pressure by the United States and the international community.

Another key player in this scheme is Firtash, a Ukranian pro-Russian oligarch and former business associate of Paul Manafort who is in Austria fighting extradition to the United States to face charges related to a bribery conspiracy. In the summer of 2019, Firtash fired his legal team to hire diGenova and Toensing, who were working closely with Parnas, Giuliani, and Solomon. (As it turns out, diGenova and Toensing also represented Solomon.) Parnas has recently claimed that Firtash agreed to work with Giuliani and his cronies to help them discredit the Mueller investigation in exchange for getting his extradition case dropped. Parnas alleged that Solomon played a key role in helping him connect with Firtash, saying “Basically I was given certain documents by John Solomon that would validate to Dimitri Firtash that I was in the loop and that I knew what was going on, because Mr. Firstash is a gentleman that just doesn't see anybody.”

All told in 2019, Solomon published dozens of columns in The Hill aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation and planting the seeds of this new Ukrainian element of the conspiracy theory. Solomon brought the conspiracy theory to Fox News and Fox Business, where he has appeared at least 92 times since March 20 through the end of 2019 to push elements of the conspiracy theory, in some cases alongside his attorneys diGenova and Toensing. None of the three ever disclosed their relationship to each other. Hannity gushed over Solomon’s work, hosting him at least 65 times during this same time period. Solomon’s efforts paid off when Fox News announced in October 2019 that it was hiring him as a contributor; he had recently announced he was leaving The Hill.

Solomon’s work also became a critical part of Trump’s impeachment inquiry. Multiple witnesses testified that his reporting was inaccurate but nonetheless led to Yovanovitch’s removal.

“Just the News”

In the same week that incriminating evidence has been released showing Solomon’s deep role in the Ukranian scandal, Solomon announced his latest venture, Just the News. Solomon is pitching the outlet as the answer to “the growing need for fact-based, impartial news and compelling digital content” that will feature “fact-based news without an agenda, with a neutral voice and with unprecedented transparency.” In reality, readers should expect anything but.

Solomon began his career as a mainstream reporter and has leveraged that experience to provide him cover for the decades of right-wing propaganda he has advanced since. A 2012 Columbia Journalism Review profile noted that “Solomon has a history of bending the truth to his storyline” and that he “was notorious for massaging facts to conjure phantom scandals.”

And “conjure phantom scandals” he does. For instance, prior to his involvement in the Ukraine disinformation campaign, Solomon was a key player in advancing the manufactured Uranium One scandal, another thoroughly debunked and discredited conspiracy theory that was first deployed to damage Clinton’s 2016 presidential election campaign.

Solomon revived and revised the conspiracy theory in 2017 -- when Trump needed an assist in his efforts to discredit the Mueller investigation -- by reporting without evidence that “Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation” when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state as part of a scheme to ensure the Uranium One deal’s success. He suggested that Mueller, as FBI director, had covered up Russia’s attempt to bribe the Clintons. In November 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions appointed U.S. Attorney John Huber to investigate, and The Washington Post recently reported that Huber is winding down his two-year review without bringing any criminal charges or finding any “other known impacts.”

While Solomon was at Circa in 2016-2017 -- and continuing into his time at The Hill -- he emerged as a key figure on Hannity’s Fox show. Circa under Solomon fueled Hannity’s show with pro-Trump stories on a nightly basis. It was during this stretch, all the way into 2019, that Hannity was working to spin a counternarrative to the charges of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Solomon’s “slanted reporting” was a fundamental part of Hannity’s conspiracy theories.

A quick glance at “trusted reporters” Solomon has partnered with to provide “honest journalism” at Just the News shows a familiar cabal of discredited journalists with a penchant for advancing right-wing conspiracy theories. For instance:

Peter Schweizer

Peter Schweizer is a Breitbart senior editor-at-large and president of conservative think tank Government Accountability Institute, both of which have been heavily funded by the pro-Trump billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer and which were previously headed by former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon. Schweizer is also the creator of several popular conspiracy theories about the Clinton family, including originating the aforementioned Uranium One allegations.

Even prior to Solomon’s involvement, the story of Hunter Biden’s role with Ukrainian gas company Burisma first gained traction on the right when Schweizer wrote about it in his 2018 book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends. Schweizer’s claims garnered airtime on Fox but had largely receded until Solomon revived it with his reporting in March 2019. Schweizer’s next book, Profiles in Corruption, is set to release January 21 and promises to target 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.

Sharyl Attkisson

Sharyl Attkisson is a former CBS news reporter who left the network in 2014 due to her shoddy reports about the Obama administration.  She was also “widely criticized within medical-research circles” for her reports about vaccines. Sources close to CBS News executives told Politico in 2013 that the network was concerned her reporting was “wading dangerously close to advocacy,” including her obsessive promotion of then-colleague Lara Logan’s disastrous *60 Minutes* Benghazi report. CBS News ultimately retracted and apologized for the report, and Logan took a leave of absence but never returned to CBS.

After leaving CBS, Attkisson also embarrassed her next employer, The Daily Signal, with faulty reporting falsely claiming that “Hillary Clinton confidants were part of an operation to ‘separate’ damaging documents” about the Benghazi attack prior to handing them over to investigators. Attkisson also published a book, alleging that the Obama administration hacked her personal computer, TV, phone, and home security system in retaliation for her often-incorrect Benghazi reporting. (CBS News did find that her work-issued laptop was breached using “sophisticated” methods, but no cyberattacker was ever named.) Attkisson kept changing her story about who did the hack and which devices of hers were hacked, but a 2015 federal investigation found no evidence that her personal computer was hacked. Attkisson also falsely accused Media Matters of accepting a payoff to specifically “target” her.

In 2015, Attkisson got a show with Sinclair Broadcast Group, the right-wing, pro-Trump TV network, and the disgraced reporter fit right in. Before her Sinclair show launched, Attkisson happened to be responsible for one of the earliest cycles of campaign-era Trump spin, when Trump promoted her misleading insistence that Trump called then-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) a war hero four times. Trump was plainly being sarcastic in each of the four instances he called McCain a “war hero,” including the now-infamous line: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

Attkisson conducted a typically softball interview with Trump in 2017, inviting him to make unchecked, demonstrably false claims about a wide range of issues.

David Brody

David Brody is the chief political analyst for the Christian Broadcasting Network, a provider of generally right-wing Christian programming. Brody has a history of hostility toward LGBTQ people, once attacking a male blogger as a Republican senator’s “angry girlfriend.” Brody also opposed a transgender Obama appointee simply for being trans, writing, “There will be those who say all that matters is whether or not Simpson is qualified for the job. … Here's a newsflash for you: The transgender thing doesn't play well with millions of conservative Evangelicals.” Brody also declared that Trump was the “Big Winner” of the racist birther campaign against President Barack Obama, because Obama did ultimately release his birth certificate.

Brody has granted Trump at least 10 interviews since his 2016 campaign and continues to drive talking points that align with the administration’s positions. On a 2017 episode of Fox & Friends, Brody complained that calls for Christian leaders to denounce white supremacy, including the then-recent murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, showed that “the fix is in, if you will against evangelical Christians, white evangelical Christians in this country.” Brody was also one of many right-wing media figures piling onto Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) with a deceptively edited clip purporting to show her saying that people should be afraid of white men. In reality, she was criticizing religious profiling.

Lee Smith

Lee Smith is a pro-Trump author, who recently published The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History. The book advances the conspiracy theory that a “deep state” plot to take down Trump “officially began July 31, 2016 with the counterintelligence investigation that the FBI opened to probe Russian infiltration of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.”

Smith has described the impeachment inquiry as “a secret ritual conducted by a cult” with “Speaker Pelosi as the high priestess of the cult and Adam Schiff as a high priest.”

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/peter-schweizer/fabricated-and-wildly-inaccurate-peter-schweizers-new-book-gets-bankruptcy-law

A preeminent bankruptcy law scholar who significantly disagrees with Warren on policy told Media Matters that the notion Warren supported pro-corporate bankruptcy laws is “baffling” and “ridiculous”

WRITTEN BY TIMOTHY JOHNSON

PUBLISHED 02/03/20

In his new book, conservative author Peter Schweizer argued that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is responsible for federal bankruptcy laws that big businesses have used to their advantage. But Schweizer’s Warren criticism is based on a fabricated and wildly inaccurate history of bankruptcy law, and one expert in the field told Media Matters that Schweizer has a "fundamental misunderstanding of what bankruptcy is about.”

Schweizer, a Breitbart senior editor-at-large and president of the right-wing think tank Government Accountability Institute, is best-known for his 2015 book Clinton Cash, which was riddled with errors, fabrications, and distortions. Despite his sloppy work, Schweizer was aided in promoting his claims by a compliant mainstream press that failed to rigorously investigate his work or needlessly gave his allegations oxygen, as The Washington Post and The New York Times did when they made “exclusive agreements” with Schweizer to promote his work.

Now, as the 2020 presidential election approaches, Schweizer has released another book, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, that levels corruption allegations against several Democrats running for president and other progressive politicians. In a chapter about Warren -- who before being elected a U.S. senator in 2012 was a professor at Harvard Law School specializing in bankruptcy legal issues -- Schweizer claims that during the 1990s, she was responsible for Congress’ adoption of pro-corporate bankruptcy laws. The claim, which is false, would be contrary to Warren’s presidential campaign platform.

In his book, Schweizer seizes on the fact that between 1995 and 1997 Warren was the reporter for the National Bankruptcy Review Commission (NBRC), a bipartisan task force created by Congress to suggest changes to the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. As Schweizer relates, Warren’s work on the commission included issues relating to mass torts, which involve many people bringing a lawsuit against one or more corporations. Bankruptcy law is sometimes relevant to the resolution of these lawsuits.

Schweizer claimed that “Warren was at ground zero in rewriting corporate bankruptcy laws” because of her work with the commission and that “the new laws allowed financially healthy corporations to start using bankruptcies as a way to avoid liability from legal suits.” Schweizer also claimed that “as the New York Times explained, the legislation pushed by Warren led ‘Fortune 500 companies with otherwise solid balance sheets’ to use ‘the bankruptcy courts as part of a broad strategy to resolve potentially ruinous legal woes’” and that “the new bankruptcy laws were a big win for large corporations, from asbestos producers to manufacturers of breast implants.”

Nothing Schweizer wrote here is true -- except for the fact that Warren was the reporter for the NBRC commission. Efforts to change bankruptcy laws in the 1990s and 2000s are a complicated subject, but Schweizer’s claim of a connection between Warren’s work on the commission and “new laws” that benefited big businesses is false for one simple reason: There were no “new laws” as a result of the NBRC final report. Congress ignored the recommendations and set its own course, eventually making broad changes to the bankruptcy laws in 2005 (which Warren opposed).

The NBRC delivered its final report to Congress in 1997. As conservative legal scholar Todd Zywicki explained in a 2003 law review article, the NBRC’s “idiosyncratic ideological orientation guaranteed that its recommendations would be dead on arrival” in Congress.  Zywicki, a professor specializing in bankruptcy at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, criticized the commission’s recommendations as overly friendly to judges and trial lawyers in his article and explained that they were unappealing to Congress because of ideological disagreements about the personal responsibility people who file for bankruptcy bear.

So instead of adopting the commission's recommendations, Congress set its own course, which was laid out in a 2006 Department of Justice report that chronicles the history of the NBRC commission through when Congress actually overhauled bankruptcy laws in 2005. Before the final NRBC report was delivered in 1997, legislation that was “in sharp disagreement with the Reports' consumer provisions was introduced.” That bill failed the following year, but as the DOJ report author Judith Benderson explained, it “rose repeatedly from the ashes in some curiously creative ways.”

In 2000, another version of the bill was passed by Congress, but then it was pocket vetoed by President Bill Clinton. Warren was actually involved in sinking the legislation. In a 2004 appearance on PBS program Now with Bill Moyers, Warren recounted that in the late 1990s she was invited by then-first lady Hillary Clinton to educate her on bankruptcy issues and the bill, which Bill Clinton was considering signing. Warren recalled that Clinton “went back to White House, and I heard later from someone who is a White House staffer that there were skid marks in the hallways when Mrs. Clinton got back as people reversed direction on that bankruptcy bill.” As Warren explained, President Clinton had been considering signing the bill to show “another way that he could be helpful to business”:

ELIZABETH WARREN: President Clinton had been showing that this is another way that he could be helpful to business. It wasn't a very high visibility bill. And when Mrs. Clinton came back with a little better understanding of how it all worked, they reversed course, and they reversed course fast. And indeed, the proof is in the pudding.

The last bill that came before President Clinton was that bankruptcy bill that was passed by the House and the Senate in 2000 and he vetoed it. And in her autobiography, Mrs. Clinton took credit for that veto and she rightly should. She turned around a whole administration on the subject of bankruptcy. She got it.

As the DOJ report explains, a modified version of the bill was again introduced in 2005. That bill, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA), became law after it was passed by Congress and enacted by President George W. Bush. As Vox explained, “Warren opposed the bill so vehemently that its passage inspired her transition from a Harvard bankruptcy law professor, who studied middle-class economics, to a senator and now a presidential hopeful.”

According to legal publication Lexology, “between 1997 and 2005, numerous bills intended to address consumer bankruptcy abuse were presented to the house or senate floors. Consumer lending businesses are widely reported to have been the dominant lobby behind these bills,” and BAPCPA became the largest change in bankruptcy laws in 35 years. The primary purpose of the law was to make it more difficult for individuals to file for bankruptcy.

Reached by phone, bankruptcy expert and University of Chicago Law School professor Douglas Baird said the notion that Warren supported or helped enact pro-corporate bankruptcy laws was “ridiculous” and “baffling.” Baird emphasized that he is “not a supporter of Warren” and that the two have had significant public disagreements about bankruptcy policy, jokingly referring to himself as a “conservative force of darkness” compared to Warren. Still, Baird said he wanted to explain what Warren’s views were when they were traveling in the same circles during the 1990s, such as when they were both members of the National Bankruptcy Conference.

Baird said that during the late 1990s and early 2000s, Warren “took positions that were so pro-consumer” on bankruptcy that they were repudiated by large financial institutions, and that “the idea she was taking positions that made her the tool of large organizations is ridiculous.” Baird described Warren’s role as reporter for the NBRC commision as something like an “executive director” or even a “cat herder.” While offering some criticism of how Warren used that role, Baird emphasized that she was not the “policymaker” and mentioned, as others have, that Congress didn’t take up the commission report’s findings anyway.

Reached for comment by Media Matters about Schweizer’s claims, Seton Hall Law professor Stephen Lubben wrote by email that “the 2005 bankruptcy amendments did very little to change corporate bankruptcy law (it was mostly about personal bankruptcy)” and “that, combined with the fact that the Commission's work had little to no impact on the 2005 amendments, would seem to massively undercut [Schweizer’s] claims.”

Schweizer inserts more misrepresentations in his book, making claims about Warren and Section 524(g) of the Bankruptcy Code in order her paint her as having pushed corporate interests. The provision was added by Congress in 1994, and is relevant to companies facing legal claims over asbestos exposure. Relying on a legal declaration issued by Warren in 2002 about her consulting work with Congress during the 1990s, Schweizer wrote that “she was also a key advisor on an obscure but profoundly important section of the bankruptcy law called U.S.C. 524(g)” and claimed the law benefits big corporations.

The 524(g) provision of the Bankruptcy Code is a codification of a process used by a federal bankruptcy court to resolve the *Johns Manville* asbestos bankruptcy case. According to Warren’s 2002 legal declaration, some members of Congress “hoped that the [NBRC] Commission would develop a more comprehensive approach to replace” 524(g) and that in its final 1997 report the commission did make further recommendations (which Congress ignored). In his book, Schweizer characterizes 524(g) as legislation “pushed by Warren” and claims it was a way for corporations to “avoid liability.”

But according to Baird, describing what Warren did on 524(g) issues as pushing corporate interests is a conclusion that someone who “doesn’t understand the law” would reach, as in Baird’s view, 524(g) is not an anti-consumer law. Baird added that “nothing that Warren was doing was contrary to the interests of tort victims” in that litigation area and that she was “involved in coming up with a sensible mechanism” to resolve certain legal disputes.

Overall, Baird said that Schweizer’s characterizations of Warren’s work with Congress on bankruptcy laws and the conclusions that he drew from them show a “fundamental misunderstanding of what bankruptcy is about.”

Schweizer has been touting his smear of Warren across conservative news outlets, appearing on Fox News shows Special Report and Fox & Friends and on Fox News contributor Mark Levin’s radio show and claiming that Warren helped rewrite bankruptcy laws -- sometimes while also falsely saying that she did so to benefit corporate interests.

More reputable outlets would be wise to give Schewizer’s false claims attention only when they’re debunking them.

escalator:

Bannon & Breitbart, aka the Three Men and A Baby ghost

Around that same time in 2011, the 42yo Breitbart suffered a heart attack. Within a year, he collapsed on an L.A. street and died on 1 March 2012, with his autopsy blaming another massive heart attack due to an enlarged heart. Later that very same day, Bannon has said he met with New York investors to plan the future of Breitbart News, and he would quickly be named Executive Chairman on 19 March.

This was a crucial time period for all of these players. In February2012, Bannon founded the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) with $2m in seed funding from the Mercers. Rebekah Mercer became Chairwoman, and Bannon installed Peter Schweizer — author of Reagan’s War, the book adapted into Bannon’s first “documentary” — as president of GAI. Like Bossie and Mercer, Schweizer is yet another Clinton-hating, Reagan-adoring, tax reform & financial deregulation advocate and conspiracy theorist.

A couple of the first ‘reports’ out of the gate for GAI: a treatise attesting to the horrors of food stamps, as well as another which itemized every instance of President Barack Obama’s attendance at his daily briefings. Breitbart predictably publishes multiple stories each time GAI puts out a press release, but both of those early missives were picked up for publication and discussion in major media outlets, such as ABC News, Washington Times, National Review, and Washington Post.

Peter Schweizer on Russia Today

fox bs

bossie has no lnx to back up any of this (link to solomon artl]

no lnx

Bossie: The media need to investigate Joe Biden and his Ukraine dealings

David N. Bossie By David N. Bossie | Fox News

Are media going easy on Biden?

For the past 12 days, the political media has been focused on “handsy” and “creepy” former Vice President Joe Biden and his penchant for making unwanted contact with women seemingly wherever he is. While these allegations deserve their fair share of attention, the mainstream media may be missing -- or more likely ignoring -- the real Biden story that’s staring them in the face.

When I served as the chief investigator for the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight during the Clinton Administration, I regularly worked with journalists on investigations they were covering for weeks and even months. But 20 years later, those types of stories are few and far between.

BIDEN FACES SCRUTINY FOR DEMANDING OUTSTER OF UKRAINE OFFICIAL PROBING FIRM THAT EMPLOYED HIS SON

That being said, the media must do a deep-dive into Joe Biden and his family’s relationship with Ukraine, like the recent reports byaward-winning journalist John Solomon in his column at The Hill.

The biased media’s refusal to cover the Biden-Ukraine story to date is shameful. President Trump never receives such favorable treatment. In fact, the vast majority of liberal journalists out there today hate President Trump and cover him and his administration with a presumption of guilt.

When it comes to the Biden’s and Ukraine, there’s an awful lot of smoke. Among other things, Solomon is reporting that in 2016 during his tenure as Barack Obama’s Vice President, Biden threatened to pull $1 billion dollars in loans to Ukraine if its President Petro Poroshenko didn’t fire the country’s prosecutor general.

The catch? The prosecutor was allegedly knee-deep in a corruption probe of Burisma Holdings, a firm that featured Biden’s son Hunter as a board member.

Biden got his way and the blowhard former vice president even publicly bragged about the firing.A top official from the Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office confirmed to Solomon that they are currently investigating these troubling allegations.

As it turns out, Hunter Biden’s firm in America (Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC) was allegedly receiving six figures a month from Burisma and according to Solomon, the fired prosecutor told him that he was planning to question Hunter Biden and other Burisma board members before he was relieved of duty.

[pix]

Solomon links to court records indicating that over an 18-month period in 2014- 2015 “more than $3 million was paid out of Burisma accounts to an account linked to Biden’s … Rosemont Seneca firm.” This was happening at the same time that Joe Biden was running point for the Obama Administration on matters involving Ukraine.

Using high office to enrich oneself or family members is textbook corruption. It’s an example of crony capitalism at its worst; and it appears Joe Biden was alledgedlyinvolved in a big dose of it in Ukraine.

Citizens United has been working to uncover corruption in our government using Freedom of Information Act litigation against the State Department for years.Last month we filed suit in federal court to try and shed light on the overseas business activities of Hunter Biden and some of his associates after one year of State Department recalcitrance.

Some of the serious allegations involving the Biden’s and Ukraine were first uncovered by Peter Schweizer in his book “Secret Empires.” Once you learn about Hunter Biden’s business associations in Ukraine, it’s quite fitting that Joe Biden made his last foreign trip as Vice President there in January 2017.

According to Schweizer, “Four days before Biden arrived, Burisma made a dramatic announcement: the Ukrainian criminal investigations into the company and its founder had been ended by Ukrainian government prosecutors.”

If Biden were a Republican like President Trump, the mainstream mediawould be digging into these allegations in hopes of destroying him politically. But Biden is a Democratic ally and presidential frontrunner, so the liberal media has taken a pass on Ol’ Joe’s alleged Ukrainian mess so far.

During his visit to Ukraine in January of 2017, Biden made remarks about corruption in Ukraine that haven’t aged very well, knowing what we now know. Biden told Ukrainians to " ... keep demonstrating your commitment to the rule of law; keep fighting corruption; insist on transparency; investigate and prosecute government officials who siphon off public funds for their own enrichment.”

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

It’s time for former Vice President Biden to answer questions about the real story. There’s a lot we still don’t know about what happened in Ukraine.

David N. Bossie is president of Citizens United, a Fox News contributor, the 2016 deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump for President, and the former chief investigator for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform and Oversight during the Clinton administration. He is the co-author of "Let Trump Be Trump"  and “Trump’s Enemies.”

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https://www.axios.com/david-bossie-presidential-coalition-ceases-fundraising-721dde4b-42da-4cba-bbe9-2d917b367039.html

[graf]

former Trump campaign deputy manager David Bossie, who Axios recently exposed as milking donors by flaunting President Trump’s name, is trying to repair and revive his controversial fundraising operation. 

The bottom line: Bossie suspended fundraising after Axios revealed that very little of the money he was raising was going to political campaigns. Trump was livid, forcing the Bossie retreat. Now, Bossie tells us he is making several changes — presumably to get back into Trump’s good graces and back into the fundraising business.

The impact: Bossie directed his political group, the Presidential Coalition, to cease all fundraising on May 7, 2 days after Axios published the findings of its investigation, done in collaboration with the Campaign Legal Center (CLC).

• That's in part thanks to the president, who personally authorized the Trump campaign to issue a blistering statement, without naming Bossie, condemning "any organization that deceptively uses the president's name, likeness, trademarks, or branding and confuses voters," in the wake of our story.
• "The president was pissed," a Trump campaign official told Axios. "He doesn’t like the idea that his supporters would be tricked into donating to things they thought were the campaign ... and he doesn’t like it when people benefit from using his name, especially financially."

The fallout: Bossie told Axios that the group is "currently redesigning our fundraising programs, because of my longstanding relationship with the president and because of my desire to only help the president and the administration."

• The Presidential Coalition will no longer reference "The Trump Coalition" in its mailers and fundraising materials, Bossie said. He claims they were going to stop using that language after 2019 anyway, "due to the regulatory regime."
• The group will also be far more clear that the Presidential Coalition is an affiliate of Citizens United: "We will print it in our mailers and on the envelopes to be even more transparent," Bossie said.
• Despite these changes, Bossie still claims that he doesn't think "there was anything whatsoever that was done outside of the appropriate fundraising avenues."
• Read Bossie's full response.

By the numbers: The Presidential Coalition's average daily contributions plunged from over $20,000 per day in early May to under $2,000 per day by the end of June, according to a new Axios/CLC analysis of the organization's latest IRS filing from the first half of 2019.

• Worth noting: The majority of donations made to the Presidential Coalition (62%) in the first half of 2019 came from unitemized, small donors who gave less than $200 in a year — similar to the contributions from previous years. The dates of those small-donor contributions are not known, given IRS regulations.

The state of play: Despite the backlash it faced, the Presidential Coalition is still spending just a small percentage of its money on direct political activity, though the percentage is higher than that of 2017 and 2018:

• The group spent $5.9 million in the first half of 2019, but devoted just $148,100 (or 2.5%) of its overall spending on political contributions. Another $325,000 was spent on "digital ad buys" that correspond to a July pro-Trump digital ad campaign, according to CLC's analysis.
• Taken together, the Presidential Coalition dedicated nearly 8% of overall spending to direct political activity, up from 3% in 2017 and 2018.
• As before, most of the Presidential Coalition's spending went toward more fundraising, as well as rent and payroll.
• What to watch: Bossie said his group has also been building up a $4.3 million war chest, and that starting after Labor Day, the Presidential Coalition will spend $3 million — or $1 million per month — over September, October and November on ads supporting the president and state and local candidates.

Worth noting: Bossie, a Fox News contributor, was totally absent on the network for nearly 3 months after our story ran. However, he did appear on the network again on July 31 to defend Trump after his tweets attacking Baltimore Rep. Elijah Cummings. A Fox News spokesperson told Axios that Bossie is still a contributor.

The Trump campaign told Axios that it stands by its May statement.

Go deeper:

• Read CLC's latest report
• Inside a top Trump adviser's fundraising mirage
• Elderly Bossie donors say they thought they were helping Trump

DAVID BOSSIE

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/democratic-candidates-are-finally-punching-back-against-corporate-medias-shoddy-press-coverage/

no lnx

Democratic candidates are finally punching back against corporate media’s shoddy press coverage

Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos October 13, 2019

Democrats running for president have a new message for the news media: We’re not going to take it anymore.

No longer willing to stoically suffer through bad, misleading press coverage, Democrats are borrowing a page from Republicans by going public with their complaints and demanding journalists do better. But unlike Republicans who often “work the refs” by griping about imaginary slights in hopes of better treatment in the future, Democrats are calling out the press with wholly accurate claims of media malpractice.

Last week, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign sent a blistering letter to New York Times editor Dean Baquet, reprimanding the paper for helping spread Donald Trump’s debunked conspiracy theory about Joe Biden and his son’s business dealings in Ukraine. It’s “part of a larger strategy not to let the same coverage that corrupted the 2016 election happen this time around,” a campaign source told CNN’s Brian Stelter.

The stinging critique from Biden came one day after the Times published an opinion column from discredited right-wing author Peter Schweizer, once again hyping the Biden/Ukraine story. Schweizer, who wrote a patently dishonest book about Hillary Clinton in 2015 alleging all sorts of made-up crimes—a book the Times helped market and promote during the campaign—has been peddling the Biden smear all year within the far-right media ecosystem.

It was the Times that trumpeted Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash as the “the most anticipated and feared book” of the 2016 campaign season. And it was the Times that forged an exclusive alliance with the Breitbart-backed book (published by a Rupert Murdoch-owned subsidiary), and used the factually erroneous tome as a guidepost for Hillary Clinton ‘gotcha’ articles.

As for this campaign cycle, even after mainstream news outlets had completely debunked the hollow claims about Biden that Schweizer was peddling, the Times invited the smear’s architect, who has a soft spot for plagiarism, to spread more partisan attacks via the newspaper. Also, note that it was the Times that got caught last May trying to peddle the GOP’s anti-Biden storyline about Ukraine in the first place.

And yes, the right-wing media feasted on the Times’ handiwork last spring, and presented it as confirmation that Biden is corrupt. More recently, the Times often tied Trump’s attempt to get a foreign player to interfere with an American election with the bogus allegations Biden has faced regarding Ukraine, suggesting that both Trump and Biden were being sullied in the process.

The Biden campaign’s aggressive response last week represents a new approach for prominent Democratic candidates. In the past, party stalwarts often ignored press slights, likely feeling that media critiques weren’t why they were running for president and that candidates didn’t want to get distracted from larger, more important issues. But after Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes yet still lost the election thanks to some of the most openly hostile, sexist, and unfair campaign coverage in modern American history, Democratic campaigns are moving faster and much more forcefully to call out bad behavior and pressure news organizations to do better.

My sense is also that for way too long, Beltway Democrats remained wedded to the idea that the press was actually their friend and ally, and that The New York Times for instance, was on the “side” of progressives. But the Times, of course, has been at the forefront of tearing down a long list of Democratic nominees in recent years.

Today, determined not to get ‘Hillary’d,’ or ‘Gore’d,’ or ‘swift boated‘ like previous Democratic nominees Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry, who all lost extremely closes races after being treated unfairly by the press (led by dubious Times coverage in all three instances), more Democrats are stating up front that they’re not going to politely stand back and ignore what they see as unfair and unprofessional media coverage. In 2016, the press obsessed so much over the phony Clinton email “scandal” that coverage of her policy initiatives got obliterated. In 2000, the press took the GOP bait and spent the entire campaign depicting Gore, previously known as a Boy Scout-like politician, as a craven liar. And Kerry was the subject of a vicious, extended smear campaign as partisan Vietnam War veterans, cheered on by Republicans, lied about his war record while the Beltway press amplified the bogus swift boat claims for weeks on end.

The Biden campaign last week also dispatched letters to both Facebook and Twitter, urging them not to run an ad that spread the debunked theory about Biden and Ukraine. “Whether it originates from the Kremlin or Trump Tower, these lies and conspiracy theories threaten to undermine the integrity of our elections in America,” the campaign stressed.

Biden hasn’t been alone among candidates voicing clear media critiques. In the wake of yet another rash of mass shootings, Beto O’Rourke was asked if he thought Trump’s racist, anti-immigration rhetoric had led to immigrants being targeted. “Like, members of the press, what the fuck?” the Democrat responded. “It’s these questions that you know the answers to.”

Bernie Sanders also recently offered up a blunt critique of the news media.“There are six major media conglomerates, including Time Warner which owns CNN, which control about 90% of the media in this country in terms of what we see, hear and read. Between you and me, that is a very dangerous situation,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “The CEOs make tens of millions of dollars a year in compensation. They have an agenda, and I worry about that, as I do worry about concentration of ownership in agribusiness, in Wall Street and in many other areas.” (Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard has aired critiques of the press this campaign season, but they strike me as being un-serious and often incoherent.)

There’s no question Democrats face in uphill battle on this front, not only because they’re getting a late start in the larger debate, but because the Beltway press responds differently to media critiques coming from the left and the right. Eternally spooked by the conservative claim of “liberal media bias,” journalists tend to be hypersensitive to GOP allegations of malpractice. At the same time, political journalists often ignore criticism, or become extremely defensive when their work is questioned by Democrats and liberals.

Nonetheless, the ongoing media debate is one that Democrats desperately need to part of. And for the 2020 campaign, they will be.

Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.

==

For nearly two years, conservative operatives have been trying to weaponize the Ukraine-based story that has led Trump to the brink of impeachment. A look back over the coverage of the story—a repeatedly discredited conspiracy theory involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine—suggests that America’s news organizations continue to be just as susceptible to manipulation by political partisans pushing complicated and hard-to-check foreign narratives as they were in 2016. In fact, several of the same players are involved. “There’s no effective mechanism in this country for weeding disinformation out,” Paul Barrett, the deputy director of N.Y.U.’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, and the author of the recent study “Disinformation and the 2020 Election,” said. “We’re not doing anything about it at all.”

Anyone trying to track the Ukrainian conspiracy stories that were eventually embraced by President Trump is likely to get mired in the same echo chamber of right-wing news purveyors that misinformed voters in 2016. A pivotal source of the allegations against the Bidens, for instance, is the Government Accountability Institute, a Florida-based opposition-research operation that was founded by the former Trump political adviser Stephen Bannon—the same conservative nonprofit that ginned up questionable stories about the Clintons during the last Presidential campaign. In both instances, much of the coverage of the scandal was kicked off by Peter Schweizer, a longtime conservative political writer who is an editor-at-large at Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute. Since its founding, in 2012, the group has largely been funded with millions of dollars in tax-exempt donations from the family foundation of the New York hedge-fund magnate Robert Mercer, who was a major donor to Trump’s 2016 campaign. In the organization’s most recently available I.R.S. tax filings, for 2017, Mercer’s daughter Rebekah is listed as the board chairman.

Asked about the Government Accountability Institute’s role in this year’s Biden scandal coverage, Bannon e-mailed to say, “It’s key. It was the predicate,” as it had been for much of the previous Clinton scandal coverage. As Joshua Green describes in “Devil’s Bargain,” his book, from 2017, about Bannon’s role in the Trump campaign, Bannon designed the organization as a means of transmitting partisan dirt-digging to the mainstream media. He realized that, though mainstream reporters were suspicious of partisan opinion, they were open to damning facts about public figures, regardless of the sourcing. He set out, with Schweizer, to produce material that would generate mainstream coverage, and right-wing outrage.

Thus, during the last Presidential campaign, under the auspices of the Government Accountability Institute, Schweizer published the best-selling book “Clinton Cash.” In a novel arrangement, he doled out negative scoops about the Clintons from it in advance to a variety of mainstream news outlets, including the Times. The paper disclosed its exclusive deal with the book’s author to its readers, and maintained that it independently verified and expanded on the information. But when it ran a front-page story derived from the book on April 24, 2015, the Times stirred controversy and criticism, including from its own public editor.

The story insinuated that, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had risked national security by facilitating the sale of American uranium mines to Russia in exchange for more than two million dollars in contributions to the Clinton Foundation from the businessmen behind the deal, who worked for a company called Uranium One. The story enabled Clinton’s opponents to frame her as greedy and corrupt. Even a year after she had lost the race, the Fox News host Sean Hannity was still invoking it on air, calling it “the biggest scandal ever involving Russia.”

Yet later reporting poked holes in the story’s insinuation of corruption, revealing that multiple government agencies—not just Clinton’s State Department—had approved the deal, and that the amount of uranium involved was negligible. (Schweizer didn’t respond to phone calls from The New Yorker.) On Thursday, the Daily Beast identified what it said were over a dozen passages in his book, “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” that were lifted from other sources, such as Wikipedia—a charge that his publisher, HarperCollins, denied amounted to a violation of fair use.

For those who recall the “Clinton Cash” controversy, the baseless tales claiming that Biden corruptly intervened on behalf of his son’s Ukrainian business interests feel a lot like the movie “Groundhog Day.” In March of 2018, Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute once again produced a book that was perfectly timed for the Presidential campaign. “Secret Empires” devoted a chapter to the subject of “Bidens in Ukraine,” which laid out the conflicts of interest posed by the wheeling and dealing of Biden’s son Hunter. (An additional chapter laid out Hunter Biden’s business deals in China.) As the book recounted, in 2014, Hunter Biden, a Washington lobbyist, took a profitable post on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company run by a shady oligarch, while his father, who was then the Vice-President, handled a drive to rid Ukraine of corruption. Other news organizations, including the Times and the Wall Street Journal, had already run stories on the same unethical-seeming morass. (In July, The New Yorker published a piece about the relationship between Joe and Hunter Biden that dismissed allegations of any illegality in the Ukraine matter but included some concerns from Obama Administration officials that Hunter could potentially undermine his father’s work.)

...Jane Mayer of theNew Yorkerexplains how the “Biden/Ukraine” hoax was invented and spread by the same people who invented the “Uranium One” fiction whichFox News and other Republican sludge generators spawned in order to smear Hillary Clinton in the 2016. The cast of characters for both smears is remarkably similar.

...

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no lnx

The Invention of the Conspiracy Theory on Biden and Ukraine

How a conservative dark-money group that targeted Hillary Clinton in 2016 spread the discredited story that may lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment.

By Jane Mayer October 4, 2019

No journalist played a bigger part in fuelling the Biden corruption narrative than John Solomon, and documents reportedly show that his columns were part of the Trump team’s strategy.Photograph by Nick Wass / Invision / AP / Shutterstock

For nearly two years, conservative operatives have been trying to weaponize the Ukraine-based story that has led Trump to the brink of impeachment. A look back over the coverage of the story—a repeatedly discredited conspiracy theory involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine—suggests that America’s news organizations continue to be just as susceptible to manipulation by political partisans pushing complicated and hard-to-check foreign narratives as they were in 2016. In fact, several of the same players are involved. “There’s no effective mechanism in this country for weeding disinformation out,” Paul Barrett, the deputy director of N.Y.U.’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, and the author of the recent study “Disinformation and the 2020 Election,” said. “We’re not doing anything about it at all.”

Anyone trying to track the Ukrainian conspiracy stories that were eventually embraced by President Trump is likely to get mired in the same echo chamber of right-wing news purveyors that misinformed voters in 2016. A pivotal source of the allegations against the Bidens, for instance, is the Government Accountability Institute, a Florida-based opposition-research operation that was founded by the former Trump political adviser Stephen Bannon—the same conservative nonprofit that ginned up questionable stories about the Clintons during the last Presidential campaign. In both instances, much of the coverage of the scandal was kicked off by Peter Schweizer, a longtime conservative political writer who is an editor-at-large at Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute. Since its founding, in 2012, the group has largely been funded with millions of dollars in tax-exempt donations from the family foundation of the New York hedge-fund magnate Robert Mercer, who was a major donor to Trump’s 2016 campaign. In the organization’s most recently available I.R.S. tax filings, for 2017, Mercer’s daughter Rebekah is listed as the board chairman.

Asked about the Government Accountability Institute’s role in this year’s Biden scandal coverage, Bannon e-mailed to say, “It’s key. It was the predicate,” as it had been for much of the previous Clinton scandal coverage. As Joshua Green describes in “Devil’s Bargain,” his book, from 2017, about Bannon’s role in the Trump campaign, Bannon designed the organization as a means of transmitting partisan dirt-digging to the mainstream media. He realized that, though mainstream reporters were suspicious of partisan opinion, they were open to damning facts about public figures, regardless of the sourcing. He set out, with Schweizer, to produce material that would generate mainstream coverage, and right-wing outrage.

Thus, during the last Presidential campaign, under the auspices of the Government Accountability Institute, Schweizer published the best-selling book “Clinton Cash.” In a novel arrangement, he doled out negative scoops about the Clintons from it in advance to a variety of mainstream news outlets, including the Times. The paper disclosed its exclusive deal with the book’s author to its readers, and maintained that it independently verified and expanded on the information. But when it ran a front-page story derived from the book on April 24, 2015, the Times stirred controversy and criticism, including from its own public editor.

The story insinuated that, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had risked national security by facilitating the sale of American uranium mines to Russia in exchange for more than two million dollars in contributions to the Clinton Foundation from the businessmen behind the deal, who worked for a company called Uranium One. The story enabled Clinton’s opponents to frame her as greedy and corrupt. Even a year after she had lost the race, the Fox News host Sean Hannity was still invoking it on air, calling it “the biggest scandal ever involving Russia.”

Yet later reporting poked holes in the story’s insinuation of corruption, revealing that multiple government agencies—not just Clinton’s State Department—had approved the deal, and that the amount of uranium involved was negligible. (Schweizer didn’t respond to phone calls from The New Yorker.) On Thursday, the Daily Beast identified what it said were over a dozen passages in his book, “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” that were lifted from other sources, such as Wikipedia—a charge that his publisher, HarperCollins, denied amounted to a violation of fair use.

For those who recall the “Clinton Cash” controversy, the baseless tales claiming that Biden corruptly intervened on behalf of his son’s Ukrainian business interests feel a lot like the movie “Groundhog Day.” In March of 2018, Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute once again produced a book that was perfectly timed for the Presidential campaign. “Secret Empires” devoted a chapter to the subject of “Bidens in Ukraine,” which laid out the conflicts of interest posed by the wheeling and dealing of Biden’s son Hunter. (An additional chapter laid out Hunter Biden’s business deals in China.) As the book recounted, in 2014, Hunter Biden, a Washington lobbyist, took a profitable post on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company run by a shady oligarch, while his father, who was then the Vice-President, handled a drive to rid Ukraine of corruption. Other news organizations, including the Times and the Wall Street Journal, had already run stories on the same unethical-seeming morass. (In July, The New Yorker published a piece about the relationship between Joe and Hunter Biden that dismissed allegations of any illegality in the Ukraine matter but included some concerns from Obama Administration officials that Hunter could potentially undermine his father’s work.)

But Schweizer went a step further. His chapter implied not just that Burisma was a crooked company but that the end of a Ukrainian criminal investigation into it on January 12, 2017, was in some unstated way connected to Joe Biden’s visit to the country four days later. In this way, Schweizer floated the possibility that, as Vice-President, Biden had abused his power to protect the company or his son from prosecution. Yet Schweizer provided no proof of causation nor evidence of illegality.

As he rolled out his new book, Schweizer promoted it in all the usual conservative news outlets, including “Hannity” and “The Story with Martha MacCallum,” on Fox News. But the turning point in the Biden coverage, it appears, was in late 2018, when Trump’s private lawyer and political advocate, the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, got involved. That winter, Giuliani began speaking to current and former Ukrainian officials about the Biden conspiracy theory, and meeting with them repeatedly in New York and Europe. Among those officials was Viktor Shokin, a former top Ukrainian prosecutor who was sacked in March, 2016, after European and U.S. officials, including Joe Biden, complained that he was lax in curbing corruption. Shokin claimed that he had lost his powerful post not because of his poor performance but rather because Biden wanted to stop his investigation of Burisma, in order to protect his son. The facts didn’t back this up. The Burisma investigation had been dormant under Shokin. But in March, according to NBC News, Giuliani gave the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, a packet of Trump Hotel folders containing the purported evidence against Biden, including Giuliani’s interview with Shokin and his strategy to spread the Biden story, “including segments being placed on Fox News.” Before long, this explosive, politically useful legend took on a life of its own in America’s conservative media.

As an anonymous whistle-blower’s complaint to Congress revealed, and as the Washington Post has reported, no journalist played a bigger part in fuelling the Biden corruption narrative than John Solomon, who until last week was an opinion columnist and executive vice-president of The Hill, in Washington. Solomon had been a respected investigative reporter for the Washington Post, but in recent years he worked for overtly conservative outlets, including a stint as the editor of the Washington Times. As Giuliani conspired this past spring with questionable Ukrainian sources, Solomon pumped out a string of eye-catching stories echoing those sources’ claims about the Bidens. This appears to have been no coincidence. According to NBC, the Giuliani documents show that Solomon’s columns were part of the Trump team’s strategy. (The New Yorker was unable to reach John Solomon, and a question e-mailed to the editor of The Hill, about whether the publication stood by Solomon’s stories, went unanswered.)

This spring, Solomon wrote a series of columns, based on an interview with Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko. On March 26th, Solomon wrote a column about Lutsenko’s claim that the then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, an Obama holdover named Marie Yovanovitch, had given him a list of politically protected figures that he was forbidden from prosecuting—a charge the State Department dismissed as “an outright fabrication.” That same day, Solomon wrote another column suggesting a new investigation into Clinton, which he shared in a tweet, writing, “Did Ukraine try to secretly help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election? Chief prosecutor says there’s enough evidence to start investigating.”

On April 1st, Solomon turned his focus to Biden, writing a column for The Hill called “Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian Nightmare,” which claimed that Ukraine was reopening its criminal probe into Burisma. It also repeated the unsubstantiated claim that Shokin’s investigation into the company had been cut short at the behest of Biden.

In Solomon’s April 1st column, he cited Schweizer’s book. Two days later, Schweizer sent “kudos” to Solomon during an interview on Breitbart News, and added, “We’re talking about potentially legal jeopardy involving the Vice-President’s family.” Schweizer opined that it was “all the sort of thing that needs to be investigated and looked into by a grand jury,” and added, “it’s pretty clear that you have a pattern that the for-sale sign was open with the Biden family . . . and that in itself demands investigation in the United States.”

Soon, both Schweizer and Solomon were appearing repeatedly on Fox News, spreading the anti-Biden narrative further. According to the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, during the month of April, Fox ran at least twelve segments about Solomon’s reporting on Biden. After one of seven episodes in which Sean Hannity discussed it on his show, President Trump tweeted a reference to Solomon’s reporting. His son Donald Trump, Jr., took up the narrative, too, and tweeted a link to a story in the Daily Wire, a conservative outlet, which echoed Solomon’s claims.

On April 7th, Giuliani appeared on Fox and demanded that the Justice Department investigate the Democrats’ Ukraine dealings. On April 25th, the same day that Joe Biden officially declared that he was running for President, Trump himself called in to Hannity’s show on Fox, saying that he wanted the Attorney General, Bill Barr, to be involved. By raising the spectre of a criminal investigation, Trump, a President dogged by allegations of corruption had, with the help of the conservative echo chamber, managed to cast his chief political rival in a parallel story, leaving the public in a fog of suspicion and confusion. As Barrett, of N.Y.U., explained it, “The consequence is that we begin to inch our way towards the mire that Russians are in where ordinary people lose their ability to tell truth from untruth, and even cease caring about it.”

By May, the mainstream media, including the Times, had picked up on the story about Biden and Ukraine. Although the Times’ piece ran under a headline pointing out that that the scandal was being “promoted by Trump and Allies,” and, midway, noted that there was no evidence of criminality, critics attacked the paper for reprising the Uranium One playbook. “It’s precisely what we saw in the last election,” Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School and the co-author of the recent book “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,” told me. Benkler argues that when a publication with the Times’ credibility pays any attention to a fringe conspiracy theory, it “provides enormous validation” just by covering the story. “I don’t fault the Times for doing a story,” he said. “But it’s not like the nineteen-sixties anymore, when there were just three TV networks. You live in a country where a large part of the population is susceptible to propaganda. There’s a new editorial responsibility to be much more careful and not bury the denial.”

By mid-summer, the Times and other mainstream outlets, most notably Bloomberg News, had more or less knocked down the conspiracy theories. By then, Trump was so invested in the counterfactual narrative that he was demanding that Ukraine’s new President provide confirmation of it, as the whistle-blower’s complaint relates. Or, as documents released by Congress earlier this week revealing discussions between his emissaries to Ukraine put it, “Potus really wants the deliverable.” With Trump facing the prospect of impeachment in the House of Representatives, it appears that he is a casualty of his side’s own disinformation. “Whether Trump and Giuliani are dupes of their own propaganda I can’t say. But the timeline is completely consistent with that,” Benkler said. “Either way, it proves that running an Administration based on Hannity is dangerous.”

Jane Mayer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995.Read more »

More:Hunter BidenJoe BidenDonald TrumpImpeachment

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-is-about-to-become-the-right-wing-smear-machines-greatest-unintended-casualty/

no lnx

Trump is about to become the Right-wing smear machine’s greatest unintended casualty

Written by Daily Kos October 6, 2019

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/bannon-schweizer-and-the-mercers-team-up-to-advance-conspiracy-theory-targeting-biden/

When President Donald Trump yesterday urged China to investigate the business dealings of the political opponent Trump apparently fears most—former Vice President Joe Biden—his purpose was likely as much to inject some disinformation into the presidential campaign as it was a request for back-up material for his claim. Which is not to suggest that China might not have some incentive to come up with some disinformation to please Trump; he is, after all, conducting a trade war against the superpower to the East. And besides, it makes for a great diversion from all of that impeachment nonsense.

Trump’s attempts to prove that his opponent (who does not own hotels frequented by foreign leaders looking to do business with the United States) to be corrupt follows a script familiar to those who remember the Uranium One non-scandal with which pro-Trump players sought to tar Trump’s 2016 presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton.In fact, the allegations against Biden and his son, Hunter, are being advanced by the same crew that crafted and pushed the Uranium One narrative: Steve Bannon and Peter Schweizer.

This part of the formula has been tried and tested: Schweizer, employed by the Bannon-founded Government Accountability Institute, writes a book full of cherry-picked facts that, without context, paint a damning portrait of Trump’s opponent.

With such explosive claims made, mainstream outlets feel compelled to report, if not on the claims themselves, then on the fact that the allegations were stated by some person of note.

Bannon has been publicly shunned by his former patrons, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, ever since he turned up in Michael Wolff’s book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” saying unflattering things about the first family. So Bannon found a new source in Miles Kwok (Guo Wengui), a fugitive Chinese billionaire, who is said to have created a $100 million fund for Bannon’s latest enterprise, Committee for the Present Danger: China, which Bannon leads with professional Islam-hater Frank Gaffney.

Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Institute chugs along without Bannon, still receiving millions from the Mercer Family Foundation. (In 2017 alone, the foundation granted GAI $1.7 million.) The non-profit appears to exist solely to support the work of Peter Schweizer, author of the book “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” from which the Uranium One narrative sprang. Last year, Schweizer re-emerged with a new tome, “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” which presents the right’s case against Biden, seeking to implicate the candidate in the business schemes of his son, who doubtlessly enjoyed opportunities granted him by virtue of his famous last name. (The Daily Beast reports that Schweizerapparently liftedsome passages for that book from a Wikipedia entry on Patrick Daley, son of the former Chicago mayor, Richard M. Daley.)

But just as Schweizer was never able to prove that Hillary Clinton had any involvement with the investment of a Russian energy firm in U.S. uranium stores, he has not proven any involvement by Biden in the business dealings of his son, Hunter, in either Ukraine or China.

In April, Bannon launched his new “committee” with an event at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. That same day, Biden was kicking off his presidential bid with an event in western Pennsylvania. Speaking at a podium in a ballroom dripping crystal chandeliers, Bannon said to his audience of right-wing hedge-fund operators and business people, “Joe Biden has to answer the question: What did you know, when did you know it, and how much money has your family, and you personally, taken from the most murderous regime of the 21st century?”

Which is a lot like that age-old example of an unfair question: When did you stop beating your wife?

Tags: Donald J. TrumpDonald TrumpFrank GaffneyGuo WenguiHunter BidenJoe BidenMiles KwokPeter SchweizerRebekah MercerRobert MercerSteve BannonImpeachmentCommittee for the Present Danger: ChinaGovernment Accountability InstituteMercer Family Foundation

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raw story

ref 4 digby

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/09/new-york-times-battered-on-msnbc-for-pushing-smear-of-hunter-biden-in-order-to-maintain-access-to-trump/

An “AM Joy” panel jumped all over the New York Times for pushing a widely debunked smear of Hunter Biden promoted by Donald Trump, saying the newspaper is more interested in maintaining their access to the Oval Office than debunking the lie.

Speaking with host Joy Reid — who noted that her producers asked for comment from the Times but were rebuffed — MSNBC regular Maria Teresa Kumar scorched the Times, as well as reporter Ken Vogel, for the uncritical parroting of the president’s smear.

Pointing to Vogel’s story and noting his source was a Breitbart writer, Kumar explained, “The biggest challenge, Ken Vogel does not declare the source , that Peter Schweizer,  is underwritten by the Mercer family — the Mercer family is a neo-facist family that underwrites Steve Bannon and the Breitbart Report so it is not credible.”

“What they had done so stealthily, so well, is that they know that if they can have any type of story in an established newspaper, as is the New York Times, that it any breeds a sense of legitimacy,” she continued. “Fox News takes it and Breitbart takes it, all the ultra-rightwings take it and say, ‘Look, the New York Times is saying it, so it must be true.’ That’s a lack of due diligence.”

“It’s disappointing in the New York Times, quite frankly,” she further explained. “When they try to equate something with Biden and Trump, they’re trying to make sure they continue having access to the president and that’s not the way to do it.”

With host Reid notingVogel’s desire to not appear on her show, AM Joy regular Eric Boehlert called the Times reporting, including previous stories about Democrats and Hillary Clinton, “Timidity access journalism.”

Watch

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// pod save 9/23/19

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/its-clinton-cash-all-over-again-as-the-media-blow-the-trump-whistleblower-story/

...no lnx

another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

We would praise the reporters who revealed the content of a whistle-blower’s complaint that the Trump regime has refused to turn over to Congress as the law requires. But it appears that the outlines of the story were already known in DC political circles. Two weeks before the whistleblower story broke, The Washington Post ran an editorial noting that Donald Trump was withholding $250 million in military aid to Ukraine, and that while “some suspect Mr. Trump is once again catering to Mr. Putin, who is dedicated to undermining Ukrainian democracy and independence,… the president has a second and more venal agenda: He is attempting to force [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelensky to intervene in the 2020 U.S. presidential election by launching an investigation of the leading Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.” The authors added, “Mr. Trump is not just soliciting Ukraine’s help with his presidential campaign; he is using U.S. military aid the country desperately needs in an attempt to extort it.”

But we’re conflicted about crediting WaPo’s editorial board for breaking that news. They, like so many neutral outlets this week, described the goal of Trump’s extortion as forcing Ukraine to “launch an investigation” of Biden. That is flatly false, as there is no serious allegation of wrongdoing against the former Vice President. So Trump didn’t press Zelensky to investigate Biden–he used the power of his office to extort the newly elected Ukrainian leader to fabricate a controversy about a domestic political opponent.

Every headline suggesting that Trump (or Rudy Giuliani) simply pressed for an “investigation” adds credence to Trump’s defense.

This is not the first time the press has assisted Trump in his effort to smear Biden. In May, The New York Times helped mainstream Trump’s baseless allegation in a story titled, “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies.” Although the piece acknowledged that Biden’s effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to oust former prosecutor Viktor Shokin was based on the view of the entire US government that Shokin had consistently turned a blind eye to corruption within Ukraine’s elites, and that Shokin had “long [been] a target of criticism from other Western nations and international lenders,” it nonetheless insinuated that something was amiss because Biden’s son, Hunter, had been connected to a firm that Shokin may have been investigating.

The story was widely panned for being misleading. CNN noted that “it wasn’t until the 19th paragraph that The Times noted that there was no evidence to support the claim that Biden intentionally tried to aide his son by working to oust the prosecutor. Bloomberg also reported on May 16 that the Ukrainian prosecutor general said he had no evidence of misconduct against Biden.”

The piece was co-authored by Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel. One month later, Mendel took a job as Volodymyr Zelensky’s spokesperson. Vogel remains with The Times.

Here’s @kenvogel of the New York Times saying on MSNBC that he views Joe Biden son’s work in Ukraine as “a significant liability for Joe Biden.”

“There is a story here,” Vogel adds, saying “we’re going to continue to, sort of, pull that back.” (I’m sure Trump is very grateful!) pic.twitter.com/HSl90pk6Zn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 20, 2019

It’s hard not to see echoes of how The New York Times—followed by CNN and The Washington Post—helped move the Uranium One nontroversy from the fever swamps of the right into the mainstream political dialogue in 2015. That contrived scandal, like this one, had absolutely no basis in fact. It had been pushed relentless by conservative outlets for months without getting much traction, until former Breitbart editor-at-large Peter Schweizer snookered The Times into laundering the allegations in a now-infamous piece titled, “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal.” After that, every ostensibly neutral outlet ran with it, and although the story was easily and repeatedly debunked, it, along with EmailGhazi, became the basis for Trump’s claims that Hillary Clinton was hopelessly corrupt and should be locked up. (Peter Schweizer, having failed so far to get traction with a different Biden “scandal” having to do with China, is now pushing hard on the Biden-Ukraine story.)

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619 funny wihnow the other day

(poster of mercer at LA? movie gig px

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/inoculation-as-a-form-of-propaganda

np lnx

Inoculation as a form of propaganda

written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly June 12, 2019

Meeting charges with countercharges brings a disease into the body politic that's a prophylactic against accountability.

With so much focus on Fox News providing a propaganda platform for Donald Trump, national news outlets haven’t been paying as much attention to theSinclair Broadcasting Group — which has been trying to take over local broadcast news.

It is worth remembering that a 2018 report from Emory University found that “when Sinclair buys a local station, its news program begin to cover more national and less local politics, the coverage becomes more conservative, and viewership actually falls — suggesting that the rightward tilt isn’t enacted as a strategy to win more viewers but as part of a persuasion effort.” In other words, Sinclair has become the local right-wing propaganda network.

True to form, Eric Bolling’s show on Sinclair recently featured an interview with Peter Schweizer. You might remember him as Steve Bannon’s partnerwho authored the book Clinton Cash, which was weaponized by the Trump campaign in 2016. More recently, Schweizer wrote Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends. His discussion with Bolling represents a form of propaganda we’re seeing quite often these days.

“The problem is the corruption is being globalized,” Schweizer said. “What that means is thatforeign governments and foreign oligarchs are looking to recruit the family members of politiciansbecause they believe by striking commercial bargains with them—helping politician families become rich—that they’re going to get favorable treatment.”[CHAO MCCONNELL?!]

“And Joe Biden has been a major recipient of that kind of largesse from them,” Schweizer added.

As he did with Clinton Cash, Schweizer backs up his allegations of corruption with inferences and innuendo, but zero actual evidence. What struck me most was the fact that stories about “globalized corruption” in the form of allegations about countries like Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia have been rampant when it comes to Donald Trump and his family. As a matter of fact, this story broke at about the same time as Schweizer’s interview.

A real estate company part-owned by Jared Kushner has received $90m in foreign funding from an opaque offshore vehicle since he entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump.

Investment has flowed from overseas to the company, Cadre, while Kushner works as an international envoy for the US, according to corporate filings and interviews. The money came through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven that guarantees corporate secrecy.

Kushner, who is married to Trump’s elder daughter Ivanka, kept a stake in Cadre after joining the administration, while selling other assets. His holding is now valued at up to $50m, according to his financial disclosure documents.

When right-winger’s like Schweizer level these kind of charges about the Bidens, they are obviously forms of hypocrisy and projection. But it’s also a type of propaganda that we could call “inoculation,” because they introduce the disease into the body politic as a prophylactic against accountability. To mitigate charges of corruption against Trump and his family, similar charges are leveled against their opponents. As we’re seeing now with Attorney General William Barr’s investigation of the investigators, that ultimately leads to charges being met with countercharges in an attempt to confuse the public and ward off accountability.

The reason that kind of propaganda works for Republicans is because low-information voters — spurred by a media obsessed with bothsiderism — tend to respond by saying “they all do it,” which promotes cynicism and a disengagement from the political process. As Barack Obama once wrote:

A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.

As with all forms of propaganda, this one is not easy to combat. But the first step is to recognize what’s going on. From there, taking personal responsibility for staying grounded in facts and evidence, no matter where they lead, is the only possible antidote.

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House hearing to shine spotlight on Clinton Foundation

Posted By -NO AUTHOR- On 11/22/2018 @ 3:45 pm In APP Frontpage,Politics,U.S. | No Comments

Hillary Clinton at the American Federation of Teachers Union on July 13, 2018 (Video screenshot)

As they prepare to hand over the leadership of committees to the Democrats, House Republicans will hold a hearing into the Justice Department’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., told Hill.TV on Wednesday that U.S. Attorney John Huber, who has been working with the DOJ and the FBI on the the probe, will testify before the House Oversight Committee Dec. 5,the Daily Caller reported.

Meadows said Huber was tasked in part with investigating possible “improper activity” by the Clinton Foundation.

The allegations center on “pay for play” donations to the charity while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

Critics, including investigative journalistPeter Schweizer, have presented evidence Clintons exchanged political favors for donations and pushed favorable policies to receive donations.

The New York Times reported Trump told his White House counsel earlier this year he wanted the DOJ to prosecute Clinton.

In March, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided a special prosecutor was not needed to investigate Hillary Clinton regarding allegations the sale of Uranium One to a Russian state-owned company while she was secretary of state was related to donations made to the Clinton Foundation.

Sessions said Huber also was reviewing the allegations of Republican lawmakers that the FBI used the unsubstantiated anti-Trump dossier to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016.

Meadows said in a Twitter message at the time that Sessions’ decision not to appoint a special counsel was “disappointing.”

“So the Obama DOJ can open a legally questionable investigation into the Trump campaign — allegedly based on a campaign volunteer mouthing off at a London bar — but this DOJ can’t appoint a second special counsel after all the troubling documents we’ve seen? Disappointing,” he wrote.

Schweizer, the author of “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” was the first to report nine foreign investors in the Uranium One deal gave $145 million to the Clinton Foundation. The New York Times confirmed in an April 2015 story Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. The Times found that the Clintons, however, did not publicly disclose the contributions, despite an agreement Hillary Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors.

In addition, Bill Clinton received a $500,000 speaking fee from a Russian bank tied to the Kremlin in 2010, when Hillary Clinton opposed sanctions on Moscow. She reversed her position the following year.

Article printed from WND: http://www.wnd.com

URL to article: http://www.wnd.com/2018/11/house-hearing-to-shine-spotlight-on-clinton-foundation/

11/18 where are they now/ pension plan checkin premature apparently:

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==

fox tucker c

PETER FRANZ SCHWEIZER, AMERICAN INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST, NOVELIST, AUTHOR, POLITICAL CONSULTANT, THE CREEPY LINE PRODUCER: It's what Google and Facebook are doing on regular basis by suppressing stories like steering us towards other stories rather than the stories we're actually seeking.

ROBERT EPSTEIN, SENIOR RESEARCH PSYCHOLOGIST, AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY: It will always favor one online music service over another and one candidate over another.

Google crosses the creepy line every day.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Peter Schweizer is one of the people behind this new documentary. It's called Creepy - The Creepy Line, and it premiered this week. He joins us on set. Peter, thank you very much--

SCHWEIZER: Great to be here.

CARLSON: --for coming on. So, why should we care what Google, a private company, is doing?

SCHWEIZER: Because they have an amazing amount of influence on the consumption of information and news in this country. 80 to 90 percent of searches are done through Google.

And Google not only collects information on us, which threatens our privacy, but they use that information to manipulate us, to steer us in directions we don't want to go. It's affecting the voting that's taking place in this country. And some people are arguing it's determining the outcome of elections.

CARLSON: Well, so, how could you have a meaningful democracy where the people rule in the face of corporate power this concentrated?

SCHWEIZER: Well, look, the ma - mantra has always been you've got to have an informed electorate, right?

CARLSON: Right.

SCHWEIZER: The electorate needs to--

CARLSON: Exactly.

SCHWEIZER: --know what's going on.

Well, the problem is, if you have voters, who are not high information voters, but they - they want to vote, and they're going to go to Google to guide them in the week before an election, and those results are skewed.

And there's overwhelming academic evidence that they manipulate search results. You're going to have an electorate that is strongly influenced by the result. That undermines democracy.

The fundamental problem is - is that people don't recognize that. They don't understand they're being manipulated. And unless something is done about it, the future of the Republic is - is under threat.

CARLSON: Yes. You can't have a democracy under those circumstances.

SCHWEIZER: Yes.

CARLSON: But just to back up, you said there's overwhelming academic evidence that Google--

SCHWEIZER: Yes.

CARLSON: --manipulates its search results. They deny that.

SCHWEIZER: Yes. They do. And here's the interesting thing, Tucker. They've denied this before.

You remember 10 years ago or so, Yelp and some of these other companies, TripAdvisors were accusing Google of manipulating the algorithm to suppress them in search results and who push Google-related companies. And Google said, "Absolutely not. These results are organic."

We now know the Federal Trade Commission, the European Union, and Academics at Harvard said, "That's wrong. You were manipulating the algorithm."

Their defense now is the same when it comes to political speech. The problem is that there's been numerous peer-reviewed studies done by Robert Epstein and others that clearly demonstrates they are suppressing news stories.

And, in fact, in the 2016 election, they found in all 10 search results from one through 10, Google was suppressing negative stories about Hillary Clinton and pushing positive stories about and - and - and pushing negative stories about Donald Trump.

This, by a researcher, by the way, who was a Hillary Clinton supporter, not a Trump supporter.

CARLSON: This seems like the story of the century.

SCHWEIZER: Yes. Huge story. Huge story. And overlooked, because it's confusing, it's difficult to understand, and it's happening behind the curtain. It's the Wizard of Oz behind the iron curtain. We were used to thinking about, you know, Dan Rather, media bias.

He makes a snarky comment. He makes a comment about George Bush. That's visible for everyone to see. This kind of bias is hidden. We don't know what we don't know, and that's what makes it so frightening.

CARLSON: It's a remarkable story and a remarkable documentary. Thank you, Peter Schweizer. I appreciate it.

==

2018 book

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/22/this-time-peter-schweizer-went-too-far-even-for-the-new-york-times/

at a moment when the current President of the United States is up to his eyeballs in scandals related to sex, his finances and a possible conspiracy with Russians to influence the 2016 election—not to mention his obvious mental unfitness for office—it is nothing short of absurd that right-winger Peter Schweizer is out with a book about political corruption that ignores all of that.

Let’s remind ourselves of Schweizer’s most recent history. He co-founded the Government Accountability Institute with Steve Bannon and financing from Robert Mercer. His last book, Clinton Cash, was weaponized (with a huge assist from the New York Times) to lay the foundation for Trump’s “crooked Hillary” meme and the media’s obsession with the Clinton Foundation.

On the cover of Schweizers latest book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, we see the faces of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Mitch McConnell and Jared Kushner. During a recent interview with Sean Hannity, Schweizer claims that the inclusion of Kushner was more of a warning than an allegation of corruption. But it is worth noting that Schweitzer’s partner, Steve Bannon, has been pretty open about the fact that he considers the president’s son-in-law to be an enemy, along with Majority Leader McConnell.

The attacks on Biden and Kerry are apparently based on Schweizer’s assertion that, while in their roles as Vice President and Secretary of State, they went easy on China and their sons benefited in their business dealings as a result. Once again, he’s playing the “merchant of doubt” with no actual evidence of corruption. All he has is a factless assertion that these two politicians gave China a break and that their sons were rewarded.

Right-wingers are positively salivating over the inclusion of Barack Obama in all of this. Take a look at how the writers at Investor’s Business Daily open their report.

Former President Obama and his political supporters have repeatedly stated that his administration was scandal-free, unlike administrations before and after. “We’re probably the first administration in modern history that hasn’t had a major scandal in the White House,” Obama himself said…

But now comes Peter Schweizer’s new book, “Secret Empires: How Our Politicians Hide Corruption and Enrich Their Families and Friends,” which shows that the Obama administration and its cronies were up to their necks in questionable business deals and may even have intentionally distorted public policy to accommodate their own profit-making.

They are mad as hell that none of their pseudo-scandals—from Benghazi to Fast and Furious—ever materialized into anything other than fantasies in their fevered imaginations. But now…they’ve finally got something on Obama. He and his cronies may have even “intentionally distorted public policy to accommodate their own profit-making.” It’s just that somehow, over the course of eight years, we all missed what was going on and Schweizer has finally broken the code.

Katelyn Caralle, writing in the Washington Examiner, summarized how this supposedly worked.

The book, released Tuesday, said Obama and his administration would deem industries either destructive to the environment or exploitative for the financial and professional gain of his friends, including industries such as coal mining, offshore drilling, cash advance companies, and for-profit colleges.

In other words, Obama didn’t really have an issue with polluters contributing to climate change or the way that payday lenders and for-profit colleges ripped people off. What was behind his executive actions was really a scheme about lowering the value of those companies so that his friends could swoop in a make a quick buck off of them.

It’s hard to miss the projection going on here. When conservatives suggest that they support coal miners, it’s really about lining the pockets of people like Don Blankenship. When they promote tax cuts for the middle class, it turns out that they’re really boosting the shareholder profits of major corporations. Given that, you can see why they might not understand that someone like Barack Obama really cares about the crisis of climate change or how various businesses set out to exploit people of modest means. There must be nefarious motives—like the enrichment of his friends.

Peter Schweizer knows better. This is nothing short of an attempt to distract us all from how Donald Trump and Republicans continue to exploit the working people of this country for their own political and financial gain. He and his pal Steve Bannon assume that this will give fuel to the mainstream media’s love affair with both siderism.

So far, it’s not working. Schweizer’s book is literally lighting up right-wing news sites. But this time, even the New York Times doesn’t seem to be buying it. His claims are so absurd that perhaps people are finally beginning to see him for the propagandist he’s always been.

==

guard uk sez clinton cash early and critical moment that set up narrative crooked hillary?

injected escalator into mainstreaM PRESS

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/8/billionaire_gop_backer_robert_mercer_used

==

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Cash

Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich is a 2015 *New York Times* bestsellingbook by Peter Schweizer in which he investigates donations made to the Clinton Foundation by foreign entities, paid speeches made by Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the state of the Clintons' finances since leaving the White House in 2001. It was published by Broadside Books, a division of HarperCollins. Research for the book was conducted by the Government Accountability Institute,^[1] a conservative nonprofit investigative research organization founded by Peter Schweizer and Steve Bannon. It has been adapted into both a film and a graphic novel.

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Synopsis

The book argues that the Clinton family accepted lavish donations and speaking fees from foreign donors at times when the State Department was considering whether to award large contracts to groups and people affiliated with those donors.^[4] One of those donors include Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi.Clinton Cash is an investigation of the foreign benefactors of Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.^[2] It investigates alleged connections between Clinton Foundation donors and Hillary Clinton’s work at the State Department.^[3]

The book has eleven chapters. Some chapters focus on particular transactions or deals, such as the creation of UrAsia Energy and Uranium One in Kazakhstan, and the connection shareholders had and have to the Clintons. Other chapters focus on a broader set of relationships, particularly with regard to Bill Clinton’s paid speeches during the years Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, and whether those paying for his speeches had significant business before the State Department.^[4] Schweizer dubs the Clintons' blend of government service and private remuneration the “Clinton blur.” ^[5]

Publication

The New York Times, The Washington Post and Fox News were granted exclusive agreements with the book's author to pursue the story lines found in the book.^[6] The Times faced considerable criticism for this arrangement from both its readers and from other media outlets.^[6] The paper's own public editor, Margaret Sullivan, said the arrangement was "troubling" and lacked transparency.^[6] Salon wrote that Schweizer was not a responsible journalist and that the arrangement showed that right-wing forces were luring the mainstream press into giving attention to gossip and innuendo much as they had during various supposed Clinton controversies of the 1990s.^[7] In addition, Media Matters criticized these two newspapers for failing to report in a timely fashion on inaccuracies that had been discovered in the book.^[8]

Clinton campaign reaction

The day the book was published, Hillary Clinton's campaign set up a portal called "The Briefing" on its official website. The Briefing is designed to rebut the allegations made in Schweizer's book. Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, wrote: "The book has zero evidence to back up its outlandish claims... While we will not be consumed by these kinds of attacks, we will also not let them go unchallenged."^[9] Various spokespeople for Hillary and Bill Clinton disputed the book's allegations,^[10] e.g. concerning the charges that Clinton was paid for speeches by Irish billionaire Denis O'Brien of Digicel in exchange for help in securing telecommunications contracts in Haiti in 2010.^[11]

Commercial reception

Clinton Cash debuted at number two on the *New York Times* Best Seller list. In its first week it sold 31,000 copies and was also second on the Nielsen BookScan ranking for adult nonfiction.^[12] The book stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover non-fiction for five weeks.^[13]

A paperback edition of the book released in 2016 made the relevant Times best seller list as well.^[14] According to Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, the book sold approximately 200,000 copies, in hardcover and paperback as of July 2016.^[15]

Critical reaction and actions taken

Writing for The Washington Post, academic and political activist (and brief 2016 U.S. Democratic presidential primary opponent of Hillary Clinton) Lawrence Lessig wrote "On any fair reading, the pattern of behavior that Schweizer has charged is corruption."^[16] James Freeman reviewed the book for The Wall Street Journal, writing that "Almost every page of the fascinating Clinton Cash... will be excruciating reading for partisans on both sides of the aisle".^[17]

Ed Pilkington, writing for The Guardian, reported that it was factually correct that "large donations to the foundation from the chairman of Uranium One, Ian Telfer, at around the time of the Russian purchase of the company and while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, were never disclosed to the public. The multimillion dollar sums were channeled through a subsidiary of the Clinton Foundation, CGSCI, which did not reveal its individual donors."^[18] Following publication and in reaction to areas where it said improvements were warranted, the Clinton Foundation said it would put into place some new procedures for better financial reporting and that it would limit some kinds of foreign donations. Pilkington assessed those claims made by the Clinton Foundation as unlikely to put the matter to rest: "But with Bill refusing doggedly to give up his speaker engagements – “I gotta pay our bills” – and foreign corporations and super-rich individuals still able to donate to the family charity, it looks like this controversy may run and run."^[18]

Pilkington also described the book as "an unrestrained attack on the former president and first lady." Pilkington notes that several of the claims in the book have been proven factually false. According to Pilkington, Schweizer does not prove corruption on the part of the Clintons, but "one of his main contentions – that the former president’s rates skyrocketed after his wife became secretary of state – is correct... pointing to several glaring conflicts of interest."^[18]

Several weeks after the book's initial publication, HarperCollins and the author made several corrections to the Kindle edition of the book. Schweizer corrected "seven or eight" passages that were revealed to be inaccurate after the book was released.^[3] FactCheck.org found Schweizer's assertion that Clinton, as Secretary of State, could have stopped Russia from buying a company with extensive uranium mining operations in the U.S. to be false.^[19] PolitiFact found the assertion that Clinton changed her views on a nuclear deal with India in response to donations to her family's foundation to be false.^[20]

Film adaptation

In May 2016, a film adaptation of the book, funded by co-founder of Government Accountability Institute and Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen Bannon (CEO of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016), was screened at the Cannes Film Festival.^[21][22]

*Time* magazine reported that conservatives were not the intended audience for the film adaptation of the book: "Environmentalists. Anti-nuke activists. Gay-rights advocates. Good-government folks. They’re all going to find themselves increasingly uncomfortable over claims that the likely Democratic nominee, in the film’s words, takes cash from the “darkest, worst corners of the world.”^[23]

The film's U.S. premiere was scheduled for July 24, 2016 in Philadelphia (prior to the 2016 Democratic National Convention there) and the film had a limited release in four other major U.S. cities in early August.^[21][22]The release has not gained enough attention from professional reviewers to gain scores on either the Rotten Tomatoes or MetaCritic websites. On that same day, Breitbart News uploaded the film onto .^[24]

Graphic novel adaptation

A graphic novel adaptation of the book, written by Chuck Dixon and illustrated by Brett R. Smith, was released by Regnery Publishing on August 8, 2016.^[25][26]

In late summer 2016 this graphic adaptation placed itself atop the Times best seller list for the Hardcover Graphic format.^[27]

See also

• Government Accountability Institute
• Clinton Foundation–State Department controversy

References

1. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved 2017-02-05.
2. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Becker, Jo; McIntire, Mike (April 23, 2015). "Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal". The New York Times. Retrieved 28 August 2015.
3. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Cash#cite_ref-politico_3-1) Karni, Annie (May 14, 2015). ":{':(style="padding-left:0.2em"):}:Clinton Cash' publisher corrects '7 or 8' inaccurate passages". Politico. Retrieved 28 August 2015.
4. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Cash#cite_ref-Newsweek0501_4-1) Wofford, Taylor (May 1, 2015). "Everything You Need to Know About 'Clinton Cash:{':(style="padding-right:0.2em"):}:". Newsweek. Retrieved 28 August 2015.
5. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Green, Joshua; Epstein, Jennifer (April 25, 2015). "Author Alleges Bill Clinton Just Quit Education Company Because of 'Clinton Cash:{':(style="padding-right:0.2em"):}:". Bloomberg. Retrieved 28 August 2015.
6. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Cash#cite_ref-public_6-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Cash#cite_ref-public_6-2) Sullivan, Margaret (April 23, 2015). "An ‘Exclusive’ Arrangement on a Clinton Book, and Many Questions". The New York Times. Retrieved 28 August 2015.
7. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "The right’s new Clinton obsession just went mainstream: How a sketchy Hillary “exposé” hooked the New York Times". Salon. April 21, 2015.
8. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/05/01/after-forming-clinton-cash-exclusives-ny-times/203492
9. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Haberman, Maggie. "Clinton Team Bolsters Its Defense Ahead of Negative Book’s Release", The New York Times, May 4, 2015. Accessed: May 6, 2015.
10. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Stanton, John (April 28, 2015). "Spokesman Disputes Book: Bill Clinton Not Paid For Series Of Speeches". buzzfeed.com. Retrieved 1 April 2016.
11. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ ":{':(style="padding-left:0.2em"):}:Spokesman Disputes Book: Bill Clinton Not Paid For Series Of Speeches". buzzfeed.com. April 28, 2015.
12. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Milliot, Jim (2015-05-15). ":{':(style="padding-left:0.2em"):}:Clinton Cash,' 'Selfish' Hit the List". Publishersweekly.com. Retrieved 2016-09-11.
13. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Paul, Pamela (21 June 2015). "Hardcover Nonfiction Books - Best Sellers - June 21, 2015 - The New York Times". The New York Times Book Review. The New York Times Company. Retrieved 7 October2016. 5 WEEKS ON THE LIST: CLINTON CASH by Peter Schweizer. Harper/HarperCollins. An examination of donations made to the Clinton Foundation by foreign entities.
14. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2016-06-14. Retrieved 2016-06-14.
15. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Hillary and Bill Clinton's Story of Money-Grubbing and Sleaze". 21 July 2016.
16. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Lessig, Lawrence (May 8, 2015). "Democrats embrace the logic of 'Citizens United:{':(style="padding-right:0.2em"):}:". The Washington Post. Retrieved 28 August 2015.
17. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Freeman, James (May 6, 2015). "There’s Money to Be Made". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 28 August 2015.
18. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Cash#cite_ref-guardian_18-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Cash#cite_ref-guardian_18-2) Pilkington, Ed (May 5, 2015). "Clinton Cash: errors dog Bill and Hillary exposé – but is there any 'there' there?". The Guardian. Retrieved 28 August 2015.
19. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Kiely, Eugene (April 28, 2015). ":{':(style="padding-left:0.2em"):}:No ‘Veto Power’ for Clinton on Uranium Deal". FactCheck.org. Retrieved 1 April 2016.
20. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Carroll, Lauren (May 6, 2015). ":{':(style="padding-left:0.2em"):}:Clinton Cash' author: Hillary Clinton changed positions on India nuclear deal". PunditFact. Tampa Bay Times. Retrieved 1 April 2016.
21. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Cash#cite_ref-GreenFilm_21-1) Joshua Green, 'Clinton Cash' Has Been Made Into a Movie, Bloomberg Politics (April 28, 2016).
22. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Cash#cite_ref-GuardianFilmAdaptation_22-1) Clinton Cash film aims to cause likely Democratic nominee maximum damage, The Guardian (May 12, 2016).
23. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Elliott, Philip (12 May 2016). "Clinton Cash: A Scathing Film Aimed at Persuading Liberals". TIME.com. New York: Time Magazine. Retrieved 7 October 2016.
24. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Hudson, Jerome (25 July 2016). ":{':(style="padding-left:0.2em"):}:Clinton Cash’ Movie Surpasses 500,000 Views in 48 Hours". Retrieved 25 July 2016.
25. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Harper, Jennifer (24 July 2016). "Bill and Hillary: The graphic novel". The Washington Times. Retrieved 5 August 2016.
26. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ ISBN 978-1-62157-545-0
27. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ [[1]](https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/hardcover-graphic-books/?_r=0)^{[dead link]}

Categories: 

• 2015 non-fiction books
• American graphic novels
• American political books
• Books about Bill Clinton
• Books about foreign relations of the United States
• Books about Hillary Clinton
• Books about politics of the United States
• Books adapted into films
• English-language books
• HarperCollins books
• Hillary Clinton controversies

mirror/ cover for collusion?

In an Oct. 19 story for Breitbart, Stone said Podesta’s business ties to Russia were the motivation for the tweet.

nb wsj art'l on podesta ussr is peter sweitzer

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-podesta-and-the-russians-1477262565

==

http://mediamatters.org/tags/peter-schweizer

no link img

Echoing Trump, Fox Casts Doubt On FBI's Probe Into Clinton's Emails

Research ››› November 7, 2016 11:18 AM EST ››› JULIE ALDERMAN

Fox News personalities are echoing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign, which claimed that the FBI would not have been able to “review 650,000 emails in eight days” to cast doubt on the bureau’s probe into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. However, experts point out that the FBI is able to do so using technology such as “automated search and filtering tools.”

The FBI Was Basing A Potential Clinton Foundation Case On This Garbage Right-Wing Book

Blog ››› November 2, 2016 10:01 AM EDT ››› MATT GERTZ

The FBI was reportedly trying to build an investigation into the Clinton Foundation around claims made in a right-wing book riddled with errors written by a Republican activist with a history of bogus reporting. The author’s organization is headed by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign chief executive and is funded by one of Trump’s top campaign supporters.

The FBI in August was considering whether to expand investigations into both Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s “secretive business dealings in Ukraine”and Democratic presidential nominee “Hillary Clinton’s relationships with donors to her family foundation,” but, following longstanding precedent, decided not to proceed for fear of impacting the election, according to The New York Times. The paper further reported that the Clinton Foundation inquiry “had not developed much evidence and was based mostly on information that had surfaced in news stories and the book ‘Clinton Cash,’ according to several law enforcement officials briefed on the case.”

Clinton Cash: The Untold Story Of How And Why Foreign Governments And Businesses Helped Make Bill And Hillary Rich is a 2015 book authored by Peter Schweizer, a Republican activist and consultant who has worked for Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, and Breitbart News.

Schweizer has a disreputable history of reporting marked by errors and retractions, with numerous reporters excoriating him for facts that "do not check out," sources that "do not exist," and a basic failure to practice "Journalism 101." Clinton Cash is similarly a trainwreck of bogus research that included more than 20 errors, fabrications, and distortions, according to a Media Matters review. On the campaign trail, Trump has pushed conspiracy theories from the book, leading reporters to note that the book has been “discredited” and features “lies” and claims that “fell apart under scrutiny.”

Schweizer is also the president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), a right-wing group that purports to investigate “government corruption.” Stephen Bannon, who is taking a leave of absence from his role as chief executive of Breitbart News to serve the same role with the Trump campaign, is also the executive chairman and co-founder of GAI. The group has been heavily funded by the Mercer Family Foundation, which is run by Rebekah Mercer.

Mercer’s father, the hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer, is one of the nation’s largest Republican donors and a major investor in Breitbart News, and the father and daughter were reportedly key to Bannon’s ascension to a leading role in the Trump campaign. Robert Mercer has also donated millions to a pro-Trump super PAC that Rebekah Mercer controls.

UPDATE: Schweizer disclosed during an August Fox News appearance that "earlier this year at [the FBI's] request," he had met with "two people from the bureau to talk about some things related to the Clinton Foundation, specifically things that were in Clinton Cash." From the August 24 edition of The O'Reilly Factor:

Mike Pence Runs With Conservative Media Lie About Clinton Foundation’s Charitable Spending

Blog ››› October 4, 2016 11:59 PM EDT ››› ERIC HANANOK

Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence ran with the lie that the Clinton Foundation has only devoted 10 percent of its funds to charitable causes. Pence’s figure, which has been frequently used by conservative media figures throughout the campaign, is wildly inaccurate: fact-checkers have concluded that the charity devotes 80-90 percent of money to charitable causes, and charity watchdogs have given the foundation high ratings.

During the October 4 debate, Pence claimed twice that “less than 10 cents on the dollar in the Clinton Foundation has gone to charitable causes.” Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine responded, “90 percent.” Debate moderator Elaine Quijano did not respond to the exchange.

Pence’s statistic is false.

PolitiFact wrote that the “Clinton Foundation spends between 80-90 percent on program services, which experts say is the standard in the industry to define charitable works. It spends the majority of its money directly on projects rather than through third-party grants.”

FactCheck.org similarly found that the claim that the Clinton Foundation only spends a small portion of its money on charitable works is “simply wrong.” It wrote that “One independent philanthropy watchdog did an analysis of Clinton Foundation funding and concluded that about 89 percent of its funding went to charity.”

Pence’s 10 percent statistic was popularized by author Peter Schweizer, who wrote the error-riddled book Clinton Cash. Trump and his campaign have repeatedly touted Schweizer’s work.

Claims that the Clinton Foundation gave a small percentage of its funds to charitable works have been echoed throughout the conservative media. For instance:

Rush Limbaugh claimed that "85 percent of every dollar donated to the Clinton Foundation ended up either with the Clintons or with their staff to pay for travel, salaries, and benefits. Fifteen cents of every dollar actually went to some charitable beneficiary."

Fox Business host Gerri Willis claimed only 6 percent of the foundation's 2013 revenue "went to help people."

Fox News co-host Eric Bolling said that "only 10 cents on the dollar went to charitable uses, causes."

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said of the Clinton Foundation: “It is not a charitable foundation. No charitable foundation has only 10 percent that goes to a charity.”

Further undermining Pence’s claims, two leading foundation watchdogs -- Charity Navigator and CharityWatch -- have given the Clinton Foundation high marks.

CharityWatch President Daniel Borochoff told CNN of the Clinton Foundation: “They have good governance and accountability. They have great financial efficiency. They have valuable, important programs that help a lot of people in the world. Pull the politics out. Regardless of what you think about Hillary, the Clinton Foundation is an excellent charity.”

Clinton-Obsessed Judicial Watch Hosts Discredited Conspiracy Theorists To Push New Misinformation

Research ››› September 22, 2016 7:37 PM EDT ››› BOBBY LEWIs

Conservative anti-Clinton group Judicial Watch announced a “special panel presentation” promising a “scandal update” on the Clinton Foundation and the emails of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Judicial Watch, itself a hub for baseless smears against the Clintons, invited to the panel two discredited Clinton conspiracy theorists known for making claims based on “bogus” data.

Days After Breitbart Exec. Becomes Head Of His Campaign, Trump Calls For Clinton Foundation Special Prosecutor

Trump’s Call For Special Prosecutor Premised On Baseless Lies Promoted By Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon...

conspiracy theorists known for making claims based on “bogus” data.

Days After Breitbart Exec. Becomes Head Of His Campaign, Trump Calls For Clinton Foundation Special Prosecutor

Trump’s Call For Special Prosecutor Premised On Baseless Lies Promoted By Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon

Blog ››› August 22, 2016 10:05 PM EDT ››› TYLER CHERRY

Donald Trump called for a special prosecutor to conduct an “expedited investigation” into the Clinton Foundation, just days after former Breitbart News chairman Stephen Bannon was named chief executive of Trump’s campaign. Bannon helped spread the baseless smears hyped in the discredited Clinton Cash book that Trump is now lifting his attacks from.

Trump said during an August 22 campaign rally that “an expedited investigation by a Special Prosecutor” into the Clinton Foundation -- specifically into claims of “coordination between the pay-for-play State Department and the corrupt Clinton Foundation” -- is required because the FBI and Department of Justice “certainly cannot be trusted to quickly or impartially investigate Hillary Clinton’s crimes.”

Trump’s demand for a special prosecutor comes less than a week after Trump hired former Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen Bannon as the campaign’s chief executive. Bannon -- who ran Breitbart as a propaganda arm of the Trump campaign -- has long led a smear campaign against Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation with discredited and false attacks.

After Breitbart editor-at-large Peter Schweizer wrote the error-filled Clinton Cash -- which made a series of baseless allegations of corruption and quid pro quo by the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton -- Bannon wrote and produced the accompanying documentary film. Bannon is also the executive chairman and co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute, which Schweizer is president of.

Among the discredited attacks that Trump has adopted from Bannon and Schweizer’s smear campaign include claims that Clinton “signed off” on a Russian uranium deal that led to “millions of dollars in donations” to the Clinton Foundation. That conspiracy has been widely discredited, and Schweizer himself admitted he had no "direct evidence" proving Clinton intervened on the issue.

Trump also echoed Bannon and Schweizer’s evidence-free claim that an Iranian telecommunications company escaped sanctions from Clinton while secretary of state because it paid Bill Clinton for a speech.

It is no surprise that Trump is infusing Bannon’s shoddy anti-Clinton attacks with his own campaign, given the close-knit relationship Trump has had with Breitbart during his campaign.

Hannity Hosts Discredited Anti-Clinton Shills Dinesh D'Souza And Peter SchweizerFollowing First Night Of DNC

Video ››› July 26, 2016 12:39 AM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

GOP Lawmakers Latch Onto Fox’s Unsubstantiated Claims About A Clinton Foundation Investigation

Research ››› July 19, 2016 6:58 PM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

GOP lawmakers reportedly circulated a letter requesting several federal agencies investigate the Clinton Foundation, parroting “unresolved media reports” to allege that the nonprofit was a “lawless ‘pay to play’ enterprise.” This latest move echoes months of unsubstantiated assertions from Fox News that the foundation was already under investigation for supposed abuses during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

Hannity Says Clinton Cash Book "Was Never Debunked," One Day After His Fox Colleague Debunked It

Video ››› June 23, 2016 5:36 PM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

O'Reilly: "Fox News Cannot Confirm The Data" Behind Discredited Book Trump Used To Smear Hillary Clinton

Video ››› June 22, 2016 8:27 PM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

Reporters React To Trump’s Clinton Cash Citations By Noting "Widely Discredited" Book's Factual Problems

Research ››› June 22, 2016 4:43 PM EDT ››› ERIC HANANOKI

Donald Trump forwarded conspiracies from the book Clinton Cash during his June 22 speech attacking Hillary Clinton. Numerous reporters correctly noted that the book suffers from serious factual problems; as CNN analyst David Gergen noted, “that book has been basically discredited.”

The Discredited Books At The Heart Of Trump's Speech

Research ››› June 22, 2016 1:04 PM EDT ››› ERIC HANANOKI

Donald Trump cited claims from two discredited anti-Clinton books -- Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash and Gary Byrne’s Crisis of Character -- in his June 22 speech attacking Hillary Clinton. Clinton Cash is filled with errors and sloppy research, while Crisis of Character has been strongly denounced by Secret Service veterans as implausible.

On Smerconish, David Brock Says Major Media Outlets Concluded “There’s No There, There” From Clinton Cash

Video ››› June 12, 2016 9:48 AM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

Peter Schweizer Teams Up With Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones To Promote Clinton Cash Movie

Video ››› June 3, 2016 4:28 PM EDT ›››

Fox Hosts Author Of Error-Filled Book Clinton Cash To Recycle Debunked Smears About Hillary Clinton

Video ››› May 23, 2016 10:30 AM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

The Breitbart Team Turned An Anti-Clinton Smear Book Into A Terrible Documentary

Blog ››› May 13, 2016 5:17 PM EDT ››› JOE STRUPP

The upcoming anti-Clinton documentary Clinton Cash largely rehashes the shoddily-researched conspiracies from the 2015 book on which it’s based.

Media Matters attended a screening of the film Thursday in New York City ahead of its release. Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer and Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon – who co-wrote and co-produced the film -- were on hand to promote it to an audience that included Fox News personalities Bill Hemmer and Brian Kilmeade.

When the book -- which largely pushes the evidence-free claim that while serving as secretary of state, Clinton did favors for foreign entities that donated to the Clinton Foundation -- was published last year, Schweizer, a Republican activist with a history of factual problems, was criticized by Media Matters and other outlets for a series of sloppy errors. Some of the errors were later corrected in the Kindle version of the book.

Clinton Cash also heavily relied on innuendo in the absence of solid proof for its central allegation that the Clintons have traded favors for money. As Slate writer Jamelle Bouie put it, “Peter Schweizer’s attack on the Clintons leads with his conclusions and never connects the dots.”

The film has many of the same factual problems. For example, a key accusation lobbed at the Clinton Foundation in the film in order to undermine the idea that it does important charitable work is the claim that only “10 percent” of its donations actually go to charity.

Schweizer repeatedly relied on this talking point while on the Clinton Cash book tour last year, claiming that other than the 10 percent the Clinton Foundation gives to “other charitable organizations, the rest they keep for themselves.”

But the “10 percent” statistic is deceptive -- even Fox News labeled it “incredibly misleading.” Network correspondent Eric Shawn explained in a report last year that the Clinton Foundation doesn’t “give grants to other charities. They do most of it themselves." He also cited IRS figures indicating the foundation has a "rate of spending of about 80 percent" and "experts for charity say that's very good.”

The film uses big headlines and grainy news clips to paint the Clintons as being in the pocket of anyone who pays for a speech or donates to the Clinton Foundation, but still fails to connect the dots with substantial evidence.

“You have money coming at certain times and then you have policy decisions that are made that affect the people that sent the money, then people are left to the question: is this all coincidence or is this a case of follow the money,” Schweizer told Media Matters after the screening. “I just don’t believe it’s coincidence.”

The film doesn't feature interviews with sources or people with direct knowledge of the events that Clinton Cash claims prove a quid pro quo arrangement.

“That was intentional,” Schweizer said about the missing outside voices. “We simply wanted to narrate the stories as they came through and explain to people how it rolled out. We didn’t want it to be talking head.”

Following the screening, Bannon said the film is going to premiere at the Cannes Film Festivalon Monday, and that the producers are “in discussions with people approaching us to get this out before the [Democratic] convention.” DID IT? RECEPTION?

Bannon added, “We may cut a TV deal with a broadcast or a cable network like Yahoo or Netflix, we are in discussion with people to get this out to a broader audience.” He later joked, “We’re open for bids right after this.”

He said the movie “cost a couple million bucks” to make, but did not elaborate on the funding sources.

Schweizer claimed the documentary is not designed to just throw “red meat” out to a conservative audience, instead suggesting the filmmakers are trying to dissuade people outside the Republican party from supporting Hillary Clinton.

“This is really designed to appeal to people in general, who may not know much about how the Clintons have operated,” Schweizer said. ”You can have a business model that says ‘let’s throw red meat out there that make a lot of money,’ or you can create a documentary film that’s designed to inform people who may not necessarily agree with your point of view and get that information out.”

When Bannon was asked by an audience member about the reaction to the book, he turned defensive, claiming the mainstream media was ignoring the findings. He also criticized the Democratic primary debate panelists for not raising any of the issues in the debates.

“12 to 14 debates, 35 to 40 hours of prime time debates, not one question about anything in this film,” Bannon said. “That’s an indictment on the mainstream media and that’s an indictment of everybody who had a debate.”

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has recently indicated that he plans to use the claims from Clinton Cash in a likely general election matchup with Clinton. In an interview with Breitbart News this week – where Schweizer also serves as senior editor-at-large – Trump called the Clinton Cash book “amazing” and said he is sure the movie “will be good” because of Bannon’s involvement.

Breitbart News has faced widespread criticism over the past year for its Trump cheerleading. Last year, Buzzfeed reporter McKay Coppins reported that “many” people inside Breitbart “believe Trump has provided undisclosed financial backing to the outlet in exchange for glowing coverage.” (Bannon called the allegation “a lie.”)

After the screening, Schweizer said Trump and his campaign had “zero” involvement with the film, and said that because of his role as president of the non-profit Government Accountability Institute, “we are not allowed to do that.”

When asked what he thought of the reaction the book got and if he was disappointed with all of the criticism, Schweizer said, “I think we got good media coverage. Some people in your organization have disagreements on some of these matters, the interpretations."

Media Matters’ fact check of Schweizer’s book can be read here.

==

http://216.92.66.74/index.php/Test_nik  not officil?

State Department Approval of Uranium One Deal

In April 2015, the New York Times ran a controversial story linking Clinton Foundation donations to a controversial mining deal. The Times reported that from 2009 to 2013, the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, acquired Uranium One, a Canadian uranium company which gave the Russians control of one fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Because the deal involved acquisition of uranium in the United States, a strategic asset, a number of US government agencies had to approve of the deal, including the State Department during the tenure of Secretary Hillary Clinton. An April 23, 2015 New York Times’ investigation showed that during this period, several Uranium One executives and employees, including the chairman Ian Telfer, made numerous donations to the Clinton Foundation totaling several million dollars. ^[24]

The Times reporting stirred controversy also because a primary source was Peter Schweizer, a right-wing political operative.The Times did disclose in the article that: "Some of the connections between Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation were unearthed by Peter Schweizer, a former fellow at the right-leaning Hoover Institution and author of the forthcoming book ‘Clinton Cash.’ Mr. Schweizer provided a preview of material in the book to The Times, which scrutinized his information and built upon it with its own reporting." But this did not satisfy critics who wrote to the Times ombudsman asking for further disclosure. ^[25]

The story also reported that before the Rosatom acquisition, Bill Clinton had helped Frank Guistra acquire large stakes in uranium mines located in Kazakhstan. Guistra had also been a large Clinton Foundation donor, giving a total of $31.1 million. Uranium One later acquired Guistra’s stakes in the Kazakhstan mines. ^[24] [26]

The State Department denied that the donations had anything to do with approval for the Rosatom acquisition of Uranium One. Foreign investment transactions which involve strategic assets must be approved by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), of which the State Department is one member along with several other agencies. Jose Hernandez, the official who was the State Department’s representative on CFIUS at the time, told Time magazine that Clinton did not participate in the evaluation of this deal, stating “Secretary Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter.” ^[27] Additionally, Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, exclaimed “to suggest the State Department, under then-Secretary Clinton, exerted undue influence in the U.S. government’s review of the sale of Uranium One is utterly baseless.” ^[24]

Further complicating the matter for the Clintons is the fact that they failed to properly disclose the donations to their foundation. $2.35 million donated by Telfer was not publically disclosed, despite an agreement Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. ^[28] The incident caused Clinton to admit “mistakes” in accounting and promise greater openness and transparency regarding foreign donors. ^[29]

==

Rebranding Steve Bannon: Inside the PR Campaign to Rehab Trump Adviser’s Image

How a cagey publicist is trying to fight the bad press about the president-elect’s new chief adviser

Tim Molloy | November 16, 2016 @ 3:23 PM

If you see any stories in the next few days about how Steve Bannon was a great boss at Breitbart News and excelled during his time in the U.S. Navy, you’ll know that publicist Maria Sliwa is thriving in her job.

On Sunday, Trump named Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart and CEO of his presidential campaign, as his chief adviser. Since then, Bannon has gotten lots of bad press, some of it accusing him of racism, sexism and anti-Semitism.  (A New York Times news story said critics see him as a “voice of racism.” An opinion piece in the Washington Post called him a “dead lizard wrapped in the Confederate flag.”)

So someone decided to take the initiative and get Bannon some good PR. The question is who.

On Wednesday, Sliwa sent out two emails to reporters offering interviews with two men available to talk about Bannon: U.S. Navy Seal (Ret.) Carl Higbie, and Breitbart Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein.

But Sliwa insisted on Wednesday that she isn’t working for Bannon.

Also Read:

Steve Bannon Illegally Paid Via Movie Company, Watchdog Group Says

“I’m not working for Bannon,” she told TheWrap in a brief interview. “I have a client who is.”

In two brief talks with a Wrap reporter, Sliwa wouldn’t say who actually hired her. When the reporter noted that she has worked for Breitbart in the past (see press release, below) she replied, “Oh God, please no,” and hung up.

She also asked why it was necessary to ask about the publicist behind a story.

The answer, in this case, is that it illustrates how people push Bannon’s agenda in ways that leave no sign of his involvement.

Also Read:

Cory Booker Blasts Trump Appointment Steve Bannon: He 'Won't Build Bridges, He Will Burn Them'

It is not unusual for prominent people to hire publicists, or to seek positive stories. But it is unusual for publicists to refuse to say who they work for. (The Public Relations Society of America’s code of ethics says publicists should “reveal the sponsors for causes and interests represented.”)

Higbie and Klein were only part of the effort to rebrand Bannon in a more positive light. The Huffington Post noted that Trump spokesman Jason Miller cast Bannon on Wednesday as someone who has “embraced diversity.”

Sliwa’s emails to reporters on Wednesday were not the first time she has been involved in advancing Bannon’s agenda. She has promoted the work of a group Bannon helped establish in 2012, a nonprofit called the Government Accountability Institute. According to Bloomberg, it “partners with mainstream media outlets conservatives typically despise to disseminate those findings to the broadest audience.”

Also Read:

Even Glenn Beck Is Terrified of Steve Bannon's Alt-Right Movement (Video)

Sliwa also helped promote “Clinton Cash: A Graphic Novel,” based on the book “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” (The press release is below.) The New York Times cited some of the book’s findings in an April 2015 story.

The book was written by GAI president Peter Schweitzer. Bannon became GAI’s founding chairman in 2012, Bloomberg reports. Schweizer’s e-book, “Bush Bucks: How Public Service and Corporations Helped Make Jeb Rich,” was published during the Republican primaries.

Both books cast an unfavorable light on political rivals of Trump’s as he sought to win the Republican nomination and then the presidency.

Sliwa’s bio notes that she is the president of Freedom Now Communications, Inc. and M. Sliwa Public Relations, as well as the press agent for the Sudan Campaign, and has “played a major role in publicizing the genocide, slavery and rape of civilians in Sudan and Darfur.” It says she is also part of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University and a former New York City undercover police officer. And she is the sister of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.

Also Read:

How Steve Bannon Made a Fortune Off of 'Seinfeld'

Sliwa’s press release about Higbie on Wednesday quotes him saying that Bannon “has excelled in every single role he has held dating back to his service in the US Navy. I cannot imagine a better person to be advising an already successful businessman taking on the biggest business in the world, the US Government.”

On Wednesday night, hours after this story was initially published, Higbie got into a PR crisis of his own: Fox News’ Megyn Kelly gave him an on-air scolding after he said that the Japanese internment camps of World War II helped establish a precent for a national registry of Muslims.

Here are screen grabs of the two press releases from Sliwa:

clinton graphic novel

==

==

ktm

Chapter 9 No Good Deed Goes Unpunished p. 178

Clinton fdn: laura B, colin powell and murdoch have attended events; chris ruddy newsmax gave 7 figs (million?) 181

HC made deal when SoS that she cd recuse from matters that involve CFdn

fdn discloses all names, even tho does not have to

algeria gave 1/2 mill for haiti earthquake, but HC tough on them after

peter schweizer clinton cash bk: HC did favor for (foreign?) funders

long history of error eg accused dem sen of inside trading 188 publ by harpercollins , murdoch

NYT did fluff/hype on book v(worth 1 mil$?), had an exclusive deal (tho Fox also did?) mention gov't accountability Initiative but did not say gop oppo. proved nothing, fell back on just asking question 198 chronology off; on russia uranium BC fdn disclosed/ but cda affil could not cda law? 199 but fox still does 1 hr special; NYT stood by peter s; Romney claimed HC bribed on the basis. 201

NYT is best place to spread disinfo bc of its (no longer deserved if it ever was, paper of record and all cf chomsky?]

in 90's NYT Gerth got whitewater going

later cnn analysis found 19 errors of fact ) 192

2 yrs later Tyson story belated correction

late 90'd Wen Ho Lee alamos story blockbuster but petered out/discounted but not before another GOP attack 193

Safire (nixon) ~ David Halberstam

==

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/04/23/abc-news-finds-more-errors-in-schweizers-clinto/203390

ABC Newsreported that it "uncovered errors" in Peter Schweizer's upcoming anti-Clinton book, Clinton Cash.Schweizer has a long history of sloppy research and reporting -- earlier this week, ThinkProgress revealedthat the conservative author cites a hoax press release in the book.

On April 23, ABC News explained that their independent review of the source material used for Clinton Cash"uncovered errors in the book, including an instance where paid and unpaid speaking appearances were conflated." The book purports to reveal connections between Hillary Clinton's time as secretary of state, donations to the Clinton Foundation, and paid speeches given by the Clintons, but Schweizer reportedly admitsin the book he cannot prove his allegations.

According to ABC, Schweizer "said the errors would be corrected." The book is due for release on May 5; it is unclear whether the errors will be corrected before the first publication.

Media Mattersidentified ten previous instances in which Schweizer made serious factual errors, issued retractions, or relied on questionable sourcing.

INDEX:

Serial Misinformer Peter Schweizer Is Releasing A New Anti-Clinton Book

Schweizer Is A Republican Activist And Consultant

Schweizer Retracted "Incorrect" Report About Sen. Whitehouse

*USA Today* Corrected Schweizer's False Reporting About Gore

*Wash. Post*: Schweizer's Group Launched "Bogus" Attack On Obama's Security Briefings

"A Fatal Shortcoming In Journalism 101": Reporters Debunked Schweizer's Obama-Sebelius Reporting

Fact Checker: Schweizer Couldn't Back Up Energy Reporting When Called Out For Errors

Fact Checker On Schweizer's Reporting About Pelosi: "The Facts Don't Fit Schweizer's Claim"

*Seattle Times*: Schweizer Flubbed Reporting About Rep. McDermott

Investigation: Schweizer's Facts "Do Not Check Out," And Sources "Do Not Exist"

Veteran Journalist Found Schweizer Book Practiced "Neither Journalism Nor History"

Schweizer "Tacitly Conced[ed] He Was Wrong" About Al Franken's Hiring Of Minorities

Serial Misinformer Peter Schweizer Is Releasing A New Anti-Clinton Book

Peter Schweizer Is Releasing Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. On May 5,HarperCollins Publishers will release Clinton Cash. A publisher's description claims of the book: "Meticulously researched and scrupulously sourced, filled with headline-making revelations, Clinton Cashraises serious questions of judgment, of possible indebtedness to an array of foreign interests, and ultimately, of fitness for high public office." HarperCollins is owned by NewsCorp, which is headed by Rupert Murdoch :{and is the sister company of Fox News parent 21st Century Fox. HarperCollins.com, accessed :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[4/9/15:{]}:

Potential Clinton Opponent Rand Paul Is Touting Clinton Cash And Suggested He Has Access ToTheBook.During a CNN interview, Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul touted Clinton Cash as supposedly revealing "unseemly" and "troubling revelations." Paul said he's "aware of a book that will be coming out in the next couple weeks that will make" accusations about Clinton, but he's not "at liberty to say" more. Paul added that he could not "prove the veracity" of the book's claims, but "there should be a lot of questions asked" about Clinton based on the book's reporting. CNN, *The Situation Room*, [4/8/15]

NY Times: "Conservative 'Super PACs' Plan To Seize On 'Clinton Cash.'" In an April 19 article previewing Clinton Cash, the New York Timesreported that "its contents have already made their way into several of the Republican presidential candidates' campaigns," and that conservative super PACs are planning to "seize on" the book:

Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which includes Mr. Paul and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, have been briefed on the book's findings, and its contents have already made their way into several of the Republican presidential candidates' campaigns.

Conservative "super PACs" plan to seize on "Clinton Cash," and a pro-Democrat super PAC has already assembled a dossier on Mr. Schweizer, a speechwriting consultant to former President George W. Bush and a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution who has contributed to the conservative website Breitbart.com, to make the case that he has a bias against Mrs. Clinton. *New York Times,*[4/19/15]

Cause For Concern: 10 Incidents Of Significant Errors, Retractions, Or Questionable Sourcing By Schweizer. Reporters and fact checkers have excoriated Schweizer for massive factual problems over the years. A Media Mattersanalysis found at least 10 separate incidents in which the media called out Schweizer for botching his reporting.

The following is how reporters have described Schweizer's work: "Incorrect," "inaccurate," "bogus," "a fatal shortcoming in Journalism 101," "the facts didn't stand up," "unfair and inaccurate," "specious argument," "there was nothing there," "suspicious," "the facts don't fit," facts "do not check out," sources "do not exist or cannot be tracked down," "confusion and contradiction," "discrepancies," "admitted a mistake," "neither journalism nor history," "a polemic so unchecked ... that we can't tell the fact from the fiction," sources "have clearly used him," and "tacitly conced[ed] he was wrong."

Schweizer Is A Republican Activist And Consultant

Schweizer Worked For The Bush White House As A Speechwriting Consultant From 2008-2009.PeterSchweizer.com, accessed [3/26/15]

Sarah Palin Hired Schweizer To Advise Her On Foreign Policy.:{ Schweizer received $106,250 from Palin's Sarah PAC in 2011-2012, according to Federal Election Commission records. :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*New York Times*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[5/25/11:{; FEC.gov, accessed }:3/27/15:{] }:

Schweizer Helped Write Bobby Jindal's Autobiography. Jindal wrote on the acknowledgements page of his 2010 book that Schweizer was "crucial to this book." Jindal is a potential Clinton opponent as he is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination. *Times-Picayune*, [2/17/10; Leadership and Crisis, 2010;Politico, 3/24/15]

Schweizer Has Worked For Breitbart.com And The Conservative Hoover Institution.Breitbart.com states that Schweizer is a Breitbart News senior editor-at-large. He "was the William J. Casey Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution." *Media Matters*, [11/13/11; Breitbart.com, 3/20/15; Hoover.org, accessed 4/9/15]

Schweizer Heads The Government Accountability Institute (GAI), A "Free Markets" Organization.Guidestar.org, accessed [3/26/15]

Schweizer Heads Oval Office Writers LLC With Former Bush Aide Marc Thiessen.The firm states it helps prepare speechwriting, keynotes, congressional testimony, and fundraising help, among other services. OvalOfficeWriters.com, accessed [4/10/15; accessed 4/10/15]

Schweizer Headlined Republican Party Fundraisers.According to event notices, Schweizer headlined 2012 Republican fundraisers for the Wakulla Republican Committee in Florida and the Republicans of Hoboken in New Jersey. WakullaCountyChamber.com, accessed [3/25/15; The Jersey Journal, 3/28/12]

Schweizer Regularly Speaks To Conservative Groups And Conferences. He has spoken to conservative groups and conferences such as the Charles Koch Institute, the 2012 National Conservative Student Conference, 2015 Conservative Leadership Conference, and Young America's Foundation's 2011 West Coast Leadership Conference. YouTube,[; CSPAN, 8/3/12; Sched.org, accessed 3/26/15; YAF.org, 11/3/11]

Schweizer Was A Contributor To A Glenn Beck Book.Schweizer is listed as a contributor to former Fox News host Glenn Beck's book Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth and Treasure (Threshold Editions, October 2010). Amazon.com, accessed [3/26/15]

Schweizer's Books Attack Liberal Ideology.His books include Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked The Global Economy --And How They Will Do It Again If No One Stops Them; Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic And Envious, Whine Less...And Even Hug Their Children More Than Liberals;and Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy. Amazon.com, accessed [3/26/15]

Schweizer Donated To Republican Adam Hasner's 2012 U.S. Senate Campaign. FEC.gov, accessed [3/26/15]

Schweizer Retracted "Incorrect" Report About Sen. Whitehouse

Schweizer SuggestedSen.Whitehouse Committed Insider Trading. As The Providence Journal noted, Schweizer alleged in his 2011 book Throw Them All Out that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) benefited from a stock sale because of his position in the U.S. Senate:

Schweizer's overall case is that members of Congress enjoy deep access to valuable inside business information that they, unlike other citizens, can legally exploit for personal benefit, such as well-timed stock transactions.

One episode in the book concerns a large volume of stock sales made by legislators in mid-September 2008, just after a private session in which top executive branch officials briefed congressional leaders on details of the unfolding financial crisis. The book notes that Whitehouse sold holdings in a financial stock at that time. That trade came amid the senator's largest volume of trading for that year.

[...]

Schweizer's other brief mention of Whitehouse concerned a regulatory agency's announcement on May 15, 2007, that Medicare reimbursements would be curtailed for Amgen's highly profitable drug Aranesp. Schweizer writes correctly that Whitehouse sold between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of Amgen stock on May 9 and asks whether he "knew anything" about the adverse regulatory action to come a week later.

"We cannot be sure," Schweizer writes in part. "But the timing seems too good to be true" because Amgen stock prices fell quickly. *Providence Journal*, 11/19/11, via NewsLibrary.com; Google Books, accessed [3/30/15]

Journal: Schweizer's Reporting Was Wrong.The Journal noted numerous factual problems with Schweizer's allegations, including that Whitehouse wasn't a member of the committee in question at the time:

Whitehouse rebutted with three points. First, he said he didn't know about the trades because his financial adviser was empowered to make them unilaterally. Second, he wasn't present at the leadership meeting and he said he had no inside information to act on. Third, he suggested that defensive sales were the obvious strategy for a trader at that moment in 2008 because of such public crises as the fall of the Lehman Brothers securities firm.

[...]

But Schweizer writes incorrectly that Whitehouse sat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and hints that membership could have conferred access to information about the coming Medicare decision on Amgen's drug.

Whitehouse was not a member of the health committee in 2007, although he joined it later.

[...]

Schweizer's account omits many months of very public findings and questions on Aranesp and another Amgen anemia drug which, according to independent biotech industry analysts, might have prompted investors to sell shares in the company at any number of points. Contemporaneous stock tips, agency statements and news accounts seem to establish, moreover, that it would not have required insider information to surmise that adverse regulatory action on Amgen's products was possible, if not probable. [Providence Journal, 11/19/11, via NewsLibrary.com]

Schweizer Retracted His Allegation Against Whitehouse. The author was forced to retract his attack against Whitehouse:

Whitehouse was not a member of the health committee in 2007, although he joined it later. If Schweizer had realized that, he was asked in an interview, would he have included Whitehouse in this passage of his book?

"No, I probably would not have mentioned him," the author replied. Schweizer said he would correct the mistake. [Providence Journal, 11/19/11, via NewsLibrary.com]

USA TodayCorrected Schweizer's False Reporting About Gore

Schweizer Claimed Al Gore "Receives $20,000 A Year In Royalties"FromAZinc Mine.In an August 10, 2006, USA Today op-ed, Schweizer attacked Al Gore for "hypocrisy" and a lack of "credibility," writing: "Humanity might be 'sitting on a ticking time bomb,' but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River." *USA Today*, [8/10/06]

USA TodayCorrection: Schweizer's Reporting Was "Inaccurate." USA Today subsequently attached a correction to Schweizer's piece, writing: "Correction: In this column that appeared Aug. 10 on the Forum Page, writer Peter Schweizer inaccurately stated that former vice president Al Gore receives royalties from a zinc mine on his property in Tennessee despite his environmental advocacy. He no longer does, as the mine was closed in 2003." *USA Today*, [8/17/06]

Wash. Post: Schweizer's Group Launched "Bogus" Attack On Obama's Security Briefings

Schweizer's GAI Released Data Claiming Obama Skipped More Than Half Of His Presidential Daily Briefings.The Washington Post wrote in 2012 of research by Schweizer's Government Accountability Institute:

The notion that Obama has skipped his intelligence briefings was promoted by a right-leaning research group called the Government Accountability Institute, which published a report detailing that the president's daily calendar shows Obama receiving an in-person briefing on the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) 43.8 percent of his time in office. (The percentage dropped from a high of 48.8 percent in 2010 to 38.2 percent through May of 2012.) WashingtonPost.com, [9/24/12]

Wash. Post: GAI's Data Is "Bogus."The Washington Post's Fact Checker blog examined a political ad that used GAI's report and strongly criticized GAI's data, awarding the briefings claim "Three Pinocchios" and concluding:

Clearly, different presidents have structured their daily briefing from the CIA to fit their unique personal styles. Many did not have an oral briefing, while three -- two of whom are named Bush -- preferred to deal directly with a CIA official. Obama appears to have opted for a melding of the two approaches, in which he receives oral briefings, but not as frequently as his predecessor.

Ultimately, what matters is what a president does with the information he receives from the CIA. Republican critics may find fault with Obama's handling of foreign policy. But this attack ad turns a question of process -- how does the president handle his intelligence brief? -- into a misguided attack because Obama has chosen to receive his information in a different manner than his predecessor. WashingtonPost.com, [9/24/12]

Wash. Post: By This Standard, Reagan Missed 99 Percent Of His Briefings.The Post wrote: "As it turns out, no president does it the exact same way. Under the standards of this ad, Republican icon Ronald Reagan skipped his intelligence briefings 99 percent of the time." *Washington Post*, [9/24/12]

ABC News: The Report "Appears To Be More A Matter Of Semantics Than Hard Fact."ABC News wrote that the GAI report "appears to be more a matter of semantics than hard fact" and quoted White House officials stating that "Obama has never 'skipped' a Presidential Daily Briefing, aides say, even if an in-person briefing isn't listed on his schedule." ABCNews.com, [9/14/12]

"A Fatal Shortcoming In Journalism 101": Reporters Debunked Schweizer's Obama-Sebelius Reporting

Schweizer Claimed Obama AndHealth And Human Services SecretaryHad "Just One" Meeting Together In Three-And-A-Half Years.Schweizer wrote a Politico Magazine piece -- headlined, "When Barry Met Kathy: Almost never, it turns out" -- claiming his organization could only find one instance where the president and the former Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, met:

A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) analysis finds that from July 12, 2010, to Nov. 30, 2013, the president's public schedule records zero one-on-one meetings between Obama and Sebelius. Equally shocking, over the same period, the president's calendar lists 277 private meetings with his other Cabinet secretaries (excluding full Cabinet meetings).

Given these startling findings, and the fact that the White House calendar did not reflect meetings prior to July 12, 2010, GAI researchers then performed a second analysis using another respected recorder of presidential activity, the POLITICO presidential calendar. The results: Just one April 21, 2010 entry was found listing a White House meeting between Obama and Sebelius--and even that was a joint meeting with then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. *Politico Magazine*, [12/5/13]

TIMEFact Check: "The Problem? Sebelius And The President Did Meet-- A Lot." Reporter Kate Pickert documented problems with Schweizer's reporting:

The problem? Sebelius and the President did meet-- a lot. "She is frequently at the White House for meetings related to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, including dozens with the President in the last year alone," says Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for HHS. "In fact, she met with the President just yesterday."

The problem with Schweizer's analysis is his data set: Cabinet Secretaries who regularly come to the White House are not always recorded in the White House visitors log or listed on the president's public schedule. But Schweizer, a former foreign policy adviser to Sarah Palin and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, based the column on an analysis of the official presidential schedule and a presidential calendar published by Politico. Time.com, [12/6/13]

The Hill: "Sebelius Was In Frequent Contact With President Obama And Senior White House Aides."The Hill filed a Freedom of Information Act request and found:

The documents reveal that Sebelius met with or attended calls and events with Obama at least 18 times between Oct. 27, 2012, and Oct. 6, 2013, including at least seven instances in which the two were scheduled to discuss the new healthcare law, according to the secretary's draft schedules. *The Hill*, [2/13/14]

Washington Post's Wemple: Schweizer Story "Bears A Fatal Shortcoming In Journalism 101."Post opinion writer Erik Wemple wrote that Schweizer's "story bears a fatal shortcoming in Journalism 101. Judging from the text, Schweizer never approached the White House or HHS for comment on his research. The White House confirms that it was never asked about it, and HHS declined to comment." *Washington Post*, [12/9/13]

Presidential Records Expert Said Schweizer's Analysis Was Flawed. Towson University Professor Martha Joynt Kumar, who studies presidential records, told the Washington Post:

Martha Joynt Kumar offers a different perspective on things. She's the Towson University professor who spends her time poring over presidential records in a much-cited and ongoing effort to document the media's access to presidents going back to Ronald Reagan. If there's one thing Kumar knows, it's the comprehensiveness of advance presidential schedules. Or non-comprehensiveness. "Presidents have never released the full accounting of what a president was going to be doing that day," Kumar says. "There are a lot of meetings that wouldn't appear."

Advance public schedules for any given president, Kumar says, are commonly just a page in length; the diary of what actually happened that day may stretch to five pages. Such is the chasm between what's planned and what happens. It's in that space, HHS appears to be saying, that the president and Sebelius have matched wits in recent years. The retrospective diaries of actual presidential meetings generally aren't released until 12 years after a president leaves office, Kumar says. *Washington Post*, [12/9/13]

Fact Checker: Schweizer Couldn't Back Up Energy Reporting When Called Out For Errors

Schweizer Claimed 80 Percent Of A Department Of Energy Loan Program Went To Companies Run Or Owned By "Obama Financial Backers." Schweizer wrote that "In the 1705 government-backed loan program, for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers." *Throw Them All Out*, pg. [79-80, 2011, via *Media Matters*]

17 Of The 25 Companies That Schweizer Identifies Did Not Receive 1705 Loan Guarantees. Among several problems, Media Matters found that only 8 of the 25 "politically connected" companies Schweizer listed actually received loan guarantees through the 1705 program. *Media Matters*, [11/18/11]

Many Of The Alleged Obama Cronies Listed By Schweizer Also Supported Republicans. *Media Matters*, [11/18/11]

FactCheck.org: Schweizer's Reporting Suffers From Numerous "Problems."A February 2012 FactCheck.org article heavily criticized Schweizer's reporting, writing that his data had numerous "problems" and explaining that he couldn't back up his assertions when asked:

In checking Schweizer's $16.4 billion claim, we found it to be too high by nearly $6 billion. In his book, Schweizer lists 25 companies he says were headed by "Obama bundlers, large donors and supporters" who he said received a total of $16.4 billion in loan guarantees.

Schweizer says in his book that all of that came from the Department of Energy's 1705 program (which awarded stimulus dollars for renewable energy systems, electric power transmission systems and leading-edge biofuels projects). But by our count, only seven of the 25 companies on Schweizer's list got 1705 loan guarantees. And they totaled about $3.7 billion, not $16.4 billion.

We did find that some companies on Schweizer's list got aid from other federal clean-energy programs, but not enough to total $16.4 billion. For example, two firms got DOE loan guarantees through the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program. But those companies -- Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors -- secured less than $1 billion.

In all, the Department of Energy reported clean energy loans of only about $4.7 billion to firms on Schweizer's list. Some others on the list got loans or grants through other programs with the Department of Agriculture and Treasury Department.

There are other problems as well. Four of the companies on Schweizer's list received conditional commitments for loan guarantees but never ultimately got the money (either because they were unable to provide necessary documentation in time to meet application deadlines, or because they decided to seek private, commercial financing). Schweizer told us he included them because "that doesn't undermine the point that political connections helped at the federal level." That may be, but the ad claims the companies received the money, and they did not. Schweizer also claimed Summit Texas Clean Energy got $1.5 billion in federal aid, which isn't so. In fact, the Department of Energy provided the company $450 million in grants, for a $1.7 billion project financed mostly by industry. Together, those factors inflated Schweizer's figure by nearly $6 billion.

We asked Schweizer about the problems with his figures. He responded via email: "There are other companies besides those mentioned in the book that got money. It's not presented as a complete list." But he did not supply the "complete list" for us to validate. FactCheck.org, [2/9/12]

Fact Checker On Schweizer's Reporting About Pelosi: "The Facts Don't Fit Schweizer's Claim"

Schweizer Attacked Pelosi For Hiring Non-Union Labor For Work On Vineyard.In his book Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, Schweizer attacked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA):

Apparently, however, these fundamental rights do not apply to families that may be picking grapes in Pelosi's own vineyards. Congresswoman Pelosi and her husband own a vineyard in the Napa Valley, on Zinfandel Lane in St. Helena, worth almost $25 million. [Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, 2005]

ThePelosis Paid Workers Higher Wages Than Unions.San Francisco's ABC affiliate investigated Schweizer's research and found "the facts don't fit Schweizer's claim. For starters, the Pelosis pay more than union workers are paid in the same valley -- that from the pastor at St. Helena's Catholic Church, a well known advocate for farm workers who's involved in labor negotiations with the same labor manager the Pelosis use ... Of the more than 300 vineyards, fewer than four are union, and most of the farm workers in the Napa Valley get paid better." KGO, 11/28/06, via [Internet Archive]

KGO: If "Pelosi Wanted To Have Union Workers She Could Not Ask The Union For A Contract. It's Illegal."KGO reported that Schweizer's claim was bunk because Pelosi couldn't legally unionize her workers. When pressed about this detail, Schweizer dodged accountability:

But all of that aside, if Nancy Pelosi wanted to have union workers she could not ask the union for a contract. It's illegal and has been since 1975.

A spokesman for the United Farm Workers Union explains.

Marc Grossman, United Farm Workers Union: "It is patently illegal for any grower to even discuss a union contract, which is the only way you can supply union workers, without the workers first having voted in a state conducted secret ballot election."

I asked Peter Schweizer, the Hoover Research fellow, if he had researched those facts before he called Pelosi a hypocrite.

Peter Schweizer: "It's really for her to explain why there is this inconsistency. It's not my responsibility to go and find out how every single particular circumstance is handled on the Pelosi vineyard." KGO, 11/28/06, via [Internet Archive]

Seattle Times: Schweizer Flubbed Reporting About Rep. McDermott

Schweizer: McDermott Committed Insider Trading Related To Bioterrorism Bill.In his book Throw Them All Out, Schweizer wrote of Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA):

*Throw Them All Out*, [p. 22, 2011]

Seattle Times: Schweizer's Reporting Was Wrong. While Schweizer claimed that "With the passage of Project Bioshield, ID Biomedical would secure $8 million from Washington to develop a plague vaccine," then-Seattle Times reporter Kyung M. Song found that his reporting was wrong:

The book, by Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said McDermott "bet big" by buying 2,000 shares in ID Biomedical of Quebec for $10 apiece in June 2004. That was six weeks before the House of Representatives passed the $5.6 billion bill dubbed Project Bioshield.

It turns out, however, that an $8 million grant for ID Biomedical's Bothell subsidiary a grant that Schweizer said resulted from the legislation's passage actually was funded by a separate competition launched a year before by the National Institutes of Health.

And McDermott says he didn't pick the stock. Instead, he said, the purchase was initiated by his financial consultant at the time at Wells Fargo, Jane Suzick, and he merely gave consent.

"I never make suggestions about what to invest in and I don't suggest when to buy or sell anything. I just take advice from my financial consultant and approve what she suggests," McDermott said through his spokesman, Kinsey Kiriakos. "Alas, I'm no richer than I was years ago."

Suzick, now with Morgan Stanley Smith Barney's Seattle office, declined to comment.

[...]

Yet even if ID Biomedical were to have benefited directly from the passage of Project Bioshield, the fate of the legislation was no secret.

It passed the Senate unanimously, 99-0, on May 19, 2004, and the House approved it 414-2 on July 15, 2004. McDermott bought his shares two weeks after the Senate vote and six weeks before the House vote. *Seattle Times*, [12/10/11]

Former Seattle Times Reporter: Schweizer Lacks "Credibility" And His Reporting "Was Unfair And Inaccurate." Media Matters investigative reporter Joe Strupp spoke with Kyung M. Song, the Seattle Timesreporter who covered Schweizer's book. She told Media Mattersof Schweizer and his reporting: "I don't think he has much credibility as an author. I just felt that it didn't stand up, the facts didn't stand up. It was really sensational. It was unfair and inaccurate."

Song, who left the Times earlier this year after 15 years and now works as associate managing editor forAerospace America magazine, said Schweizer attacked McDermott unfairly.

"Clearly he was making a specious argument specifically with regard to McDermott," she said. "The allegation against Jim McDermott was that you had this congressman profiting from insider trading, but insider trading requires a position of privileged information, meaning non-public information and you act on that information to your advantage and that certainly wasn't the case with Jim McDermott."

She later added, "the allegation looked sensational, but when you got into the details, there was nothing there. He was clearly building a case against Jim McDermott and other people. He was trying to spin something with bits and pieces of information that didn't amount to anything really. I didn't think that he had a case and he spun it out of nothing." [Media Matters interview, 4/8/15]

Investigation: Schweizer's Facts "Do Not Check Out," And Sources "Do Not Exist"

Sunday TimesReporters Found Enormous Problems With Schweizer's Reporting;Schweizer Was Forced To Admit Severe Errors. Sunday Times (UK) reporters David Leppard and Nick Rufford investigated Schweizer's book Friendly Spies and concluded: "Facts that are checkable do not check out. Individuals credited for supplying information do not exist or cannot be tracked down. Requests to the author for help and clarification result in further confusion and contradiction."

The Sunday Times was trying to confirm Schweizer's reporting that, as the Times summarized, a "British Foreign Office diplomat, close to former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, had been recruited by the French secret service. During clandestine meetings at the plush Paris Sheraton, the diplomat had betrayed sensitive details of the UK's proposed negotiating position at European Community (EC) summits."

After questioning, Schweizer admitted some fault in his reporting and retracted one detail: "Through his publisher and an attorney, Schweizer has told us he now accepts that the original names and address he gave us for his sources were incorrect. He also admitted a mistake over the Sheraton hotel. But he says he did not fabricate the story."

The reporters documented how their "extensive efforts" to verify Schweizer's reporting "left us suspicious" in a nearly 2,000-word Washington Post piece on April 11, 1993. From the article, which is not available online:

It was a story we naturally wanted to report in our paper, so we went to great lengths to check it out. Yet our extensive efforts have left us suspicious. Facts that are checkable do not check out. Individuals credited for supplying information do not exist or cannot be tracked down. Requests to the author for help and clarification result in further confusion and contradiction.

[...]

Schweizer told the Sunday Times that two retired directors of the French foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, would confirm his story. He also provided the names of two French agents who he said were directly involved in the operation. He would not give us their telephone numbers but faxed us copies of letters he said he had sent them on our behalf, requesting that they cooperate with us. Last month two reporters from the Sunday Times' investigative unit flew to Paris to begin background inquiries.

Schweizer had assured the Sunday Times that Adm. Pierre Lacoste, a retired intelligence expert who was the DGSE's director from 1982 to 1985, knew of the French espionage story. But when we spoke to Lacoste, he insisted he knew nothing about the Sheraton hotel operation.

Sunday Times reporters showed Lacoste page 117 of Schweizer's book, where he states: "In [March] 1984, at the suggestion of President Mitterand [sic], DGSE director Pierre Lacoste issued an order to Service 7 to implement a program of intelligence collection within the European communities."

Lacoste recalled giving an interview to Schweizer in his Paris apartment. But he insisted that no such order had been received or issued, from Mitterrand or anyone else. He said that Service 7, the special operations directorate of the DGSE that Schweizer said had been told to carry out the order, did not exist in 1984.

Asked whether the DGSE had ever had a spy in the British Foreign Office, Lacoste replied, "During my term, definitely not."

Schweizer expressed surprise that Lacoste did not confirm his story.

Sunday Times reporters then met with Lacoste's predecessor, Pierre Marion, who lives in retirement in the village of La Celle-St-Cloud. This time we were acting on Schweizer's assurances that Marion had given him the names of the two DGSE agents who became sources for his book -- agents named Pascal Fasquelle and Francois Lorot.

Like Lacoste, Marion confirmed he had granted an interview to Schweizer. He was also frank about several sensitive intelligence operations not included in Schweizer's account. But the retired spymaster insisted he knew nothing of the Sheraton operation. Moreover, he categorically denied giving Schweizer the names Fasquelle or Lorot. He said he had never heard of Schweizer's two sources.

Why would Schweizer lead us to his sources if they could not confirm the story? Perhaps the French spy chiefs had told Schweizer too much and were now covering up. Or maybe Schweizer doubted that the Sunday Times would go to Paris to interview his sources. In search of an explanation, we began to hunt in earnest for Pascal Fasquelle, the retired DGSE agent who Schweizer insisted had handled the Sheraton espionage operation.

In a previous telephone conversation, Schweizer had declined to give Fasquelle's full address, saying only that he lived in Vanves, a seedy suburb in west Paris. So the newspaper employed a professional tracing agent while reporters checked the local electoral register and telephone directories. We spoke to local postmen to see if they had ever delivered mail to a Pascal Fasquelle. There was no trace.

In growing frustration, we rang Schweizer and told him we were beginning to wonder if Pascal Fasquelle existed. Schweizer assured us he did. To prove it, he described the apartment block in Rue Auguste Comte where he claimed he had visited Fasquelle at home. Schweizer would not give us the apartment number, he said, out of loyalty to his source.

Eventually, we found the shabby 12-story building on the outskirts of Vanves, but none of the many residents interviewed there had heard of Pascal Fasquelle. No Fasquelle was listed in the resident's directory. A concierge said she did not recognize the name.

However, a post box did show the name Pascal Lorot -- the same forename as Fasquelle and the same surname as the second DGSE agent Schweizer claimed was involved in the spying operation, Francois Lorot. Had Schweizer accidentally mixed up the two names?

In a telephone conversation later that day, Schweizer insisted he had not confused his two French agents. He expressed surprise that there was a Lorot living in Vanves and said he was sure there had been no mistake. "I know the address, I remember the area and I know the address checks out perfectly," he insisted, referring to a notebook.

Explaining the apparent coincidence that a Lorot lived at Fasquelle's address, Schweizer said: "Lorot is a common name in France." In fact, Lorot is a name from the Burgundy region and is almost unknown in Paris. No Lorots are listed in the Paris telephone directory.

Mystified, we remembered that in an earlier telephone conversation, Schweizer had told us that a Wall Street Journal reporter had also checked the French espionage story, interviewing the two DGSE sources. But now Schweizer could not recall the reporter's name. "It was something Jewish," he said.

The next day the Sunday Times visited Pascal Lorot at 18 Rue Auguste Comte. To our astonishment Lorot confirmed that he knew Schweizer very well.

But Lorot, who is 32, said he was not a retired DGSE agent. He is in fact an economist at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development in London, where he lives for part of the week. He told us Schweizer was an old friend he first met in 1985 during a seminar at George Mason University in Virginia. In fact, Lorot had invited Schweizer to stay at his Vanves apartment while the American was researching "Friendly Spies."

We explained the remarkable set of coincidences that had led us to Lorot's door. We also uncovered another coincidence. The letter Schweizer claims he sent to Pascal Fasquelle urging his cooperation with the Times ends: "Send my love to Katarine." The real Pascal Lorot had a wife called Catherine, pronounced "Katarine."

"This is terrible," the real Pascal Lorot told us. "I had trusted Peter as a friend. But I cannot understand this. I think my trust has been maybe misplaced."

Our doubts about Schweizer's French espionage story were heightened by further, smaller discrepancies, like his claim that the secret agents had met repeatedly at the Paris Sheraton. According to ITT-Sheraton in Boston, there was no Sheraton hotel in Paris between 1982 and 1992 -- in other words, during the entire time of the meetings described by Schweizer. But when we queried Schweizer for an explanation, his answer was tantalizingly incomplete. "They [Sheraton] didn't own anything?" he said. "That's very unusual."

Meanwhile, we contacted Jacques Delors, the president of the EC, about another detail in Schweizer's account: that Delors posed for a photo with the information-trading British diplomat shortly before the Brussels summit. Delors said through a spokesman that he had no recollection of posing with any British diplomat at that time. Further, Delors' office in Brussels pointed out that he has never had a private office in Paris, where Schweizer claims the photograph was taken.

We have been unable to talk directly to Schweizer since telling him we had found Pascal Lorot. Through his publisher and an attorney, Schweizer has told us he now accepts that the original names and address he gave us for his sources were incorrect. He also admitted a mistake over the Sheraton hotel. But he says he did not fabricate the story.

Since Schweizer is now unreachable -- Atlantic Monthly Press chairman Morgan Entrekin informs us he is holidaying in a camper somewhere in the Midwest -- the Sunday Times has enlisted the publisher's assistance in proving Schweizer's claims. We have asked to hear the taped interview with Lacoste, the DGSE chief, which Schweizer said he made. We have asked again for the name of the Wall Street Journal reporter who interviewed Schweizer's sources. We have asked Schweizer to call Pierre Marion and ask him to confirm on tape the names of the DGSE agents that Schweizer said Marion gave him. And of course we would be convinced if Schweizer could put us in touch with the two agents themselves. So far, none of that information has been forthcoming. [Washington Post, 4/11/93, via Nexis]

Veteran Journalist Found Schweizer Book Practiced "Neither Journalism Nor History"

LA TimesReview: Schweizer Book "Neither Journalism Nor History." The late veteran journalist Jonathan Kwitny documented numerous problems with Schweizer's book Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union in a 1994 Los Angeles Times review. Kwitny, who worked for PBS and The Wall Street Journal, wrote that Schweizer practiced "neither journalism nor history" and argued "he evidently doesn't believe in picking up a phone to check" his sources' assertions. From the review:

Considering that the 1980s saw the most dramatic shift in international politics of our lifetime, maybe of any decade in history, Schweizer had a unique opportunity to produce a journalistic and historical landmark. Sadly, this book is neither journalism nor history. Its many valuable revelations and insights have been spun into a polemic so unchecked and, for the reader, often un-checkable, that we can't tell the fact from the fiction.

The book yields no indication that Schweizer accepted his new data as leads and went back to where the action happened--Afghanistan, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Central Russia and elsewhere--to talk to the people involved. Such reporting might have humbled, at least a bit, his thesis. He says a handful of people in Washington by their mere resolve and willingness to work long hours and spend tax money unflinchingly were able to turn Communist success into the destruction of Communism around the world. He knows this because they told him.

[...]

Though Schweizer's source list includes some honorable men, some others have clearly used him to skewer their enemies and embellish their own spots in history. He includes occasional footnotes, but mostly doesn't say who told him what. And he evidently doesn't believe in picking up a phone to check their various assertions.

[...]

The point is that to judge what is right in these weighty and controversial matters, a reader needs from an author a candid accounting of the various possibilities. Readers are not well served by the unsupported boasts of former officials who would like to take credit for a famous victory, and certainly not by the unsubstantiated purported thoughts of long-dead CIA directors.

On the other hand, if Schweizer was much of a digger, maybe he wouldn't have been given all these interviews and documents in the first place. *Los Angeles Times*, [6/12/94; New York Times, 11/28/98]

Schweizer "Tacitly Conced[ed] He Was Wrong" About Al Franken's Hiring Of Minorities

Schweizer Claimed Al Franken Spurned Minority Hiring, Employing "Only One" Black Individual Out Of 112 People.In his 2005 book Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy,Schweizer accused Al Franken of a "lack of diversity among [his] own employees," claiming he had hired "only one" African-American throughout his career (emphasis original):

....much more

solyndra era: Last week found the right wing echo chamber, from Fox News to the New York Post, and the conservative blogosphere in an anti-green frenzy based on faux facts from a new book, Throw Them All Out. The author of this far-fetched screed is Peter Schweizer, Sarah Palin's foreign policy guru, currently employed by the Hoover Institution, a think tank funded largely by oil interests (e.g., Exxon, ARCO, Transamerica, and Richard Mellon Scaife's oil and banking fortune) to craft the philosophical underpinnings for unregulated pollution, unrestricted corporate profit taking, and massive corporate welfare for the carbon/nuke incumbents.

Peter Schweizer (born 1964) is a conservative author and a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Schweizer's book Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy received praise from conservative political pundits including Bill O'Reilly. Schweizer's book Reagan's War was the basis of the documentary film In the Face of Evil. The book recounts Ronald Reagan's multi-decade struggle against Communism and credits him with winning the Cold War.

Schweizer is the editor-in-chief of Bigpeace.com

In March 2009, Schweizer and Marc Thiessen opened Oval Office Writers LLC.^[1]

In March 2010, Schweizer joined the Research Advisory Council of the James Madison Institute.

On May 3, 2011, Schweizer was hired as a foreign policy adviser to former Republican Governor of Alaska and Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.^[2]

[edit] Works

• Architects of Ruin: How a Gang of Radical Activists and Liberal Politicians Destroyed Trillions of Dollars in Wealth in the Pursuit of Social Justice, 2009 (ISBN 0-061-95334-2)
• Makers and Takers: Why conservatives work harder, feel happier, have closer families, take fewer drugs, give more generously, value honesty more, are less materialistic and envious, whine less … and even hug their children more than liberals, 2008 (ISBN 0-385-51350-X)
• Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, 2005 (ISBN 0-385-51349-6)
• The Bushes : portrait of a dynasty, 2004, co-authored with Rochelle Schweizer (ISBN 0-385-49863-2)
• Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism, 2002 (ISBN 0-385-50471-3)
• Disney the Mouse Betrayed, 1998 (ISBN 0-89526-387-4)
• Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1994 (ISBN 0-87113-567-1)
• Friendly Spies: How America's Allies Are Using Economic Espionage to Steal Our Secrets, 1992 (ISBN 0-87113-497-7)

[edit] References

1. ^ Alexovich, Ariel; Klingebiel, Jacqueline (March 25, 2009). "Suite Talk March 25, 2009: Speechwriters Open New Outlet". The Politico.
2. ^ http://conservatives4palin.com/2011/05/sarahpac-hires-a-new-foreign-policy-adviser.html

[edit] External links

• Peter Schweizer official website
• BigPeace.com at Andrew Breitbart Websites
• Profile at the Hoover Institution
• Profile at the James Madison Institute
• Schweizer's Bio at Oval Office Writers LLC
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Peter Schweizer at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Peter Schweizer in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schweizer

solyndra st'l/book on crony capitalism http://thevictorychronicles.com/2011/11/12/how-obamas-alternative-energy-programs-became-green-graft/#.Tr7PXbN09sM.facebook

By Peter Schweizer

Correction: In this column that appeared Aug. 10 on the Forum Page, writer Peter Schweizer inaccurately stated that former vice president Al Gore receives royalties from a zinc mine on his property in Tennessee despite his environmental advocacy. He no longer does, as the mine was closed in 2003.

Al Gore has spoken: The world must embrace a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." To do otherwise, he says, will result in a cataclysmic catastrophe. "Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb," warns the website for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. "We have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin."

Graciously, Gore tells consumers how to change their lives to curb their carbon-gobbling ways: Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, use a clothesline, drive a hybrid, use renewable energy, dramatically cut back on consumption. Better still, responsible global citizens can follow Gore's example, because, as he readily points out in his speeches, he lives a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." But if Al Gore is the world's role model for ecology, the planet is doomed.

For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film's distributor, pays this.)

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.

Gore is not alone. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has said, "Global warming is happening, and it threatens our very existence." The DNC website applauds the fact that Gore has "tried to move people to act." Yet, astoundingly, Gore's persuasive powers have failed to convince his own party: The DNC has not signed up to pay an additional two pennies a kilowatt hour to go green. For that matter, neither has the Republican National Committee.

Maybe our very existence isn't threatened.

Gore has held these apocalyptic views about the environment for some time. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.

Living carbon-neutral apparently doesn't mean living oil-stock free. Nor does it necessarily mean giving up a mining royalty either.

Humanity might be "sitting on a ticking time bomb," but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River.

The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life? Giving up the zinc mine or one of his homes is not asking much, given that he wants the rest of us to radically change our lives.

Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author ofDo As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy.

Marc Thiessen

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marc A. Thiessen (born 1967) is an American author, columnist and political commentator, who served as a speechwriter for United States President George W. Bush(2004–2009) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2001–2004). He wrote the 2010 New York Times bestselling book, Courting Disaster, in which he argues that the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA, which the Obama administration has characterized as torture,^[1] are not torture by any reasonable legal or moral standard^[2] and "were not only effective, but lawful and morally just".^[3]

Thiessen's articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, USA Today and other publications. He has also appeared on Fox News, CNN, NPR, and other media outlets. In its January 11, 2010 issue, The Daily Telegraph named Thiessen number 97 of the "100 Most Influential Conservatives in America".

[edit] Personal life

Thiessen grew up in Upper East Side in Manhattan, where both his parents were "liberal Democrat" doctors.^[4] His mother grew up in Poland and fought as a teenager in the Warsaw Uprising, a military struggle in which his grandfather died.^[4]

Thiessen is a graduate of the Taft School (1985), a private prep school in Connecticut. He graduated from Vassar College (BA in 1989) and completed post-graduate studies at the Naval War College.

He lives in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife Pamela, who is currently the Staff Director of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, and their four children.^[5]

[edit] Career

Thiessen has worked in Washington for many years, starting with five years at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. He spent six years (1995–2001) on Capitol Hill as spokesman and senior policy advisor to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC).^[6] He joined the Bush administration as Chief Speechwriter for Donald Rumsfeld in 2001, then moved to Bush's speechwriting team in 2004.^[6] In February 2008, he became chief speechwriter when William McGurn resigned. ^[7]

In March 2009, Thiessen and Peter Schweizer opened Oval Office Writers LLC.^[8]

Thiessen is currently a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a columnist for The Washington Post, starting March 2010.

[edit] Book

Thiessen's first book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack (ISBN 1596986034), was published by Regnery Publishing in January 2010. The book is endorsed by the former Vice President Dick Cheney,^[9] former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,^[2] and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey.^[10][11] It reached the No. 9 spot on the New York Times Best Sellers list for hardcover nonfiction in February 2010.^[12]

Jane Mayer, author of *The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals*, a book which Thiessen says has fundamental errors of fact,^[13] heavily criticised Courting Disaster in a book review, claiming it is "based on a series of slipshod premises."^[14] In a long response, Thiessen defended the accuracy of his book and said Mayer's review contained many factual errors and omissions. For example, Mayer quoted the head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism branch in 2006 as saying that Thiessen's account of the Heathrow plot is "completely and utterly wrong";^[14] in reply Thiessen quoted a former senior CIA official as saying that the CIA liaises only with MI6 and MI5, so the Scotland Yard official "would have no way of knowing what intelligence the CIA shared with MI6 or MI5, much less the ultimate source of that intelligence". Thiessen added, "The week her article appeared in The New Yorker, former CIA director Mike Hayden handed it out in his class at George Mason University's School of Public Policy as an example of all that is wrong with intelligence journalism today."^[15] (Hayden had earlier written a positive review of Thiessen's book for The Daily Caller.^[16])

Matthew Alexander, a former military interrogator and author of How to Break a Terrorist, characterises Thiessen's book as 'a literary defense of war criminals'.^[17]

Thiessen's promotional tour for Courting Disaster included confrontational interviews with CNN's Christiane Amanpour and MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, and an interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, an uncut version of which was posted online.^[18]

[edit] References

1. ^ MSNBC Report of Obama speech describing techniques used at Guantanamo as torture MSNBC 1/9/2009; Stout, David, Holder Tells Senators Waterboarding is Torture New York Times January 15, 2009.
2. ^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Thiessen#cite_ref-Amazon_1-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Thiessen#cite_ref-Amazon_1-1) Courting Disaster, Amazon.com page.
3. ^ "Book details: Courting Disaster". Regnery.
4. ^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Thiessen#cite_ref-Taft2005_3-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Thiessen#cite_ref-Taft2005_3-1) "Heard But Not Seen" by Tom Frank, Taft School Bulletin, Summer 2005, pp22-25
5. ^ "Marc Thiessen Biography". MarcThiessen.com.
6. ^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Thiessen#cite_ref-OOW-MT_5-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Thiessen#cite_ref-OOW-MT_5-1) "Marc A. Thiessen". Oval Office Writers, LLC.
7. ^ "President Bush Thanks Bill McGurn, Announces Marc Thiessen as New Assistant to the President for Speechwriting". Press Release. George W. Bush White House. December 14, 2007.
8. ^ Alexovich, Ariel; Klingebiel, Jacqueline (March 25, 2009). "Suite Talk March 25, 2009: Speechwriters Open New Outlet". The Politico.
9. ^ Courting Disaster: One of the most important books of the year, by Michelle Malkin, January 18, 2010
10. ^ Ralph Peters, Michael Mukasey, Andy McCarthy, January 19, 2010.
11. ^ Marc Thiessen, Mukasey Calls Courting Disaster 'Absolutely Superb', National Review, January 20, 2010.
12. ^ Web page titled "Best Sellers / Hardcover Nonfiction", February 5, 2010, New York Times website, retrieved April 20, 2010
13. ^ Courting Disaster, chapter 2
14. ^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Thiessen#cite_ref-jmach_13-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Thiessen#cite_ref-jmach_13-1) Mayer, Jane (March 29, 2010). "A curious history of the C.I.A.". The New Yorker.
15. ^ Thiessen, Marc, "Jane Mayer's Disaster", National Review Online, April 14, 2010, retrieved April 20, 2010
16. ^ Hayden, Michael (February 15, 2010). "Former CIA Director Hayden: Thiessen's 'Courting Disaster' a must-read". Book Review. The Daily Caller. Retrieved April 20, 2010.
17. ^ Alexander, Matthew (February 27, 2010). "Courting Fear". Slate.
18. ^ http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-march-9-2010/exclusive---marc-thiessen-extended-interview-pt--1

[edit] External links

• Thiessen's personal website (also his website for Courting Disaster)
• Thiessen's blog
• Thiessen's op-eds for The Washington Post
• Thiessen's blog posts at The Washington Post's website