byron york wa exmr
see main wa examiner
defended ukraine platform change
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:{mma 5 24
accident day after hush money def implodes after fox pushed fail guy?
over a handful of hours on Tuesday, the right’s conspiracy theory ecosystem concocted a sinister plot by President Joe Biden to assassinate his predecessor out of the banal fact that FBI agents received standard instructions on the use of force before conducting a court-ordered search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in 2022.
Hundreds of pages of filings were unsealed on Tuesday in Trump’s classified documents case, revealing that the former president — who is charged with 40 federal criminal counts related to his alleged willful retention of documents after leaving the White House — had multiple documents marked “classified” in his bedroom that were discovered months after the 2022 search.
Credible outlets reviewed the documents and produced a wave of news stories detailing what a judge described as “strong evidence” of Trump’s allegedly criminal acts. Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA media supporters ginned up a counternarrative based on a credulous reading of a deceptive argument from Trump’s lawyers that was included in the unsealed documents.
The story that emerged from the right-wing media echo chamber posits that pro forma language provided to FBI agents before the 2022 search which stated that “law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary” was actually part of a Biden scheme to assassinate Trump. This is both a horrific accusation to make without evidence and facially absurd for any number of reasons. (Why would the Biden administration issue assassination orders in writing and then conduct the Mar-a-Lago search on a date specifically selected because Trump would be in New York instead?) But it spread quickly from its initiation by a key figure in the right’s January 6 disinformation community, through the ranks of MAGA influencers, to Trump himself, and then to the Fox News airwaves.
By Tuesday night, Trump’s campaign had issued a fundraising email in which the presumptive Republican presidential nominee alleged of the Biden administration, “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
The startlingly quick adoption of an unhinged conspiracy theory shows how the right-wing media apparatus operates, dreaming up convoluted but inflammatory nonsense and bombarding their audience with it. Here’s how it happened.
Right-wing fabulist turns standard FBI policy into “mind-blowing” story
The right-wing writer Julie Kelly, in a series of Tuesday afternoon posts on X (formerly Twitter), purported to reveal the “bombshells” she had uncovered by scouring the unsealed documents.
“Tons of new unsealed filings on classified docs case--I will try to post as much as I can (there goes the workout) but this is mind-blowing,” she posted at 1:21 p.m. ET. “FBI authorized the use of deadly force at Mar-a-Lago.”
She included a screenshot of a filing from Trump’s lawyers which stated that the FBI’s “Operations Order” for the Mar-a-Lago search “contained a ‘Policy Statement’ regarding ‘Use of Deadly Force,’ which stated, for example, ‘Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary.’”
Kelly went on to post the “Policy Statement” and claim that the instructions show that “the FBI risked the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests for a publicity stunt to make it look like Trump stole national security files.” She added, “People need to be arrested for this.”
In reality — and as more credible journalists pointed out — those instructions are standard for FBI searches.
“These are the rules that apply to FBI agents whenever they do anything,” Reuters reporter Brad Heath wrote in response to Kelly’s initial claim on X. He added, “Agents - like all cops - can use deadly force when met with a sufficiently serious threat. The policy the FBI followed here applies all the time; they are the same rules agents follow when walking down a sidewalk.”
“One clue that this is the generic DOJ use of force policy — not something cooked up for Mar-a-Lago, let alone ordered by the president — is that it talks about the use of warning shots in prison,” Heath noted in response to Kelly’s post with the “Policy Statement.”
The FBI would later issue a statement confirming that the bureau had “followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force.”
Kelly is among the foremost proponents of the right’s January 6 counternarrative. She has argued that the violent rioting at the U.S. Capitol by Trumpists who assaulted scores of law enforcement officers “was probably the biggest instance of police brutality that this country has seen since the Civil Rights movement,” described a police officer who testified before the January 6 select committee as a “crisis actor,” and suggested that the FBI fabricated the pipe bombs discovered at the Republican and Democratic national headquarters that day because it is “an enforcement arm, a surveillance arm of the Democratic Party.” And her interpretation of the filings made no sense and was quickly debunked.
None of that slowed down the ranks of MAGA influencers, who quickly seized on her story.
MAGA influencers run with “assassination” nonsense
Within minutes, influential figures in the MAGA movement adopted Kelly’s interpretation and effectively began competing for the most overwrought response as they furiously posted on X. Many alleged that the document showed a Biden-directed assassination plot against Trump.
“The FBI authorized the use of **deadly force** when they raided Mar-a-Lago,” Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk commented. “You read that right. They were authorized to kill Trump employees, possibly even assassinate Trump himself, to exact their political revenge.”
“The FBI authorized the use of deadly force when they raided Mar-a-Lago?” wrote podcaster and former One America News host Liz Wheeler. “Were they hoping to assassinate Trump or his family or employees? This is insane.”
“So that was the real reason for the FBI raiding a president’s home: an excuse to use deadly force against Donald Trump,” offered The Federalist’s Sean Davis. “The court case was just plan B for the corrupt DOJ and FBI.” He added, “The FBI is a domestic terrorist organization.”
Trump ally Laura Loomer similarly argued that the document shows “a possible assassination attempt of President Trump by the Biden regime and FBI!”
Trump and the GOP lie that this shows Biden is “A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY”
Trump and his campaign are very attuned to the nonsense his online supporters generate, and within hours they adopted their bogus narrative.
At 5:21 p.m. ET — just four hours after Kelly’s initial post — Trump posted on his Truth Social account: “WOW! I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE — 25TH AMENDMENT!”
Trump’s campaign posted his comment to X, where it was quickly reposted by an arm of the Republican National Committee.
The former president’s most unhinged congressional supporters chimed in.
“The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light. Does everyone get it yet???!!!!” commented Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).
His biggest media supporters were not far behind.
Fox “news” and “opinion” sides parrot the MAGA spin
Right-wing commentators have spent the last nine years figuring out how to respond to Trump’s massive lies. At this point, everyone who retains a major platform knows their role is to, at the least, soft-pedal his unhinged claims, and at most, to prove they are on board with the MAGA movement by treating them as truth.
That’s what played out on Fox’s airwaves after Trump declared that the FBI’s use of standard orders for the Mar-a-Lago search showed that Biden is “A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”
Fox could have provide credible reporting tamping down on the lies circulating online. The network employs people who report on the Justice Department and FBI and even has Kerri Kupec Urbahn, a former top aide in the Trump DOJ, on the payroll. If the network wanted to find out if the FBI orders were standard, it would be really easy to do so.
But Fox’s business model and its political agenda both depend on propagandizing for Trump, so that’s not what happened. Instead, around an hour after Trump’s Truth Social post, FoxNews.com sent the following push alert: “BREAKING NEWS New docs reveal Biden DOJ authorized ‘deadly force’ in Mar-a-Lago raid.’” Here’s how the story’s promotion looked on the website’s front page:
From FoxNews.com at approximately 6:23 p.m. on May 21, 2024.
When the network first discussed the story later that hour on the flagship “news” show Special Report, the segment focused on the same “deadly force” language Kelly had flagged.
Bret Baier, the network’s chief political anchor, opened by highlighting that “former President Trump's attorneys argue the Biden administration Justice Department authorized the use of deadly force if necessary” during the Mar-a-Lago search. Correspondent Kevin Corke responded that the order is “quite shocking.”
Baier went on to downplay the notion that the FBI instructions were standard.
“There may be some people, Kevin, who say that this is just a policy statement of standard operating procedures put inside this operations order for this specific raid,” he said. “But obviously it's not standard operating procedure when you're going into the house of the former president, who happens to be protected by Secret Service.”
Video file
CitationFrom the May 21, 2024, edition of Fox News' Special Report.
When Baier offered a similar comment later in the hour during a panel segment, contributor Byron York described the situation as “kind of worrisome” because the FBI was supposedly “loaded for bear and prepared for the possibility of some sort of violent confrontation with the Secret Service. … The idea that it was prepared for this way, as opposed to, say, worked out in advance, is really troubling.” (In fact, the FBI ensured that “the Secret Service would receive a heads-up a few hours before FBI agents arrived to avoid any law enforcement conflict,” The Washington Post has reported.)
Fox’s “opinion” hosts have been running with the story ever since.
CitationFox News screenshots, 5/21/24 and 5/22/24
“They were actually thinking of using deadly force, or it's on the table that might be necessary at Mar-a-Lago?” Laura Ingraham asked Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO). “Deadly force? OK. It’s really lawfare, it’s not funny. Something actually could have gone down I guess at Mar-a-Lago, beyond just looking for the documents.”
Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro went even further on Watters’ show, with the host declaring, “Authorized armed agents to use deadly force in the Mar-a-Lago raid. That is insane. Is there any justification for that?”
“Absolutely not,” Pirro replied, adding that “my mind as a prosecutor goes to maybe they wanted the engagement of physical force. Maybe they wanted to come in without FBI, without DOJ, without all of that identifying so that they could engage in deadly physical force.”
Sean Hannity called the “deadly force” language a “shocking new revelation.” He acknowledged it was “boilerplate language” but nonetheless asked, “Why was Merrick Garland prepping for a possible, what, shootout?”
Fox was still carrying Trump’s water on Wednesday morning:...
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On Friday, right-wing Washington Examiner political correspondent Byron York took to Twitter to warn that former President Donald Trump's increasingly open fraternization with white nationalists like Nick Fuentes is a crisis for the Republican Party.
"Trump, Kanye, Nick Fuentes — No longer a disaster waiting to happen," wrote York. "Now just a disaster.
This comes after Fuentes reportedly traveled to Trump's Mar-a-Lago country club residence in Palm Beach, Florida for a meeting — after which pro-Trump rapper Kanye West claimed that Trump was "really impressed" with the far-right activist.
Fuentes first gained prominence after his participation in the 2017 white supremacist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted in the murder of a counterprotester. He leads a movement known as the "Groyper Army," an association of extremist internet trolls whose mission is to inject white nationalist ideology into the mainstream of political debate. Fuentes was active in politics during the 2022 midterms as well, with failed Washington Congressional candidate Joe Kent seeking his endorsement.
Kanye West himself, who also goes by the mononym Ye, has come under heavy fire in recent weeks for promoting anti-Semitic beliefs, including a social media rant in which he said he was going to go "death con 3" on Jewish people.
All of this comes as Trump is preparing for his third consecutive run for president in 2024, which has conservative forces unsure whether to fall in with the base or back him once more.
End Impeachment Secrecy | RealClearPolitics
https://www.realclearpolitics.com › 2019/10/07 › end_impeachment_secre...
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https://www.mediamatters.org/trump-impeachment-inquiry/impeachment-inquiry-brings-out-byron-yorks-brand-dated-partisan-punditry
the Washington Examiner and Fox News fixture bends but doesn't break rank with his conservative colleagues
WRITTEN BY PARKER MOLLOY
PUBLISHED 11/25/19 9:32 AM EST
In the world of pundits, there are the bomb throwers, there are the professionally nonpartisan, and then there are the toadies, like Byron York. For the better part of two decades, York’s been a mainstay in American political media. Serious-faced and bespectacled, York -- and to some extent, people like The Washington Post's Hugh Hewitt -- are treated as more respectable conservative voices, an aesthetically welcome contrast to conspiracy-minded kings of bluster like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Even so, the work serves a nearly identical purpose: to protect and promote Republican ideals.
Throughout the Trump administration, much of York’s writings and media appearances could be best characterized as an attempt to run interference for the president. As the House impeachment inquiry began, his work took on even more of a singular focus.
York is determined that the real impeachment story is about the origin of the whistleblower complaint, not the largely corroborated substance of it. He suggested that the administration’s willingness to provide Ukraine with lethal weaponry was somehow exculpatory evidence against Trump's apparent attempt to push Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden under the threat of withholding aid. In another column, he employed the “Sideshow Bob defense,” saying it is “a fundamental problem with the Democratic case” that “they are accusing Trump of attempted crimes that never actually came to fruition.”
After acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney admitted that the administration engaged in a quid pro quo with the Ukrainian government (which he later retracted), York appeared on Fox News to defend Mulvaney by focusing on the portions of his statement unrelated to a quid pro quo. While congressional committees held closed-door depositions for the impeachment inquiry, York argued that the hearings should be held in public, repeatedly accusing Democrats of engaging in “secrecy.” The day the House was to finally vote on an impeachment resolution to begin public hearings, York dubbed it “The Adam Schiff Empowerment Act.” And he attacked the reputation of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council who testified before Congress during the impeachment hearings, and brushed him off as “a witness whose testimony was filled with opinion, with impressions, who had little new to offer.”
Prior to the Ukraine scandal, York was on hand to defend the repeated stays of Air Force members at Trump’s Turnberry resort in Scotland. He scoffed at The New York Times’ 1619 Project marking the 400th anniversary of American slavery and argued that it was done in part to smear Trump ahead of an election. In York’s view, yes, Trump is the victim of “presidential harassment” by the Democrats and he was the victim of “spying” by the Obama administration. York also agreed with the president that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential elections “exonerated” him.
After a gunman massacred 22 people inside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, York devoted a column to arguing that the shooter’s manifesto proves that he wasn’t motivated by Trump. During an appearance on Fox News, he remarked that the shooter “was actually very prescient” for his belief that media outlets would tie his anti-immigrant attack to Trump rhetoric. In June, he wrote an article linking “anti-Trump fever” to the assault of a right-wing activist.
York uses a couple simple tricks to appear less partisan than he actually is.
York seems far more willing than many other pro-Trump columnists to make small admissions critical of Trump that give the appearance of some sort of objectivity. For instance, in an article about E. Jean Carroll and her report that Trump sexually assaulted her, York conceded that Trump has a history of getting caught in lies, noting, “Trump has denied things in the past, such as the payoff to Stormy Daniels, that were, in fact, true.” In an October 20 piece, he rejected Trump’s “Crowdstrike” conspiracy theory as having “no basis in fact,” though he would later flirt with a watered-down version of the conspiracy that Ukraine conspired to harm Trump’s chances in the 2016 election. This strategy gives York a veneer of respectability, allowing him to criticize the president without actually publishing anything that might be read as negative.
Another tactic York uses is hardly unique to his own writing, but it’s worth remarking on, anyway. He has a tendency to fudge the truth just enough to make it fit with the point he’s trying to make. In a June column clearly intended to justify Trump’s February declaration of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, York argued that Democrats concerned about the well-being of detainees should admit they were wrong for opposing Trump’s proclamation. York highlighted quotes from Democratic leadership that called Trump’s declaration a “fake crisis.” The article was written with a clear goal of getting readers to conflate Trump’s belief that the number of border-crossings had become a crisis with Democrats’ concerns that the people being detained were being subjected to inhumane living conditions. The crisis York pointed to, about detainee living conditions, was wholly different from the one Trump used as a premise for his emergency declaration. Trump created that crisis.
The same goes for one of his most recent claims, that Democrats don’t want people looking into how the investigations into Ukraine or Russia started and are thus protecting the whistleblower’s identity. This is untrue, and it distorts the fact that Democrats are making their arguments on the substance of the whistleblower’s claims -- rather then focusing on the whistleblower him- or herself -- because they’re trying to hide some presumably shady and partisan origin story. But as Marcy Wheeler noted at Emptywheel, “It cannot be true that we need to learn about the whistleblower to understand how all this started and also be true that the whistleblower’s view is meaningless because he was operating exclusively from hearsay. The claim itself underscores that multiple people on the call itself objected when they heard the president extort a foreign leader.”
There’s not a lot of consistency in York’s arguments, and he’s shown himself more than willing to drop a talking point the moment it no longer works in his favor.
Nowhere has this been as clear as in York’s ever-shifting defense of Trump throughout the Russia investigation. For instance, in May 2017, he claimed that a “confederation of Democrats, pundits, Obama holdovers, and NeverTrumpers” were trying to take Trump down for something he and his campaign didn’t do.
Throughout the Trump-Russia investigation, the core question -- the question that mattered above all others -- was whether President Trump or his associates colluded with Russia to try to influence the 2016 election. If there were proof of that, the effect on Trump's presidency would have been devastating, and possibly fatal.
The problem, for the confederation of Democrats, pundits, Obama holdovers, and NeverTrumpers who hoped to see that result, has been that so far, after a lot of investigating, no evidence has emerged that collusion actually occurred. Although they allowed that previously unknown proof could always emerge, last week some of the lawmakers most deeply involved in the investigation, and most closely in touch with the intelligence community and law enforcement working on the probe, conceded that there appeared to be no there there.
Just two months later, a New York Times report uncovered details of the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which Donald Trump Jr., presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Trump’s then-campaign chair Paul Manafort met with Russians with the goal of getting damaging information on Trump’s political opponent Hillary Clinton. York’s tune changed in the blink of an eye. Gone was “there appeared to be no there there,” replaced with the rhetorical question, “What campaign wouldn't seek motherlode of Clinton emails?”
As the Mueller report would later note, Trump Jr. wasn’t charged with a crime on the basis that he may not have known that he was breaking the law. From page 187:
On the facts here, the government would unlikely be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the June 9 meeting participants had general knowledge that their conduct was unlawful. The investigation has not developed evidence that the participants in the meeting were familiar with the foreign-contribution ban or the application of federal law to the relevant factual context.
York’s columns feel less like a part of some grand narrative and more like episodic works without consistent factual themes. At best, York’s political insights can be viewed as a misguided attempt at playing devil’s advocate for conservative voters, fueled by motivated reasoning. At worst, he’s just another layer of right-wing obfuscation in a time when truth and clarity is in demand.
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