jane mayer nyer bak

=see ginni 1/22html 10:00:23=big artl book on ginni/cleta? strange  justice?=<div>=</div><div>an 8 23</div><div>leonard Leo, the co-chair of the conservative Federalist Society's board of directors, may not be a household name. But the fifty-eight-year-old lobbyist holds significant sway over Republican Party politics. For instance, The Guardian's Ed Pilkington <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/aug/09/leonard-leo-federalist-society-manipulates-free-speech" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">recalls on Wednesday</a>, all three associate justices who thrice-indicted former President Donald Trump nominated to the United States Supreme Court were names recommended by Leo.According to Pilkington, Leo has also marketed himself as a defender of the First Amendment. But Pilkington points out that "a couple of eye-catching, and seemingly incongruous, events have led to speculation that his commitment to free speech might be more complicated than he professes, and more self-serving. If all American citizens are equal in front of this vital element of the US Constitution, could it be that some people – notably Leo himself – are more equal than others?"<div id="story_page_incontent_p2_target" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><ins class="adsbygoogle" data-ad-client="ca-pub-5155643920455169" data-ad-slot="6339868799" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none; text-align: center; margin-bottom: 20px; display: block;" /></div>Pilkington alludes to two instances that he says are evidence of Leo's "duality" regarding individual freedom of expression.READ MORE: <a href="https://www.alternet.org/scotus-senators/" target="self" title="view post: Dem Senators demand full accounting of gifts to SCOTUS justices from Paul Singer and Leonard Leo" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Dem Senators demand full accounting of gifts to SCOTUS justices from Paul Singer and Leonard Leo</a>"The first of the two events took place in the bailiwick of the Bangor Daily News, in Maine, where Leo has a $3m waterfront estate on an elite island community in Northeast Harbor. On 20 July, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported on a <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-new-lawsuit-alleges-that-leonard-leo-called-for-the-arrest-of-a-pro-choice-protester" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">new lawsuit</a> that had been brought by a 23-year-old local resident for wrongful arrest," <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/aug/09/leonard-leo-federalist-society-manipulates-free-speech" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Pilkington writes</a>. "Eli Durand-McDonnell, a landscaper, was part of a group of progressive activists who staged a series of peaceful protests outside Leo's home. They were angry about his role in securing a rightwing supermajority on the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/law/us-supreme-court" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">US supreme court</a>, and the evisceration of fundamental rights that flowed from that."Although "Leo isn't named as a defendant in the <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23895844-leonard-leo-complaint" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">civil lawsuit</a>, which accuses two local police officers of making an illegal and retaliatory arrest of Durand-McDonnell during one of the protests on 31 July 2022, a month after the devastating abortion ruling," Pilkington continues, "it does claim that the arrest was made 'at the direct behest of Leo, a powerful and wealthy conservative political activist who has used millions of dollars as political speech to influence American politics and courts.'"Event number two "burst into public view five days after <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-new-lawsuit-alleges-that-leonard-leo-called-for-the-arrest-of-a-pro-choice-protester" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Mayer's New Yorker article</a>. On 25 July, Leo wrote <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23886791-leonard-leo-letter" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">a letter</a> through his lawyer to two leading Democratic US senators on the judiciary committee, Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse," Pilkington explains. "The senators wanted Leo to answer a series of questions about his ties to the Supreme Court justices as part of an ethics investigation they were conducting. Leo has long been a figure of interest for Congress, given his outsized influence on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/us-politics" target="_blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">US politics</a> and the courts."Leo's attorney, however, argued that their client "is entitled by the First Amendment to engage in public advocacy, associate with others who share his views, and express opinions on important matters of public concern,'" Pilkington says, adding, "Leo declined to cooperate with Congress lnk to pilk</div><div>
</div>===<a href="https://facultygov.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/261/2019/10/Mayer-article-on-Right-Wing-Billionaires.pdf">https://facultygov.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/261/2019/10/Mayer-article-on-Right-Wing-Billionaires.pdf</a>16 ppHow Right-Wing Billionaires

Infiltrated Higher Education

Chronicle Review By Jane Mayer FEBRUARY 12, 2016 
...The Olin foundation also backed what came to be known as the Collegiate Network,

privately financing a string of right-wing newspapers on America’s college campuses.

Among them was The Dartmouth Review, which infamously published an editorial in

Ebonics proclaiming, "Now we be comin’ to Dartmut’ and be up over our ’fros in

studies, but we still be not graduatin’ Phi Beta Kappa." The paper hosted a feast of

lobster and champagne to mock a student fast against global hunger, sledgehammered

shantytowns erected by students protesting apartheid in South Africa, and published a

transcript of a secretly taped meeting of students belonging to Dartmouth’s gay

student association. The Dartmouth Review became an incubator for right-wing media

figures like D’Souza and the future conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. Its

counterpart at Vassar, meanwhile, gave starts in journalism to the ABC correspondent

Jonathan Karl and Marc Thiessen, an online columnist at The Washington Post best

known for his defense of the Bush administration’s use of torture....If the Olin foundation was less than transparent about its mission, it was not for

the first time. Between 1958 and 1966, it secretly served as a bank for the Central

Intelligence Agency. During these eight years, the CIA laundered $1.95 million

through the foundation. Olin, according to Miller, regarded his undercover role as part

of his patriotic duty. Many of the government funds went to anti-Communist

intellectuals and publications. But in 1967, the press exposed the covert propaganda

operation, triggering a political furor and causing the CIA to fold the program. The

CIA money at the Olin foundation, which was not publicized at the time, disappeared

as quietly as it had arrived. The idea of using the private foundation to fund

ideologically aligned intellectuals, however, persisted.

The Olin foundation invested in William F. Buckley Jr., whose television

show, Firing Line, the foundation supported. It also funded Allan Bloom, author of

the best-selling slam from the right at American higher education, The Closing of the

American Mind (in which Bloom also lashed out at rock music as a "nonstop,

commercially prepackaged masturbation fantasy"). The foundation also supported

Dinesh D’Souza, author of Illiberal Education, which blasted "political correctness,"

castigating rules requiring sensitivity to women and minorities as the overreaching of

liberal thought police.

In addition, the Olin foundation funded professors at leading universities all over the

country, including Harvard’s Harvey C. Mansfield and Samuel P. Huntington. It

donated $3.3 million to Mansfield’s Program on Constitutional Government at

Harvard, which emphasized a conservative interpretation of American government...<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">----</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">mma 3/9 23</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">CHRIS HAYES (HOST): Jane, I thought of that piece you wrote because in the Dominion filings, what we see is that struggle for control laid bare. Right? Like the people inside Fox know that what Trump is saying are lies, possibly like lies that will expose them to litigation risk, right? Might endanger American democracy. But their audience likes Trump and wants to hear them and so they decide to go along. What do you think the state of that very fraught intense relationship is now?JANE MAYER (GUEST): I mean, I think it's more tense than ever, but it's actually been tense, if you go back, almost from the start. I mean when you really think of it, it's interesting. Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump have known each other, by my calculation, for 46 or 47 years. And they've had a kind of a -- sort of -- mutually beneficial, dysfunctional relationship, almost from the start. They were introduced by Roy Cohen, who's one the more iniquitous sort of fixers in the world of, you know, history of American politics, who'd worked for Joe McCarthy. And their original sort of deal that they struck up was, at the time, Murdoch-owned The New York Post and he wanted to sell newspapers, and Trump was a rising businessman who wanted to be a celebrity. And so if Trump could get publicity from Murdoch and Murdoch could sell papers by writing up the sort of antics of Donald Trump. And so one got fame, the other got money. One got influence, and the other, sort of you know, media empire. [and political pwr]And it kept expanding. And it became -- it went from The New York Post to then to Fox. And at that point it started, it widened the audience. And kind of, the business plan, though, for both of them was to drive fear and anger in the working class, class resentment, racial resentment and benefit from it. And, I think what you've seen, though, is that all the way through there's been some tensions. I mean, basically Murdoch, apparently, for years has wanted to have a president that he was close to. He's known every president since JFK, but he's never really had a close associate in the White House until Trump, someone he could call on the phone and he calls him "Donald" and they've known each other that long. And Trump got, out of Murdoch just an incredibly powerful, useful platform, given to him by the man who's arguably the most powerful media mogul in the world. </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div>=<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-news-team-essential-cog-corrupt-propaganda-machine">https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-news-team-essential-cog-corrupt-propaganda-machine</a>2019there will be no Fox News debate for this year’s Democratic presidential primary contest. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/democratic-national-committee-rejects-fox-news-for-debates-citing-new-yorker-article/2019/03/06/a0bdf55c-402e-11e9-922c-64d6b7840b82_story.html?utm_term=.67c62eb93b32" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">closed the door</a> to the right-wing network on Wednesday, telling The Washington Post that the party had rejected the network’s bid in light of the “inappropriate relationship” between Fox News and President Donald Trump that The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer documented in her <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">damning new story</a>. Perez’s statement brought a <a href="https://twitter.com/mlcalderone/status/1103362496965103618" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">quick response</a> from Bill Sammon, Fox News’ senior vice president and Washington managing editor, who urged the DNC to “reconsider its decision to bar Chris Wallace, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, all of whom embody the ultimate journalistic integrity and professionalism,” from moderating a debate.Sammon’s comment is a <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2009/10/13/foxs-news-programs-echo-its-opinion-shows-smear/155660" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">well-worn talking point</a> familiar to anyone who has followed the network’s public relations campaigns over the years. Fox executives and flaks are constantly telling <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/04/report-trump-has-loyalty-scale-fox-news-hosts/?utm_term=.68507239a28b" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">reporters</a> and <a href="https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/fox-news-tv-advertising-upfront-america-watching-1203135697/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">advertisers</a> alike that the network simply has separate “news” and “opinion” sides like any other news outlet. In their telling, it is unfair to hold the conspiracy theories and naked bigotry of Fox’s right-wing prime-time hosts against Wallace, Baier, MacCallum, Shep Smith, and the rest of the purportedly objective news team.But Mayer’s piece is more than a dissection of Fox’s merger with the Trump White House and emergence as a propaganda tool for his administration. It also helps underscore the farcical nature of the narrative that Sammon and his fellow Fox executives use in pushing back against the network’s detractors.“Fox’s defenders view such criticism as unfounded and politically biased,” Mayer writes, noting that in response to her inquiries, “Fox’s public-relations department offers numerous examples of its reporters and talk-show hosts challenging the Administration.”This argument was <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2009/10/13/foxs-news-programs-echo-its-opinion-shows-smear/155660" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">never credible</a>, but the network’s reinvention as state TV has rendered it utterly appalling. Everyone at Fox is complicit in what the network has become.[twt]the Fox-Trump fusion that Mayer reveals -- the total breakdown of basic journalistic standards, the endless propagation of paranoid conspiracy theories bolstering Trump, the revolving door between network and White House, the Fox hosts advising the president by day and shilling for him on air by night -- came about while Wallace and company were collecting paychecks from the network. To the extent they may have wished to halt that slide, they were obviously unable to do so.That's because Fox is -- by design, and to its core -- a right-wing propaganda apparatus that relies on misinformation, disinformation, and outright bigotry to promote the conservative movement and Republican Party. That is its <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/05/18/roger-ailes-professional-legacy-creating-propaganda-machine-s-hurting-america/216543" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">business model and its political project</a>. It also employs some reporters, who have little influence over the bulk of the network’s operations. The reporters may at times criticize the unwillingness of other Fox employees to follow basic media ethics, but to no avail; as Mayer points out, “many Fox News reporters were angry, and provided critical anonymous quotes to the media” after Sean Hannity appeared on stage at a Trump political rally, but Fox supported Hannity nonetheless. The network’s pro-Trump talkers provide Fox with an audience, ratings, and political heft, and so its executives will choose the Hannitys over the Wallaces every time.The Wallaces nonetheless play important roles -- ones that are unique in the media.At a normal outlet, journalists report out stories and try to break news. At Fox, on-air talent who roughly adhere to journalistic standards serve a very different purpose: They provide Fox’s PR team a fig leaf to point to when critics decry the network’s vile programming. When Hannity, Tucker Carlson, or Laura Ingraham get in trouble, Fox corporate can point to the likes of Wallace or Smith “challenging the Administration” as evidence that the network is more than a right-wing fever swamp.Mayer highlights two examples of this phenomenon: Smith giving a monologue in which he “contradicted Trump’s scaremongering about immigrants,” and Wallace debunking one of the White House’s “wildly inaccurate” talking points during an interview with press secretary Sarah Sanders. Both instances <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/01/07/guess-which-cable-news-network-isnt-talking-about-chris-wallaces-interview-sarah-huckabee-sanders/222435" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">garnered media attention</a> precisely because <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=shep+smith+invasion&rlz=1C1GCEU_enUS822US822&oq=shep+smith+invasion&aqs=chrome..69i57j0.3119j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">they cut against the right-wing lies and smears</a> typically seen on Fox programs with much bigger audiences.That attention benefits Fox’s PR offensive: When clips like these go viral, they become examples the network’s team can highlight when they want to argue that Fox is not a monolithic pro-Trump apparatus. Fox keeps people like Wallace and Smith on the payroll not in spite of these types of segments, but because these segments burnish the Fox brand for journalists, advertisers, politicians, and other elites who don’t watch the network’s programming on a regular basis, more than making up for the hosts’ hefty salaries.But these deviations from Fox’s norms are ultimately hollow. In effect, they are the new versions of former Fox host Megyn Kelly’s <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/06/12/megyn-kelly-turned-alex-jones-because-her-struggling-show-needs-viral-moment/216870" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">“Megyn moments,”</a> bolstering the credibility of the hosts and their network, but without any broader impact on the trajectory of Fox’s programming. Smith may tell his audience that there is no immigrant “invasion,” but that doesn’t stop the network’s prime-time lineup from assuring its much larger audiences that there is one. Wallace can give Trump aides a hard time in his interviews, but those exchanges <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/01/07/guess-which-cable-news-network-isnt-talking-about-chris-wallaces-interview-sarah-huckabee-sanders/222435" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">end up going viral</a> everywhere except at Fox itself, which apparently prefers not to inform too many viewers about the administration’s false talking points.As The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/10/31/shepard-smith-cant-redeem-fox-news/?utm_term=.9a56ccc6dbfb" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">put it</a>: “Nothing that Smith says during his Fox News program -- no matter how sick his burns on Trump might be -- neutralizes the impact of Dobbs or Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or dozens of other Fox talking heads. Nothing. Episodic truth-telling about Trump doesn’t excuse fulsome conspiracy-theorizing about Trump.”Baier and, of late, MacCallum, are often included in these discussions, but they largely went unmentioned by Mayer. I find their typical inclusion in these discussions suspect. Both tend to avoid publicly criticizing their colleagues, unlike Smith and Wallace, and produce far fewer of these viral moments. Baier’s biggest story in recent years was <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/11/04/even-bret-baier-has-now-abandoned-bret-baiers-anonymously-sourced-fbi-report/214310" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">his quickly debunked and largely retracted report</a>, days before the 2016 election, that the FBI was conducting a “very high priority” investigation of “possible pay-for-play interaction” between Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation that would “likely” result in an indictment; more recently, he’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/business/media/sean-hannity-fox-news.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">breached ethical norms</a> by golfing with Trump. Meanwhile, MacCallum is <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2011/05/18/foxs-straight-news-anchor-martha-maccallum-regu/179762" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">every bit as pure an ideologue</a> as anyone else on the network, using her show to claim that a border wall is <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018/11/30/fox-host-martha-maccallum-humanitarian-perspective-wall-what-needed/222201" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">“needed”</a> to stop the immigrant <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018/12/20/fox-host-pushes-trumps-position-border-wall-funding-lets-get-together-and-secure-border/222377" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">“invasion”</a> and declare that <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2017/08/14/fox-host-martha-maccallum-dont-we-need-recognize-both-sides-have-gone-insane-these-attacks/217624" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">“both sides”</a> were at fault during the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, VA, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/09/24/fox-news-interview-brett-kavanaugh-was-sham-here-are-seven-reasons-why/221436" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">among</a> <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/02/04/fox-news-host-trump-s-hours-executive-time-it-sounds-lot-work/222754" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">other</a> <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/05/23/fox-news-added-more-female-hosts-still-had-same-abortion-misinformation-problem/220255" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">misdeeds</a>.It’s also telling that the network’s PR effort consistently focuses on these sorts of moments from Fox’s journalistically inclined anchors rather than major news stories that its reporters break. That’s because the dirty secret of Fox News’ “news” team is that the “news” team doesn’t break much news.The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and a host of other news outlets have spent the last few years producing scoops at a furious, exhausting rate. What Fox scoops can you remember? Despite unparalleled access to the Trump administration and other Republican officials, the network has little to show for itself.Instead, the Fox “news” team provides daily fodder for the network’s right-wing stars to opine about. Their role is to fill the network’s “news” hours with reports on whatever stories conservatives are panicking over that day -- <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/11/09/study-fox-spent-nearly-12-hours-pushing-uranium-one-pseudoscandal-over-last-three-weeks/218475" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Uranium One</a>, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2014/09/16/report-foxs-benghazi-obsession-by-the-numbers/200694" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Benghazi</a>, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/10/23/study-caravan-coverage-has-taken-over-news-cycle-s-exactly-what-fox-news-and-trump-wanted/221806" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">migrant caravans</a>, and the purported Justice Department <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/01/25/fox-goes-silent-its-secret-society-conspiracy-theory-falls-apart/219167" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">conspiracy</a> against Trump among them. They provide incremental stories, often sourced to Republican legislators, that advance the narratives with fresh details for the “opinion”-side hosts to freak out about[vid?]sammon himself is a key party to this dynamic. In 2010 and 2011, this top “news”-side figure became the <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+sammon+media+matters&rlz=1C1GCEU_enUS822US822&ei=P-1_XKDAOObV5gK8g5C4Cw&start=10&sa=N&ved=0ahUKEwjg25KP8O3gAhXmqlkKHbwBBLcQ8tMDCGk&biw=1866&bih=1007" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">subject of widespread criticism</a> after Media Matters produced a <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2011/03/29/foxs-bill-sammon-problem/178036" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">series of reports</a> showing how he had used his position to slant the network’s news coverage to the right -- including by claiming on air during the 2008 election that Barack Obama was advocating socialism, a charge he admitted he did not believe. Rather than firing Sammon for lying to its audience, Fox curtailed his on-air appearances but let him keep his senior job overseeing the network’s news coverage. Most recently, he was the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/paloma/the-trailer/2019/02/07/the-trailer-2020-democrats-embrace-the-green-new-deal-litmus-test/5c5af92b1b326b66eb098634/?utm_term=.bc2f3ec7dbb3" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">point man</a> in Fox’s effort to get the Democratic National Committee to let the network host a presidential primary debate, an attempt that ended Wednesday when the DNC <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/democratic-national-committee-rejects-fox-news-for-debates-citing-new-yorker-article/2019/03/06/a0bdf55c-402e-11e9-922c-64d6b7840b82_story.html?utm_term=.f69181ef77cd" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">announced</a> that it would not partner with Fox in light of Mayer’s story.<div style="box-sizing: border-box;">Mayer points to two cases in which Fox considered taking a big swing at a major scoop. It’s instructive to consider them as a pair. First, during the 2016 presidential campaign, a FoxNews.com reporter put together the story that Trump had had a sexual relationship with the adult film actress known as Stormy Daniels and that a payoff and nondisclosure agreement had been arranged to prevent her from detailing the affair. Second, in 2017, a second FoxNews.com reporter <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/10/02/fox-news-seth-rich-investigation-almost-certainly-never-coming-because-network-doesnt-actually-care/221537" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">developed a story suggesting</a> that the murdered Democratic staffer Seth Rich, rather than Russian intelligence operatives, had stolen the DNC emails that were leaked during the campaign.The former story, which would have been damaging to Trump, never ran. The latter, which benefited his claims that he had not been helped by Russia, did. The Rich story quickly unraveled, eventually forcing Fox to issue a retraction. The network also claimed it was conducting an internal investigation, but to this date no results have materialized and no employee held accountable.That’s how things work at Fox. It’s long been a propaganda outlet, and now it’s merged with the White House. It is toxic, and no number of tough Wallace interviews or Smith viral monologues can redeem it.</div>==2x<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie</a>no lnxReporter at LargeAugust 9, 2021 IssueThe Big Money Behind the Big LieDonald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.By Jane MayerAugust 2, 2021?It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election. Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.Approximately 2.1 million Presidential votes were cast in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and accounts for most of the state’s population. In recent years, younger voters and people of color have turned the county’s electorate increasingly Democratic—a shift that helped Biden win the traditionally conservative state, by 10,457 votes. Since the election, the county has become a focus of ire for Trump and his supporters. By March, when Logan’s company was hired, the county had already undergone four election audits, all of which upheld the outcome. Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican and a former Trump ally, had certified Biden’s victory. But Trump’s core supporters were not assuaged.As soon as the Fox News Decision Desk called the state for Biden, at 11:20 p.m. on November 3rd, Trump demanded that the network “reverse this!” When Fox held firm, he declared, “This is a major fraud.” By the time of the “Deep Rig” première, the standoff had dragged on for more than half a year. The Cyber Ninjas audit was supposed to conclude in May, but at the company’s request Fann has repeatedly extended it. On July 28th, the auditors completed a hand recount, but they are still demanding access to the computer routers used by Maricopa County and also want to scrutinize images of mail-in-ballot envelopes. The U.S. Department of Justice has warned that “private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling” ballots could face prosecution for failing to follow federal audit rules. Trump, meanwhile, has fixated on Arizona’s audit, describing it as a step toward his “reinstatement.” On July 24th, he appeared in Phoenix for a “Rally to Protect Our Elections,” and said, “I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy—I’m the one trying to save American democracy.” Predicting that the audit would vindicate him, he rambled angrily for nearly two hours about having been cheated, calling the election “a scam—the greatest crime in history.”In June, I stood in the bleachers at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where the audit was taking place, and witnessed people examining carton after carton of paper ballots cast by Arizonans last fall. Some inspectors used microscopes to investigate surreal allegations: that some ballots had been filled out by machines or were Asian counterfeits with telltale bamboo fibres. Other inspectors looked for creases in mail-in ballots, to determine whether they had been legitimately sent in envelopes or—as Trump has alleged—dumped in bulk.As the audit has unfolded, various violations of professional norms have been observed, including inspectors caught with pens whose ink matched what was used on ballots. One auditor turned out to have been an unsuccessful Republican candidate during the election. As I watched the proceedings, black-vested paid supervisors monitored the process, but their role was cloaked in secrecy. The audit is almost entirely privately funded, and a county judge in Arizona recently ordered the State Senate to disclose who is paying for it. Last week, Cyber Ninjas acknowledged having received $5.7 million in private donations, most of it from nonprofit groups led by Trump allies who live outside Arizona, including Byrne.I was joined in the bleachers by Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state and a Republican, whom the State Senate had designated its liaison to the audit. He acknowledged that, if the auditors end up claiming to have found large discrepancies, “that will of course be very inflammatory.” Indeed, a recent incendiary claim by the auditors—that the vote had tallied about seventy thousand more mail-in ballots than had been postmarked—prompted one Republican state senator to propose a recall of Arizona’s electoral votes for Biden. (In fact, the auditors misunderstood what they were counting.) Nevertheless, Bennett defended the audit process: “It’s important to prove to both sides that the election was done accurately and fairly. If we lurch from one election to another with almost half the electorate thinking the election was a fraud, it’s going to rip our country apart.”Many experts on democratic governance, however, believe that efforts to upend long-settled election practices are what truly threaten to rip the country apart. Chad Campbell, a Democrat who was the minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives until 2014, when he left to become a consultant in Phoenix, has been shocked by the state’s anti-democratic turn. For several years, he sat next to Karen Fann when she was a member of the House, and in his view she’s gone from being a traditional Republican lawmaker to being a member of “Trump’s cult of personality.” He said, “I don’t know if she believes it or not, or which would be worse.” Arizona, he added, is in the midst of a “nonviolent overthrow in some ways—it’s subtle, and not in people’s face because it’s not happening with weapons. But it’s still a complete overthrow of democracy. They’re trying to disenfranchise everyone who is not older white guys.”
Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.
Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”
Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, whose office has authority over the administration of elections, told me that the conspiracy-driven audit “looks so comical you have to laugh at it sometimes.” But Hobbs, a Democrat, who is running for governor, warned, “It’s dangerous. It’s feeding the kind of misinformation that led to the January 6th insurrection.” QAnon followers have been celebrating the audit as the beginning of a “Great Awakening” that will eject Biden from the White House. She noted, “I’ve gotten death threats. I’ve had armed protestors outside my house. Every day, there is a total barrage of social media to our office. We’ve had to route our phones to voice mail so that no one has to listen to it. It can be really traumatizing. I feel beaten up.” She added, “But I’m not going to cave to their tactics—because I think they’re laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 elections.”
Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.
One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions. Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.
Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.It might seem improbable that a low-profile family foundation in Wisconsin has assumed a central role in current struggles over American democracy. But the modern conservative movement has depended on leveraging the fortunes of wealthy reactionaries. In 1903, Lynde Bradley, a high-school dropout in Milwaukee, founded what would become the Allen-Bradley company. He was soon joined by his brother Harry, and they got rich by selling electronic instruments such as rheostats. Harry, a John Birch Society founding member, started a small family foundation that initially devoted much of its giving to needy employees and to civic causes in Milwaukee. In 1985, after the brothers’ death, their heirs sold the company to the defense contractor Rockwell International, for $1.65 billion, generating an enormous windfall for the foundation. The Bradley Foundation remains small in comparison with such liberal behemoths as the Ford Foundation, but it has become singularly preoccupied with wielding national political influence. It has funded conservative projects ranging from school-choice initiatives to the controversial scholarship of Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” which argues that Blacks are less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite.” And, at least as far back as 2012, it has funded groups challenging voting rights in the name of fighting fraud.Since the 2020 election, this movement has evolved into a broader and more aggressive assault on democracy. According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, “We need to regard what’s happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.” Pillars of the conservative establishment, faced with a changing U.S. voter population that threatens their agenda, are exploiting Trump’s contempt for norms to devise ways to hold on to power. Senator Whitehouse said of the campaign, “It’s a massive covert operation run by a small group of billionaire élites. These are powerful interests with practically unlimited resources who have moved on to manipulating that most precious of American gifts—the vote.”
An animating force behind the Bradley Foundation’s war on “election fraud” is Cleta Mitchell, a fiercely partisan Republican election lawyer, who joined the organization’s board of directors in 2012. Until recently, she was virtually unknown to most Americans. But, on January 3rd, the Washington Post exposed the contents of a private phone call, recorded the previous day, during which Trump threatened election officials in Georgia with a “criminal offense” unless they could “find” 11,780 more votes for him—just enough to alter the results. Also on the call was Mitchell, who challenged the officials to provide records proving that dead people hadn’t cast votes. The call was widely criticized as a rogue effort to overturn the election, and Foley & Lardner, the Milwaukee-based law firm where Mitchell was a partner, announced that it was “concerned” about her role, and then parted ways with her. Trump’s call prompted the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, to begin a criminal investigation.In a series of e-mails and phone calls with me, Mitchell adamantly defended her work with the Trump campaign, and said that in Georgia, where she has centered her efforts, “I don’t think we can say with certainty who won.” She told me that there were countless election “irregularities,” such as voters using post-office boxes as their residences, in violation of state law. “I believe there were more illegal votes cast than the margin of victory,” she said. “The only remedy is a new election.” Georgia’s secretary of state rejected her claims, but Mitchell insists that the decision lacked a rigorous evaluation of the evidence. With her support, diehard conspiracy theorists are still litigating the matter in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta. Because they keep demanding that election officials prove a negative—that corruption didn’t happen—their requests to keep interrogating the results can be repeated almost indefinitely. Despite three independent counts of Georgia’s vote, including a hand recount, all of which confirmed Biden’s victory, Mitchell argues that “Trump never got his day in court,” adding, “There are a lot of miscarriages of justice I’ve seen and experienced in my life, and this was one of them.”Mitchell, who is seventy, has warm friendships with people in both parties, and she often appears grandmotherly, in pastel knit suits and reading glasses. But, like Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate,” to whom she bears a striking resemblance, she should not be underestimated. She began her political career in Oklahoma, as an outspoken Democrat and a champion of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was elected to the state legislature in her twenties, but then lost a bid for lieutenant governor, in 1986. She told me that she subsequently underwent a political conversion: when her stepson squandered the college tuition that she was paying, she turned against the idea of welfare in favor of personal responsibility, and began reading conservative critiques of liberalism. When I first interviewed her for this magazine, in 1996, she told me that “overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our times.”On behalf of Republican candidates and groups, she began to fight limits on campaign spending. She also represented numerous right-wing nonprofits, including the National Rifle Association, whose board she joined in the early two-thousands. A former N.R.A. official recently told the Guardian that Mitchell was the “fringe of the fringe,” and a Republican voting-rights lawyer said that “she tells clients what they want to hear, regardless of the law or reality.”In our conversations, Mitchell mocked what she called the mainstream media’s “narrative” of a “vast right-wing conspiracy to suppress the vote of Black people,” and insisted that the fraud problem was significant. “I actually think your readers need to hear from people like me—believe it or not, there are tens of millions of us,” she wrote. “We are not crazy. At least not to us. We are intelligent and educated people who are very concerned about the future of America. And we are among the vast majority of Americans who support election-integrity measures.” Echoing what has become the right’s standard talking point, she declared that her agenda for elections is “to make it harder to cheat.”Mitchell told me that the Democrats used the pandemic as a “great pretext” to “be able to cheat”: they caused “administrative chaos” by changing rules about early and absentee voting, and they didn’t adequately police fraud. She denied that race had motivated her actions in Georgia. Yet, in an e-mail to me, she said that Democrats are “using black voters as a prop to accomplish their political objectives.”Few experts have found Mitchell’s evidence convincing. On November 12, 2020, the Trump Administration’s own election authorities declared the Presidential vote to be “the most secure in American history.” It is true that in many American elections there are small numbers of questionable ballots. An Associated Press investigation found that, in 2020, a hundred and eighty-two of the 3.4 million ballots cast in Arizona were problematic. Four of the ballots have led to criminal charges. But the consensus among nonpartisan experts is that the amount of fraud, particularly in major races, is negligible. As Phil Keisling, a former secretary of state in Oregon, who pioneered universal voting by mail, has said, “Voters don’t cast fraudulent ballots for the same reason counterfeiters don’t manufacture pennies—it doesn’t pay.”What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”Alarmism about election fraud in America extends at least as far back as Reconstruction, when white Southerners disenfranchised newly empowered Black voters and politicians by accusing them of corruption. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some white conservatives were frank about their hostility to democracy. Forty years ago, Paul Weyrich, who helped establish the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, admitted, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”Like many conservatives of her generation, Cleta Mitchell was galvanized by the disputed 2000 election, in which George W. Bush and Al Gore battled for weeks over the outcome in Florida. She repeatedly spoke out on behalf of Bush, who won the state by only five hundred and thirty-seven votes. A dispute over recounts ended up at the Supreme Court.Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”Barack Obama’s election in 2008 made plain that the voting-rights wars were fuelled, in no small part, by racial animus. Bigoted conspiracists, including Trump, spent years trying to undermine the result by falsely claiming that Obama wasn’t born in America. Birtherism, which attempted to undercut a landmark election in which the turnout rate among Black voters nearly matched that of whites, was a progenitor of the Big Lie. As Penda Hair, a founder of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, told me, conservatives were looking at Obama’s victory “and saying, ‘We’ve got to clamp things down’—they’d always tried to suppress the Black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.”Mitchell was at the forefront of the right’s offensive. In 2010, she accused the Majority Leader of the Senate, the Democrat Harry Reid, who was running for reëlection in Nevada, of planning “to steal this election if he can’t win it outright.” Her evidence was that Democrats in the state had provided “clearly illegal” free food at voter-turnout events—a negligible infraction, given that Reid won by more than forty thousand votes.A year later, Mitchell successfully defended Trump, who had been exploring a Presidential bid, against charges that he had taken illegal campaign contributions. She had been recommended to Trump by Chris Ruddy, [pardon?]  the founder of the conservative media company Newsmax, which was also a Mitchell client. Later, Ruddy introduced the future President to Mitchell over dinner at Mar-a-Lago. (She told me that she found Trump “gracious,” and noted that, since the 2020 election, she has talked with him “pretty often.”)In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, eliminating the Justice Department’s power to screen proposed changes to election procedures in states with discriminatory histories, one of which was Arizona. Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and a Democrat, told me that “the state has a history of voter suppression, especially against Native Americans.” Before Rehnquist became a Supreme Court Justice, in 1971, he lived in Arizona, where he was accused of administering literacy tests to voters of color. In the mid-two-thousands, Goddard recalled, Republican leaders erected many barriers aimed at deterring Latino voters, some of which the courts struck down. But the 2013 Supreme Court ruling initiated a new era of election manipulation.Around this time, Mitchell became a director at the Bradley Foundation. Among the board members were George F. Will, the syndicated columnist, and Robert George, a Princeton political philosopher known for his defense of traditional Catholic values. By 2017, Will, who has been a critic of Trump, had stepped down from the Bradley board. But George has continued to serve as a director, even as the foundation has heavily funded groups promulgating the falsehood that election fraud is widespread in America, particularly in minority communities, and sowing doubt about the legitimacy of Biden’s win. The foundation, meanwhile, has given nearly three million dollars to programs that George established at Princeton. He has written in praise of Pence’s refusal to decertify Biden’s election, and has lamented that so many Americans believe, “wrongly,” that “the election was ‘stolen.’ ” But he declined to discuss with me why, then, he serves on the Bradley Foundation’s board.The board includes Art Pope, the libertarian discount-store magnate, who serves on the board of governors at the University of North Carolina. Pope, who has also acknowledged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, declined to discuss his role at the foundation. Another board member is Paul Clement, a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, who is one of the country’s most distinguished Supreme Court litigators. He could not be reached for comment.Mitchell argues that the right spends “a pittance” on election issues compared with the left. “Have you looked at the Democracy Alliance?” she asked me. The Alliance, whose membership is secret, distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money to many left-leaning causes. But, when it comes to influencing elections, the contrast with the Bradley Foundation is clear. Whereas the Alliance’s efforts have centered on increasing voter participation, the Bradley Foundation has focussed on disqualifying ostensibly illegitimate voters.Like most private nonprofits, the Bradley Foundation doesn’t disclose much about its inner workings. But in 2016 hackers posted online some of the group’s confidential documents, which showed that, once Mitchell became a director, she began urging the foundation to support nonprofit organizations policing election fraud. Mitchell has professional ties to several of the groups that received money, although she says that she has abstained from voting on grants to any of those organizations.One recipient of Bradley money is True the Vote, a Texas-based group that, among other things, trains people to monitor polling sites. Mitchell has served as its legal counsel, and hacked documents show that she advocated to the I.R.S. that the group deserved tax-exempt status as a charity. To earn such a designation, a group must file federal tax forms promising not to engage in electoral politics. In a letter of support, she asserted that “fraudulent voting occurs in the United States,” citing a 2010 case in which the F.B.I. arrested nine Floridians for election violations. But, as with many voter-fraud allegations, the details of the case were less than advertised. The accusation involved a school-board election in a rural Black community in which a campaign had collected dozens of absentee ballots, in violation of the law. The charges were eventually dismissed. The judge found “no intent to cast a false or fraudulent ballot.” True the Vote, which was granted tax-exempt status, has since been the subject of numerous complaints from voters, who have accused it of intimidation and racism.Last year, a Reuters report characterized Mitchell as one of four lawyers leading the conservative war on “election fraud,” and described True the Vote as one of the movement’s hubs. The story linked the group and three other conservative nonprofits to at least sixty-one election lawsuits since 2012. Reuters noted that, during the same period, the four groups, along with two others devoted to election-integrity issues, have received more than three and a half million dollars from the Bradley Foundation.It’s a surprisingly short leap from making accusations of voter fraud to calling for the nullification of a supposedly tainted election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Bradley Foundation, is leading the way. Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board.One of the group’s directors is John Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University, in California. On January 4, 2021, he visited the White House, where he spoke with Trump about ways to void the election. In a nod to the Independent Legislature Doctrine, Eastman and Trump tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote, instead throwing the election to the state legislatures. Pence was not persuaded.Two days later, Eastman spoke at Trump’s “Save America” rally in Washington, hours before the crowds ransacked the Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win. “This is bigger than President Trump!” Eastman declared. “It is the very essence of our republican form of government, and it has to be done!” He thundered that election officials had robbed Trump by illegally casting ballots in the name of non-voters whose records they had extracted, after the polls had closed, from a “secret folder” in electronic voting machines. He told the crowd that the scandal was visible in “the data.” There is no evidence of such malfeasance, however. Eastman, who recently retired, under pressure, from Chapman University, and was stripped of his public duties at another post that he held, at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me he still believes that the election was stolen, and thinks that the audits in Arizona and other states will help prove it. The Bradley Foundation declined to comment on him, or on Mitchell, when asked about its role in funding their activities.Two other Public Interest Legal Foundation lawyers—its president, J. Christian Adams, and another board member, Hans von Spakovsky—served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, where they began efforts to use the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to protect Black voters, to prosecute purported fraud by Black voters and election officials. Both men have argued strenuously that American elections are rife with serious fraud, and in 2017 they got a rare opportunity to make their case, when Trump appointed them to a Presidential commission on election integrity. Within months, after the commission was unable to find significant evidence of election fraud, it acrimoniously disbanded. Adams and von Spakovsky, who are members of what Roll Call has termed the Voter Fraud Brain Trust, have nevertheless continued their crusade, sustained partly by Bradley funds. Von Spakovsky now heads the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, which has received grants from the Bradley Foundation.At Heritage, von Spakovsky has overseen a national tracking system monitoring election-fraud cases. But its data on Arizona, the putative center of the storm, is not exactly alarming: of the millions of votes cast in the state from 2016 to 2020, only nine individuals were convicted of fraud. Each instance involved someone casting a duplicate ballot in another state. There were no recorded cases of identity fraud, ballot stuffing, voting by non-citizens, or other nefarious schemes. The numbers confirm that there is some voter fraud, or at least confusion, but not remotely enough to affect election outcomes.Even Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who for years led the Party’s election-law fights, recently conceded to the Times that “a party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”The Voter Fraud Brain Trust lent support to Trump’s lies from the time he took office. In 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California. Soon afterward, von Spakovsky gave Trump’s false claim credence by publishing an essay at Heritage arguing that there was no way to disprove the allegation, because “we have an election system that’s based on the honor system.”More than a year before the 2020 election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. According to a leaked video of an address that she gave in May, 2019, to the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative society, she warned that Democrats were successfully registering what she sarcastically referred to as “the disenfranchised.” She continued, “They know that if they target certain communities and they can get them registered and get them to the polls, then those groups . . . will vote ninety per cent, ninety-five per cent for Democrats.”One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.In August, 2019, e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College. The working group was convened by alec, the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers. The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec, and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently.Mitchell and Bolick declined to answer questions about the working group’s focus, but it appears that Bolick’s participation was productive. After the election, she signed a resolution demanding that Congress block the certification of Biden’s victory and award Arizona’s electors to Trump. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of the Independent Legislature Doctrine. It would enable a majority of the Arizona legislature to override the popular vote if it found fault with the outcome, and dictate the state’s Electoral College votes itself—anytime up until Inauguration Day. Bolick has described her bill as just “a good, democratic check and balance,” but her measure was considered so extreme that it died in committee, despite Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Yet, simply by putting forth the idea as legislation, she helped lend legitimacy to the audacious scheme that the Trump campaign desperately pursued in the final days before Biden’s Inauguration: to rely on Republican-led state legislatures to overturn Electoral College votes. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, who served as an associate White House counsel under Obama, told me, “Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and alec are providing the grease to turn these attacks on democracy into law.”Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles. Clarence Thomas, one of the three U.S. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore laying out the Independent Legislature Doctrine, is the godfather of one of Clint Bolick’s sons. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.Months before the 2020 vote, Lisa Nelson, the C.E.O. of alec, also anticipated contesting the election results. That February, she told a private gathering of the Council for National Policy about a high-level review that her group had undertaken of ways to challenge “the validity” of the Presidential returns. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky.Although the law bars charitable organizations such as the Council for National Policy from engaging in electoral politics, Nelson unabashedly acknowledged, “Obviously, we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote.” She went on, “But it’s very clear that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” One plan, she said, was to urge conservative legislators to voice doubt to their respective secretaries of state, questioning the election’s outcome and asking, “What did happen that night?”By August, 2020, when the Council for National Policy held another meeting, the pandemic had hurt Trump’s prospects, and talk within the membership about potential Democratic election fraud had reached a frenzy. At the meeting, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s president, echoed Trump’s raging about mail-in ballots, describing them as “the No. 1 left-wing agenda.” He urged conservatives not to be deterred by criticism: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist, and so forth.”A younger member of the organization, Charlie Kirk—a founder of Turning Point USA, which promotes right-wing ideas on school campuses—injected a note of optimism. He suggested that the pandemic, by closing campuses, would likely suppress voting among college students, a left-leaning bloc. “Please keep the campuses closed,” he said, to cheers. “Like, it’s a great thing!”Five months later, Turning Point Action, a “social welfare organization” run by Kirk’s group, was one of nearly a dozen groups behind Trump’s “March to Save America,” on January 6th. Shortly before the rally, Kirk tweeted that the groups he leads would send “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” His tweet was deleted after the crowds assaulted the Capitol.Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is headquartered in Arizona, and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud. Turning Point’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, is a member of the Republican National Committee and a former chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party. Bowyer’s friend Jake Hoffman runs an Arizona-based digital-marketing company, Rally Forge, that has been Turning Point’s highest-compensated contractor. In the summer of 2020, Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to spread incendiary misinformation about the coming elections. In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the 2016 campaign. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. Some messages were posted under the teens’ accounts, but others were sent under assumed personae. Many posts claimed that mail-in ballots would “lead to fraud,” and that Democrats planned to steal the Presidency.Turning Point Action denied that it ran a troll farm, arguing that the teen-age employees were genuine, but a study by the Internet Observatory at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center documented the scheme, along with other dubious practices by Rally Forge. In 2016, the company fabricated a politician—complete with a doctored photograph—to run as an Independent write-in candidate against Andy Biggs, a far-right Republican seeking an open congressional seat in Arizona. The ploy, evidently intended to siphon votes from Biggs’s Democratic opponent, didn’t go far, but it was hardly the company’s only scam. The Guardian has shown how Rally Forge also created a phony left-wing front group, America Progress Now, which promoted Green Party candidates online in 2018, apparently to hurt Democrats in several races.
In October, 2020, Rally Forge was banned from Facebook, and its president, Hoffman, was permanently suspended by Twitter. Undeterred, he ran as a pro-Trump Republican for the Arizona House—and won. Remarkably, the chamber’s Republican leadership then appointed him the vice-chair of the Committee on Government and Elections. Since getting elected, Hoffman has challenged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, called for election audits, and, in coördination with the Heritage Foundation, used his position to propose numerous bills making it more difficult to vote.
This past spring, at a private gathering outside Tucson, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action—the politically active arm of the Heritage Foundation—singled out Hoffman for praise. As a leaked video of her remarks revealed, she told supporters that, with the help of Hoffman and other state legislators, the nonprofit group was rewriting America’s election laws. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe,” Anderson explained. “We’ve got three bills done in Arizona!” She continued, “We’re moving four more through the state of Arizona right now . . . simple bills, all straight from the Heritage recommendations.” One of the bills, she noted, was “written and carried by Jake Hoffman,” whom she described as “a longtime friend of the Heritage Foundation.”
Hoffman’s bills have made the Heritage Foundation’s wish list a reality. Voting by mail has long been popular in Arizona, with as many as ninety per cent of voters doing so in 2020, but one of Hoffman’s bills made it a felony to send a mail-in ballot to residents who hadn’t requested one, unless they were on an official list of early voters. Another bill, which Hoffman supported, will, according to one estimate, push as many as two hundred thousand people off the state’s list of early voters. Opponents say that this legislation will disproportionately purge Latinos, who constitute twenty-four per cent of the state’s eligible voters. Another bill by Hoffman banned state election officials from accepting outside donations to help pay for any aspect of election administration, including voter registration. (One of the bill’s targets was Mark Zuckerberg, whose foundation helped county election officials in Arizona handle the pandemic.) In February, at a hearing of the Committee on Government and Elections, a witness from the Washington-based Capital Research Center—also funded by the Bradley Foundation—testified in support of Hoffman’s legislation. Athena Salman, the ranking Democrat, told me she was incensed that Hoffman—“a guy who paid teen-agers to lie”—was put on the election committee. “It’s the fox guarding the henhouse!” she said.
Anderson, of Heritage, declined to respond to questions about the group’s collaborations with Hoffman, instead sending a prepared statement: “After a year when voters’ trust in our elections plummeted, restoring that trust should be the top priority of legislators and governors nationwide. That’s why Heritage Action is deploying our established grassroots network for state advocacy for the first time ever. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there.”
Hoffman, who formerly served as a town-council member in Queen Creek, a deeply conservative part of Maricopa County, did not respond to requests for comment. Kristin Clark, a Democrat who mounted a write-in campaign against him after the news of his troll farm broke, called Hoffman an “unintelligent man who wants to be a big guy.” She told me, “The Republicans here have changed. They were conservative, but now they’ve sold out. It’s money that’s changed it. All these giant, corporate groups that are faceless—it’s outside money.” In her view, “Jake Hoffman is but a cog.”
The spark that ignited the Arizona audit was an amateur video, taken on Election Night, of an unidentified female voter outside a polling place in what Kristin Clark recognized as Hoffman’s district. The voter claimed that election workers had tried to sabotage her ballot by deliberately giving her a Sharpie that the electronic scanners couldn’t read. Her claim was false: the scanners could read Sharpie ink, and the ballots had been designed so that the flip side wouldn’t be affected if the ink bled through. Nevertheless, the video went viral. Among the first to spread the Sharpiegate conspiracy was another one of Charlie Kirk’s youth groups, Students for Trump. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised. The case was soon dismissed, but not before Adams tweeted, “just filed to have our client’s right to #vote upheld. Her #Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure.” Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, investigated, and his office took only a day to conclude that the Sharpie story was nonsense. But, by then, many Trump supporters no longer trusted Arizona’s election results. Clark, the former Democratic challenger to Hoffman, told me that she watched in horror as “they took B.S. and made it real!”
A day after the election, the office of Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, reported that, based on a routine, bipartisan hand recount of a sample of ballots, “no discrepancies were found” in Maricopa County. Within days, the mainstream media had called the election for Biden, based on late returns from Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. But Cleta Mitchell, who had been dispatched by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help the Trump campaign in Georgia, told Fox News, “We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted.” As Georgia was ratifying its results with a recount, she tweeted that the tally was “fake!!!”
Meanwhile, on the conservative Web site Townhall, Hoffman demanded “a full audit of the vote count in swing states,” adding that the election was “far from over.” He claimed that there had been “countless violations of state election law, statistical anomalies and election irregularities in more than a half dozen states,” and argued that state legislatures should therefore have the final say. By December, he had joined his friend Bowyer and other members of the state’s Republican Party in filing suit against Arizona’s governor, calling for the state to set aside Arizona’s eleven electoral votes and allow the legislature to intervene.
At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society. Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Pennsylvania court had usurped the legislature’s authority to oversee elections. The effort didn’t succeed, but Richard Hasen, the election-law professor, regards such arguments as “powder kegs” that threaten American democracy. Leo didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Hasen believes that Leo is trying to preserve “minority rule” in elections in order to advance his agenda. Hasen told me, “Making it harder to vote helps them get more Republican victories, which helps them get more conservative judges and courts.”
In the case of Arizona, it took only a week for a federal district court to dismiss Hoffman and Bowyer’s suit, citing an absence of “relevant or reliable evidence.” The court admonished the plaintiffs that “gossip and innuendo” cannot “be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.” Hoffman and the other plaintiffs appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the matter, but it waited to do so until March. In the meantime, election-fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona were growing out of control.
On November 12th, Biden was declared the winner in Maricopa County. Soon after, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, was picking up takeout food for his family when the board’s chairman—one of four Republicans on the five-person board—called to warn him to be careful going home. Ninety angry people had gathered outside the chairman’s house, and Gates’s place could be next. “We’d all been doxed,” Gates told me. He and his wife are the legal guardians of a teen-ager whose father, a Ugandan, was nearly killed by henchmen for Idi Amin. “It’s chilling to see the parallels,” Gates told me. “You’d never think there were any parallels to a strongman autocracy in Africa.” Gates considers himself a political-science nerd, but, he said, “I had no concept that we were heading where we were heading.”
Gates, who moved to Arizona as a teen-ager, was a latchkey kid whose idea of entertainment was watching C-span. He is forty-nine and describes himself as a “child of the Reagan Revolution” who started a Republican club in high school. He attended Drake University, in Iowa, partly so that he could witness the state’s Presidential caucuses. Winning a Truman Scholarship opened his way to Harvard Law School, where he joined the Federalist Society, the Harvard Law School Republican Club, and the Journal of Law and Public Policy. At Harvard, membership in all three was called the “conservative trifecta.” Gates can scarcely believe how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have changed in the years since.Over breakfast in June, in Phoenix, he apologized for his eyes welling up with tears as he described his efforts to stand up to his own party’s mob. He said that he and the other county supervisors had been “feeling great” about how well their administration of the election had gone despite the pandemic. But, as the final ballots were counted and Trump fell behind, Maricopa County became the focal point of conspiracy theorists. “Alex Jones and those guys start coming out here, and they’re protesting outside of our election center as the counting is going on,” he said. He could hear people screaming, and what sounded like a drum: “It was Lollapalooza for the alt-right—it was crazy.” He started getting calls and e-mails saying, “You guys need to stop the steal.” Gates told me, “I’d wonder, Is this a real person?” But some angry messages came from people he knew. They said they’d never support him again. “People thought I was failing them,” Gates said. “I have been called a traitor so many times in the last six months.”Gates says that Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate’s president, confided to him that she knew there was “nothing to” the fraud charges. (She didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Nevertheless, she buckled under the political pressure and authorized a subpoena of the county’s ballots, for the “forensic audit.” At one point, county supervisors were told that if they didn’t comply they would face contempt charges and, potentially, could be imprisoned. For a time, the official Twitter account for the audit accused the supervisors, without evidence, of “spoliation” of the ballots. “I get a little emotional when I talk about it,” Gates said. “My daughter called me, frantically trying to find out whether or not I was going to be thrown in jail.” Trump supporters set up a guillotine on a grassy plaza outside Arizona’s statehouse, demanding the supervisors’ heads. Inside, Gates recalled, one Republican member after another rose to denounce the county supervisors.A representative for the national Republican Party tried to silence Gates when he spoke out to defend the integrity of Arizona’s election. He told me that Hoffman’s ally Tyler Bowyer, of the Republican National Committee, paid him a visit and warned, “You need to stop it.” According to Gates, Bowyer made it clear that “the Republican National Committee supports this audit.” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Bowyer, denied that the visit was an official attempt at intimidation, calling it instead a “personal courtesy.”Gates said that after he received death threats he fled with his family to an Airbnb. At one point, the sheriff sent two deputies to guard Gates’s home overnight. Trump supporters, Gates said, “are basically asking Republican leaders to bow before the altar of the Big Lie—‘You’re willing to do it? O.K., great. You’re not? You’re a rino. You’re a Commie. You are not a Republican.’ It’s been incredibly effective, really, when you think about where we’ve come from January 6th.”Part of what had drawn Gates to the Republican Party was the Reagan-era doctrine of confronting totalitarianism. He’d long had a fascination with emerging democracies, particularly the former Soviet republics. He had come up with what he admits was a “kooky” retirement plan—“to go to some place like Uzbekistan and help.” He told me, “I’d always thought that, if I had a tragic end, it would be in some place like Tajikistan.” He shook his head. “If you had told me, ‘You’re going to be doing this in the U.S.,’ I would have told you, ‘You’re crazy.’ ”Some of the political pressure on election officials in Arizona was exerted directly by Trump and his associates, potentially illegally. Interfering in a federal election can be a crime. As the Arizona Republic has reported, the President and his legal adviser Rudy Giuliani phoned state and local officials, including Fann. The White House switchboard tried to connect Trump with the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, but, even though the chairman was a Republican, he ducked the call, lest the President interfere improperly. Giuliani called Gates’s cell phone when he was shopping at Walgreens on Christmas Eve. Not recognizing the number, Gates didn’t answer. “You can’t make this stuff up,” he told me. Giuliani left a voice mail saying it was a “shame” that two Republicans couldn’t work things out—he’d come up with a “nice way” to “get this thing fixed up.”
“I never returned the phone call,” Gates said. A week later, when news broke of Trump’s notorious call to officials in Georgia, Gates was more relieved than ever that he hadn’t called Giuliani back. A panel of judges in New York has since suspended Giuliani’s law license, for threatening the public interest by making “demonstrably false and misleading statements” about the Presidential election.
By New Year’s Eve, when Trump tried and failed to reach the chairman of the Maricopa County board, his Administration was in extraordinary turmoil. Attorney General William Barr had resigned from the Justice Department after declaring that it had detected no significant election fraud. Even so, Trump continued to demand that the department investigate a variety of loony conspiracies, including a plot to erase Trump votes using Italian military satellites. According to a leaked e-mail, a Justice Department attorney disparaged the satellite theory as “pure insanity.” A man supposedly involved in the plot issued a denial to Reuters, and Italian police suggested that the allegation was baseless. But the conspiracy theory, which became known as Italygate, had bubbled up from the same pools of dark money that were funding other election misinformation. Records show that Italygate was spread by a “social welfare organization” called Nations in Action, whose directors included von Spakovsky. When Talking Points Memo contacted von Spakovsky, he said that he had resigned from the board on January 8th. But the money trail remains. Crooks and Liars, a progressive investigative-reporting site, dug up tax filings showing that the group’s 501(c)(3) sibling, the Nations in Action Globally Lifting Up Fund, had received thousands of dollars from the Judicial Crisis Network—a nonprofit enterprise, closely tied to Leonard Leo, that also funds Turning Point Action.While Justice Department officials were fending off conspiracy theories being spread by tax-exempt charities in Washington, the pressure was even more acute on local officials in Phoenix. Trump tweeted relentlessly about the audit. He “clearly has had a fascination with this issue, because he thinks it’s the key to his reinstatement,” Gates told me. “It’s not about Arizona. We’re literally pawns in this. This is a national effort to delegitimize the election system.” Gates predicted that, if “Arizona can question this, and show that Trump won,” the game will move on to Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia, all of which have sent Republican delegations to observe Arizona’s audit. Noting that both QAnon followers and his own state’s Republican Party chair had referred to “dominoes” in connection with the audit, Gates said, “We know what that game is, and how it works.”
It would be tempting for Gates, a lifetime Republican with political ambitions, to blame only Trump for his party’s anti-democratic turn. But he has few such illusions. What’s really going on, he believes, is a reactionary backlash against Obama: “I’ve thought about it a lot. I believe the election of President Obama frightened a lot of Americans.” Gates argues that the fear isn’t entirely about race. He thinks it’s also about cosmopolitanism, secularism, and other contemporary values that make white conservatives uncomfortable. But in the end, he said, “the diversification of America is frightening to a lot of people in my party.”
Gates believes that his party’s reaction may backfire. Polls show that, although the Arizona audit is wildly popular among Republican voters in the state, it alienates independents, who constitute approximately a third of the state’s electorate—and whose support is necessary for statewide candidates to win.
For now, though, conservative groups seem to be doubling down on their investments in election-fraud alarmism. In the next two years, Heritage Action plans to spend twenty-four million dollars mobilizing supporters and lobbyists who will promote “election integrity,” starting in eight battleground states, including Arizona. It is coördinating its effort with the Election Transparency Initiative, a joint venture of two anti-abortion groups, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project. The Election Transparency Initiative has set a fund-raising goal of five million dollars. Cleta Mitchell, having left her law firm, has joined FreedomWorks, the free-market group, where she plans to lead a ten-million-dollar project on voting issues. She will also head the Election Integrity Network at the Conservative Partnership Institute, another Washington-based nonprofit. As a senior legal fellow there, she told the Washington Examiner, she will “help bring all these strings” of conservative election-law activism together, and she added, “I’ve had my finger in so many different pieces of the election-integrity pie for so long.”
Back in Arizona, where the auditors are demanding still more time, Gates believes that the Big Lie has become a “grift” used to motivate Republican voters and donors to support conservative candidates and political groups. “The sad thing is that there are probably millions of people—hardworking, good Americans, maybe retired—who have paid their taxes, always followed the law, and they truly believe this, because of what they’ve been fed by their leaders,” he said. “And what’s so dispiriting is that the people who are pushing it from the top? They know better.” =<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/the-slime-machine-targeting-dozens-of-biden-nominees">https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/the-slime-machine-targeting-dozens-of-biden-nominees</a>no lnx manyA Reporter at LargeThe Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden NomineesIn an escalation of partisan warfare, a little-known dark-money group is trying to thwart the President’s entire slate.By Jane MayerApril 16, 2022The American Accountability Foundation has undermined the likes of Ketanji Brown Jackson, but it’s also gone after relatively obscure political appointees whose public profiles can be easily distorted.Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; Source photograph by Anna Moneymaker / GettyDuring the autos-da-fé that now pass for Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, it’s common for supporters of a nominee to dismiss attacks from the opposing party as mere partisanship. But, during the recent hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, Andrew C. McCarthy—a Republican former federal prosecutor and a prominent legal commentator at National Review—took the unusual step of denouncing an attack from his own side. When Republican senators, including Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn, began accusing Jackson of having been a dangerously lenient judge toward sex offenders, McCarthy wrote a column calling the charge “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” He didn’t like Jackson’s judicial philosophy, but “the implication that she has a soft spot for ‘sex offenders’ who ‘prey on children’ . . . is a smear.”
In the end, the attacks failed to diminish public support for Jackson, and her poised responses to questioning helped secure her nomination, by a vote of 53–47. But the fierce campaign against her was concerning, in part because it was spearheaded by a new conservative dark-money group that was created in 2020: the American Accountability Foundation. An explicit purpose of the A.A.F.—a politically active, tax-exempt nonprofit charity that doesn’t disclose its backers—is to prevent the approval of all Biden Administration nominees.
While the hearings were taking place, the A.A.F. publicly took credit for uncovering a note in the Harvard Law Review in which, they claimed, Jackson had “argued that America’s judicial system is too hard on sexual offenders.” The group also tweeted that she had a “soft-on-sex-offender” record during her eight years as a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. As the Washington Post and other outlets stated, Jackson’s sentencing history on such cases was well within the judicial mainstream, and in line with a half-dozen judges appointed by the Trump Administration. When Jackson defended herself on this point during the hearings, the A.A.F. said, on Twitter, that she was “lying.” The group’s allegation—reminiscent of the QAnon conspiracy, which claims that liberal élites are abusing and trafficking children—rippled through conservative circles. Tucker Carlson repeated the accusation on his Fox News program while a chyron declared “jackson lenient in child sex cases.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist representative from Georgia, called Jackson “pro-pedophile.”
Mudslinging is hardly new to American politics. In 1800, a campaign surrogate for Thomas Jefferson called Jefferson’s opponent, John Adams, “hermaphroditical”; Adams’s supporters predicted that if Jefferson were elected President he would unleash a reign of “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest.” Neither the Democratic nor Republican Party is above reproach when it comes to engaging in calumny, and since at least 1987, when President Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully nominated Robert Bork to be a Justice, the fights over Supreme Court nominees have been especially nasty. Yet the A.A.F.’s approach represents a new escalation in partisan warfare, and underscores the growing role that secret spending has played in deepening the polarization in Washington.
Rather than attack a single candidate or nominee, the A.A.F. aims to thwart the entire Biden slate. The obstructionism, like the Republican blockade of Biden’s legislative agenda in Congress, is the end in itself. The group hosts a Web site, bidennoms.com, that displays the photographs of Administration nominees it has targeted, as though they were hunting trophies. And the A.A.F. hasn’t just undermined nominees for Cabinet and Court seats—the kinds of prominent people whose records are usually well known and well defended. It’s also gone after relatively obscure, sub-Cabinet-level political appointees, whose public profiles can be easily distorted and who have little entrenched support. The A.A.F., which is run by conservative white men, has particularly focussed on blocking women and people of color. As of last month, more than a third of the twenty-nine candidates it had publicly attacked were people of color, and nearly sixty per cent were women.
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Among the nominees the group boasts of having successfully derailed are Saule Omarova, a nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, and Sarah Bloom Raskin, whom Biden named to be the vice-chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board. David Chipman, whom the President wanted to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and David Weil, Biden’s choice for the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor, both saw their nominations founder in the wake of A.A.F. attacks. Currently, the group is waging a negative campaign against Lisa Cook, who, if confirmed, would become the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.
Tom Jones, the A.A.F.’s founder and executive director, is a longtime Beltway operative specializing in opposition research. Records show that over the years he has worked for several of the most conservative Republicans to have served in the Senate, including Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin; Ted Cruz, of Texas; Jim DeMint, of South Carolina; and John Ensign, of Nevada, for whom Jones was briefly a legislative director. In 2016, Jones ran the opposition-research effort for Cruz’s failed Presidential campaign. When I asked Jones for an interview, through the A.A.F.’s online portal, he replied, “Ms. Meyers . . . Go pound sand.” Citing an article that I had written debunking attacks on Bloom Raskin from moneyed interests, including the A.A.F., he said, “You are a liberal hack masquerading as an investigative journalist—and not a very good one.” Jones subsequently posted this comment on his group’s Twitter account, along with my e-mail address and cell-phone number.
A decade ago, Bill Dauster, a Democrat who is now the chief counsel to the Senate Budget Committee, helped Jones organize a bipartisan Torah study group for Jewish congressional staffers. Dauster recalls him as “soft-spoken and cordial,” and finds it hard to reconcile the man he knew with Jones’s current persona. “I find what he appears to have done quite distasteful,” he said.
In interviews with right-wing media outlets, Jones hasn’t been shy about his intentions. Last April, he told Fox News, which called A.A.F.’s tactics “controversial,” that his group wants to “take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden Administration,” making it “as difficult as possible” for the President and his allies on Capitol Hill “to implement their agenda.” When asked why his group was bothering to attack sub-Cabinet-level appointees, he explained that people in “that second tier are really the folks who are going to do the day-to-day work implementing the agenda.”
Last year, an A.A.F. member infiltrated a Zoom training session for congressional staffers about the ethics rules surrounding earmarks—pet spending projects that lawmakers write into the federal budget. The infiltrator asked leading questions during the meeting and then posted a recording of it online. The attempted sting backfired: nothing incriminating was said, and the A.A.F.’s underhanded tactics became the story. Evan Hollander, then the spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, told The Hill that, “for a group that purports to concern itself with ethics, using fake identities, misrepresenting themselves as Congressional staff and surreptitiously recording meetings is hypocritical in the extreme.”
Jones made no apologies. He told Fox News, “I’m never doing anything illegal. But just because it’s impolite to log into an earmark-training seminar and offend the morals of Capitol Hill staff, that’s not going to stop me from doing it.” He added, “If I’ve got to trail someone on the ground to find out what they’re doing, I’m totally going to do it. Because people who are making decisions need to have this information—they need to understand who they are trusting with the reins of government. And sometimes that means we will use unorthodox methods.”
Liberal and conservative political groups habitually scrutinize a prominent nominee’s record or personal life in search of disqualifying faults. But the A.A.F. has taken the practice to extremes, repeatedly spinning negligible tidbits or dubious hearsay into damning narratives. The group recently deployed its unorthodox methods, Politico has reported, while “desperately pursuing dirt” on Lisa Cook, the nominee for the Federal Reserve. Cook, who has been a tenured professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University since 2013, has attracted bipartisan support. Glenn Hubbard, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the George W. Bush Administration, has said, “Cook’s talents as an economic researcher and teacher make her a good nominee for the Fed, adding to diversity of perspectives about policy.” In college, Cook won a Marshall Scholarship. She subsequently obtained a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and served as a staff economist on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. She also held appointments at the National Bureau of Economic Research and at various regional Federal Reserve banks. The A.A.F., though, has portrayed her as unqualified, and suggested that her tenure at Michigan State is undeserved.
On April 13th, Jones sent out the latest of at least three e-mail blasts from the A.A.F. to about fifty of Cook’s colleagues at Michigan State. In the most recent of these messages, which were obtained by The New Yorker, Jones said that Cook “did not warrant” tenure. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the A.A.F. obtained records showing that the school’s provost had granted Cook full professorship in 2020, overruling a decision not to give her that title the previous year. Jones sent these personnel records to dozens of Cook’s colleagues, and asked, “Are any of you concerned that . . . she’s not good enough to sit on the Federal Reserve Board?” He urged any detractors to “not hesitate to” contact him. Meanwhile, Jones fished for further information by posting a message on an anonymous online gossip forum, Economics Job Market Rumors, which has been decried by one prominent economist as “a cesspool of misogyny.”
Some of the A.A.F.’s attacks on Cook carried racial overtones. Cook had made donations to bail funds for impoverished criminal defendants, including racial-justice protesters who had been arrested; she was following a tradition of activist lawyers in her family, and considered it a form of charity. The A.A.F. argued on Twitter that she had made “racist comments” and “even bailed out rioters who burned down American cities.” Cook’s reputation was sullied enough that the Senate Banking Committee vote on her nomination resulted in a tie, with no Republicans supporting her. Cook’s nomination can still proceed to the Senate floor, but her confirmation remains in limbo, as one conservative news outlet after another repeats the A.A.F.’s talking points. A writer for the Daily Caller, Chris Brunet, said in a Substack column that Cook is a “random economist at Michigan State University who has shamelessly leveraged her skin color and genitalia into gaining the backing of several key White House officials.” Brunet tweeted proudly that his critique had been promoted on Fox News by Tucker Carlson.
The A.A.F.’s treatment of Cook has been mild compared with what several other Biden nominees have gone through. Late last year, Saule Omarova—a leading academic in the field of financial regulation, who is a law professor at Cornell and holds doctorates in law and political science—withdrew her name from consideration as Biden’s Comptroller of the Currency. She did so, she told me, because an opposition-research campaign against her, which the A.A.F. took credit for, had, among other things, falsely portrayed her as a secret communist.
Born in Kazakhstan, in what was then the Soviet Union, Omarova received an undergraduate degree from Moscow State University, but she became a naturalized American citizen in 2005. Yet, during her confirmation hearing, in a moment reminiscent of the Joseph McCarthy era, the Republican Senator John Kennedy, of Louisiana, declared that he didn’t know whether to call her “professor or comrade.” Omarova replied, “Senator, I am not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.” Omarova’s résumé is hardly anti-capitalist: she worked at the corporate law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and served in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department.
Omarova told me, “There were so many accusations. A.A.F. was at the forefront of making my life extremely and unnecessarily difficult.” The group discovered that Omarova, after she’d read an article in The Economist about potatoes, had tweeted fondly about a time she helped farmers harvest potatoes outside Moscow. The A.A.F. proclaimed that the Biden Administration had “nominated a woman who waxes nostalgic for the good ole days of poverty, hunger, and forced labor in communist Russia.” Conservative outlets pounced on similar tweets about her past. “The A.A.F. made it into this big deal,” she told me. “They said, ‘She wants to make America into the Soviet Union.’ It was a complete absurdity. But people who have no idea who I am jumped in and said, ‘Go back to the Soviet Union!’ ”
Digging into a person’s past—especially someone who isn’t that well known—takes time and money. “Somebody must have paid them a lot,” Omarova said, of the A.A.F. “They went through all my public speeches and academic writings to find any kind of phrase they could use against me.” She’d been featured, along with other professors, in an obscure 2019 documentary based on “Assholes: A Theory,” a whimsical treatise by Aaron James, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine. The A.A.F., without acknowledging the film’s satirical tone, promoted a snippet of Omarova calling the financial-services industry “the quintessential asshole industry.” She told me, “They didn’t cite the film. It made me sound unhinged, nasty, and, like, a rude person.” A compilation of clips from the documentary had been taken off YouTube owing to copyright violations; during the pre-hearing process for Omarova’s nomination, Republican staffers insinuated that she’d personally concealed the footage. “I don’t know what kind of relationship those senators had with A.A.F.,” she told me. “But clearly they knew of that clip.”Omarova told me that someone went to Moscow to “try to dig up” an undergraduate paper that she’d written on Karl Marx. Opponents also circulated an elementary-school photograph of her wearing the obligatory red kerchief of the Young Pioneers. “They used it to say ‘Look at her, she’s such a devout Communist!’ They were going through my whole life, looking for anything they could smear or frighten me with.”
Omarova disclosed reams of personal information to the Senate, including her compensation as a law professor. Jones then e-mailed her colleagues at Cornell about what he portrayed as her annual salary—but the figure he cited represented nearly two years of pay. In the e-mail, which was obtained by The New Yorker, Jones asks, “Do you think it is appropriate for the university to provide such a large salary to Dr. Omarova?” He invited her colleagues “to share” their “thoughts” with him.
While the hearings were ongoing, the A.A.F. trumpeted a dismissed shoplifting charge against Omarova—omitting the fact that she’d disclosed it herself. She told me that the incident, which came about from a misunderstanding with a security guard, had occurred not long after she had emigrated from Russia—and had led her to become a lawyer. The A.A.F. also accused her of belonging to a Marxist group on Facebook that she was unaware of and had never participated in, and misleadingly edited a comment she’d made about the need to insure economic security for laid-off fossil-fuel workers so that it sounded like an attack on those workers and the industry. “They were saying that I wanted to kill oil-and-gas workers,” she told me. “That’s exactly the opposite of what I was saying.”
Omarova had suggested that it would be good for the environment if America transitioned away from fossil fuels, even if some companies ended up going out of business. She had also called for tougher regulations on banks. These two points likely constituted the true motivation for the opposition she encountered from the Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee. Omarova was soon opposed by every Republican senator, and also five Democrats—led by Jon Tester, of Montana, who has been a major recipient of banking-industry donations. Her nomination was doomed. The A.A.F.’s Web site celebrated the news with the headline “a.a.f. research tanks saule omarova.”
Omarova described the confirmation experience as “soul-crushing.” She went on, “You feel stripped down. You feel your house has been destroyed, and you are standing there in front of everyone looking at you, and they have distorted and twisted everything.” She expressed surprise that, in the United States, spurious controversies could be so easily “manufactured out of nothing.” She added, “I’m a naturalized citizen. I put so much effort to be here, and I embraced this country with all my heart. I came from a place that didn’t have freedom of speech or thought. But this made so personally clear to me how fragile our democracy is.”
Three months after Omarova withdrew her nomination, Sarah Bloom Raskin endured a similar character assassination. Bloom Raskin, a law professor at Duke University, was not a new or untested figure. After graduating from Harvard Law School, she worked as a staffer on the Senate Banking Committee, and she twice won confirmation from the Senate to top economic positions: between 2010 and 2014, she was a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, and during the Obama Administration she served as the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury—becoming, at the time, the highest-ranking woman in the department’s history. Her husband, Representative Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, is a progressive firebrand, but Bloom Raskin is regarded as a moderate in business circles, and has wide support from the banking industry. But, like Omarova, Bloom Raskin offended fossil-fuel companies—in her case, by suggesting that climate change posed a potential economic risk that the Federal Reserve needed to consider.
Rather than debating the merits of such views, the A.A.F. questioned Bloom Raskin’s probity. In February, it filed a complaint to the Office of Congressional Ethics against Jamie Raskin, accusing him of being late in filing a financial report disclosing one and a half million dollars in income that he and his wife had received from her sale of stock. In 2017, Bloom Raskin had been granted stock in a small Colorado trust company founded by a friend; she served on its board after leaving the Obama Administration. Three years later, after Bloom Raskin had left the board, she sold her stock at market price.
Congressional rules require such sales to be disclosed within thirty to forty-five days. The Raskins took eight months. Nonetheless, they had voluntarily disclosed the transaction months before Biden nominated Bloom Raskin to the Fed. And they had explained that in December, 2020, two weeks after the stock sale, their son had died, by suicide. “We were comatose, barely functioning, so of course Jamie didn’t remember to file,” Bloom Raskin told me. “I don’t ask for special treatment, but do these people have no heart?”
Bloom Raskin was taken aback by an A.A.F. statement that cast her and her husband as “career politicians who have used the system to enrich themselves” with “shady” deals. She told me, “When these smears started, they seemed so inconsequential. It didn’t occur to me they’d start manufacturing things.” But, Bloom Raskin said, “I began to get calls from people saying, ‘Someone named Tom Jones, who represented himself as working for a good-government group, was clearly looking for dirt.’ ” A source knowledgeable about the A.A.F.’s outreach, who asked not to be identified, told me Jones was pushing the baseless narrative that Bloom Raskin had abused her access as a former Fed governor to obtain a special “master account” for the Colorado trust company. The source debunked the claim: all trusts in Colorado that meet certain criteria are eligible for master accounts, which enable speedier financial transactions. “While it’s often true that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, in this case there was an arsonist,” the source told me. Dennis Gingold, a lawyer who co-founded the Colorado trust company, agreed. He called the attacks on Bloom Raskin’s ethics “a pretext,” adding, “It’s one thing to oppose Sarah. It’s another thing to slander her. But they didn’t care.”
The A.A.F. had pipelines to the Republicans on the Banking Committee, and also to conservative media outlets, where attacks on Bloom Raskin began to appear. Senator Pat Toomey, the ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, demanded that she answer more than a hundred questions in writing, many of them about whether she’d made a phone call to Fed officials to push for the “master account” for the Colorado trust company. If she had made such a call, it would have been mundane, but she couldn’t remember if she had, and said so. Toomey proclaimed that her answer was “evasive.” Bloom Raskin told me, “I was telling the truth at all times. I could have lied and said that I did—the call wouldn’t have been anything wrong. But I just couldn’t remember.” (Though Toomey’s attacks echoed A.A.F. research, a spokesperson for the senator said that any suggestion of coördination was “paranoid conjecture.”)
Bloom Raskin offered to sit down with the Republicans on the Banking Committee, so that she could defuse any outstanding questions. The Democrats also offered to bring in banking regulators who had dealt with the Colorado trust, to clear up any misconceptions. But the Republicans refused to meet with her or the banking regulators. “They wouldn’t let me explain,” Bloom Raskin said. “I realized they wanted me to seem evasive.” At that point, the Republicans had staged a boycott of committee meetings, so that there could be no votes on Bloom Raskin or on Biden’s other nominees to the Fed—including its chair, Jerome Powell—leaving vacancies at the top of the most powerful central bank in the world.
Just as the Democrats on the Banking Committee were preparing to confront the A.A.F.’s claims about Bloom Raskin, West Virginia’s Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, announced that he, too, would not vote for her, effectively capsizing her nomination. In a phone call, Manchin—who has grown rich from the coal industry, and who during the current election cycle has taken more donations from fossil-fuel interests than any other senator—admitted to Bloom Raskin that her position on climate change had turned him against her. She recalls Manchin telling her, “Don’t take it personally—it’s the industry.” (A spokesperson for Manchin declined to comment on the senator’s “private discussions.”) President Biden called Bloom Raskin, too, and described the attacks on her as unfair.
Bloom Raskin told me, “When something like this first happens, you wonder, Did I do something wrong? And then you realize, Of course, you didn’t. But you wonder, Do other people think I did? It’s so disgusting.” She continued, “I think they were afraid I could be effective. I definitely was going to hit the ground running. I knew what I was doing.”
The A.A.F. also claims to have sabotaged the nomination of David Chipman, Biden’s choice to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In the face of strong opposition from gun-rights activists, he withdrew his nomination last September, leaving the agency that regulates guns without a director. (The position has been unfilled for all but two years since 2006, when Senate confirmation for the position became a requirement.) The A.A.F. compiled for the Senate a twenty-four-page dossier that incoherently accused Chipman, a twenty-five-year veteran of the A.T.F., of being both a racist and a radical social-justice warrior consumed by “wokeness.” The allegations came from anonymous sources. According to Jones, an unidentified A.T.F. agent had reported hearing Chipman say that so many Black candidates had passed an A.T.F. exam that they must have cheated. Ted Cruz—Jones’s former boss—took up the campaign against Chipman. He and the A.A.F. demanded to see two complaints that had been filed against Chipman with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, even though both had been resolved without disciplinary action. At the same time, the A.A.F.’s dossier contained anonymous allegations claiming that Chipman was a radical “anti-racist” who favored destroying Confederate memorials and wanted to “use fighter jets to bomb” Mount Rushmore and Stone Mountain “into rubble,” because they offended people of color. The A.A.F. even contacted Chipman’s ex-wife in search of evidence against him, but she declined to coöperate.
Chipman told me that the A.A.F.’s modus operandi is to make claims that are “adjacent” to the facts and then “turn them around completely.” Although he had once accused a Black candidate of cheating on an A.T.F. exam that he had proctored, Chipman raised no questions about several other Black candidates who’d passed the same exam. The two dismissed E.E.O.C. complaints were the only ones that had ever been filed against him, he said, and in both cases he’d merely insisted that two subordinates be present for their regular work hours. He did say, on Facebook, that he opposed naming Army bases after Confederate soldiers, and he believes that monuments celebrating them are inappropriate and racially insensitive. But “it was characterized as if I was calling for violence,” he told me, adding, “I never advocated violence or called for anyone to blow up anything. I spent twenty-five years investigating bombings!” Chipman said, “The racial things they used were hugely ugly,” and noted that “the facts don’t matter to these people—they’re just used as weapons.” A protester appeared outside his house; on Twitter, users called for his death. Chipman’s wife, who had worked at the A.T.F. for decades, felt so unsafe at her job that she quit.
Race is also a theme of attacks that the A.A.F. has directed at Carlton Waterhouse, a Black environmental lawyer whom Biden has nominated to become an assistant administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency, overseeing environmental-justice efforts for underserved communities. Waterhouse’s résumé is strong: he studied engineering at Penn State, and has a doctorate in ethics from Emory and a law degree from Howard University, where he helped develop the school’s Environmental Justice Center. On Fox News, however, Jones dismissed Waterhouse as “a racist” who is “obsessed with pushing racially divisive rhetoric and policies into every aspect of public life.” A dossier that the A.A.F. compiled on Waterhouse states that he “wants to resegregate America’s schools . . . by establishing schools explicitly for Black students.” Yet, in an article the dossier cites as evidence, Waterhouse actually writes that such schools should be “open to all children.” The A.A.F.’s dossier also claims that Waterhouse was “so radical he opposes the Civil Rights Legislation of the 1960’s and 1970’s.” Waterhouse told me that this was a distortion “intended to stir up disapproval.” His criticism of the civil-rights movement was only that it hadn’t gone far enough to establish a framework for reparations. “It’s hateful, and a gross misrepresentation,” he said. Waterhouse has yet to be confirmed, leaving a top environmental-justice job at the agency vacant. The blocking of so many Biden nominees has made it significantly harder for the President and his Administration to enact policies that they were elected to implement. Waterhouse said that he was hopeful and excited about the prospect of getting to work, but added that the A.A.F.’s campaigns were having a chilling effect: “People won’t want to serve, because your name will be dragged through the mud.”
As Jones has portrayed it, his group is merely catching up with the sleazy tactics of progressive dark-money groups—which, he claims, went to great lengths to try to block Cabinet nominees during the Trump Administration, not to mention conservative Supreme Court nominees such as Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. Of course, neither Thomas nor Kavanaugh were felled by anonymous slurs during their nomination hearings; they were credibly and directly confronted by female victims who accused them, in sworn testimony, of sexual misconduct. Nan Aron, the former head of Alliance for Justice, a progressive group that led the charge against both Thomas and Kavanaugh, acknowledged that, over the years, her group had scoured the records, finances, and personal lives of nominees it opposed. The crucial difference, she said, was that “it wasn’t the groups that were manufacturing” the scandals which plagued the nominees. As she put it, “None of the groups were looking for Christine Blasey Ford—no one made phone calls to find her.”
Ford, who maintains that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school, reached out directly to Democrats in Congress. The ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, Dianne Feinstein, sent an emissary to evaluate Ford’s claims and declined to make them public, but by then Ford had voiced her complaints to enough people that the word spread to reporters, including to me and Ronan Farrow, another writer at this magazine. Some conservatives have tried to establish a false equivalence between conventional reporting and the mudslinging directed at Ketanji Brown Jackson. But Ford testified in Congress against Kavanaugh. A second woman who accused him of sexual misconduct on the record, Deborah Ramirez, offered to speak to the F.B.I. (Kavanaugh strongly denied the allegations against him during his own congressional testimony.) Notably, the A.A.F.’s campaigns against Biden nominees have produced no witnesses or alleged victims who have testified before Congress. And some of the group’s accusations have been summarily rejected by outside authorities. The New York Attorney Grievance Committees curtly declined a demand by the A.A.F. that they investigate Biden’s nominee for general counsel of the Navy, John P. (Sean) Coffey, whom the A.A.F. had accused of engaging in “an unethical pay-to-play scheme” when his law firm represented pension funds. In a four-paragraph response to Jones, obtained by The New Yorker, the chief attorney for the legal group declined to take action, noting, “You provide no evidence.”
Brian Fallon, the co-founder and executive director of Demand Justice—a progressive nonprofit dark-money group that has become a target of conservative critics, because it scrutinizes the records of right-leaning judicial nominees—told me, “It sounds as if this group is reverse-engineering the process. It’s almost like they’re trying to create the story line as opposed to finding a dry fact”—and then “trying to get people to give voice to the narrative.” His group conducts opposition research, too, but he said that it was “ham-fisted and sloppy” to post requests for dirt on anonymous message boards or to send mass e-mails to a nominee’s colleagues. “Most opposition researchers on our side would worry about using such tactics,” he said. “Because people are so quick to play the victim, they’d worry about becoming the story.”
Fallon said that crumbs of negative information about high-profile nominees can always be found, but unless the facts pass “the smell test of being in good faith,” and can hold up under the scrutiny of experts and the press, they aren’t worth much. During the closely watched confirmation hearings of Jackson, he argued, the mud stained mainly those who threw it; the senators who lobbed the sex-offender accusations “oozed bad faith, and were lambasted” to the point that the critique “wasn’t adopted by the Republican Party at large.” In the end, Jackson secured three Republican votes and “emerged from the hearings with higher approval ratings.” He said, of the A.A.F., “They may be taking a victory lap, but their opposition research backfired.” The A.A.F.’s strategy, however, has proved more damaging when deployed on nominees whose hearings receive less attention. Such people are easier to smear because charges against them are often not properly scrutinized.
The A.A.F. describes itself as a champion of transparency, but it declines to reveal the sources of its funding. Its official mailing address is a handsome historic building a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. But when I stopped by there recently, to ask for the group’s basic financial records—which all tax-exempt nonprofits are legally required to produce—a woman at the lobby’s front desk said there was no such group at that address. Instead, the building is occupied by a different nonprofit group: the Conservative Partnership Institute, which serves as a kind of Isle of Elba for Trump loyalists in exile. It has become the employer of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and of Trump’s former ad-hoc legal adviser Cleta Mitchell, both of whom are fighting subpoenas from the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cameron Seward, the general counsel of the Conservative Partnership Institute, appeared in the lobby and assured me that there was no relationship between his group and the A.A.F. Yet documents that the A.A.F. filed with the I.R.S. in 2021, to secure its tax-exempt status, describe the group as existing “in care of” C.P.I. Moreover, C.P.I.’s 2021 annual report notes that it launched the A.A.F. because “conservatives didn’t have a group performing research on Biden’s woke nominees—even though plenty of liberal groups were digging up (or manufacturing) dirt on our side.” The groups have several overlapping directors, including Jones, who sits on both boards. The A.A.F. told the I.R.S. that its mission is to conduct nonpartisan research, but it is curious that the largest contribution by far to its parent group, C.P.I., is a million-dollar “charitable contribution” from Save America—Trump’s political-action committee. Trump reportedly raised much of the pac’s money from supporters after his 2020 defeat, and his campaign has called the group an “election defense fund.”
Save America made its contribution to C.P.I. a few months after Meadows joined the group. Meadows’s son, Blake, an associate attorney at the Georgia law firm Foster, Foster, & Smith, appears to be involved with C.P.I., too: his name appears in a lawsuit filed last month on behalf of the A.A.F. against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Matthew Buckham, the A.A.F. co-founder, also has a Trump connection: he worked at the White House during his Administration, in the personnel office. (His father, Ed Buckham, is chief of staff to Marjorie Taylor Greene.)
It’s a great advantage to be able to treat opposition research as a tax-exempt charitable expense rather than as, say, a campaign cost. On March 21st, Paul Teller, the executive director of an advocacy group that serves as former Vice-President Mike Pence’s political operation, gave a lecture to Christian pastors in which he said, of the A.A.F., “I’m just in love with these guys!” Teller enthused, “They are just taking it to every Biden-Harris nominee that comes across to Congress,” adding, “Some of the stuff that we’re fighting with the Supreme Court nominee Jackson came from our friends at the American Accountability Foundation.” He went on, “We’re partnering, we’re collaborating.” Teller’s group is widely seen as promoting a potential Pence campaign for President in 2024.
When the A.A.F. applied for its tax-exempt status, it portrayed itself, under penalty of perjury, as a nonpartisan charity that would neither participate in political campaigns nor try to influence legislation. As a tax-exempt nonprofit dark-money organization, Jones’s group isn’t required to publicly disclose its donors, so it’s impossible to know all the sources of its funding. Clearly, though, it has big ambitions. In its I.R.S. filing, the A.A.F. submitted revenue projections that predict its budget as six hundred thousand dollars in 2021, a million dollars in 2022, and one and a half million dollars in 2023.
Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and Trump critic at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, believes that the A.A.F. is doing “frightening, sleazy stuff” with serious implications. Not only is the group creating needless vacancies in important Administration positions; it is intimidating well-qualified people from wanting to undergo the nomination process. “It’s tough enough to get top-flight people in government,” Ornstein said. “But, if you also have to go through a well-funded, well-oiled slime machine, it’s really an attack on government.”=<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/aftermath-sixteen-writers-on-trumps-america">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/aftermath-sixteen-writers-on-trumps-america</a><p class="has-dropcap has-dropcaplead-standard-heading paywall" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 32px;">During the Presidential primaries, Donald Trump mocked his Republican rivals as “puppets” for flocking to a secretive fund-raising session sponsored by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire co-owners of the energy conglomerate Koch Industries. Affronted, the Koch brothers, whose political spending has made their name a shorthand for special-interest clout, withheld their financial support from Trump. But on Tuesday night David Koch was reportedly among the revellers at Trump’s victory party in a Hilton Hotel in New York.Trump campaigned by attacking the big donors, corporate lobbyists, and political-action committees as “very corrupt.” In a tweet on October 18th, he promised, “I will Make Our Government Honest Again—believe me. But first I’m going to have to #DrainTheSwamp.” His DrainTheSwamp hashtag became a rallying cry for supporters intent on ridding Washington of corruption. But Ann Ravel, a Democratic member of the Federal Elections Commission who has championed reform of political money, says that “the alligators are multiplying.”<div data-attr-viewport-monitor="inline-recirc" class="inline-recirc-wrapper inline-recirc-observer-target-8 viewport-monitor-anchor" data-event-boundary="click" data-event-click="{" pattern="pattern" inlinerecirc="InlineRecirc" data-include-experiments="true" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Many of Trump’s transition-team members are the corporate insiders he vowed to disempower. On Friday, Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, the new transition-team chair, announced that Marc Short, who until recently ran Freedom Partners, the Kochs’ political-donors group, would serve as a “senior adviser.” The influence of the Kochs and their allies is particularly clear in the areas of energy and the environment. The few remarks Trump made on these issues during the campaign reflected the fondest hopes of the oil, gas, and coal producers. He vowed to withdraw from the international climate treaty negotiated last year in Paris, remove regulations that curb carbon emissions, legalize oil drilling and mining on federal lands and in seas, approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and weaken the Environmental Protection Agency.For policy and personnel advice regarding the Department of Energy, Trump is relying on Michael McKenna, the president of the lobbying firm MWR Strategies. McKenna’s clients include Koch Companies Public Sector, a division of Koch Industries. According to Politico, McKenna also has ties to the American Energy Alliance and its affiliate, the Institute for Energy Research. These nonprofit groups purport to be grassroots organizations, but they run ads advocating corporate-friendly energy policies, without disclosing their financial backers. In 2012, Freedom Partners gave $1.5 million to the American Energy Alliance.Michael Catanzaro, a partner at the lobbying firm CGCN Group, is the head of Trump’s energy transition team, and has been mentioned as a possible energy czar. Among his clients are Koch Industries and Devon Energy Corporation, a gas-and-oil company that has made a fortune from vertical drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Another widely discussed candidate is Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of the shale-oil company Continental Resources, who is a major contributor to the Kochs’ fund-raising network. Wenona Hauter, of Food and Water Watch, says that Hamm has “done all he can to subvert the existing rules and regulations.”Myron Ebell, an outspoken climate-change skeptic, heads Trump’s transition team for the E.P.A. Ebell runs the energy-and-environmental program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an anti-regulatory Washington think tank that hides its sources of financial support but has been funded by fossil-fuel companies, including Exxon-Mobil and Koch Industries. David Schnare, a self-described “free-market environmentalist” who has accused the E.P.A. of having “blood on its hands,” is a member of the E.P.A. working group. Schnare is the director of the Center for Energy and the Environment at the Thomas Jefferson Institute, part of a nationwide consortium of anti-government, pro-industry think tanks. He is also the general counsel at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which has received funding from coal companies. In 2011, Schnare started hounding the climate scientist Michael Mann, who had been a professor at the University of Virginia, by filing public-records requests demanding to see his unpublished research and his private e-mails. The legal wrangling tied up Mann’s work until 2014, when the Virginia Supreme Court ordered Schnare to desist. The Union of Concerned Scientists has described these actions against climate scientists as “harassment.”Norman Eisen, who devised strict conflict-of-interest rules while acting as Obama’s ethics czar, says, “If you have people on the transition team with deep financial ties to the industries to be regulated, it raises questions about whether they are serving the public interest or their own interests.” He ruled out Obama transition-team members who would have had a conflict of interest in their assigned areas, or even the appearance of one. “We weren’t perfect,” he said. “But we tried to level the playing field because, let’s face it, in the Beltway nexus of corporations and dark money, lobbyists are the delivery mechanism for special-interest influence. ”Questions to Trump’s transition team about its conflict-of-interest rules went unanswered, as did questions to the lobbyists and industry heads involved. But the composition of the group runs counter to a set of anti-lobbyist proposals that Trump released in October, to be enacted in his first hundred days. It called for a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave public office, and a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying for a foreign government.The tenth item on the list of proposals is the Clean Up Corruption in Washington Act, which would implement “new ethics reforms to Drain the Swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics.” Trevor Potter, who served as the commissioner of the F.E.C. under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and is now the president of the Campaign Legal Center, described Trump’s ethics proposals as “quite interesting, and quite helpful.” He was puzzled, though, by the vagueness of the “Drain the Swamp” act. “It’s a complete black box so far,” Potter said.Potter wondered if Trump’s lack of specificity reflected internal divisions. He noted that Don McGahn, who served as the Trump campaign’s attorney, is an opponent of almost all campaign-finance restrictions. “Many on the transition team are registered lobbyists who are deeply invested in the system Trump says he wants to change,” Potter said. “It looks like the lobbyists and special interests are already taking over.”=https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/in-the-mueller-report-erik-prince-funds-a-covert-effort-to-obtain-clintons-e-mails-from-a-foreign-stateerik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater, a former private-security company embroiled in controversy surrounding its use of lethal force against civilians in Iraq, makes a strange cameo appearance in the redacted version of the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tag/mueller-investigation" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; --colortoken-name:colors.interactive.base.light; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; line-height: inherit;">Mueller report</a>, which was released on Thursday morning. Prince, who is the brother of Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, is described as having provided some funding for a secretive effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s private e-mails from shadowy operatives working on the so-called dark Web.According to the report, Prince “provided funding to hire a tech advisor to ascertain the authenticity” of e-mails that conservative activists had obtained. Prince, who was interviewed by the special counsel’s team, said that the cache of e-mails in question turned out to be fakes.The report, however, details a strange effort by <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; --colortoken-name:colors.interactive.base.light; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; line-height: inherit;">Trump</a>-campaign associates to hack into Clinton and the Democrats’ e-mail accounts that paralleled the Russian plot. According to Mueller, the effort began as early as December, 2015, and ramped up after Trump publicly declared, on July 27, 2016, that he hoped Russia would “find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing” from Clinton’s private e-mail server. Mueller and his team <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/current/robert-mueller-let-donald-trump-duck-direct-questions-about-obstruction" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; --colortoken-name:colors.interactive.base.light; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; line-height: inherit;">never interviewed Trump</a>, but the retired lieutenant general <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/michael-flynn-general-chaos" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; cursor: pointer; --colortoken-name:colors.interactive.base.light; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; line-height: inherit;">Michael Flynn</a>, the campaign aide whom Trump later appointed his national-security adviser, told them that Trump repeatedly asked to get Clinton’s e-mails. According to the report, Flynn tried to do this by contacting multiple people who might be able to supply them, including two well-placed conservative operatives, Peter Smith and Barbara Ledeen.Smith, an investment banker and Republican donor, had helped finance an investigation of Bill Clinton’s sexual relationships in Arkansas, leading to the 1993 Troopergate scandal. Ledeen, a Republican Senate staffer, worked for Chuck Grassley. Grassley was then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and one of the fiercest defenders of Trump and critics of the Russia investigation. Barbara Ledeen’s husband, Michael Ledeen, had co-authored a book with Flynn. A spokesman for Grassley’s office described Barbara Ledeen’s efforts as her private pursuit, rather than an official effort undertaken by the senator’s office.In December, 2015, Ledeen e-mailed Smith a proposal to obtain Clinton’s private e-mails, which, she claimed, “were classified” and had been “purloined by our enemies.” According to Mueller’s report, the proposal claimed that the “Clinton email server was, in all likelihood, breached long ago,’ and that the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian intelligence services could ‘re-assemble the server’s email content.’ ” In an account of Ledeen’s efforts, the Guardian GUK cited notes by federal investigators that said her motive was concern for the well-being of her children, who have served in the U.S. military, and whose safety, she suggested, could have been undermined if Clinton’s e-mails had fallen into hostile governments’ hands. But, in her e-mails to Smith, as revealed by the Mueller report, Ledeen appears more focussed on partisan politics. She writes, “if even a single email was recovered and the providence [sic] of the email was a foreign service, it would be catastrophic to the Clinton campaign.”<div class="ConsumerMarketingUnitThemedWrapper-kkMeXf hBFNZw consumer-marketing-unit consumer-marketing-unit--article-mid-content" role="presentation" aria-hidden="true" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="consumer-marketing-unitslot consumer-marketing-unitslot--article-mid-content consumer-marketing-unitslot--in-content" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="journey-unit" style="box-sizing: border-box;">The report shows that, though Smith declined to participate in the project at first, Ledeen went ahead and obtained a cache of e-mails. After Trump publicly called for help in getting Clinton’s e-mails, Smith initiated his own effort and circulated information about it to members of Trump’s campaign. According to Mueller’s report, in August, 2016, “Smith sent an email from an encrypted account with the subject ‘Sec Clinton’s unsecured private email server’ ” to recipients including the Trump-campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis. Smith reported that he was involved in efforts “to poke and probe on the above,” and that the Clinton’s server had been “hacked with ease by both State-related players and private mercenaries.”Smith set up an L.L.C. for the project and structured it as an “independent expenditure group” that, under campaign law, could not coördinate with the Trump campaign, yet Smith circulated e-mails saying that his initiative was “in coordination with” the Trump campaign “to the extent permitted” by the law. The New Yorker obtained a document from Smith, from September, 2016, in which he claimed that he was working with the Trump-campaign representatives <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/steve-bannons-roman-holiday" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; --colortoken-name:colors.interactive.base.light; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; line-height: inherit;">Steve Bannon</a>, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, and Michael Flynn, and also with the Republican National Committee, Judicial Watch, Citizens United, and the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/james-okeefe-accidentally-stings-himself" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; --colortoken-name:colors.interactive.base.light; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; line-height: inherit;">conservative activist James O’Keefe</a>. There is no evidence that any of these individuals were, in fact, working with Smith. But the Mueller report’s depiction of Smith, Ledeen, Flynn, and Prince’s efforts suggests that Trump and his immediate campaign orbit were deeply intent on obtaining Clinton’s private e-mails during the period when Russia was hacking into them.In September, 2016, Smith and Ledeen rejoined forces, at which point Prince provided some of the funding for the operation. Mueller’s team obtained files from Smith’s computer showing that Smith had documents that WikiLeaks had stolen from the computer of the Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, though Mueller found no conclusive evidence that Smith had obtained the stolen files prior to WikiLeaks’s public release of them. (Smith died in May, 2017, in what was ruled a suicide.)In his remarks prior to releasing the report, Attorney General William Barr stressed that it is not criminal to disseminate stolen information, such as the e-mails that the Russians hacked from the Democrats during the 2016 campaign, so long as those spreading the stolen information were not involved in the initial theft. It appears that the Attorney General’s definition of the criminal law was narrow and careful for a reason—many Trump-campaign supporters were involved in tiptoeing right up to the line.=an 821<div id="sPost_0_0_7_0_22_3_1_0_0_0_1_0" class="post-partial articlesplash-custom" style="margin-bottom: 40px; position: relative; overflow: hidden !important;"><div class="post-splash-custom clearfix" data-attr-layout_copylink="inactive" data-attr-show_around_the_web="true" data-attr-all_element_order="headline,photo_caption,photo_credit,author,date,post_shares,body,primary_tag,subheadline,section,tags,page_views,badges,badges_sponsored,snark_line,like_button,source_link,collection_button,community_comments,follow_button,main_author,community_name,all_sections,date_modified,custom_field_covid_guidelines,custom_field_covid_ann_location_name,custom_field_covid_ann_location_url,custom_field_covid_ann_location_address_more,custom_field_covid_tested_info_url,custom_field_covid_ann_location_address,custom_field_covid_prevention_info_url,custom_field_covid_government_benefits_url,custom_field_covid_expires,custom_field_hide_iterable_takeover,custom_field_covid_government_benefits_service_type_url,custom_field_covid_government_benefits_name,custom_field_covid_government_benefits_audience_name,custom_field_covid_travel_bans,custom_field_covid_government_benefits_provider_name,custom_field_covid_desease_statistics_url,custom_field_covid_covid_updates_guidelines,custom_field_covid_transport_closures,product_prices,product_vendor,product_buy_link,custom_field_is_survey_post,custom_field_survey_text_italic,custom_field_smart_news_headline,custom_field_wevegotissues,custom_field_survey_text_red" data-attr-layout_all_date_format="%B %d, %Y" data-attr-layout_whatsapp="active" data-attr-layout_separator="inactive" data-attr-layout_slack="inactive" data-attr-layout_flipboard="active" data-attr-show_more_button_text="Read More" data-attr-layout_photo_credit="over" data-attr-layout_linkedin="inactive" data-attr-layout_post_shares="bottom" data-attr-layout_pinterest="inactive" data-attr-layout_date="bottom" data-attr-layout_author="bottom" data-attr-show_full_post_body="true" data-attr-layout_photo_caption="over" data-attr-layout_reddit="inactive" data-attr-layout_body="bottom" data-attr-id="sPost_0_0_7_0_22_3_1_0_0_0_1_0" data-attr-all_share_buttons="Flipboard,Facebook,Twitter,Email,Linkedin,SMS,Separator,Slack,GooglePlus,Pinterest,Whatsapp,Reddit,CopyLink,Tumblr" data-attr-layout_headline="top" data-attr-format="splash-custom" data-attr-layout_tumblr="inactive" data-attr-layout_sms="active" data-attr-layout_all_image_crop="16x9" data-attr-layout_googleplus="inactive" data-attr-layout_quality="7" data-attr-header_template="jinja/post/custom-css.html" style="position: relative;"><article elid="2654464453" data-is-frozen="false" class="clearfix page-article sm-mb-1 quality-MD post-2654464453"><div class="row px10" style="margin-bottom: -40px; margin-left: -10px; margin-right: -10px; overflow: hidden;"><div id="col-center" class="col sm-mb-1" style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 40px; float: left; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; width: 838.688px;"><div class="widgetbody clearfix sm-mt-1" style="margin-bottom: 10px;"><div class="body js-expandable clearfix js-listicle-body css-listicle-body-2654464453" style="margin: auto; width: 654.938px; line-height: 31px;"><div class="body-description"><div> Mayer, author of the 2016 New York Times bestseller "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right," is shedding light on how dark money donated by ultrarich conservatives has contributed to the tactics used to magnify former President Donald Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud.</div>In a piece published by The New Yorker, Mayer <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">dissected the controversial election audit in Maricopa County, Ariz.</a>, as she explained why the effort is not as local as it may seem."Although the audit in Arizona may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country's wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives," Mayer wrote.She went on to discuss <a data-linked-post="2647364451" href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/dark-money-jane-mayer-on-how-the-koch-bros-and-billionaire-allies-funded-the-rise-of-the-far-right/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">the uses of dark money</a> and how it has aided in promoting the falsehood of widespread voter fraud."Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote," she wrote.Experts are expressing concern about the <a data-linked-post="2648656738" href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/contemporary-democracy-and-the-sacred-rights-religion-and-ideology/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">efforts being made to upend election laws and dismantle the United States' democracy </a>While Mayer largely highlighted the election audit in Arizona, there are many different states across the country where Republican lawmakers are taking aim at voting practices and election laws.<div class="around-the-web"><div class="from-your-siteheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.438px; list-style: none;"><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/dark-money-jane-mayer-on-how-the-koch-bros-and-billionaire-allies-funded-the-rise-of-the-far-right/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Dark Money: How the Koch Bros. and billionaire allies funded the ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/dark-money-groups/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">How 'dark money' from the Koch network and others is fueling ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/arizona-audit-2653487627/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">'Wholly inappropriate': Secret Trump-affiliated 'dark money' groups ... ›</a></li></ul><div class="around-the-webheadline" style="font-weight: 700; 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width: 654.938px;"><div class="mb-2 survey_post_promo" id="ssurvey_shared_element_0_0_19_0_0_0"><div class="posts-custom posts-custom-section section-holder clearfix" data-block="section_1" data-format="posts-custom" data-source="frontpage_parent_site_Poll" data-source-type="page" data-source-unique="true" data-section-id="528622410" data-is-reordable="true" data-using-stickers="true" data-has-more="true" data-attr-element_classes="survey_post_promo" data-attr-posts_id="ssurvey_shared_element_0_0_19_0_0_0" data-attr-source_site="parent_site" data-attr-layout_headline="bottom" data-attr-format="posts-custom" data-attr-all_element_order="headline,subheadline,section,author,community_name,date,date_modified,badges,badges_sponsored,photo_credit,photo_caption,body,snark_line,page_views,post_shares,follow_button,community_comments,like_button,source_link,collection_button,tags,primary_tag,main_author,all_sections,custom_field_is_survey_post,custom_field_survey_text_italic,custom_field_smart_news_feed_headline,custom_field_Send-alternative-headline-to-smartnews,custom_field_survey_text_red" data-attr-data-rm-advanced="true" data-attr-source_url="Poll" data-attr-section_url="Poll" data-attr-layout_all_headline_tag="h2" data-attr-layout_all_image_crop="original" data-attr-source_unique="true" data-attr-v="2" data-attr-limit="1" data-attr-node_id="/root/blocks/block[survey_shared_element]/abtests/abtest[1]/posts-" data-attr-without_current="true" data-attr-layout_quality="1" style="margin-bottom: 0px;"><div class="posts-wrapper clearfix" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; line-height: 0;"><div class="widget" elid="2654254444" data-category="Poll" style="position: relative; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 20px; width: 654.938px; display: inline-block; vertical-align: top; background: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><article elid="2654254444" data-is-frozen="false" class="clearfix page-article sm-mb-1 quality-HD post-2654254444" style="margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.4;"><div class="row px10" style="margin-bottom: -40px; margin-left: -10px; margin-right: -10px; overflow: hidden;"><div id="col-center" class="col sm-mb-1" style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 40px; float: left; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; display: flex; width: 674.938px;"><div class="widgethead" style="margin: 0px; position: relative; width: 291.438px;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/trump-influence-poll/" aria-label="Is Trump's influence diminishing?" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; overflow-wrap: break-word;" /></div></div></div></article></div></div></div></div></div><div class="" id="sPost_0_0_7_0_22_3_1_0_0_1" style="margin: auto; width: 654.938px;"><div id="lightbox-inline-form-ae0a1a76-b06b-45e5-9d44-8cc41de9ef21" align="center"><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/trump-influence-poll/" aria-label="Is Trump's influence diminishing?" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; overflow-wrap: break-word;"></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/mitch-mcconnell-is-still-refusing-to-rein-in-trump-and-americans-are-paying-the-price-new-yorker">https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/mitch-mcconnell-is-still-refusing-to-rein-in-trump-and-americans-are-paying-the-price-new-yorker</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div><div style="text-align: left;">no lnx</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Mitch McConnell is still refusing to rein in Trump — and Americans are paying the price: New Yorker</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Written by Sarah K. Burris / Raw Story April 13, 2020</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer explained that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is enabling President Donald Trump’s bad behavior at a time that Americans need a leader the most.</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">“On Thursday, March 12th, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, could have insisted that he and his colleagues work through the weekend to hammer out an emergency aid package addressing the coronavirus pandemic,” she wrote. “Instead, he recessed the Senate for a long weekend and returned home to Louisville, Kentucky. McConnell, a seventy-eight-year-old Republican who is about to complete his sixth term as a senator, planned to attend a celebration for a protégé, Justin Walker, a federal judge who was once his Senate intern. McConnell has helped install nearly two hundred conservatives as judges; stocking the judiciary has been his legacy project.”</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Democrats were working with the White House’s Steve Mnuchin, and McConnell was needed for the next step. He was cracking jokes at an event halfway across the country during the crisis. It took McConnell 11 days to come up with a bill.</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">“McConnell, who is known as one of the wiliest politicians in Washington, soon reframed the narrative as a personal success story,” The New Yorker said. “In Kentucky, where he is running for reëlection, he launched a campaign ad about the bill’s passage, boasting, ‘One leader brought our divided country together.’ At the same time, he attacked the Democrats, telling a radio host that the impeachment of Trump had ‘diverted the attention of the government’ when the epidemic was in its early stages. In fact, several senators—including Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut—had raised alarms about the virus nearly two months before the Administration acted, whereas Trump had told reporters around the same time that he was “not concerned at all.” And on February 27th, some three weeks after the impeachment trial ended, McConnell had defended the Administration’s response, accusing Democrats of ‘performative outrage’ when they demanded more emergency funding.”</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">The New Yorker explained that McConnell’s worship for Trump is really a kind of “cynical political genius.” He’s both protecting his caucus and covering himself in a deeply red state where Trump is more popular than even he is.</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">“When the pandemic took hold, the President’s standing initially rose in national polls, and McConnell and Trump will surely both take credit for the aid package in the coming months,” said the report. “Yet, as covid-19 decimates the economy and kills Americans across the nation, McConnell’s alliance with Trump is looking riskier. Indeed, some critics argue that McConnell bears a singular responsibility for the country’s predicament. They say that he knew from the start that Trump was unequipped to lead in a crisis, but because the President was beloved by the Republican base, McConnell protected him.”</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">The report recalled that McConnell even blocked witnesses at the impeachment trial, which basically guaranteed that Trump would remain in office.’</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">“There are a lot of people disappointed in him. He could have mobilized the Senate. But the Republican Party changed underneath him, and he wanted to remain in power,”said David Hawpe, the former editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal.</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Columnist and journalism professor Al Cross called McConnell’s partnership with Trump “the most important political relationship in the country.”</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">According to The New Yorker, Cross “had hoped that McConnell would push back against Trump. After all, past Republicans have crossed party lines to defend democracy—from censuring Joe McCarthy to forcing the resignation of President Richard Nixon.”’</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">“But Trump and McConnell have come to understand each other,” Cross said. “The President needs him to govern. McConnell knows that if their relationship fell apart it would be a disaster for the Republican majority in the Senate. They’re very different in many ways, but fundamentally they’re about the same thing—winning.”</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">The extensive piece goes on to explain even more ways in which McConnell has sold his soul in further efforts to protect himself in what will likely be one of the most difficult elections of his career. Democrats are still fighting it out in a primary election, but the race has already seen more donations than any other in the country. As the coronavirus creeps into the southern states, McConnell could end up in a desperate situation explaining why he hasn’t done enough while his state is suffering.</div></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">---</div>1119<a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/11/12/elizabeth-warren-pregnancy-fired-america-rising/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://theintercept.com/2019/11/12/elizabeth-warren-pregnancy-fired-america-rising/</a>in oct documents surfaced that appeared to contradict a key story told by Sen. Elizabeth Warren on the campaign trail. In her telling, Warren’s “dream job” as a public school teacher ended in 1971 when the school principal noticed she was “visibly pregnant,” a form of employment discrimination that was legal and common during that era. On October 7, a conservative website presented archived documents that appeared to challenge that narrative, including the minutes of a meeting in which the school board had voted to extend Warren’s tenure and another in which the board notes that Warren herself resigned from the job.<div data-reactid="212" style="box-sizing: border-box;">The story spread like wildfire, moving from conservative publications to major newspapers. Even Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to President Donald Trump, <a href="https://twitter.com/KellyannePolls/status/1181314387048615936" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">weighed</a> in on the controversy to suggest that the Democratic candidate had lied about her life story. More records seeming to challenge Warren’s narrative emerged, including a <a href="http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people7/Warren/warren-con1.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">2007 interview</a> in Berkeley, California, in which Warren appeared to say that she left teaching on her own accord to raise her child and seek additional education credentials, as well as a contemporaneous newspaper story about Warren leaving the school “<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elizabeth-warren-pregnancy-claim-democratic-presidential-candidate-stands-by-being-pushed-out-of-teaching-job/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">to raise a family</a>.”Warren has stood by her story that she was “shown the door” because of her pregnancy. “When I was 22 and finishing my first year of teaching, I had an experience millions of women will recognize. By June I was visibly pregnant — and the principal told me the job I’d already been promised for the next year would go to someone else,” Warren <a href="https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1181556990906118144" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">said</a> on Twitter last month.But how did these documents surface in the first place? According to the results of an open records request, an opposition research group known as America Rising had requested documents from the Riverdale Board of Education in New Jersey just weeks before the news appeared. It asked for “Warren’s employment records,” as well copies of other records requested from the school board from the previous two years.In response to the request, a school official provided America Rising with the school board minutes that became the basis for the story that erupted the following month, along with emails from a Wall Street Journal reporter, who had requested similar records in April.America Rising — which is <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/america-rising-llc-pac-america-rising-squared-definers-public-affairs" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">affiliated</a> with a political action committee, a public relations firm, and a for-profit research company, as well as several news websites — has been <a href="https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/?data_type=processed&committee_id=C00542902&two_year_transaction_period=2014&two_year_transaction_period=2016&two_year_transaction_period=2018&two_year_transaction_period=2020" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">backed</a> over the years by Republican donors, including hedge-fund billionaires Paul Singer and Ken Griffin, private equity investor John Childs, and banker Andrew Beal.America Rising did not respond to a request for comment. The organization did not claim direct responsibility for the Warren story, but <a href="https://americarisingpac.org/meeting-minutes-contradict-elizabeth-warrens-claim-of-being-fired-over-pregnancy/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">touted the documents</a> as soon as they appeared online via an allied conservative website called the Washington Free Beacon. Free Beacon is also <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/us/politics/trump-dossier-paul-singer.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">funded by Singer</a>.America Rising is known for attempting to dig up dirt on politicians, journalists, and activists on behalf of donors’ interests. The group went after journalist <a href="https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/01/america-rising-pac-sets-sights-for-koch-chronicler-jane-mayer-218081" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">Jane Mayer</a>, shopping negative information about the New Yorker writer following the publication of her book “Dark Money.” In 2016, America Rising focused on environmentalist Bill McKibben, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/opinion/sunday/embarrassing-photos-of-me-thanks-to-my-right-wing-stalkers.html?r=0&module=inline" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">dispatching its team</a> to obtain thousands of documents from McKibben’s past and to follow the Vermont-based writer, filming him at public events, as well as while grocery shopping and sitting in a church pew. This year, Definers Public Affairs, an affiliate of America Rising that shares the same staff, decided to <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/04/definers-facebook-oppo-research-controversy-1480400" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">rebrand</a> following <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/15/definers-republican-firm-plan-defend-facebook-attack-rivals-soros" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">revelations</a> that the company had been retained by Facebook to orchestrate a campaign to smear its critics.</div><div id="third-party--article-mid" class="NewsletterEmbed-container" data-reactid="213" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px -20px 20px; width: auto; display: flex; justify-content: center;"><div class="Newsletter-shortcode Newsletter-shortcode-layout-full" data-reactid="214" style="box-sizing: border-box; width: fit-content; display: flex; margin-right: 0px;">
</div></div><div data-reactid="223" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;">The current America Rising research effort on Warren appears to be part of a <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/15/gop-group-preps-opposition-research-blitz-against-mike-bloomberg.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">broader dive</a> into the Democratic field, which is being <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/18/trump-team-guns-for-2020-rivals-242781" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">coordinated</a> with America First Policies, the nonprofit arm of Trump’s Super PAC. The effort involves research on Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Michael Bloomberg, Joe Biden, Cory Booker, and other Democratic candidates....</div>The New York Times <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=fa40e68085e4854fa7e9ffd59919389e4b9908784629aeca08dc51cf987239038b0ac6ead899bc3f4310b52bbedd42e1609ab6093cfa74f5" title="again lifted up" helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" color="color" rgb="rgb">again lifted up</a> Breitbart's Peter Schweizer. Chris Hayes and The New Yorker's Jane Mayer <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=fa40e68085e4854f869a4e10392fa6a1659f6ea2c9a5ed8157a78b2423271e58e1a5b157b58221281b1999462554ec3a430d0a7c4eebf9bc" title="ripped" helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" color="color" rgb="rgb">ripped</a> mainstream outlets for enabling Schweizer's lies.=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 “<a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://issuu.com/nyusterncenterforbusinessandhumanri/docs/nyu_election_2020_report" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Disinformation and the 2020 Election</a>,” 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 “<a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0728KHFD5/?tag=thneyo0f-20" target="blank" rel="nofollow" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Devil’s Bargain</a>,” 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 “<a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062369296/?tag=thneyo0f-20" target="blank" rel="nofollow" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Clinton Cash</a>.” 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 <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">story</a> 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 <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">later</a> 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 <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/peter-schweizer-book-alleging-biden-corruption-in-ukraine-appears-to-have-lifted-passages-from-wikipedia" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">identified</a> what it said were over a dozen passages in his book, “<a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062569368/?tag=thneyo0f-20" target="blank" rel="nofollow" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends</a>,” 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 <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-biden-jeopardize-his-fathers-campaign" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Hunter Biden</a> 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.)
<div style="text-align: left;">=</div><div style="text-align: left;">...Jane Mayer of the<a title="" href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-invention-of-the-conspiracy-theory-on-biden-and-ukraine" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> New Yorker </a>explains how the “Biden/Ukraine” hoax was invented and spread by the same people who invented the “Uranium One” fiction which Fox 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.</div><div style="text-align: left;">...</div><div><div style="text-align: left;">no lnx</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">The Invention of the Conspiracy Theory on Biden and Ukraine</div><div style="text-align: left;">How a conservative dark-money group that targeted Hillary Clinton in 2016 spread the discredited story that may lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment.</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">By Jane Mayer October 4, 2019</div></div>=cjp...<div style="text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Lee Fang, an investigative journalist at the Intercept, who has reported for a number of outlets about the sprawling political network funded by the conservative Koch brothers, said he suspects operatives working for the Kochs hacked his private account on the image hosting site Photobucket and circulated an image of him smoking marijuana as a teenager.</div><div style="text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">The image published by the conservative website the Washington Free Beacon, in a post titled "High Times at The Intercept" that mocked the publication's decision to hire Fang, was taken from a password protected account, Fang said. The Free Beacon was co-founded by Michael Goldfarb, who previously worked as a crisis communications consultant for the Kochs.</div><div style="text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Fang told CPJ he can't definitively prove who was behind the hack, but said that his reporting had been flagged by pro-Koch Brothers operatives before, including on a now-defunct website, KochFacts.com, that listed journalists writing critically on the Kochs' political activities.</div><div style="text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...</div><div style="text-align: left;">In her book Dark Money, an investigation into the Koch's political network, New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer alleged that the brothers retained New York City Police Commissioner-turned private investigator Howard Safir to delve into her past. Mayer wrote that sources told her Goldfarb was involved in that work. She said she also discovered that a dossier erroneously accusing her of plagiarism was passed around conservative D.C. media circles--a reporter with the conservative Daily Caller website even contacted her editors at The New Yorker, accusing her of plagiarism. She was able to quickly refute the allegations before they were made public. The Koch Brothers have called Mayer's reporting inaccurate, but did not directly refute the accusations when contacted by The New York Times in 2016. </div><div style="text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Safir did not respond to CPJ's request for comment. This kind of treatment can be particularly chilling for reporters without the institutional backing of a major publication. Roddy Boyd, the president of the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation, says that last year he was lured to London with a job offer, only to be pumped for information about his reporting on an insurance company AmTrust. "It was really shady," he told CPJ. "It makes you wonder; what won't they do." Some investigative campaigns however, have run into legal trouble. Back in 2006, the California Attorney General found that private investigators hired by Hewlett Packard to trace leaks to the press had targeted the phone records of nine journalists. Hewlett Packard's general counsel resigned and a court sentenced one of the investigators to three months in jail for identity theft. In the wake of the Weinstein scandal, his lawyer David Boies expressed some regret. He said that he did not select the private investigators that Weinstein hired, or direct their work--although his signature appears on the BlackCube contract. "It was not thought through," Boies wrote in a public statement explaining his decision to facilitate Weinstein and BlackCube's relationship. "And it was a mistake. I take responsibility for that." There's no indication he or BlackCube broke any laws or will face any censure (although, The New York Times reported that BlackCube lacked the proper license to do business in New York)</div><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house</a><div class="SectionBreak SectionBreaksectionBreak1ppA7" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision;">In January, during the <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.newyorker.com/tag/government-shutdown" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">longest government shutdown</a> in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message.But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.newyorker.com/tag/sean-hannity" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Sean Hannity</a>, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.newyorker.com/tag/Kirstjen-Nielsen" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Kirstjen Nielsen</a>, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The pool report noted that Hannity was seen “huddling” with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/27/trump-kim-summit-2019-1193122" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">reported</a> that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.”Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox’s chairman, <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.newyorker.com/tag/rupert-murdoch" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Rupert Murdoch</a>. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”Hemmer argues that Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.” For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/24/sarah-huckabee-sanders-trumps-battering-ram" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Sarah Sanders</a>, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “<a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/how-fox-and-friends-rewrites-trumps-reality" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Fox & Friends</a>” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”Fox’s defenders view such criticism as unfounded and politically biased. Ken LaCorte, who was in senior management at Fox News for nearly twenty years, until 2016, and recently started his own news service, told me, “The people at Fox said the same thing about the press and Obama.” Fox’s public-relations department offers numerous examples of its reporters and talk-show hosts challenging the Administration. Chris Wallace, a tough-minded and ecumenical interviewer, recently grilled <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.newyorker.com/tag/stephen-miller" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Stephen Miller</a>, a senior Trump adviser, on the need for a border wall, given that virtually all drugs seized at the border are discovered at checkpoints. Trump is not the first President to have a favorite media organization; James Madison and Andrew Jackson were each boosted by partisan newspapers. But many people who have watched and worked with Fox over the years, including some leading conservatives, regard Fox’s deepening Trump orthodoxy with alarm. <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/bill-kristol-wanders-the-wilderness-of-trump-world" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Bill Kristol</a>, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.” Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”</div><div class="SectionBreak SectionBreaksectionBreak1ppA7" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision;">Nothing has formalized the partnership between Fox and Trump more than the appointment, in July, 2018, of Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News, as director of communications and deputy chief of staff at the White House. Kristol says of Shine, “When I first met him, he was producing Hannity’s show at Fox, and the two were incredibly close.” Both come from white working-class families on Long Island, and they are so close to each other’s children that they are referred to as “Uncle Bill” and “Uncle Sean.” Another former colleague says, “They spend their vacations together.” A third recalls, “I was rarely in Shine’s office when Sean didn’t call. And I was in Shine’s office a lot. They talked all the time—many times a day.”Shine led Fox News’ programming division for a dozen years, overseeing the morning and evening opinion shows, which collectively get the biggest ratings and define the network’s conservative brand. Straight news was not within his purview. In July, 2016, <a class="ArticleBodylink1FS03" href="https://www.newyorker.com/tag/roger-ailes" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(255, 255, 255), rgb(255, 255, 255)), linear-gradient(rgb(0, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 0)); background-position: 0px 87%, 100% 87%, 0px 92%; background-size: 0.05em 1px, 0.05em 1px, 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: geometricprecision; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 1px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 2px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) -1px 0px 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px -3px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">Roger Ailes</a>, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Fox, was fired in the face of numerous allegations of chronic sexual harassment, and Shine became co-president. But within a year he, too, had been forced out, amid a second wave of sexual-harassment allegations, some of them against Fox’s biggest star at the time, Bill O’Reilly. Shine wasn’t personally accused of sexual harassment, but several lawsuits named him as complicit in a workplace culture of coverups, payoffs, and victim intimidation.Shine, who has denied any wrongdoing, has kept a low profile at the White House, and rejects interview requests, including one from this magazine. But Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”...</div><div style="text-align: left;">=</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/here-are-5-of-the-craziest-revelations-from-the-new-yorkers-expose-of-fox-news-influence-on-trump/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/here-are-5-of-the-craziest-revelations-from-the-new-yorkers-expose-of-fox-news-influence-on-trump/</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div>Monday, The New Yorker published Jane Mayer’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house/amp?_twitter_impression=true" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">stunning exposé</a> into how Fox News, always a right-wing network, has morphed into an overt propaganda instrument of President Donald Trump’s White House, and how the symbiotic relationship between the president and Fox’s billionaire international news mogul owner Rupert Murdoch has effectively created something that has never before existed in American politics.<div class="p1_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">To some degree, the article covers ground that has long been known or suspected — the way that Trump’s policy decisions on everything from the <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/why-fox-news-made-trump-shut-down-the-government.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">federal government shutdown</a> to the <a href="https://www.salon.com/2017/07/26/is-trumps-transgender-ban-linked-to-tucker-carlsons-spurious-claims-on-child-abuse/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">transgender military ban</a> are informed by his daily binge-watching of Fox talk shows; how former Fox executive Bill Shine has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/07/foxification-trump-white-house-visualized/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">blurred the Fox and White House payrolls</a> since being hired as Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff; and how Fox itself has discarded the few journalistic guardrails it had during President Barack Obama’s years, with hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs now free to openly join political rallies and offer advice to the president.<div class="p2_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">But there are some new, mind-blowing revelations in Mayer’s article. Here are five of the most significant:<div class="p3_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><ol style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 50px; list-style: none;"><li style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; list-style: decimal;">Trump ranks reporters on a scale of 1 to 10 for their “loyalty” to him — and Steve Doocy is a 12.</li></ol>Trump is well known for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/reliable-source/wp/2017/09/25/from-angelina-jolie-to-kim-k-how-donald-trump-rates-women-in-new-howard-stern-tapes/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">assigning numbers to women</a> based on how attractive he thinks they are. But according to Mayer’s reporting, he does the same thing for reporters based on how loyal he thinks they are to him. “Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of ‘Fox & Friends,’ is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.”<div class="p4_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Needless to say, this is a dangerous development. Trump has a track record of rewarding and punishing reporters based on his whims. During the presidential transition, he <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/313898-ap-breitbart-had-front-row-seat-at-trump-presser" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">reserved a seat at a press conference</a> for a Breitbart reporter. And last year, Trump <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/07/media/trump-cnn-press-conference/index.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">suspended</a> the press pass of CNN’s Jim Acosta after he challenged the president’s claims on special counsel Robert Mueller and the Honduran migrant caravan. He later relented after one of his own judicial appointees <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2018/11/judge-rules-white-house-must-reinstate-jim-acostas-press-pass-now/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">ordered</a> him to restore Acosta’s credentials.<div class="p5_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><ol start="2" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 50px; list-style: none;"><li style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; list-style: decimal;">Jared Kushner is effectively Rupert Murdoch’s direct pipeline to the White House.</li></ol>Despite having <a href="https://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/how-these-seemingly-unqualified-people-scored-powerful-jobs.html/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">essentially no qualifications</a> for any of it, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has worn numerous hats in the administration, from <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/world/americas/kushner-mexico-president-diplomacy.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">meeting with foreign heads of state</a> to <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-kushner-tries-to-win-support-for-peace-plan-in-arab-world-inflames-israeli-right-1.6980369" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">working on the Middle East peace plan</a> to <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/28/15075416/kushner-solve-opioid-crisis" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">fixing the opioid epidemic</a> — and Trump trusts him enough to have <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/trump-reportedly-overruled-white-house-officials-to-grant-his-son-in-law-a-top-secret-clearance-and-tried-to-cover-it-up/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">overridden intelligence officials</a> to give him a top-secret security clearance.<div class="p6_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">One other person who trusts him, according to Mayer’s article, is Murdoch. In fact, Kushner may be Murdoch’s most direct liaison with the Trump administration.<div class="p7_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Sources told The New Yorker that Kushner routinely asks Murdoch for advice, has “assured Murdoch that the White House is a smooth-running operation, despite many reports suggesting that it is chaotic,” and that the two of them communicate “Like, every day.” Given that the White House has given Kushner such a massive portfolio of responsibility and trust, Murdoch’s relationship with Kushner is likely one of the biggest influences he has on the executive branch.<div class="p8_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><ol start="3" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 50px; list-style: none;"><li style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; list-style: decimal;">Roger Ailes allegedly fed Trump questions before the GOP debates.</li></ol>During the presidential election, it was reported that former Fox News host Megyn Kelly — who famously tried to question Trump on his treatment of women at the GOP debates only to have Trump <a href="https://nypost.com/2015/08/08/trump-megyn-kelly-had-blood-coming-out-of-her-wherever/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">dismiss her as on her period</a> — <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/305534-megyn-kelly-trump-got-debate-question-in-advance" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">asserted</a> that Trump had help with the debate questions ahead of time. She later denied saying or believing this — but Mayer’s reporting now backs up this idea:<div class="p9_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;">A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won.<div class="p10_20" style="font-style: italic; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /></blockquote>It is hard to know whether this claim is accurate, as Ailes is deceased and contemporary reporting suggested that Fox was not yet in Trump’s orbit at that point of the Republican cycle. But if true, this would be highly damning — especially considering Trump asserted that the <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/donna-brazile-finally-admits-she-shared-debate-questions-with-clinton-campaign" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">incident</a> where former Democratic National Committee Chief Donna Brazile gave Hillary Clinton CNN questions ahead of time proved the network was “a total fake.”<div class="p11_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><ol start="4" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 50px; list-style: none;"><li style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; list-style: decimal;">Fox News uncovered the Stormy Daniels scandal during the election — but buried the story and retaliated against the reporter who found it.</li></ol>The revelation that Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen made an illegal hush payment to silence an affair between Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels, first reported in January 2018 by the Wall Street Journal, was a huge story that led to a massive federal investigation, jail time, and congressional investigations.<div class="p12_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">But all of it could have come out much sooner — because as Mayer reports, Fox News had the story during the 2016 presidential election, killed it, and may have retaliated against Diana Falzone, the reporter who uncovered it:<div class="p13_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;">Falzone had worked on the story since March, and by October she had confirmed it with Daniels through her manager at the time, Gina Rodriguez, and with Daniels’s former husband, Mike Moz, who described multiple calls from Trump. Falzone had also amassed e-mails between Daniels’s attorney and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, detailing a proposed cash settlement, accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement. Falzone had even seen the contract.<div class="p14_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /></blockquote><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;">But Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.<div class="p15_20" style="font-style: italic; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /></blockquote>According to The New Yorker, Fox then proceeded to demote Falzone, without explaining why. She later sued Fox, which settled the case and made her sign a nondisclosure agreement that prohibits her from discussing the details of her employment.<div class="p16_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><ol start="5" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 50px; list-style: none;"><li style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; list-style: decimal;">Trump personally ordered an economic adviser to use antitrust lawsuits to attack Fox News’ competitors.</li></ol>The Justice Department’s opposition to the AT&T-Time Warner merger, which is cleared to go through after federal courts <a href="https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/u-s-appeals-court-rejects-justice-department-antitrust-challenge-to-at-t-time-warner-deal-11551194524" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">demolished</a> the antitrust lawsuit, has always seemed legally suspicious — indeed, one of the reasons judges rejected it is that AT&T put forward <a href="https://twitter.com/hadas_gold/status/1102547204991057920?s=21" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">compelling evidence</a> that Trump personally wanted to kill the deal to harm CNN.<div class="p17_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">According to Mayer’s reporting, that’s exactly what was going on. Trump ordered his then-economic adviser Gary Cohn to pressure the Justice Department to block the merger — something Cohn refused to do, but which the department eventually followed through with. Trump showed <a href="https://twitter.com/hadas_gold/status/1102525899407347713?s=21" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">no such anti-corporate sentiment</a> with Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox, a deal of similar scope but which would benefit Murdoch financially.<div class="p18_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">This development also puts the Federal Communications Commission’s unexpected decision last year to kill the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s merger with Tribune Media, which was arguably <a href="https://www.alternet.org/sinclair-broadcast-group-tribune-merger-officially-dead" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">good for the local news market</a>, in a more sinister light: that merger could have strengthened Fox’s biggest competitor in conservative television broadcasting.<div class="p19_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Antitrust law is a powerful pro-consumer tool when applied fairly and equitably, but in the hands of someone like Trump, it can also be used to chill freedom of the press by rewarding and punishing news organizations.
</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">=</div> http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/james-okeefe-stings-himselfOn March 16th, a man who said his name was Victor left a voice message at the offices of the Open Society Foundations, which are funded by George Soros, saying that he was a potential donor. Then, he forgot to hang up the phone, and the machine recorded “Victor” and his staff describing what sounded like an entrapment scheme. This week, James O’Keefe, the conservative activist who has used undercover videos to try to embarrass Planned Parenthood, NPR, and ACORN, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/james-okeefe-accidentally-stings-himself">admitted that he was the caller</a> and apologized to his supporters for the failed operation. On “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” the staff writer Jane Mayer goes through the voice-mail recording to see what it tells us about O’Keefe’s methods and the scope of his ambitions.=
<div class="briefcitDetailMain"><h2 class="briefcitTitle" style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://cruzcat.ucsc.edu/search_{S5?/amayer%2C+jane/amayer+jane/1%2C2%2C5%2CB/frameset&FF=amayer+jane&1%2C%2C3/indexsort=-">}Dark side : the inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals</a></h2><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Mayer, Jane.</div><div style="text-align: left;">New York : Doubleday, [2008]</div><div class="briefcitItems"><div class="briefcitItemsHeader"><div class="briefcitItemsMain"><table id="bib_items" class="bibItems" align="center" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1" width="100%"><tbody><tr class="bibItemsEntry"><td width="32%"> <a href="http://library.ucsc.edu/locations/mch-stacks" target="blank">McH Stacks</a></td><td width="40%"> <a href="http://cruzcat.ucsc.edu/search_{S5?/cHV6432+.M383+2008/chv+6432+m383+2008/-3,-1,,E/browse"}>HV6432 .M383 2008</a>  </td></tr></tbody></table></div></div>  =<div class="GGD0W3FBGU"><div style="text-align: left;">=</div><div style="text-align: left;">http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/01/19/jane-mayer-dark-money-book-koch-brothers-nypd-fbi</div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div>The just-published book “<a target="blank" href="http://goo.gl/VEDgrM">Dark Money</a>,” penned by New Yorker staff reporter Jane Mayer, reveals that the Koch Brothers hired the former commissioner of the New York Police Department (NYPD) — and his daughter, a former FBI agent — to smear her as a “plagiarist” in the months after the release of her August 2010 bombshell article on the Kochs.That article, titled “<a target="blank" href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations">Covert Operations</a>,” served at the time as one of the first in-depth pieces of long-form investigative journalism on David and Charles Koch and the influential right-wing political and <a target="blank" href="http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/climate-deniers/koch-industries/">climate change denial Tea Party network they had Frankensteined</a>. Mayer's book exposes that the Kochs hired the firm <a target="blank" href="http://vigilantresourcesinternational.com/who-we-are/">Vigilant Resources International</a>, run by former NYPD head <a target="blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Safir">Howard Safir</a> and his daughter <a target="blank" href="http://vigilantresourcesinternational.com/former-special-agent-jennifer-safir-join-father-former-new-york-city-police-commissioner-howard-safir-vigilant-resources-international-vri-17-years-service-federal-burea/">Jennifer Safir (the former FBI special agent)</a>, to do dirty work on their behalf.The story, as Mayer told it in “Dark Money,” began when she received a January 3, 2011 email from her New Yorker editor, David Remnick. “In his e-mail,” to me, Mayer wrote, “Remnick explained that ten minutes earlier he’d received a baffling inquiry about me from Keith Kelly, the reporter who covered the media industry for the New York Post.”Remnick's query centered around accusations — most likely emanating from somewhere within Koch World and handed to the New York Post and other outlets — that Mayer's journalistic track record, according to their research, was rife with plagiarism. The main issue: it wasn't in the slightest. Mayer has impeccable journalism credentials.That didn't stop the witch hunt from proceeding and nearly reaching take off mode, though. <h3 style="text-align: left;">Smear Appears</h3>With or without real evidence, the point of the covert campaign was not to find genuine evidence of plagiarism, but rather a classic case of attacking the messenger. “Their aim, according to a well-informed source, was to counteract The New Yorker’s story on the Koch brothers by undermining me,” wrote Mayer. “'Dirt, dirt, dirt' is what the source later told me they were digging for in my life. 'If they couldn’t find it, they’d create it.'”Vigilant Resources International, “Dark Money” details, got a retainer fee to help the effort along according to sources who spoke to Mayer on the condition of anonymity.“VRI’s Threat, Risk and Vulnerability Assessments focus on safety and value and address a full spectrum of physical security, integrity, intellectual property and other operational risks,” VRI explains of its work on its website.VRI goes on to explain of its business conduct:<blockquote>We provide our findings and prioritized recommendations as actionable 'blueprints' for what should promptly and continuously be addressed to drive the best outcomes in risk management, crisis prevention and mitigation for each facility assessed. Our findings, recommendations and plans comport with applicable regulatory requirements and present industry best practices that are custom-tailored to the unique organizational structure, culture, profile and operations of each client.</blockquote>After receiving initial contact from the New York Post, Mayer also got what she described in her book as a more alarming plagiarism query from the right-wing news website The Daily Caller, along with more benign ones from The Washington Post, ThinkProgress and a couple others. The Washington Post and ThinkProgress denied plagiarism victimhood, however, as did two other outlets not named by Mayer in the book.“Paul Kane, a reporter at The Washington Post, quickly looked up the story in question and sent me an e-mail saying, 'Not only did you not steal from me, you Frickin’ credited me in the VERY NEXT line,'” Mayer explains in “Dark Money.” “The New Yorker had even linked to his story online. And, I later learned, my husband, who was then an editor at The Washington Post, had edited the story that I supposedly stole.”Lee Fang, now a reporter at The Intercept and formerly a blogger for ThinkProgress, similarly denied the copyright infringement accusation. “Ms. Mayer properly credited me in her story, and clearly did a ton of her own research,” <a target="blank" href="http://nypost.com/2011/01/05/smear-disappears/">Fang declared in a January 2011 statement</a> provided to the New York Post. “I have nothing but admiration for her integrity as a journalist.”<h3 style="text-align: left;">Smear Disappears</h3>Mayer killed the smear campaign before it gained any momentum or press time, however, mostly due to deft handling of the situation before it spun out of control and developed a life of its own.“With only a few hours before these allegations were set to go online, all I could do was to try to get out the truth before the lies were spread,” Mayer explained of how she management of accusations. “By midnight, I had reached three of the four authors from whom I was alleged to have plagiarized. All offered to make public statements supporting me and denying I had misappropriated their work.”Most importantly, Mayer had the truth on her side. The allegations? Tantamount to a ruse, as she laid out in the book:<blockquote>Someone, probably using a computer program, had mechanically sifted through almost a decade of my work and isolated quotations from officials, and other widely repeated phrases, to argue that 'the structure and wording' were 'quite close' to four other reporters’ news stories. None of the supposedly purloined sentences were of any particular significance…Even sillier, in two of the four stories I was alleged to have 'plagiarized,' I had specifically given credit to the authors whose work The Daily Caller was claiming I'd stolen.</blockquote>Rather than plagiarism becoming the story, then, the genesis of how the smear campaign appeared and subsequently disappeared was picked up by the likes of the <a target="blank" href="http://nypost.com/2011/01/05/smear-disappears/">New York Post</a>, <a target="blank" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/mystery-reporters-plagiarism-smear-plot-against-the-new-yorker-collapses-2011-1">Business Insider</a> and <a target="blank" href="http://www.salon.com/2011/01/06/jane_mayer_smears/">Salon</a>. At the heart of that campaign was The Daily Caller, an alternative right-wing version of The Huffington Post founded by <a target="blank" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Tucker_Carlson">Tucker Carlson</a>, the former MSNBC host and senior fellow at the Koch-founded and Koch-funded <a target="blank" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Cato_Institute">Cato Institute</a>. “In the end, even the Daily Caller found the allegations to be unfounded, and to its credit, abandoned the story,” <a target="blank" href="http://nypost.com/2011/01/05/smear-disappears/">wrote the New York Post</a>. “The story is dead but the person or persons behind the allegations remains a shadowy mystery.”Tucker Carlson proclaimed cluelessness as to how his publication was tipped off to the so-called story to begin with. “I never ask the reporters where they get stuff, only whether it’s true,” he told the New York Post. “In this case, we didn’t have enough.”Safir and VRI did not confirm or deny any retainer ties to the effort, Mayer reported in the book.A source told Mayer that <a target="blank" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Nancy_Pfotenhauer">Nancy Pfotenhauer</a> — former head of Koch front group Americans for Prosperity and Citizens for a Sound Economy, as well as former Koch Industries lobbying in Washington, DC and senior adviser to U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — served as one of several ringleaders of the effort.Koch Industries already <a target="blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/12/koch-industries-disputes-books-account-of-founders-role-in-building-a-nazi-refinery/?r=0">came out swinging</a> in advance of the book's publication, responding to an advanced review by New York Times reporter Nicholas Confessore by accusing Mayer of working to “further an agenda-driven story line [that] is grossly inaccurate.”<div style="text-align: left;">
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</div>The Daily Caller abandoned an attempt to accuse the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer of plagiarism, including in her comprehensive expose of Koch Industries. Tucker Carlson, who runs the Daily Caller, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, which has received over $5.5 million from Koch foundations since 1997. Charles Koch co-founded Cato, and Cato’s directors include David Koch and Kevin Gentry of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.<div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Pfotenhauer, N</div></div><div style="text-align: left;"> Koch hired her to do hit job on Mayer, J <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/media/2011/03/03/147953/bloggers-kneel-to-koch/" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">http://thinkprogress.org/media/2011/03/03/147953/bloggers-kneel-to-koch/</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div>Nancy Pfotenhauer, President of PR firm MediaSpeak Strategies, TV pundit and former Senior Policy Advisor and spokesperson for the 2008 John McCain presidential campaign. Cain rebut; <a href="http://www.kochfacts.com/kf/janemayernewyorker/">http://www.kochfacts.com/kf/janemayernewyorker/</a> <p class="first-text" data-textannotation-id="69e63c60c1d0702ab54bb72261b36c3f" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-break: break-word;">Last August, Jane Mayer wrote a l<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer" target="blank" data-ls-seen="1" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">ong investigative article</a> in The New Yorker about the Koch brothers, the conservative billionaires who bankroll a host of right-wing causes. Since then, she's apparently become the victim of a disturbing, organized smear campaign.<p data-textannotation-id="cab4830fa40bee74746679ac156e40e7" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-break: break-word;">Mayer, who's reported extensively on America's use of torture during the "War on Terror" and co-authored books on Clarence Thomas and Ronald Reagan, is certainly no stranger to peals of right-wing outrage. But her work on the reclusive Koch brothers (whose official objections to the story are <a href="http://www.kochind.com/files/Response%20to%20The%20New%20Yorker.pdf" target="blank" data-ls-seen="1" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">laid out in this letter</a>) seems to have raised it to a new level. Sources tell us that rumors have been circulating for some time now that a private investigator was hired to dig up dirt on Mayer in the wake of the Koch brothers story. (Dirty business, but that sort of thing <a href="http://gawker.com/5056258/who-hired-this-private-eye-to-investigate-me" x-inset="1" data-ls-seen="1" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">does happen.</a>)<aside class="referenced-wide referenced-fullwidth js_inset tmpl_referencedGroupFullWidth clearfix" style="box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; float: none; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 16px;"><div class="container" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 2.25rem; border-top: 0px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298); border-bottom: 0px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298); position: relative;"><div class="referenced-item" data-inset-id="1558311972" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">[david carr investgated?</div></div></aside><p data-textannotation-id="fdaa2bdaa964c49256becb756f14a921" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-break: break-word;">Nothing's been confirmed so far. But the circumstantial evidence does seem indicate that someone out there is planting (weak) negative stories about Mayer with any news outlet who might take them. There have been at least three efforts so far:<ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem 1.125rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.6; list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: none; position: static;"><li data-textannotation-id="d97ca76dfb0c81c4558bfc007733ee42" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 6px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1.125rem;">The Washington Examiner (which <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/new-yorker-s-shameful-attack-conservative-philanthropists-charles-and-davi" target="blank" data-ls-seen="1" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">editorialized</a> <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/examiner-opinion-zone/defense-koch-and-opportunity" target="blank" data-ls-seen="1" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">extensively</a> <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/left039s-double-standard-kochs-and-soros" target="blank" data-ls-seen="1" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">against</a> Mayer's Koch brothers piece) did research trying to turn up evidence of Mayer's political partisanship; they apparently <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/search/apachesolr_search/Jane%20Mayer?filters=created%3A[2010-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z%20TO%202011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z]" target="blank" data-ls-seen="1" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">didn't find anything</a> worth reporting.</li><li data-textannotation-id="6b69e9f2e2a3b345cc400bdc44faaecc" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 6px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1.125rem;">Elaine Lafferty wrote <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-10/billionaire-david-koch-fires-back-at-the-new-yorker/?cid=tag:all1" target="blank" data-ls-seen="1" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">a pro-Koch response</a> to Mayer's story in The Daily Beast, complete with friendly quotes from David Koch—who was unwilling to speak with Mayer herself. TDB later added an <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-10/billionaire-david-koch-fires-back-at-the-new-yorker/2/" target="blank" data-ls-seen="1" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">editor's note</a> to the story admitting, among other things, that they "should have noted that the writer who interviewed Koch had been a consultant for the McCain/Palin campaign."</li><li data-textannotation-id="ed8a302e5169938ab02ee0b6c2828225" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 6px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1.125rem;">And today, <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/smear_disappears_Xs7WqA7cghZ3IWtmyDg7rO" target="_blank" data-ls-seen="1" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">Keith Kelly reports</a>on a third incident: The Daily Caller spent "several weeks" investigating a story that Mayer plagiarized work in her Koch brothers article, and in another story years ago. They found no evidence, and now they've dropped the story.</li></ul><p data-textannotation-id="713f0c407039e88145618c7ffd4d02f2" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-break: break-word;">"Who is behind the apparently concerted campaign to smear The New Yorker's Jane Mayer?" Kelly asks, rhetorically. It doesn't take a great investigative journalist to draw up a short list of prime suspects. Scrutiny of reporters' work is fine, but hiring P.I.'s for political-style opposition research and trying to plant false stories is a mark of unscrupulous desperation. After three whiffs, will any more media outlets take the bait against Mayer? We'll be watching!<p data-textannotation-id="285ee4352bcd537aed7dd18456d67e4f" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-break: break-word;">Any reporters out there know more about the smear campaign against Jane Mayer? <a href="mailto:hamilton@gawker.com" data-ls-seen="1" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">Email me.</a>Anonymity guaranteed.<p data-textannotation-id="285ee4352bcd537aed7dd18456d67e4f" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-break: break-word;">http://gawker.com/5725466/the-desperate-campaign-to-discredit-jane-mayer dark side fora 09 http://fora.tv/2009/07/01/The_Dark_Side_Jane_Mayer/Jane_Mayer_SERE_Program_Built_Curriculum_for_Tortureno link imghttp://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/13/1469288/--Koch-Propaganda-Machine-Tries-Unsuccessfully-to-Discredit-Jane-Mayer-again
Koch Propaganda Machine Tries Unsuccessfully to Discredit Jane Mayer (again!)
By WeAreKochs  
Wednesday Jan 13, 2016 · 9:07 AM PSTWho is criticizing Jane Mayer's reporting on the Koch Brothers? The usual Koch defenders, of course!
After Jane Mayer’s revelations that “Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says” hit the New York Times, the Koch propaganda machine spun into action—with the predictable rhythm of a Nazi oil refinery!  First, the company posted a lengthy corporate rebuttal that a journalist described on Twitter as a “non-denial denial” (which didn’t even address the allegation that Charles and David Koch tried to blackmail their own brother); then, some of the same Koch-funded and supported media outlets that spread FUD on climate change have mobilized with misleading defenses of the Kochs.  Fortunately, we and others have called the propagandists out for their obvious bias for their benefactors.
John Hinderaker posted the following story to his blog (Powerline Blog) and on Twitter:
 Follow John Hinderaker @jhinderakerJane Mayer and NY Times dive into the gutter to attack Koch Industries falsely. Disgusting journalism: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/01/jane-mayer-and-the-new-york-times-dive-into-the-gutter.php … @powerlineus5:31 PM - 12 Jan 2016  18 18 Retweets   8 8 likes Our response:
 Follow WeAreKochs @WeAreKochsShill Alert: "Blogger From Koch’s Law Firm Defends #Koch, Doesn’t Disclose Ties" http://thinkprogress.org/media/2011/03/03/147953/bloggers-kneel-to-koch/ … https://twitter.com/jhinderaker/status/687084496072478720 …3:06 AM - 13 Jan 2016Blogger From Koch’s Law Firm Defends Koch, Doesn’t Disclose Ties — ThinkProgressBy Lee Fang Fighting back against public scrutiny, Koch Industries is relying on a small army of conservative bloggers, reporters, and lobbyists. Chief am…thinkprogress.org  5 5 Retweets   2 2 likesThe Daily Caller ran a story entitled “The NY Times’ Koch-Nazi Connection Has More Holes Than The French Navy”, prompting a comment (which we are unable to independently verify) from Connor Gibson:Did you really just downplay the importance of one of HItler's major refineries being built a few years before he invaded the rest of Europe? As if fuel wasn't an absolutely critical piece of infrastructure in that regard?The Daily Caller News Foundation has taken payments from Koch for the last several years, maybe your editor didn't tell you, or maybe DC doesn't bother to pretend it follows standards of journalism.You defend him every time he, his company or his political activity is criticized. It's this strange combination of sad and amusing. Is your career fulfilling, shilling and defending the world's fifth richest men?
What is it about the Daily Caller's inability to disclosure that it is funded by Charles Koch? And why can't DC seem to not speak up in Koch's defense at every opportunity? You behave like consultants, not reporters. Way to go.The Daily Caller News Foundation also happens to be listed as a “Partner Organization” of the Charles Koch Institute.
Just a reminder:“The best defense against bullshit Is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something!” — Jon Stewart
Even without seeing an advance copy, we highly recommend that Daily Kos readers read Jane Mayer’s new book “Dark Money”—the source the New York Times credits for the allegations in this article.  Mayer’s 2010 article “Covert Operations” is widely credited as the first in-depth investigative reporting on the Koch political network.  It prompted what Gawker reported to be a “Desperate Campaign to Discredit Jane Mayer”.  Allegations such as that a “private investigator was hired to dig up dirt on Mayer in the wake of the Koch brothers story” have had a chilling effect on coverage of the Kochs, and are one of the reasons that none of our members are willing to reveal their offline identities.  We salute Jane Mayer’s courage!
Wednesday, Jan 13, 2016 · 1:21:22 PM PST · WeAreKochsThere’s more:
 Follow Ian Tuttle ? @iptuttleThe @nytimes splashed the Koch Bros/Nazi news -- w/o disclosing its personal tie to the story. @NRO: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/429724/koch-brothers-nazis-new-york-times-bias …11:29 AM - 13 Jan 2016Photo published for The Deleterious Effects of Koch Addiction (UPDATED), by Ian Tuttle, National ReviewThe Deleterious Effects of Koch Addiction (UPDATED), by Ian Tuttle, National ReviewIn response to "Harry Reid, Call Your Office."nationalreview.com  Retweets   likes Follow WeAreKochs @WeAreKochsLOL ironic that @iptuttle didn't disclose National Review Institute's #Koch Foundation ties. http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/climate-deniers/front-groups/national-review-institute/ … https://twitter.com/iptuttle/status/687355788248133632 …12:11 PM - 13 Jan 2016National Review Institute - Greenpeace USAThe National Review Institute received $10,000 from Koch foundations in 2011. The National Review frequently publishes Koch-funded climate change deniers.greenpeace.org  1 1 Retweet   likesWednesday, Jan 13, 2016 · 4:13:21 PM PST · WeAreKochs
And more.  Mark Hemingway at The Weekly Standard just wrote an article with the ironic title: “New Yorker Reporter Attacks Koch Bros., Fails to Disclose Conflicts of Interest”.  The title is ironic because Mr. Heminway’s own bio states:
He was the recipient of a Gold Award journalism fellowship from the Phillips Foundation in 2003 and was a Global Prosperity Initiative fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in 2003 and 2004. 
Guess who donated $25,000, in 2003, to the Phillips Foundation for "General Operating Support"?  Koch Family Foundations!
Charles Koch, himself, is on the board of directors at the The Mercatus Center.  The Charles G. Koch Foundation directly gave $8.8 million to the Mercatus Center between 2002 and 2012.
The Weekly Standard has previously been criticized by ThinkProgress for its ties to the Kochs.
NOTE: It appears the author did disclose his own personal potential conflicts, but The Weekly Standard hid the disclosure behind a second button click (with no other content).  That means many readers (including us, in our first few reads) were unlikely to see it.  A full update to that effect has been included later, when we discovered its existence.
Wednesday, Jan 13, 2016 · 4:25:14 PM PST · WeAreKochs
It seems that the "Blogger From Koch’s Law Firm [Who] Defends Koch, Doesn’t Disclose Ties", John Hinderaker, is back with another hit piece entitled “Jane Mayer: World’s Worst Hypocrite?”.
Thursday, Jan 14, 2016 · 9:48:26 AM PST · WeAreKochsAnd so it continues:
 Follow Phil Kerpen ? @kerpen
NYT "running dubious advertorials to goose book sales for the wife of one of their top editors." http://www.weeklystandard.com/new-york-times-reporter-attacks-koch-bros.-fails-to-disclose-conflicts-of-interest/article/2000558#.Vpbjq8LNJ8w.twitter …8:42 PM - 13 Jan 2016Photo published for New York Times Reporter Attacks Koch Bros., Fails to Disclose Conflicts of InterestNew York Times Reporter Attacks Koch Bros., Fails to Disclose Conflicts of InterestIn 2011, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker published, Covert Operations, an article that purported to expose the well-known fact the Koch Brothers were financially supporting a lot of libertarian and...weeklystandard.com  6 6 Retweets   3 3 likes Follow WeAreKochs @WeAreKochs.@AmerComm is #DarkMoney org w/#Koch ties. Phil (it's prez) has reason not to like the book http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Commitment#Ties_to_the_Koch_Brothers … https://twitter.com/kerpen/status/687494981213356032 …8:46 AM - 14 Jan 2016  1 1 Retweet   likesThursday, Jan 14, 2016 · 10:36:53 AM PST · WeAreKochsMore from The Weekly Standard:
 Follow The Weekly Standard ? @weeklystandard
New Yorker's Jane Mayer Tipped Off Hillary Clinton to Unpublished NYT Story http://tws.io/1PtSjsm 8:34 AM - 14 Jan 2016Photo published for New Yorker's Jane Mayer Tipped Off Hillary Clinton to Unpublished NYT StoryNew Yorker's Jane Mayer Tipped Off Hillary Clinton to Unpublished NYT StoryOn Wednesday, I noted that the New York Times had heaped a lot of favorable coverage upon New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s new book on the Koch brothers, despite the fact that the coverage was unfair...weeklystandard.com  11 11 Retweets   12 12 likes For context:
12 Jan Brian Faughnan @BrianFaughnan@senatorshoshana Exactly. But change IS inevitable and you have to anticipate, shape it.http://www.kochind.com/MBM/guiding_principles.aspx … Follow Shoshana Weissmann ? @senatorshoshana@BrianFaughnan I love my Koch baes. I totally know what you mean6:51 AM - 12 Jan 2016  Retweets   likesShoshana Weissman’s twitter bio says that she manages Social for The Weekly Standard!  “Bae” is a term of endearment, sometimes defined as slang for “before anyone else,” for those unaware.  As it relates to the Kochs, we prefer the Danish definition: “poop.”
 Follow WeAreKochs @WeAreKochsIn case you need context for what The Weekly Standard and its Social Media Manager tweet about Jane Mayer and #Koch. https://twitter.com/senatorshoshana/status/686923522430627841 …9:29 AM - 14 Jan 2016  Retweets   likesAlso note that this Weekly Standard article is by the same author, Mark Hemingway, that we previously wrote about…
Thursday, Jan 14, 2016 · 1:19:26 PM PST · WeAreKochsAnd it continues:
14 Jan Kevin R Kosar @kevinrkosar@MikeLeePearl Perhaps of interest: http://www.weeklystandard.com/new-yorker-reporter-attacks-koch-bros.-fails-to-disclose-conflicts-of-interest/article/2000558 … Follow WeAreKochs @WeAreKochs@kevinrkosar @MikeLeePearl The Weekly Standard author has a Koch-conflict of his own, as do many Jane Mayer critics: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/01/13/1469288/--Koch-Propaganda-Machine-Tries-Unsuccessfully-to-Discredit-Jane-Mayer-again#update-1452726801000 …12:06 PM - 14 Jan 2016Photo published for Koch Propaganda Machine Tries Unsuccessfully to Discredit Jane Mayer (again!)Koch Propaganda Machine Tries Unsuccessfully to Discredit Jane Mayer (again!)After Jane Mayer’s revelations that “Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says” hit the New York Times, the Koch propaganda machine spun into action—with the predictable rhy...dailykos.com  Retweets   1 1 likeIn fact, Kevin R Kosar is a Senior Fellow at the R Street Institute. According to a testimonial from Summer 2015 Koch Fellow John D’Ambrosio that is actually published on the Charles Koch Institute website:I was lucky enough to transition into the Koch Fellow Program. I gained extensive policy experience working at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC, where I researched disruptive technology policy, contributed to a nationally recognized research project, and wrote multiple policy blogs that were published on R Street’s website.In addition to employing Koch Fellows, R Street Institute is listed by SourceWatch as an “Associate Member” of the State Policy Network (SPN).  SourceWatch also alleges that:Fueled by robust funding from right-wing funders including the Koch brothers, the Bradley Foundation, the anonymous wealthy donors to the donor-advised funds of DonorsTrust, and others, SPN has grown rapidly in recent years.Thursday, Jan 14, 2016 · 1:31:46 PM PST · WeAreKochsThis speaks for itself:
 Follow Daniel McCoy @ICTBiz_dmccoyFor those interested in Jane Mayer's Nazi sympathizer assertion directed toward Koch, this is an interesting read http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/01/jane-mayer-worlds-worse-hypocrite.php …12:08 PM - 14 Jan 2016  2 2 Retweets   1 1 like Follow WeAreKochs @WeAreKochsWe're more interested in the "previous work" that "landed" you guys lunch with #CharlesKoch. http://gawker.com/how-to-land-an-interview-with-charles-koch-1532784919 … https://twitter.com/ICTBiz_dmccoy/status/687728128295321600 …12:30 PM - 14 Jan 2016Photo published for How to Land an Interview With Charles KochHow to Land an Interview With Charles KochEvil cartoon villain Charles Koch, one half of the Amazing Billionaire Koch Bros., does not give a lot of interviews. You can hardly find a photo of the guy. But one outlet has landed a coveted...gawker.com  Retweets   likesThursday, Jan 14, 2016 · 2:06:51 PM PST · WeAreKochsWorth mentioning that Mark Hemingway’s article on the Kochs is running with the following disclosure.  It is sneakily hidden by The Weekly Standard behind a 2nd button click with no other content.  We didn’t even see it on our first reads.  However, the placement on the site is probably not the author’s fault, and Mark Hemingway deserves a positive “shout out” for doing the right thing and offering a disclosure (even if the publication’s placement means people are unlikely to see it).
(Now for my own disclosure: Yes, I have worked for and been affiliated with a couple of organizations that have received Koch money. Suffice to say, this does not mean I agree with the Kochs on everything. At least progressives can be happy that President Obama finally came around to adopting the position on gay marriage that the Kochs held for decades prior.)Thursday, Jan 14, 2016 · 5:09:07 PM PST · WeAreKochsIt continues:
 Follow Tim Carney @TPCarneyInteresting:"New Yorker's Jane Mayer Tipped Off Hillary Clinton to Unpublished NYT Story" http://www.weeklystandard.com/new-yorkers-jane-mayer-tipped-off-hillary-clinton-to-unpublished-nyt-story/article/2000567 …8:52 AM - 14 Jan 2016Photo published for New Yorker's Jane Mayer Tipped Off Hillary Clinton to Unpublished NYT StoryNew Yorker's Jane Mayer Tipped Off Hillary Clinton to Unpublished NYT StoryOn Wednesday, I noted that the New York Times had heaped a lot of favorable coverage upon New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s new book on the Koch brothers, despite the fact that the coverage was unfair...weeklystandard.com  7 7 Retweets   4 4 likes Follow WeAreKochs @WeAreKochs"Visiting Fellow, AEI"(Twitter bio). SW:[AEI] "received...$867,289...from...Koch Foundation" http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Enterprise_Institute#Ties_to_the_Koch_Brothers … https://twitter.com/TPCarney/status/687678697168596992 …4:02 PM - 14 Jan 2016  Retweets   likesThis is Tim Carney’s profile on the American Enterprise Institute website.  According to SourceWatch:David H. Koch is on the American Enterprise Institute's National Council, whose members "serve as ambassadors for AEI, providing AEI with advice, insight, and guidance as [it] looks to reach out to new friends across the country."
Between 2002 and 2013, the American Enterprise Institute received a total of $867,289 in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation.It looks like SourceWatch retrieved the AEI National Council page back in 2014.  Looking at the current National Council page, we are unable to locate David H. Koch’s name.
Thursday, Jan 14, 2016 · 7:16:37 PM PST · WeAreKochsYesterday (1/13), Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the story:
CALLER: The fact that ISIS doesn't hear Donald Trump.
RUSH:  Hey, that's nothing.  Have you heard...? Jane Mayer's got a book, and the New York Times picked it up.  Are you aware that the father of the Koch brothers built the third largest oil refine for the Nazis?
CALLER: "Oh, yeah.  What a great, quote/unquote, "recruitment tool."
RUSH:  Well, but the fact is he didn't! They're totally making this up.  They're making it up. As a reminder, even the official corporate statement did not accuse Jane Mayer of “making it up” and actually acknowledged that:Between 1928 and 1934, Winkler-Koch Engineering handled more than 500 projects.  Of these, 39 involved signed contracts to build cracking units.  One of those units was included in a refinery in the port area of Hamburg, Germany, built for Foreign Oil Co. of Boston.
…
Winkler-Koch’s contract with Foreign Oil was signed on Sept. 8, 1933, and the refinery became operational March 23, 1935. That signing was nearly six years before Germany invaded Poland.So, even the company response was essentially that they only built part of the refinery in Nazi Germany, and that it was before Hitler invaded Poland.To understand Rush Limbaugh’s over-enthusiastic defense of the Kochs, it might be helpful to note the the partially Koch-funded FreedomWorks allegedly was a sponsor of Rush Limbaugh’s in the past.  Politico’s Ken Vogel reported in 2014 on Limbaugh’s ties to FreedomWorks and the partially Koch-funded Heritage Foundation:Rush Limbaugh: The Heritage Foundation at the end of January ended its five-year sponsorship of El Rushbo’s show, for which it had paid more than $2 million in some years and more than $9.5 million overall. In 2012, FreedomWorks paid at least $1.4 million to make him an endorser, though it’s not clear that the sponsorship is ongoing.After the negative publicity those sponsorships received, it is possible that Koch-funded groups no longer have active relationships with Rush Limbaugh or his show.  But, he certainly indirectly benefited from the money that was flowing through the network of partially Koch-funded political groups in the past.
Friday, Jan 15, 2016 · 8:25:22 AM PST · WeAreKochsThe Weekly Standard has released a third anti-Mayer article entitled: “All In the Family”.  The byline of this article is merely “The Scrapbook,” so it is impossible to tell if the author has a Koch-connection.  Greenpeace previously called out The Weekly Standard and its owner, Clarity Media Group, for prior Koch defense stories and roles in the Koch-funded climate denial movement.  According to Greenpeace’s 2011 article:
Clarity Media Group has played a flagship role in standing up for the billionaire Kochs over the last year. Since the Aspen meeting, pro-Koch publications from both Examiner.com and theWeekly Standard have been featured on Koch Industries’ “Koch Facts” webpage, created to dismiss allegations of Koch’s various unsavory business practices. Clarity’s outlets also published articles attacking Greenpeace after our March, 2010 release of Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Movement.The Weekly Standard, which published a lengthy defense of the Koch brothers in March, 2011, has also been a promoter of so-called “climategate” emails. The magazine has served as a platform for prominent career climate skeptics Steven Hayward and Kenneth Green of the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute (AEI).Friday, Jan 15, 2016 · 6:58:30 PM PST · WeAreKochsAnother local news outlet in Kansas allegedly came to the Kochs’ defense; this time with a somewhat misleading newscast.  KAKE, which, like the Wichita Business Journal, landed an exclusive interview with Charles Koch, allegedly aired the videos below.  Unlike the Koch interview, which appears on the KAKE website, these videos are only accessible because they was uploaded by a citizen to YouTube.  Therefore, they cannot be verified.The text “Koch-Hitler Connection Denied” and “Koch Denies Hitler Connection” appears on the screen during both mentions, and the narration is misleading.  One video addresses “sympathy” for the Nazi regime rather than the actual accusation that Fred Koch helped build part of a Nazi oil refinery (which the company’s official statement confirmed).  The second video characterizes the company’s statement as a blanket denial—which it clearly was not. Rachel Maddow had a more direct take on the company’s statement, as it relates to Jane Mayer’s actual allegation, below:Saturday, Jan 16, 2016 · 8:39:48 AM PST · WeAreKochsIt looks like we missed an article from The Washington Free Beacon entitled “Phalange-linked Paper Attacks Dead Father of Koch Brothers”.  The article is attributed only to the “Washington Free Beacon Staff”.
According to a 2011 story by Ken Vogel in Politico, called “The Kochs Fight Back”:The Kochs also took the Democratic attacks seriously, assembling a crisis communication team including consultants Michael Goldfarb...Michael Goldfarb is the founder of The Washington Free Beacon—and, according to the site’s About page, remains its Chairman.  Meanwhile, the Free Beacon’s current editor in chief, Matthew Continetti was the author of a 2011 “hagiography to Koch Brothers” while employed alongside Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard.  ThinkProgress pointed out at the time:In over 8,000 words of hagiography, Continetti did not find space to disclose that his fellow opinion editor at the Weekly Standard, Michael Goldfarb, is currently employed by Koch Industries to help improve the company’s political image. Or that the Weekly Standard’s reporters routinely attend Koch’s secret political strategy and fundraising meetings. Or that Continetti had received a fellowship funded by the Phillips Foundation, a nonprofit heavily reliant on Koch funds.Monday, Jan 18, 2016 · 5:07:08 PM PST · WeAreKochsJane Mayer’s own 1/18/2016 article in Politico puts the multiple attacks from the Daily Caller and The Weekly Standard into context:
Two of the top donors in the Koch network owned their own news outlets. The oil tycoon Philip Anschutz owned the Washington Examiner and the Weekly Standard, and the mutual fund magnate Foster Friess was the largest shareholder of the Daily Caller.It is a possible explanation for the source of many of the recent attacks being The Weekly Standard and the Daily Caller—and recent tweets like the ones below (Chuck Ross’ twitter bio states that he is a “Reporter at The Daily Caller”):
View image on Twitter Follow Chuck Ross @ChuckRossDCReminder that Sid Blumenthal and Jane Mayer (of Koch hit job fame) are good pals.10:20 AM - 18 Jan 2016  5 5 Retweets   1 1 likeTuesday, Jan 19, 2016 · 11:49:06 AM PST · WeAreKochsNow, there is an article running in Commentary Magazine entitled “The Hypocrisy of the Koch Haters”, which references a review of Jane Mayer’s book in its opening sentence.  Not surprisingly, the author, Michael Rubin, is listed as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).  According to ConservativeTransparency.org, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation has directly contributed over $1.8 million to AEI between 2004 and 2014.
Tuesday, Jan 19, 2016 · 12:14:10 PM PST · WeAreKochsCommentary Inc. appears to be the parent organization of Commentary Magazine (they share an address).  It has received funding from DonorsTrust, Donors Capital Fund, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.  According to SourceWatch:
The twin Donors organizations are advertised as a way for very wealthy people and corporations to remain hidden when "funding sensitive or controversial issues," creating a lack of accountability.The Scaife family, and its foundations, are covered in Jane Mayer’s book.
Tuesday, Jan 19, 2016 · 3:09:01 PM PST · WeAreKochsMatt Welch’s bio lists him as the “Editor in Chief” of Reason magazine.  He just tweeted out an article on Reason defending the Kochs’ support for criminal justice reform.
 Follow Matt Welch ? @MattWelchIs the Kochs' Support for Criminal Justice Reform a P.R. Move? http://reason.com/blog/2016/01/19/is-the-kochs-support-for-criminal-justic …7:07 AM - 19 Jan 2016Photo published for Is the Kochs' Support for Criminal Justice Reform a P.R. Move?Is the Kochs' Support for Criminal Justice Reform a P.R. Move?Jane Mayer implies their interest in the issue is new while conceding it is not.reason.com  2 2 Retweets   1 1 likeAccording to Pando, the Kochs have given “millions” to Reason. Pando also details Reason’s prior history of publishing holocaust denial and pro-apartheid content.  The Kochs’ stood by Reason for all those years; I suppose it is a nice gesture for them to symbolically return the favor.
 Follow WeAreKochs @WeAreKochs#Kochs gave "millions" to Reason, notable for its holocaust denial, pro-apartheid, history. https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-racist-history-heres-a-copy-of-its-holocaust-denial-special-issue/ … https://twitter.com/MattWelch/status/689464237282832385 …2:03 PM - 19 Jan 2016Photo published for As Reason's editor defends its racist history, here's a copy of its holocaust denial "special issue"As Reason's editor defends its racist history, here's a copy of its holocaust denial "special issue"—Reason magazine, January 1976 Last weekend, I wrote about how Reason magazine — and their backers, the Koch brothers — was supporting a major push to further sell Silicon Valley on the “virtues” of...pando.com  1 1 Retweet   1 1 likeThursday, Jan 21, 2016 · 7:59:32 PM PST · WeAreKochsThe Acton Institute blog is lashing out at Jane Mayer with a blog post entitled “‘Dark Money’ and Leftist Hypocrisy”.  According to Conservative Transparency, the Charles G. Koch Foundation directly gave the Acton Institute $50,000 in each of 2011 and 2013.  In addition, DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund appear to be substantial contributors.
Meanwhile, Koch cronies are back to their dirty tricks—trying to smear Jane Mayer.  According to an article in Politico from earlier today:
America Rising PAC, the GOP opposition network founded by Matt Rhoades and Joe Pounder, has set its sights on Jane Mayer, shopping around accusations that she has ideological bias.…
Asked why they were taking up the cause of defending the Kochs, Chassé they were defending their allies."This liberal author is attacking our allies, and we’re not going to sit idly by while she spreads disingenuous information and tries to hide her clear ideological bias from the public," she said.At least they acknowledged their own “ideological bias” and “alliance” with the Kochs!
Friday, Jan 22, 2016 · 8:21:12 AM PST · WeAreKochsJonah Goldberg, from the National Review, just published two critical pieces about Jane Mayer’s new book, on the National Review website and NewsMax.  At the end of the National Review article, it says:
Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review.The National Review Institute has directly received money from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and DonorsTrust.
Also, just a reminder: according to SourceWatch:
David H. Koch is on the American Enterprise Institute's National Council, whose members "serve as ambassadors for AEI, providing AEI with advice, insight, and guidance as [it] looks to reach out to new friends across the country."
Between 2002 and 2013, the American Enterprise Institute received a total of $867,289 in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation.It looks like SourceWatch retrieved the AEI National Council page back in 2014.  Looking at the current National Council page, we are unable to locate David H. Koch’s name.
Friday, Jan 22, 2016 · 8:59:31 PM PST · WeAreKochsJonah Goldberg’s defense of the Kochs, from his perches at the Koch-funded AEI and Koch-funded National Review Institute, has now been published in the New York Post.
Tuesday, Jan 26, 2016 · 10:00:23 PM PST · WeAreKochsAnother article was published in The Weekly Standard by Mark Hemingway; this one is entitled “Koch Biographer Jane Mayer's Strange Denials of Her Family Nazi Connections”.  Another blatant smear piece by a publication owned by a Koch network donor, written by an author who was a fellow at the Koch-funded Mercatus Center in 2003 and 2004.== </div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>