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Goldfarb, M wfb

not to be c with actual jrnalist of same name, ME?

NO MERRI

SEE WFB

SINGER VULTURE

KOCH?

SEE STEELE DOSSIER OPPOS RES

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The conservative Washington Free Beacon is winning attention after a string of stories that have embarrassed left-leaning figures or institutions, most recently Columbia University, which was forced to remove three associate deans from their positions after the revelation of their private text messages mocking antisemitism concerns on campus.

“The Free Beacon exists to do hard-hitting, fact-based reporting from a conservative perspective and to attracting and growing the talent to produce it,” editor-in-chief Eliana Johnson told TheWrap.

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https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/10/28/neoconservative_website_washington_free_beacon_hired_fusion_gps_135394.html

beware bs

Steve Peoples & Zeke Miller

October 28, 2017

NEW YORK (AP) — A conservative website with strong ties to the Republican establishment triggered the investigation into Donald Trump’s past that ultimately produced the dossier that alleged a compromised relationship between the president and the Kremlin.

The Washington Free Beacon on Friday confirmed it originally retained the political research firm Fusion GPS to scour then-candidate Trump’s background for negative information, a common practice known as “opposition research” in politics. Leaders from the Free Beacon, which is funded largely by Republican billionaire Paul Singer, insisted none of the early material it collected appeared in the dossier released later in the year detailing explosive allegations, many uncorroborated, about Trump compiled by a former British spy.

“During the 2016 election cycle we retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton,” wrote the site’s editor-in-chief, Matthew Continetti, and chairman Michael Goldfarb. They continued: “The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele.”

Earlier in the week, reports revealed that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee continued funding Fusion’s work after the original GOP source lost interest.

Trump this week called it a “disgrace” that Democrats had helped pay for research that produced the document. But the original source of the research remained a secret.

The president himself hinted that he knew the Republican source earlier in the week, but he refused to share it. The White House had no immediate comment Friday night about the Free Beacon’s involvement.

The Washington Free Beacon was initially founded as a project of the conservative nonprofit group Center for American Freedom, as an alternative to liberal news sites run by progressive nonprofits. The Center for American Freedom was organized as a 501(c)4 and did not reveal its donors, but Singer was the sole funder of the site as recently as 2014, according to a Republican political veteran familiar with the site. The veteran spoke on condition of anonymity to detail the newspaper’s financial background.

The Free Beacon first retained Fusion to investigate Trump in the fall of 2015 and ended its relationship after Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination in late spring of 2016, according to a person close to Goldfarb, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions.

The website and its leaders have strong ties throughout the Republican establishment.Goldfarb was deputy communications director on John McCain’s presidential campaign. Singer was backing Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential bid at the time of the Free Beacon’s involvement. And one of Singer’s closest associates, Republican operative Dan Senor, served as Speaker Ryan’s chief adviser during the 2012 president campaign.

A representative to Singer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rubio denied any knowledge of the Fusion research or the dossier this week.

“As far as whether it was my campaign, it wasn’t and I’ll tell you why,” he told CNN. “I was running for president. I was trying to win. If I had anything against Donald Trump that was relevant and credible and politically damaging, I would’ve used it. I didn’t have it.”

The document, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, emerged this year as a political flashpoint in the broader debate over Trump’s ties to Russia.

A person close to Singer said the billionaire was not aware of Steele’s involvement or the dossier until earlier this year when it was published. The person was not authorized to share internal discussions.

Law enforcement officials have worked to corroborate the dossier’s claims. James Comey, FBI director at the time, advised Trump about the existence of the allegations, and Steele has been questioned as part of an ongoing probe into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump camp.

The U.S. intelligence community has determined that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. election. Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the Russian interference and whether it was tied to Trump’s campaign.

The House Intelligence Committee will help verify whether the Free Beacon had any involvement with Steele or his dossier, according to Jack Langer, a spokesman for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes.

“The Beacon has agreed to cooperate with the House Intelligence Committee to help the Committee verify this assertion,” Langer said.

Miller reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Chad Day, Mary Clare Jalonick, Stephen Braun and Tom LoBianco in Washington contributed to this report.

Related Topics:Fusion GPS, Media, Donald Trump

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cjp

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

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

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

...

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.

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)

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Managing editors

Sonny Bunch, Aaron MacLean, Stephanie Wang

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wiki stub

Michael Goldfarb is an American conservative[1] political writer. He was contributing editor for The Weekly Standard[2] and was a research associate at the Project for the New American Century.[3] During the 2008 presidential race he served as John McCain's deputy communications director.[4] He is a founder of the online conservative magazine The Washington Free Beacon.[1] Goldfarb attracted some online attention for two posts ridiculing liberal bloggers as basement-dwellingDungeons and Dragons players.[5]

He has a B.A. in history from Princeton University.[6] In an article titled "A Conservative Provocateur, Using a Blowtorch as His Pen," the New York Times called Goldfarb "an all-around anti-liberal provocateur" and said he "has blazed a trail in the new era of campaign finance, in which loosened restrictions have flooded the political world with cash for a whole new array of organizations that operate outside the traditional bounds of the parties."[7]

Contents

  [hide] 

Accusation of Anti-Semitism against Obama

As a blogger and deputy communications director for the McCain presidential campaign, Goldfarb told CNN, "The point is that Barack Obama has a long track record of being around anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American rhetoric."[8]

Asked to be specific, Goldfarb named Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor who once held a fundraiser for Obama, but then refused to cite anyone else. Blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote on The Daily Dish, "Asked to name one other anti-Semite other than his allegation about Rashid Khalidi, he can't. He won't. But he leaves it hanging, refusing to disown or retract the charge. This is pure McCarthyism. And it is the rotten core of McCain."[9]

Beauchamp affair

While at The Weekly Standard, Goldfarb was the first to raise doubts about the veracity of Scott Beauchamp's then-anonymous Iraq reporting for The New Republic.[10][11]

Affiliations

References

  1. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ Rutenberg, Jim (February 23, 2013). "A Conservative Provocateur, Using a Blowtorch as His Pen". New York Times. Retrieved 22 October 2013.
  2. Jump up Weekly Standard masthead Retrieved 2011-11-06
  3. Jump up "About PNAC" Retrieved 2011-11-06
  4. Jump up Weekly Standard 2 June 2008: *(Bumped) Kristol: So long (for a while) to Michael Goldfarb* Retrieved 2011-11-06
  5. Jump up http://www.theweekdaily.com/article/index/88291/3/3/Politics_new_third_rail_Dungeons_038_Dragons
  6. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ The Phillips Foundation Michael Goldfarb profile Retrieved 2011-11-06[dead ^link]
  7. Jump up Ruttenerg, Jim (February 23, 2013) ""A Conservative Provocateur, Using a Blowtorch as His Pen." New York Times. (Retrieved 5-9-2014.
  8. Jump up Michael Goldfarb on CNN (October 30, 2008)Footage on YouTube. (Retrieved 5-9-2014.)
  9. Jump up Sullivan, Andrew (October 31, 2008) "Pure McCarthyism." The Daily Dish. (Retrieved 5-9-2014.)
  10. Jump up Cohen, Patricia (July 28, 2007). "Shedding Pen Name, Private Says He's 'Baghdad Diarist'". The New York Times. Retrieved May 12, 2010.
  11. Jump up Paul McLeary, Paul (August 10, 2007). "Krauthammer, Goldfarb, and Emanuel: Getting the TNR mess wrong on purpose". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 2009-04-17.
  12. Jump up Ken Silverstein: *Neoconservatives hype a new Cold War*, Salon, 5 October 2011

External links

STUB

Categories: 

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Michael Goldfarb is a writer with the neoconservative The Weekly Standard owned by Rupert Murdoch and edited by William Kristol. Goldfarb "also works as a research associate" at the Project for the New American Century,[1], one of the leading neocon organizations. Jim Lobe describes Goldfarb as "known primarily as vociferous defenders of Israel" [2].

Beginning in spring 2007, Goldfarb participated in the U.S. Department of Defense's Bloggers' Roundtable.

In May 2007, Goldfarb was awarded a $25,000 part-time journalism fellowship by the Phillips Foundation.[3] Goldfarb’s funded project is entitled "The Upside of Global Warming."[4]

His fellowship profile states that Goldfarb is deputy online editor at The Weekly Standard, "where he has worked since 2003."[4]

He received a B.A. in History from Princeton University "with a concentration in war, revolution and the state."[4]

Contents:{:(style="color:#000000"):}:[:{hide:(style="color:#000000"):}::{]}:

Profiles

A previous entry in this space falsely stated that the Michael Goldfarb who writes for the Weekly Standard previously worked at Freedom House and Time.com. A different Michael Goldfarb was described.

Affiliations

Resources

Related SourceWatch articles

References

  1. ↑ AboutPNAC, Project for the New American Century, accessed October 18, 2007.
  2. ↑ Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe, Intel Council Head Draws Ire of Israel Lobby, 5 March 2009
  3. ↑ News Release: "Phillips Foundation Announces 2007 Journalism Fellowships; Seven Fellowships Totaling $237,500," ThePhillipsFoundation.org, May 9, 2007.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Overview of the Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellows since inception of the program, ThePhillipsFoundation.org.
  5. ↑ "Who's CSARX?" DefenseTech.org, April 19, 2007.
  6. ↑ David Gold, "The left Resorts to Liars To Slam effort in Iraq," GoldTalk.com, August 8, 2007.
  7. ↑ Ken Silverstein, Neoconservatives hype a new Cold War, Salon, 5 October 2011. One can hear an interview with Silverstein on this topic on AntiWar.com (8 October 2011).

External articles

External resources

Category: Blogging and Bloggers

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nyt

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February 23, 2013

A Conservative Provocateur, Using a Blowtorch as His Pen

By JIM RUTENBERG

At 11:42 a.m. on Feb. 14, a conservative online magazine called The Washington Free Beacon posted a dispatch about a speech Chuck Hagel gave in 2007 in which it said he called the State Department “an adjunct to the Israeli foreign minister’s office.”

The report was based on “contemporaneous” notes an attendee posted online. An hour later on the floor of the United States Senate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina urgently cited that statement as another reason to delay Mr. Hagel’s nomination as defense secretary.

Mr. Hagel denied saying it, and no recording has surfaced. But after a successful filibuster against the nominee, a group called the Emergency Committee for Israel effectively declared partial victory and vowed to “redouble its efforts to bring to light Mr. Hagel’s complete record.”

All in all, it was a very bad day for Mr. Hagel, and a smashingly good one for the conservative political operative of the moment — Michael Goldfarb.

At 32, Mr. Goldfarb is a founder of The Free Beacon, which is gaining prominence as a conservative clarion; a onetime presidential campaign aide to Senator John McCain, who provided critical support for the filibuster; and the strategist for the Emergency Committee for Israel, an anonymously financed group that advertises against President Obama and Congressional Democrats as insufficiently supportive of Israel. On top of that, he is a partner at Orion Strategies, a consulting firm whose clients have included the national governments of Taiwan and Georgia.

An all-around anti-liberal provocateur, Mr. Goldfarb has blazed a trail in the new era of campaign finance, in which loosened restrictions have flooded the political world with cash for a whole new array of organizations that operate outside the traditional bounds of the parties.

Often working with money from major Republican donors, most of whom have preferred anonymity, Mr. Goldfarb has been in the middle of nearly every major partisan dispute of Mr. Obama’s presidency — over Iran, Israel, terrorism policy and now Mr. Hagel and guns. For a time, Mr. Goldfarb worked as a communications strategist to the leading bêtes noires of liberals, the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

Mr. Goldfarb did not come up via state politics, Capitol Hill or the Republican National Committee, proving grounds that made the careers of top party operatives like Lee Atwater, Karl Rove and Matt Rhoades, the campaign manager for Mitt Romney.

His career was spawned, rather, in the conservative confines of The Weekly Standard and allied organizations, namely theProject for the New American Century, which is well known for promoting the war in Iraq. He has since gone on to thrive in the influential world of outside ideological groups. Mr. Goldfarb, known as a flamethrower on both sides of the aisle, has achieved unparalleled hybrid status in the process.

In his work at The Free Beacon, for groups like the Emergency Committee for Israel and at Orion, he has combined a relatively new form of weaponized journalism, politicking and public policy into a potent mix.

“He’s at the intersection of a lot of different worlds,” said William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, who has been a boss, mentor and colleague to Mr. Goldfarb. He said Mr. Goldfarb was representative of a new generation of conservatives whose emergence at a low ebb of their party’s power has made them “a little more entrepreneurial, more outspoken and risk-taking — not so worried about moving up a corporate ladder.”

A wisecracking native of suburban Philadelphia, Mr. Goldfarb has described himself as a cudgel. His signature political attack can best be described as gleeful evisceration, which at times has exposed him to charges of going too far and of getting too personal.

The liberal writer Lee Fang got a taste when he wrote an article for The Nation linking work that Orion has done for Taiwan to articles in The Free Beacon voicing criticism of the Obama administration for blocking a sale to Taiwan of F-16 jets.

Mr. Goldfarb denied any connection between his work at Orion and the articles, saying he did not personally handle Taiwan’s account or write the articles.

But The Free Beacon responded viscerally, with a report featuring pictures of Mr. Fang — who formerly wrote for the anonymously financed liberal blog ThinkProgress that frequently attacks the Kochs — shirtless and blowing a thick cloud of smoke. The headline read: “High Times at The Nation.”

In an interview, Mr. Fang, 26, said the photographs were from college and could have been found only in his password-protected account with Photobucket. He said he had filed a police report to get to the bottom of it. He said he felt doubly violated because the photograph was in a file that included revealing shots of his girlfriend.

“I think he’s just out to hurt people,” said Mr. Fang, who first tangled with Mr. Goldfarb when he was writing for ThinkProgress about the Kochs. “I don’t understand what his greater goal is; what would be the perfect solution to fix the most serious problems in America?”

Though Mr. Goldfarb would not share how The Free Beacon obtained the photographs, he said in a telephone interview that they were publicly available and were secured by legal means.

As he tells it, he is simply trying to have fun while practicing his admittedly combative brand of politics — the humor of which, he said, his liberal critics are too self-serious to get.

For instance, he said, a Free Beacon report that the retooled liberal magazine The New Republic had “dropped at least five prominent Jewish writers from its masthead” in what “may signal the publication’s continued drift away from a staunchly pro-Israel standpoint,” was tongue-in-cheek. (It drew angry rebuttals that The New Republic’s editor Franklin Foer is Jewish and roughly half of the writers dropped were not Jewish.)

“We’re true believers, but we’re also troublemakers, and if you look at the work we do, a lot of it has a sense of humor,” Mr. Goldfarb said. Though he said The Beacon had made a serious investment in its journalism, nonetheless, “We get up every day and say, how do we cause trouble?”

Mr. Goldfarb and his supporters say they find the attention he has received perplexing, especially from liberal groups that, in their view, basically do the same thing he does, which is attack the opposition.

Noting that ThinkProgress, which has frequently written about the donors he works with, does not disclose its own sources of financing, Mr. Goldfarb said, “They’re living in a glass house, so it’s very easy to throw the stone back at them.”

Mr. Goldfarb said he modeled The Free Beacon and its parent, the Center for American Freedom, on ThinkProgress and its related organization, the Center for American Progress. That group was co-founded by John Podesta, a former Clinton administration official, and has a reputation as a major policy production house for the Obama administration.

Referring to headlines in The Free Beacon like “Bootylicious Beyoncé Solicits for Obama,” ThinkProgress.org sent a statement from its editor, Judd Legum, that said: “They are not an imitation of ThinkProgress. They are a parody.”

Sometimes, Mr. Goldfarb said, that is the point.

His role as a hawkish magnet of liberal scorn would not have been foreshadowed by his background. His mother is a public school teacher in Philadelphia, and his father is a dean at the University of Pennsylvania medical school. His sister, Rachael Goldfarb, emerged from their household with opposite politics. She was an assistant to Mr. Podesta when he was a White House chief of staff, and she is now an official with the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a conservative whipping post.

Mr. Goldfarb, who declined to be interviewed in person, went to Princeton, where he studied war history. But even there, Mr. Goldfarb exhibited the same delight in raising the ire of his more liberal classmates, friends said. “He relished the fact that he had a viewpoint that wasn’t everybody else’s viewpoint — he was not above saying things solely for being provocative,” said a dorm mate and friend, Christopher Beha, a novelist and an associate editor at Harper’s Magazine.

After college, Mr. Goldfarb took a job as a receptionist at The Weekly Standard and worked his way up. He gained attention when he organized a campaign to discredit an anonymous author of a New Republic article criticizing the Iraq war and alleging misdeeds by troops. He rallied other bloggers to help him dig, and his campaign prompted a military investigation, eventually leading The New Republic to say it could not stand by the claims of the writer, later identified as Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

Mr. Goldfarb’s work caught the eye of strategists for Senator McCain, who hired him “to attack the press,” as Mr. Goldfarb put it in an interview in The Columbia Journalism Review. Though he said he disagreed with the tactic, he did it with trademark flair.

He left the campaign at loggerheads with some of his colleagues, who he thought were disloyal to Mr. McCain and Sarah Palin after the election. But he also gained vital contacts with donors, party leaders and, despite his role, reporters.

“There’s something to be said for stabbing people in the front in a town where everybody goes around all day stabbing each other in the back,” said Ben Smith, the editor in chief of Buzzfeed.com.

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

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