HILLARY 2
6/16
see main
TRAITOR RUSSIAGATE 7 25 FOX BAD TRIN CRM ALSO SOROS
see but the emails
see seth rich/ vince foster conspir BS fox
919 bak
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general lightning rod for anti-woman? anti-dem?
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3 26 CAVED WHEN BUSTED ON PIX TO BJ?
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AN 3 26
New video from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Epstein deposition hearing shows her mocking MAGA Rep. Lauren Boebert to her face for asking a question about a "totally made up" conspiracy theory.
Clinton was questioned in a closed-door hearing in upstate New York last week about her potential connections to the deceased sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, maintaining her stance that she had never met the man before, and had at best maintained a casual acquaintance with his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, also gave a closed-door testimony the following day.
On Monday, clips from Clinton's deposition began to circulate online, showing Boebert's line of questioning about the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory, and the former first lady's withering reaction. One particular clip, four minutes in length, was shared to X by New York Sun reporter Matt Rice.
"Pizzagate" originated amid Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, after conspiracy theorists became convinced that references to "pizza" in leaked emails from her campaign chair, Jon Podesta, were coded references. The spread of the theory led one believer to enter Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, with a loaded gun in search of a basement he thought was used to hide victims, though the property ended up having no basement to begin with.
Despite this conspiracy theory being widely debunked as a complete fabrication, Boebert nonetheless questioned Clinton last week as to whether or not she had seen anything in the newly released Epstein files related to it.
"Have you reviewed any 2025-2026 Epstein files that were released that you believe reference or relate to those specific 2016 claims regarding the Podesta emails, Comet Ping Pong, pizza used as code possibly?" Boebert asked.
After questioning about the nature of Boebert's question and the "wacky Pizzagate scandal" from the former secretary's legal team, Clinton responded: "Pizzagate was totally made up. It was an outrageous allegation that ended up hurting a number of people, that caused a deranged young man to show up with his assault rifle and shoot up a local pizzeria. I can't believe you're even referencing it."
Boebert pressed further with an awkwardly phrased follow-up question about any Epstein investigations post-2019 intersecting with "Pizzagate-style theories about Democrat figures," to which Clinton said, "I have no way of answering [that]." The congresswoman asked another question about Clinton clarifying any content from the Epstein files that may have been misinterpreted in a way that would revive the Pizzagate claims. She insisted that the line of questioning was "reasonable" as Clinton's legal team objected.
Throughout Boebert's series of questioning, Clinton repeatedly grinned and shook her head. Near the end of the video shared online, she appeared to mock Boebert's question.
"I mean really, I expected a lot of interesting questions today, but Pizzagate was not on my list," Clinton said.
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HILLARY EPSTEIN DEPOS ASKED ABOUT UFO AND PIZZAGATE
CALLS VILE; her written st rips new one; comer told up front this will not go well, we are better at it; see hcr 
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an 2 26
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's aide spoke to the press on Thursday while she was giving a statement to the House Oversight and Reform Committee about the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
The deposition was paused after Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Co.) sent an unauthorized photo of Sec. Clinton to a right-wing influencer, NBC News reporter Ryan Nobles posted on X. He did not clarify if that unauthorized photo included anyone else in the picture.
The photo was sent to Benny Johnson, who has an online streaming show.
Johnson then posted the photo on X.
The Clintons both asked for their hearings to be public. However, the Oversight Committee chairman, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) only agreed to release video and transcript of the hearing.
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December 31, 2025
Apart from being French, Brigitte Macron embodies everything a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year should be. She flouted prudish norms by seducing a much younger student at the Jesuit high school where she was a teacher. The student, Emmanuel Macron, 24 years her junior, is now her husband and the president of France. But when push comes to shove, Brigitte is quick to remind the little twerp who wears the pants.
If that's even her real name. Macron has boldly challenged the conventional expectations governing how a first lady should present herself physically, completely redrawing the line between feminine and masculine. Indeed, Michelle Obama walked so she could run.
To be honest, we're not entirely sure what's going on. Donald Trump loves to kiss Brigitte in front of her husband, whom he's teased for having "naughty" secrets. He once called her "beautiful," a claim that even the most partisan fact-checkers—Daniel Dale and Glenn Kessler (RIP) come to mind—would struggle to authenticate. And yet, in almost every respect, Trump is by far our gayest president. Say what you will about Bill Clinton, he was far too busy chasing tail to redecorate the Oval Office or build an entire ballroom to entertain guests by blasting the theme from Cats.
In any event, Brigitte has clearly taken inspiration from Clinton's nominal wife, Hillary Rodham, when it comes to utilizing the levers of state to harass or even silence one's enemies. Hillary might have a higher body count—Vince Foster, Jeffrey Epstein, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, and so on—or maybe Brigitte is just better at covering her tracks.
Assembling a multinational assassination squad to go after Candace Owens—who was threatening to reveal dark secrets about her past—was a sensible move on Macron's part. We might question the wisdom of including only one Jew, but we'll wait to see how things play out before passing judgment. In the meantime, we hope she appreciates the distinction of being a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year.
Brava, madame. Or shall we say, Bravo.
Published under: Bill Clinton , Candace Owens , Donald Trump , Emmanuel Macron , Hillary Clinton , Michelle Obama
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THEHILL 12 25
“We are the free world now.” Those words from Raphael Glucksmann, a French socialist member of the European Parliament, captured the pearl-clutching outrage of Europeans after the Trump administration did what no prior administration has ever done — stand up to Europe to defend the freedom of speech.
This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubiobarred five figures closely associated with European censorship efforts from traveling to the U.S. This includes Thierry Breton, the former European Union commissioner responsible for digital policy.
In a post on X, Rubio declared that the U.S. “will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship” and will target “leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States.”
Breton achieved infamy as one of the architects of the massive EU censorship system, which is now being globalized. Armed with the notorious Digital Service Act, Breton and others threatened American companies and officials that they would have to yield to European standards of free speech. After Breton learned that Musk was planning to interview Trump before the last presidential election, he even warned the X owner that he would be “monitored” and potentially subject to EU fines.
Socialist Glucksmann is now irate at “this scandalous sanction against Thierry Breton.”
“We are Europeans,” he declared. “We must defend our laws, our principles, our interests.” In other words, this is a war over whether Europe or the U.S. Constitution will dictate the scope of free speech for American companies and citizens.
Breton and his colleagues are finally being treated as what they are: a clear and present danger to the “indispensable right” that defines all Americans.
The EU has been enlisted by anti-free speech figures in the U.S. to force companies like X and Facebook to restore censorship of Americans. After Musk bought Twitter with a pledge to restore free-speech protections, Hillary Clintoncalled upon European officials to force him to censor under Europe’s Digital Services Act.
Nina Jankowicz, the former head of Biden’sinfamous Disinformation Governance Board, appeared before the European Parliament. She called upon the 27 EU countries to fight against the U.S., which she described as a global threat.
The E.U. enthusiastically took up the challenge. This year, I spoke in Berlin at the World Forum, which boosted the slogan, “A New World Order with European Values.” Bill and Hillary Clinton and other Americans cheered on the European efforts.
The Digital Services Act bars speech that is viewed as “disinformation” or “incitement.” When it was passed over the condemnations of many of us in the free speech community, European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestagercelebrated by declaring that it is “not a slogan anymore — that what is illegal offline should also be seen and dealt with as illegal online. Now it is a real thing. Democracy’s back.”
It is indeed a “real thing.” In my forthcoming book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, I discuss the challenges facing our republic in the 21st century, including the EU and its transnational governance model. Many on the left are supporting the erosion of national laws and values in favor of standards set by global experts and elites.
This cadre of American enablers has been increasingly vocal in Europe. Notably, late-night ABC host Jimmy Kimmeldelivered a Christmas Eve address in Great Britain denouncing the U.S. as a global threat. He declared that “from a fascism perspective, this has been a really great year. Tyranny is booming over here.”
It was crushingly ironic. Many of us have been writing for years about how free speech has been eviscerated in the United Kingdom, where people are being prosecuted for “toxic ideologies” and an ever-lengthening list of unacceptable political viewpoints.
Justice Amy Coney Barrettissued a warning this week about the collapse of free speech in the United Kingdom. Yet that is where a comedian, who is paid millions and attacks Trump nightly, went to complain about the threat to free speech in the U.S.
Both Vice President JD Vance and Secretary Rubio have delivered major speeches warning the EU about its effort to export censorship systems, particularly targeting American citizens and companies. After years of encouragement and enabling from the Obamaand Bidenadministrations, the U.S. government is finally in this fight.
That is why Europe is up in arms, denouncing the move to bar these officials as an attack on its own sovereignty. In other words, an effort to defend our own free speech values is a threat to the proclaimed “New World Order with European Values.”
In reality, I do not like travel bans. I prefer that these figures come to this country and face free-speech advocates. Yet despite our calls for Congress to get into this fight, it has done nothing due to opposition from Democratic members. We cannot wait as the EU weaponizes and globalizes censorship.
Glucksmann is right about one thing. This is a fight over who today can be rightfully called the “free world.” In the U.S., we continue to cling to the quaint notion that the free world should be based on … well, freedom.
*Jonathan Turleyis the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of the forthcoming “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution” on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.
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AN 12 25
A Fox News host is urging viewers to defend America’s “western Christian culture” and to think “communism” whenever they hear about feminism or secularism.
Rachel Campos-Duffy, a “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host, told viewers on Monday, “I think it’s really up to us to reclaim our culture.”
“We can sit and complain about it, but when we give in to those atheist groups that keep suing, we should come right back — this is our culture,” she said. “I’m not going to let, you know, pro-Palestinian or whatever they’re putting forward — these are all fronts for, you know, whenever you see any of these groups, just think feminism, secularism, just think communism. This is what they’re really about.”
“It’s always been about communism,” Campos-Duffy insisted.
“Making the state the center, removing the power of religion and family from our culture. It’s up to us to make sure that our culture remains what it is, which is a Western Christian culture with a beautiful history that we have in this country, and that we have to defend these things every single day, especially with our children.”
Campos-Duffy has a history of targeting feminism.
“Feminists like Hillary Clinton have robbed women of so much over the years, of minimizing the importance of what our purpose as mothers and as wives, and, I think, and really demeaning it and saying that it’s not the most important,” she said in September. GREIVANCE THEY DO NOT RESPECT US?
“Always remember that feminism has never been about women. It’s always been about ABORTION and COMMUNISM,” she wrote in 2023.
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// m traitor g no not dangerous, brn fail
no x gfx pix
an 11 25
President Donald Trump is targeting his former FBI Director in a series of social media posts, including a repost that accused Christopher Wray of treason.
Trump reposted a post on Monday that placed Wray among sixteen people — including several former FBI officials — and labeled them as “Obama’s Russia HOAX Treason Club.”
Those depicted as members of the alleged “Treason Club” include Wray’s predecessor, former FBI Director Jim Comey; former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe; former CIA Directors John Brennan and Gina Haspel; former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper; and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Another post that Trump reposted accused former Director Wray of lying when he testified before Congress that he did not put FBI agents in the crowd on January 6.
Trump wrote: “Wray lied!!!”
The president also reposted a post he wrote in September, that reads in part, “It was just revealed that the FBI had secretly placed, against all Rules, Regulations, Protocols, and Standards, 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th Hoax.”
Trump did not appear to provide evidence that supported his allegations.
Wray has denied there were FBI agents in the crowd as some form of operation.
A September Associated Press headline reported: “Alleged FBI documents do not prove federal agents incited Jan. 6 Capitol attack.”
Trump has also been calling for the prosecutions of his political adversaries, including U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI Director Comey, and former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
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OMG SEE FIASCO BENGHAZI MIKE SCHMIDT HAD HILLARY EMAIL HRD22 ? BUT ASSUMED SHE ALSO USES AN OFFICIAL ACCT? INVESTIGATTOR MIL INTEL ON 2ND TREY GOWDY SPECIAL COMM DID NOT SEE PROBLEM
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Trump says “Russia, if you’re listening” was a joke. There’s tape proving otherwise. | Vox
no lnx
Trump says “Russia, if you’re listening” was a joke. There’s tape to prove otherwise.
Trump is layering lie upon lie to rewrite the history of his encouragement of Russian hackers.
by Aaron Rupar
Sep 29, 2020,
Trump accused reporters this weekend of mischaracterizing comments he made in July 2016 publicly encouraging Russian hackers to attack Hillary Clinton. But the way he described those comments is completely at odds with reality, and there’s video to prove it.
“Do you remember when I said, ‘Russia, if you’re listening, find her emails,’ or whatever the hell I said? ‘Find her emails,’ and then we all laughed together, 25,000 people in a stadium,” Trump said at a rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. “They cut it off exactly before we all started to laugh together, right? And for two years they’ve been saying, ‘He dealt with Russia. He asked Russia to please get her emails,’ or whatever the hell we were asking ... the whole place cracks up with me ... this is how dishonest these people are.”
This is no doubt part of his never-ending effort to discredit the media.
Watch:
Trump made the remarks in question during his first campaign, saying, “Russia, if you’re listening — I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.”
But Trump did not say this to a cheering and laughing crowd at one of his rallies. He actually said it in front of a handful of reporters during a news conference at his Doral property in Florida. That news conference wound up being his final one before the election, in large part because of the negative stir his remarks generated.
Furthermore, nobody laughed when Trump said it, and his comments are just as bad in context as they are when the “Russia, if you’re listening” line is considered on its own. Here’s the footage:
Jim Acosta of CNN, the reporter who asked the question that prompted Trump to say “Russia, if you’re listening” at the July 2016 news conference, tweeted on Tuesday morning that “the reporters at the news conference didn’t laugh. And Trump didn’t appear to be joking.”
The president seems to be trying to turn reality on its head, even though there’s tape to prove otherwise.
Trump is spitting on his supporters and telling them it’s raining
Retconning the incident has become a staple of Trump’s campaign speeches. On September 19 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for instance, Trump brought it up and claimed “everybody laughed” and “it was a joke,” then added the lie about it happening at a rally for the first time over the weekend.
Even if Trump didn’t mean for his comments to be taken seriously, Russian hackers apparently did. According to Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officials, on the same day Trump made those comments, Russian hackers “attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provided and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.”
Trump has made clear in the years since that he doesn’t think foreign interference in American elections is a bad thing, insofar as it helps him. In October 2019, Trump flatly told reporters that he thought the Chinese and Ukrainian governments “should investigate the Bidens.” Those comments were widely condemned but were defended as just a joke by Republican members of Congress like Kevin McCarthy and Roy Blunt, even though footage of the comment showed Trump was serious.
Trump’s comments about the July 2016 news conference were especially shameless, but they were far from the only brazen lie he pushed in Middletown. He told his supporters that just prior to the coronavirus hitting the US, “we were coming together ... I was getting calls from stone-cold, hard-line Democrats,” even though in reality he had just been through an impeachment trial. He claimed 35,000 people attended his Friday evening rally in Newport News, Virginia, but local reports indicate there were around 4,000. And he appeared to fabricate stats about excess mortality in order to mislead people about how hard the US has been hit by Covid-19.
Trump once advised his supporters in 2018 to “just remember — what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” He’s not subtle about it.
See More:
2020 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Politics
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WTF?
April 9, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five
JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): We didn't want to kill Barack Obama, we just didn't think he was legally qualified to be president because of where he was born. And then Hillary, we didn't want to kill, we were just so afraid of her, we thought she'd kill us first.
But we do this in other countries. The CIA literally uses the same exact propaganda to stir up cultures in other countries to topple dictatorships we don't like. Now, we're doing it in our own country, and it's like almost working.
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4 24 maddow has natl eng ft pages hit man lebo dying of cancer etc etc
trump hush trial
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'I’m not suicidal': Kari Lake pushes Hillary Clinton murder conspiracy theory - Alternet.org
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booktv
https://series.c-span.org
C-SPAN.org | National Politics | History | Nonfiction Books
Fox News host Jeanine Pirro argues that President Biden and the Democrats are destroying the United States. View More Book TV . Book Bans in the U.S. Jul 09, 2023 | 3:54pm EDT | C-SPAN2. Book TV presents coverage of the 2023 U.S. Book Show. Publishers Weekly sponsored this event at New York University in New York City. View More Book TV . After ...
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i watched some of this, legal etgos, worst motives ~ hillary evil?
https://www.c-span.org/video/?528371-1/crimes-america
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an 5 23
rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, threatened to investigate Bill and Hillary Clinton.
During a Sunday interview on Fox News, hostMaria Bartiromo asked an animated Jordan if he would consider opening an investigation into the Clintons.
"Do you want to see another investigation of Hillary and Bill Clinton?" Bartiromo wondered. "Because in the Durham report, John Durham wrote that while they were pursuing Trump, they made no effort to investigate the claim that Hillary Clinton was taking money from foreigners for her Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation."
"They not only didn't investigate her like they did President Trump, they gave her campaign a defensive briefing!" Jordan exclaimed. "They should have done the same for President Trump because they literally had no evidence."
Jordan said he would talk with his attorneys and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) before proceeding.
"We're going to give that a good hard look," he insisted. "But nothing is off the table because it is critical the American people understand how their government, their agencies have been turned on, them the taxpayer,and we get all the facts out there."
Watch the video below from Fox News or at this link
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not wrong on vast rw consp, ~ violence
https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/not-just-an-aberration-gop/
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an 822
The early morning crew at Fox News lashed out at President Joe Biden Friday morning, just hours after he held a fiery rally in Maryland Thursday night and made the stakes for the November midterms clear: It’s democracy or fascism.
“What we’re seeing now is the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism,” President Biden, aware he was entering dangerous territory, declared as he steamrolled ahead.
“America must choose. You must choose — whether our country will move forward or backward,” Biden told the audience at the fundraising event that looked more like a Trump rally, packed to the gills with thousands of screaming fans of the president. “Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans have made their choice — to go backwards full of anger, violence, hate and division.”
READ MORE: [Biden White House Smacks Down Marjorie Taylor Greene in a Tweet
“The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security,” Biden said. “They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”
“I want to be crystal-clear about what’s on the ballot this year,” Biden said. “Your right to choose is on the ballot this year. The Social Security you paid for from the time you had a job is on the ballot. The safety of our kids from gun violence is on the ballot.”
“MAGA Republicans don’t have a clue about the power of women. Let me tell you something: They are about to find out.”
“I respect conservative Republicans,” Biden added. “I don’t respect these MAGA Republicans.”
It was President Biden labeling Trump’s “Make America Great Again” philosophy “semi-fascism” and how he defined “MAGA Republicans” that infuriated the Fox News “Fox & Friends First” hosts.
“President Biden just trashed 70 million Trump supporters again!” one Fox News host screamed. “Boy that seems very familiar, a little like Hillary’s ‘deplorables’ comment, doesn’t it?”
In fact, it seems nothing like former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 remarks, which were almost never fully reported, although Buzzfeed’s Ruby Cramer captured them and NPR published the transcript in full, which is below.
READ MORE: [Watch: Megyn Kelly Unleashes Profane ‘F’ Word Attack on Dr. Fauci
It’s important to note how Clinton expressed great compassion for GOP voters, and called on all Americans “to understand and empathize” with them:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America,” Clinton said barely months before the 2016 election.
“But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
Watch Fox News’ Friday morning response to President Biden’s remarks below or at this link:
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ref 1
https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannitys-hillary-clinton-obsession-numbers
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ref 2 2015
https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/fox-news-promotes-bombshell-book-founder-anti-hillary-clinton-group-cunt-and-writer
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB861917340688900500
Ginni clinton jihad: proto-Benghazi
no lnx
By Edward Felsenthal and David Rogers Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal
April 25, 1997
WASHINGTON -- Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had to force herself to be pleasant when she met Hillary Clinton for the first time four years ago.
Mrs. Clinton had been an outspoken supporter of Anita Hill, the woman who had famously accused Mr. Thomas of sexual harassment during his 1991 confirmation hearings. Ms. Thomas couldn't get the association out of her mind.
"For me, it was, 'Wow, now I have to, in my role, be respectful and cordial and courteous,' " Ms. Thomas recalls thinking as she moved through a receiving line toward the new first lady. Although the brief encounter was awkward for her, Ms. Thomas says she was proud of how she handled it. She gave Mrs. Clinton some verses from the Bible, along with a warning about how tough this city can be.
Today Ms. Thomas feels a kinship with Mrs. Clinton. Like the first lady, she is best known as the spouse of a prominent man. But also like Mrs. Clinton, she has become a controversial political player and has been the subject of vigorous public criticism for her partisan activities.
Although she takes pains to carve out her own identity, Ms. Thomas, 40 years old, is inevitably linked with her husband in much of what she does. "A lot of people treat her a certain way ... because of who she is married to," says radio-host Armstrong Williams, a former close aide and a friend to Justice Thomas.
Awkward Predicament
Ms. Thomas says there are challenges that come with "being a Supreme Court spouse, as opposed to just a lawyer working in Washington." Her dual role highlights an increasingly common political phenomenon: Now that many political partners are professionals themselves, they face an awkward predicament. Many find they have to struggle to avoid being used as political tools or being perceived as benefiting from their spouse's position.
Barbara Olson,an aide to the Senate leadership who has worked in congressional investigations of the Clinton administration, has been a target of Democratic sniping that she is a proxy for her husband, Theodore Olson, a prominent lawyer who has represented one of the president's accusers in the Whitewater affair. Republicans in the last Congress delighted in cutting money for a small anticrime program that paid consulting fees to Sylvia Panetta, wife of then-White House Chief-of-Staff Leon Panetta. That put Mr. Panetta in the uncomfortable position of having to fight to get the money back.
Ms. Thomas had already made a name for herself as an activist in conservative circles before Republicans took over Congress in 1994. But her influence grew after that election when her boss, Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, became House majority leader.
Ms. Thomas operates much as an eager young administrative officer back at the base camp for the Republican infantry. She works behind the scenes, serving as part strategist and part cheerleader for the leadership's effort tobeef-up the GOP's ability to investigate and oversee the White House and executive agencies.[benghazi much later?]
Partisan Battles
It is a role that takes her from dry, detailed General Accounting Office reports to the higher-profile and more partisan-edged investigations of administration scandals. She has assisted with the investigations of White House ethics, Whitewater, the firing of the White House travel staff, and the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's financial dealings. When Republicans approved an expanded budget for House committee investigations last month, the move partly reflected Ms. Thomas's influence.
She has figured in several high-profile fights involving the House Appropriations Committee. Over the objections of some Republicans on the committee, she pressed hard for deep cuts in funding to Legal Services Corp., a provider of legal aid to the poor that she viewed as using federal money to advance liberal causes.
And in a stormy panel meeting in1995, she stood watch on behalf of Mr. Armey as Republicans reluctantly lined up behind a leadership attempt to bar funding for nonprofit organizations that engage in advocacy, in many cases for poor constituencies. The measure ultimately failed because of opposition in the Senate.
During this Congress, Ms. Thomas has stepped back, as the leadership has relaxed its efforts to control committee chairmen. But she is still a force behind continuing investigations, and before last year's election she helped gather information on White House scandals for Republicans to use on the campaign trail. (That project was abandoned after word of its existence leaked, prompting concern that it would make Republicans look like scandalmongers.)
A memo this past January titled "Foreign Money Contributions Scandal" illustrates Ms. Thomas's style. Throwing as wide a net as possible, she addressed it to Republican staff on 19 committees, including the sensitive Intelligence panel. In it, she cited statutes or regulations that might have been violated by overseas contributions to Democrats. She urged staff directors to be "watchful" for administration efforts to dismiss problems as just "campaign finance." Ms. Thomas wrote, "what we don't know is how much was for sale in the Clinton presidency."
Though Ms. Thomas is good-humored and engaging, her writing sometimes gets her into trouble.Much of her job is simply informational: She helps produce a biweekly "Oversight Bulletin" publicizing current investigations. But when she pens strategy, she betrays a partisan edge that makes experienced staff directors blanch.
A case in point is an April 1996 memo she wrote for Republican congressmen Bob Walker and Jim Nussleand sent to House committees, asking for "examples of dishonesty or ethical lapses in the Clinton administration" and "anecdotes that amplify these areas." The memo requested that all such materials be sent to her as quickly as possible and reminded committee chairs that "you are a tremendous resource for this project."
Democratic Backlash
Democrats quickly turned Ms. Thomas's memo on the Republicans, claiming it proved that the investigations were partisan. During one hearing, Democrats blew up the memo and posted it on an easel to suggest that the proceeding was part of a GOP plot to denigrate the administration.
Even some Republican staff members complained that it went too far. "It didn't dawn on her that in Congress, things aren't supposed to appear politically driven,"even if they are, says a senior GOP aide who has worked with her.
In May, two weeks after the memo was distributed, Democratic Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia spotted Ms. Thomas in the audience at a hearing on the White House travel-office firings. In a rare public attack on a congressional staffer, he demanded to know why "Mrs. Clarence Thomas in that bright blue dress" was present. "I really smell a political witch hunt," he said.
Ms. Thomas didn't endure the attack silently. Later that day, she confronted Mr. Moran on a House elevator and showed him a copy of a book, "Everything Men Know About Women," in which all the pages are blank. "This book is about you," she said.Justice Thomas later left his wife a voice-mail message in which he teasingly sang verses of the song, "Devil With a Blue Dress On."
Spousal Conflict?
Democratic Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, who also questioned Ms. Thomas's role at the travel-office hearing, believes it is a conflict of interest for her to be involved in disputes between Congress and the White House that the Supreme Court might be called on to settle. "We may have a problem here where the marital relationship confuses the constitutional intent" of the separation of powers, Mr. Kanjorski says. Ms. Thomas laughs when told of Mr. Kanjorski's statement, but declines to comment....[much more]
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DAVID CORN
FreedomWorks Made Video of Fake Giant Panda Having Sex With Fake Hillary Clinton
The investigation at the influential tea party group could get weird.
By David Corn | Thu Feb. 14, 2013
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Aninternal investigation [1] of FreedomWorks—the prominent conservative advocacy group and super-PAC—has focused on president Matt Kibbe's[2]management of the organization, his use of its resources, and a controversial book deal he signed [3], according to former FreedomWorks officials who have met with the private lawyers conducting the probe. One potential topic for the inquiry is a promotional video produced last year under the supervision of Adam Brandon [4], executive vice president of the group and a Kibbe loyalist. The video included a scene in which a female intern wearing a panda suit simulates performing oral sex on Hillary Clinton. [Author's note: The previous sentence contains no typos.]
In December, after months of bitter in-fighting, two members of FreedomWorks' board of trustees—C. Boyden Gray,the White House counsel for President George H.W. Bush, and James Burnley IV, a secretary of transportation during the Reagan years—notified [1] Kibbe that they had received "allegations of wrongdoing by the organization or its employees" and had hired two lawyers, Alfred Regnery and David Martin, to investigate. Soon after, Regnery and Martin began interviewing past and present FreedomWorks employees and officials. This list included Dick Armey, the former House majority leader who in November resigned [5] as chairman of the group (and pocketed an $8 million payout [6]), citing concerns about the management of the organization. The investigating lawyers, Armey says, "picked my brain. I told them a forensic audit would be imperative because so much is hidden there." ...
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an 6 22
after Democratic aide Seth Rich was shot and killed in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, July 10, 2016, it didn’t take right-wing media outlets long to promote bogus conspiracy theories about his death. Police believe that Rich was the victim of a street robbery, but Fox News persisted in pushing conspiracy theories about his death — inspiring Rich’s parents, Joel and Mary Rich, to file a lawsuit against the right-wing cable news outlet. And a new interview with National Public Radio (NPR) is the first public interview they have granted since reaching a settlement with Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp. in 2020.
Joel Rich told NPR, "We're just beside ourselves. With all the international stories and all the national media, how do you live with that, when you know it's all false about your son and his legacy?"
Under the terms of the settlement they reached with Fox News/Fox Corp. in 2020, Joel and Mary Rich could not speak directly about Fox News or any of its hosts during the NPR interview. But they talked about their son and the pain that conspiracy theorists brought them after his death. [twt tpx]
"After Seth's death,” NPR reporter David Folkenflik explains, “figures friendly to former President Donald Trump portrayed him as a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter. They peddled false claims that he had secretly stolen thousands of e-mails and given them to WikiLeaks to try tostop Hillary Clinton from winning the presidency.They suggested Clinton and the Democrats had arranged his killing, and that the Riches themselves were in on some kind of cover-up. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fueled the suspicions, aided by such extremist blogs as Gateway Pundit. None of this was true.”
Folkenflik adds, “As intelligence agencies in the Obama and Trump Administrations, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee and Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded, hackers were deployed by the Russian government to disrupt U.S. elections. But the falsehoods [seth rich lie?] helped deflect growing evidence that the Russians had interfered in Trump's election win.”
Folkenflik notes thatSean Hannity, Eric Bolling and former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs were among the hosts at Fox News or Fox Business who “baselessly suggested that Seth Rich had been the leaker and that he was murdered because of those leaks.”
Seth Rich’s death wasn’t the first time Fox News’ willingness to promote nonsense conspiracy theories created legal problems for them. Fox News is presently facing a $1.6 billion lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for promoting the false claim that its voting equipmentwas used to help now-President Joe Biden steal the 2020 presidential election. A civil trial in that case is set for April 2023.
Fox News has also been sued for defamation by Smartmatic, a Dominion competitor. Smartmatic’s voting equipment was never used to help Democrats steal any votes in 2020, but that didn’t prevent Fox News hosts from promoting that false claim just as it promoted false claims involving Dominion. And Smartmatic asked for $2.7 billion in its lawsuit.
Although Joel Rich couldn’t get into the specifics of the settlement with Fox News/Fox Corp., he told NPR, “We are still glad we did this, because you get a settlement. It may not have the words 'I'm sorry.' But (in effect), you have the admission they did something wrong.”
Fox News, not surprisingly, declined to be interviewed for NPR’s article on Joel and Mary Rich. During the interview, they reiterated that the ludicrous conspiracy theories involving their son had no basis in fact.
Mary Rich told NPR, “We thought that when the lawsuit was over, our lives would be able to go back (to a sense of normalcy)…. People would know and understand that there was a big lie. And I have realized since then, our lives will never ever be able to return.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/mark-meadows/
i forgot ziegler:
an 6 22 raw story
Navarro, President Trump’s former trade advisor was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday due to his refusal to cooperate with the January 6th Committee, which has signaled interest in his communications with the president.
Less attention has been paid to Garrett Ziegler, a Navarro aide and zealous Trump loyalist who both supported his boss’ efforts and coordinated with a network of outside operatives who were promoting an onslaught of false claims about election fraud and legally dubious schemes to preserve Trump’s hold on power.
Ziegler received an email from the senior investigative counsel for the committee, which is scheduled to begin public hearings on June 9, requesting a meeting to discuss information he might have that is relevant to the congressional investigation.
Among his extensive efforts from his office at the White House, Ziegler facilitated a now-infamous late-night meeting on Dec. 18, 2020 in which attorney Sidney Powell, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne tried to persuade President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-running elections in six battleground states he lost to Joe Biden.
Ziegler used his White House Worker and Visitor Entry System, or WAVES pass to let Powell, Flynn and Byrne into the White House, allowing them to hold an impromptu meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, as he later recounted in aninterview with fellow election denier David Clements. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone were caught by surprise by the meeting, which reportedly descended into a shouting match. Ziegler’s efforts bypassed protocol for White House meetings, and he said when it was discovered that he had let the plotters into the White House, his visitor’s privileges were revoked.
In Navarro’s book In Trump Time, he wrote that “to support the challenge effort, he allowed “several members of my staff to help out in the battleground states on their own time.” Navarro’s book describes “the young and always earnest” Ziegler venturing to an Indian reservation in Nevada to investigate alleged vote-buying shortly after the election. The work eventually culminated in the three-part Navarro Report, which asserted without evidence that the election had been stolen from Trump.
Around the time of the election, a man named Mark Cook took a photograph of cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves that were labeled “Dominion Voting” and “Made in China.”
“My good friend Mark Cook took this picture,” Ziegler, who is now 26, wrote on his Telegram channel in June 2021. “We infiltrated the election equipment storage facility in Sacramento County, CA, and documented all of the violations of law.”
Cook’s photograph would later be used on the final page of a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” put together by Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in psychological warfare that was shown to members of Congress on Jan. 4 and 5, 2021. The presentation recommended that Vice President Mike Pence set aside the electoral votes from the six battleground states carried by Biden, and also called on President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-count the ballots.
For his part, Cook remains active in the election denial movement. Last month, he and Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor, addressed a Republican-controlled board of commissioners in Surry County, NC. Introduced by Clements as “our hardware and IT cybersecurity expert,” Cook told commissioners: “If our Pentagon can’t secure a network, Department of Defense can’t secure a network, our Department of Homeland Security can’t secure a network, are we really so foolish as to think the only system that is completely impervious to any cyber-hack is our voting system?”
Cook’s 25-minute presentation omitted a simple fact — voting tabulation machines are not networked, and preliminary counts are transferred on a mobile drive to a computer to be uploaded from local election offices for election-night reporting.
Both Ziegler and Cook were trusted associates in the network of operatives and conspiracy theorists that worked under the competing legal teams headed by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and by Powell, alongside Flynn and Byrne.
In a private Telegram text to another election denier that has been reviewed by Raw Story, Waldron said, “Mark and Garrett have worked with us since 14 Nov 20.” He added that Ziegler and Cook “both passed rigorous background checks” after suspicions arose that CIA and British intelligence assets were attempting to infiltrate the network plotting to overturn the election.
“I have no idea what Waldron was alluding to,” Ziegler told Raw Story in an email. “None. I had an active [top secret/sensitive compartmented information] clearance at the time. I think he was just spinning a tale for others.”
Waldron declined to comment for this story.
Michael Trimarco, a Giuliani associate who rented a bloc of rooms at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel in November 2020,also alluded to a dual role on Ziegler’s part in an interview with the far-right podcaster Ann Vandersteel earlier this year.
“I know some of the people that were his direct reports, because he wasn’t officially reporting directly to Peter,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “So, I know some of these other people. And politically that didn’t make people around in Peter’s world very happy with Garrett in the inter-office kinda…. But from what I saw, he was well connected with Peter… and I know he furnished a lot of information for the report.”
While enmeshed with the outside election denial network, Ziegler also provided the external teams with a direct conduit to the White House and President Trump, to the extent that Trimarco said information about election irregularities would often reach Trump before even Giuliani knew about it.
“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco said. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president. And then it would circle back to Rudy.”
In his interview with Clements, Ziegler dated work on the three-part Navarro Report to Nov. 15 — one day after Waldron said he had started working with Ziegler. Ziegler said he and four other aides assisted Navarro with the reports.
“We prepared — Peter gave direction,” Ziegler told Clements. “He’s a fantastic, logical thinker, which is very hard — easier said than done. He laid it out, what his vision was. And our job was to get the first draft.”
Much of the information in the reports was funneled up from the outside team, Trimarco said.
“Peter put out a three-volume report together, and a lot of the information — not all of it — came from this group of analysts that work working out of the Westin that did not go toTomotley,” Trimarco said, referencing attorney Lin Wood’s estate in South Carolina, where Powell and Flynn established a working headquarters away from DC.
One day after Powell, Flynn and Byrne’s Dec. 18 visit to the White House to promote their plan to have the National Guard seize voting machines and re-run the election, Trump tweeted out a link to the Navarro Report, with an invitation to his supporters to attend a “wild rally” in DC on Jan. 6, 2021.
Similar to his former boss, since leaving the White House Ziegler has continued to deride a coterie of officials he considers weak and insufficiently loyal to the president. In interviews and Telegram messages, Ziegler has particularly singled out Meadows for savage criticism.
In Telegram message in late January 2021, Ziegler wrote that he feared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would take control of the country and impose a dystopian “technocracy.”
“And I can assure you, from my standpoint in the WH, I did everything I could to prevent this,” Ziegler said. “I broke rules, protocol, etc. If I had a decade more of life under my belt, I would have had the formal power to get rid of Meadows, Cipollone, etc.”
Ziegler’s Telegram messages suggest he viewed Meadows as an obstacle to efforts to overturn the election. In one message, in February 2021, Ziegler faulted Meadows for citing an audit in Georgia as evidence of due diligence, writing that the chief of staff was “so fckn dumb (or compromised)” that he didn’t question whether an auditing company could be corrupted by “mob-like cartels.”
Like Navarro, who was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday, Meadows is fighting a subpoena from the January 6th Committee. Last December, the House voted to hold Meadows in contempt, referring his case to the Justice Department for prosecution.
Meadows played a critical role in shepherding an array of schemes entertained by Trump in his quest to hold onto power. That included hosting meetings with the president and members of the House Freedom Caucus to discuss a plan — much like Navarro’s “Green Bay Sweep” — to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to remand the electoral votes back to the battleground states and delay certifying the election for Biden, according to testimony to the January 6th Committee by White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Meadows also hosted a meeting in which Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who is now the chair of the Freedom Caucus, expressed support for the idea of sending Trump supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, while others in the meeting remained silent, the New York Times has reported. Hutchinson also reportedly testified to the committee that she saw Meadows burn documents in his office fireplace after a meeting with Perry.
Ziegler has positioned himself to the right of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, of which Meadows was a chair before he left Congress to serve as Trump’s chief of staff.
“He’s a Freedom Caucus guy,” Ziegler complained to Clements during his July 2021 interviewed. “And what this means is — I call them ‘permanent hearing holders.’ So, Benghazi, Killary…. Nobody ever gets indicted with these jokers. Mark Meadows comes from that ilk…. So, how does this relate to the president’s chief of staff? He just wasn’t effective. He would get steamrolled by people.”
Much of Ziegler’s rhetoric on Telegram is laced with racist vitriol that uses African nations as a stand-in for national decline, while Christian chauvinism as force for national rebirth.
“If we elect people like Mark Meadows — good, jolly, your brother next door — we’re gonna end up like Zimbabwe,” Ziegler said. “If I could do one thing — which is stop electing nice guys. We need Christian zealots, frankly.”
Ziegler expressed a similar sentiment in a March 2021 Telegram message, in which he wrote, “We could have a Third Great Awakening in the country, both religious and political. And the coup we just went through could be the flint that ignites it. Hopefully its ends will be a repentance to the Christ and a Republic that gets rid of this corrupt and satanic Oligarchy.”
Beyond the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting he arranged at the White House, Ziegler said he tried to help Powell get to the president on different occasion.
“I walked Sidney over to the residence one to try to get the president a binder full of evidence,” Ziegler said on a podcast in February 2021. “And we got blocked again there, too.”
Ziegler recalled that he would tell anyone who would listen to him in the White House: “Let’s just go look at the ballots. We don’t have to do it. Have the National Guard in Georgia do it.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/hillary-clinton-gop-gaslighting-ukraine-2656792503/
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hannity on defam suit: bring it on
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/sean-hannity-on-hillary-clinton/
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/fox-news-hillary-clinton/
played sp many x but cut coup plot
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see sussman spygate 2 "robert" durham mangled by fox
devin nunes he bailed to run trump media?
scaryMSN news no warning gives: [then at end rolls to brian kileade asks us to click on something to join?]
6 min interview with fmr ca congressman" not 1st time; ran confid hu sources; infiltrate, FISA warrant; russia hoaxers, crickets in mainstream press; cites andrrew c mccarthy; mueller: trump framed; cognitive issues; clinton campaIGN OPERATIVES AND dirty cops [steel?]; doing it by the bk, zero leaks, complete opposite [bizzarroworld inversion?]; fmr intelligence chair; ratcliffe pushed russia colusion docs to durham, says docs kept from congress
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/brexit/hillary-clinton-dodges-questions-on-durham-probe-developments/vi-AATWsl8
Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes on the Durham probe into individuals connected to the Clinton campaign.
blonde host: devin confid hu sources paid w/ tax;
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This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The nation's attention is riveted on the drama unfolding in Washington, where House investigators are assembling evidence for their impeachment inquiry, and President Trump is refusing to cooperate. Our guest, Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green, says that, ironically, Trump's impeachment peril is the unintended result of an effort to help him.
Last spring, a book came out called "Secret Empires: How The American Political Class Hides Corruption And Enriches Family And Friends." Its author was Peter Schweizer, the head of the Government Accountability Institute, a think tank founded by Schweizer and Steve Bannon. The book includes information about Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden and his activities in Ukraine when his father was the vice president.
The book raises questions about possible ethical violations and corruption related to Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine. The book received a lot of attention on Fox News, where it came to the attention of President Trump and led Trump to send Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to pressure the new government there to investigate the claims in Schweizer's book.
Joshua Green notes in a new article how this echoes the playbook that Schweizer and Bannon successfully used with their 2015 book "Clinton Cash," which raised questions about the propriety of Hillary Clinton's financial dealings and those of the Clinton Foundation. It led to investigations by the mainstream media. Joshua Green writes about politics for Bloomberg Businessweek and is the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain." He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies.
DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Joshua Green, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You write that the allegations of corruption involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine were first aired in a book published last year by something called the Government Accountability Institute. What is the Government Accountability Institute?
JOSHUA GREEN: Well, the Government Accountability Institute is registered as a nonpartisan research organization. It was founded in 2012 by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former chief strategist, and Peter Schweizer, who, I believe, is now the president and still works there. And it bills itself as an investigatory outfit that investigates money and politics, corruption and that sort of thing.
DAVIES: Right. Who funds it?
GREEN: Well, we don't know all the funders, but one of its chief funders is Rebekah Mercer, who is part of the Mercer family, headed by Robert Mercer, the former co-chair of Renaissance Technologies, the big hedge fund. The Mercer family was and still is a major right-wing donor to various different causes, big Trump supporters, and a family that has come into the spotlight since Trump's election - also involved in Cambridge Analytica and some of the outfits that became famous and even notorious after the 2016 election.
DAVIES: The funding certainly comes from partisan sources. You know, the co-founder was Steve Bannon. What's interesting, as you write, is that the work - the research that it produced and the books that it produced weren't intended particularly to reach the conservative media or core Republican voters. What was the purpose?
GREEN: Well, the purpose of GAI originally was to, you know, investigate politicians. But given the conservative band of people like Bannon and Schweizer and their funders, the focus often tended to be Democrats. And in my book, I write about howSchweizer and Bannon resolved to go after Hillary Clinton a couple of years before the 2016 election, knowing that she was likely to emerge as the Democratic nominee.
So through GAI and its investigators, its forensic data scientists, you know, they pored over public records, corporate filings, dark Web scrapings to compile, you know, a damning book about Bill and Hillary Clinton in their work through their nonprofit, the Clinton Foundation, that was published about a month before Hillary launched her presidential campaign. And that book, "Clinton Cash," became an instant New York Times [PARTNERSHIP?!] bestseller and really tarnished Hillary Clinton's image just as she was entering the presidential fray.
DAVIES: And the interesting thing is that, you know, Bannon was not interested in just generating material for the conservative media. It was important that mainstream media draw on this research and, you know, give it their imprimatur tour too.
GREEN: That's exactly right. You know, Bannon's critique of how Republicans deal with the media goes back to the 1990s and Bill Clinton's impeachment, when he thought that Republicans really just wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber and they chased wild rumors and conspiracy theories and really put off ordinary voters. The media didn't listen to them. Voters didn't listen to them. OPPO RESEARCH
So with "Clinton Cash," he resolved to compile factual information that he wanted the mainstream media to pick up and amplify. And so he explicitly was not looking to reach a conservative audience, which is already going to be predisposed to dislike the Clintons, and was aiming to affect the votes in the views of independents and Democrats and the type of people that Hillary Clinton was counting on.It was important to Bannon that GAI's work be picked up and taken seriously by mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News.
DAVIES: And did those mainstream media organizations publish stories based on the research?
GREEN: Yeah, they did. I mean, famously, there was a New York Times story based on Schweizer's reporting. And it revealed this in the story, looking at a Clinton Foundation deal in a Russian-backed company called Uranium One that really took off and, I think, poisoned the public views of Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. And, as Bannon intended, a whiff of corruption attached itself to Hillary Clinton. Of course, that expanded as the media focused on her missing emails and Republicans pushed these ideas. But the book really succeeded in what Bannon had set out to do. And that was to raise doubts about the ethics and morals and fitness for the presidency of Hillary Clinton.
DAVIES: Right. And we should just note that there is nothing at all unusual about credible reporters getting tips and leads and information from partisan sources. They have to, of course, independently verify the information and assess its credibility. Were the books that the Government Accountability Institute writes generally accurate?
GREEN: Well, they were based on facts. And what these investigators did was go out and turn out examples of foreign donors that hadn't been disclosed and examples of behavior by former President Bill Clinton that seemed to be conducted on behalf of donors to the Clinton Foundation.You know, Schweizer's style is not to fabricate or allege illegality. Instead, he uses his reporting to lay out a suggestive timeline that leads readers to a conclusion that, hey, something is dirty here. This reeks of influence peddling. Something is not right. And it raises doubts about the subjects.
DAVIES: So the new book from Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute is called "Secret Empires: How The American Political Class Hides Corruption And Enriches Family And Friends." And it identified Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden as a target for some of the material. What did it find about Joe and Hunter Biden?
GREEN: Well, what it found was that Hunter Biden, the vice president's son, had become a highly paid director at a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma, a position that he didn't have any obvious qualifications for. But he did have a very famous last name, and the owner of the company was interested, I think, in building credibility. Schweizer also took a look at a private equity fund that Hunter Biden became involved in that drew a lot of money from Chinese investors at the same time that Hunter was flying to China on Air Force Two with his father, the vice president.
So in Schweizer's reporting, you know, this is made to look very fishy and possibly illegal and raise doubts about the ethics of Joe Biden and whether or not, you know, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination really belongs in that position or, you know, is in some way corrupt because of his son's business dealings.
DAVIES: No direct evidence that Joe Biden did anything to assist his son in either of those ventures, right? But there's an association.
GREEN: No. No, there isn't. And Bloomberg News, my employer, has done a lot of reporting and has turned up no wrongdoing.Other outlets have taken a look. I mean, what is going on and what Schweizer is good at finding are situations like this where, you know, I think any objective reader would come to the conclusion that, you know, but for Hunter's last name, he would not be in this position. You and I would not be offered a $50,000 a month board seat at a Ukrainian gas company because our father isn't vice president.
So it's the sort of - it's what, you know, Schweizer calls corruption by proxy. There's nothing explicitly illegal, but it's sort of morally corrupt and an indictment of our system in a way that populist Republicans and Democrats like to criticize.
DAVIES: The Clinton book got a ton of mainstream media attention and had an impact on the Clintons themselves. This book, did it get a lot of mainstream attention? Did it hurt harm the Bidens?
GREEN: You know, it really didn't. It came out in 2018, and it kind of came and went. It - you know, it didn't attach itself to Biden. It didn't become - it didn't drive the political news cycle in the way that "Clinton Cash" drove the 2015-2016 presidential news cycle. It got a decent amount of attention in conservative media, but it never really broke out into the mainstream.
You know, and I speculated in my Businessweek piece, a couple of reasons for this - one, Joe Biden wasn't yet a candidate, and so there wasn't that kind of urgency to look into his past. There might have been had the book come out later on. It also didn't focus only on the Biden's; it focused on John Kerry, Barack Obama, the Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.So I think that influenced how it was received. And of course, unlike "Clinton Cash," it wasn't focused on an actual Democratic presidential candidate; it was mainly focused on his son. And so there - it was sort of one degree removed from the primary actors.
I think all these things together help explain why the book didn't really break out until, that is, Donald Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, became infatuated with it, started trying to investigate these things themselves and now has kicked off what has become an entire impeachment proceeding and put the book and the Bidens and Schweizer himself very much in the center of the 2020 presidential news cycle.
DAVIES: So when this book was launched with these stories, what were the ambitions of Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute?
GREEN: Well, I think the ambition was a reprise of what they'd seen with "Clinton Cash," that the mainstream media would look into this stuff and amplify it in the way that they had with the Clinton charges. You know, Steve Bannon, who kind of pioneered this model, has a phrase he likes to use - anchor left, pivot right. And what that means is you want to anchor this reporting on the left and the mainstream media - what Bannon considers the left - get them writing about it and then use the right-wing media to amplify what it is the mainstream media is saying and to kind of dominate the entire mediasphere.
So I think Schweizer and GAI were hoping that "Secret Empires," the Biden reporting, would be anchored in the mainstream media, and the whole process would repeat itself, but that never really happened with the second book.
DAVIES: So what did happen? Why do we know about it now?
GREEN: Well, we know about it now - it got a decent amount of attention in the right-wing media, onFox News, in the New York Post.And of course, some of - you know, one of the most loyal consumers of right-wing media is the president, Donald Trump, who according to reporting watches hours and hours of Fox News every day. So he was exposed to this reporting, exposed to the charges and the insinuations that Schweizer made. He's tweeted about the book. He's tweeted about Schweizer.
And, you know, based on everything we've heard from the whistleblower report, from the White House call transcript that was released at the end of September, Trump and Giuliani took it upon themselves to pick up the phone and try and advance Schweizer's reporting into the Bidens. I mean, essentially, calling the president of Ukraine and saying, hey,I know about this Biden stuff. I want you to look into this. I want you to investigate my political opponent. And, you know, if you don't, we're going to withhold this military aid - setting off all the alarm bells that have now led to the impeachment inquiry.
DAVIES: So it really was the president and Giuliani that took this and ran with it.
GREEN: It really was. I mean, the remarkable thing - a lot of people watch Fox News, watch right-wing media, get upset about the Clintons and the Bidens, but only one of them had the power to pick up the telephone, call the president of the Ukraine and put pressure on him to investigate the Bidens in hopes that they could turn up more damning information about Joe and Hunter Biden, knowing that Joe Biden was very likely to be his Democratic opponent in 2020.
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green about the origins of the story about Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine, which drew interest from President Trump and has now led to an impeachment inquiry. Green is the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain."
So President Trump has said that Joe Biden, when he was vice president - I guess in 2016 - sought to get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired, who was, at that time, investigating the company associated with Hunter Biden, his son - in effect, kind of scotching an investigation into his son by getting the prosecutor fired. What's the truth of this?
GREEN: Well, it is true what Trump says, but it is wildly misleading. Vice President Biden played a central role in overseeing U.S. policy in the Ukraine. But Biden, the Obama administration, Republicans in the Senate, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union were all putting pressure on the Ukrainian government to root out corruption and, particularly, to fire the chief prosecutor at the time, Viktor Shokin, who was not - who was essentially beholden to the oligarchs, was not doing the kind of corruption investigations they wanted.
So Biden threatened to withhold up to a billion dollars in aid from Ukraine if Shokin wasn't fired because he was so deeply corrupt. So Biden and the Obama administration were putting pressure on the Ukraine government to do more investigating of corruption not less, as Trump and his allies are insinuating.
And it's also - I mean, just to be clear, they weren't in - Ukrainian prosecutors were never investigating Hunter Biden. They were investigating an oligarch who owned - who is the co-founder of Burisma, the gas company, on whose board Hunter Biden served.
DAVIES: Right. And is it clear whether, at the time that he was fired,this prosecutor, Victor Shokin, was actually investigating the company?
GREEN: You know, it isn't clear.There have been conflicting reports on this. There does seem to have been an investigation into Burisma. But, you know, they paid a fine. That went away. At no point was Hunter Biden ever implicated in any kind of corruption. And part of what, I think, Trump and Giuliani were trying to do was to reopen this investigation and steer it toward Hunter Biden in hopes that they could find or maybe create damaging material around the Bidens.
DAVIES: There is a new chief prosecutor in Ukraine and was quoted as saying that he had opened an audit of a bunch of old investigations, including one into Burisma Holdings, the company that Hunter Biden was associated with. What does this portend?
GREEN: Well, it's not clear. I mean, one of the things, I think, a lot of people don't understand about the whole Ukraine situation is that Hunter Biden was never investigated by Ukrainian prosecutors. What happened was that they were investigating an oligarch named Mykola Zlochevsky, who co-founded Burisma.And so reopening investigations would be investigations into Burisma Holdings. But they - from what we know, that wouldn't affect or have anything specifically to do with Hunter Biden or his situation there.
One of the things that Trump and Giuliani are pushing for in these text messages and these - in these meetings and phone calls is for Ukrainian prosecutors to go further and specifically investigate the Bidens in hope that they can turn up dirt that can be used in the 2020 presidential campaign.
And as far as we know, there's no basis for investigating anything. There is no evidence that I'm aware of or that anybody has reported that would suggest that there was wrongdoing there.And Schweizer himself, in fact, in the New York Times today, has an op-ed saying that, you know, what transpired actually wasn't illegal under U.S. law. It was unseemly. It might have been unethical - the idea of putting a politician's son on a board as a way of maybe trying to influence the political process - but there was nothing illegal here. And that's very much Schweizer's style is not to allege illegality but to insinuate that there is something corrupt going on there.
And, I think, part of the way that this entire story went sideways and went crashing into this impeachment inquiry is that Trump is very much susceptible to the insinuation that there is something, you know, perfidious going on here and took it upon himself to, you know, push and amplify and even threaten people in hopes of advancing the story.
DAVIES: You mentioned that Peter Schweizer, the author of this book that was funded by the Government Accountability Institute, has an op-ed in The Times. He's arguing that there's a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for an American company operating in a foreign country to engage in, you know, bribery or nepotism to secure favor from governments in which they operate but that there's a big hole in the law in that there's nothing to prevent a foreign government from hiring the family of U.S. officials or creating relationships in order to, you know, create an appearance which helps their business. Does he have a point?
GREEN: I think he's got a perfectly good point. And that's exactly what seems to be going on with Hunter Biden. He had no traditional, professional qualification for the job that he held with Burisma, you know, and that in itself doesn't seem right. I think that is what Schweizer is pointing to.
Now, Trump and Republicans have taken it a lot further, twisting a lot of the facts about what was investigated, what the Obama administration and Biden were pressuring the Ukrainian government to do in 2016. But the basic fact that Hunter Biden was on this board and was probably there for political reasons, because there weren't really any other good reasons for him to be on the board - what Scheizer has pointed out here and what he says in his New York Times op-ed is that what Hunter Biden did was perfectly legal, but that, in itself, is a problem.
GROSS: Joshua Green is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek. After a break, he'll talk with Dave Davies about how the controversy is affecting the Biden campaign and how Trump and his allies are fighting back with counter narratives that paint the president as the victim of Democratic attacks.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green. In a recent column, Green argues that President Trump's impeachment worries are actually the unintended result of an effort to help him. He says Trump picked up on research about Joe Biden developed by a conservative think tank and included in a book last year.
The material was intended to harm Biden's presidential campaign. But when Trump saw the story on conservative media and began urging Ukraine to investigate Biden, he created far bigger problems for himself. Trump is now the subject of an impeachment inquiry into whether he abused the authority of his office. When we left off, Green was talking about an op-ed published in The New York Times by Peter Schweizer, the author of the book with the allegations against Biden.
DAVIES: Are you surprised that The New York Times would publish an op-ed by Peter Schweizer, you know, who got funding from, you know, the Mercers and have a very strong political point of view?
GREEN: Yeah. You know, a little bit, given the controversy it kicked up in 2016 when Schweizer's reporting appeared on the front page - in other words, in the news pages. This piece today is in the opinion section, which I think is a little bit more appropriate for the author and the subject and the claims that he's making.
DAVIES: Right. And just going back to 2016, my understanding is that, you know, the author of the Times' reporting on the Clinton Foundations and the Uranium One story is reporting that they stand by, that they independently investigated all of this and found it credible and newsworthy. Do you disagree?
GREEN: No. I don't disagree with that at all. I mean, part of what made the GAI project so effective is that they didn't do what some conservative authors do, which is to, you know, fabricate or publish rumors. I mean, they're - all of this is based in fact. They certainly put their own spin on those facts. They insinuated that there was maybe more going on than was actually going on. But they really did turn up evidence of unreported donations, of relationships that just didn't seem right that, you know, any legitimate investigative reporter, were he or she to come across this information, would want to look into further. And that's exactly what happened.
So the fact that there is a grain of truth in a lot of what is written is one of the things that makes it so effective and that Bannon and Schweizer understood from the outset would get the mainstream media to pay attention and amplify these charges. I think what happened in 2016 that upsets liberals so much is that, you know, as this stuff was being published in the mainstream media, it was also being amplified and distorted in the right-wing media. And that was having a real effect on Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.
Her reputation was unquestionably tarnished. She was dogged by these charges and allegations. You add in the amplifying voice of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate calling her crooked Hillary and corrupt and I don't think there's any question - but that - it affected voters' views of her in a way that ultimately proved disastrous for Clinton's own candidacy and for Democrats.
DAVIES: One of the things that I think adds to the political potency is that the facts of a lot of these stories are so complicated, that it's really hard for an average reader to sort out what it all means. Was there subsequent reporting on the Uranium One story which cast the Clintons' actions in a different light?
GREEN: Nothing knocked it down. You know, the subsequent reporting - I mean, I think what a lot of Democrats objected to was the fact that this, frankly, partisan outfit and author and right-wing money had produced this information that had made its way onto the front page of The New York Times. And I spoke to the liberal activist David Brock at the time about Schweizer and Bannon. And he shook his head. And he Said, you know, looking at it from their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus - meaning, you know, the intention all along from these guys was to poison the public image of Hillary Clinton. And by getting these charges onto the front pages of The New York Times, they essentially accomplished that mission. I think everything that happened subsequently with Trump's attacks and Clinton's loss in the 2016 election back that up. And this time around, with Joe and Hunter Biden, they were looking to do the same thing.
DAVIES: In the op-ed, the Times doesn't mention Peter Schweizer's association with the Government Accountability Institute or its funders, you know, the Mercers.What do you think of that?
GREEN: You know, if I were running the op-ed page, I think that's something I would've disclosed based on, you know, his background, the political lineage and what we saw in the 2016 presidential cycle.
DAVIES: So is all of this affecting the Biden campaign?
GREEN: You know, it's not clear that it is. I mean, Biden had been on a bit of a downward trajectory before Trump and the Ukraine charges really came into the news cycle. But, you know, he is - he's starting to slip now. I mean, in the latest averages of polls, Elizabeth Warren has nudged ahead of him. So, you know, it's not clear that this is a deadly development for Joe Biden's candidacy, but it certainly isn't helping.
DAVIES: Since the whistleblower complaint emerged, there's been a lot of information and text and the summary of the phone call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine, which has led to this impeachment inquiry, which is clearly picking up steam. I mean, we're going to see, you know, testimony from other players in this including the former ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch. The Trump administration says it is not going to cooperate with this because, you know, it's a witch hunt. Where do you see this going?
GREEN: Well, you know, the irony here is that Trump, by involving himself, you know, essentially made this entire project blow up in his face and committed actions that, at the very least, have launched an impeachment inquiry and I think are very likely to lead to his impeachment in the House whether or not the Senate ultimately chooses to remove him.
But what the whistleblower report showed, what the subsequent text messages that have now been revealed between the U.S. ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, and Bill Taylor, a top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, that show that the U.S. apparently was withholding military aid to help a political campaign, as Taylor put it in his text. That is the quid pro quo that Democrats are alleging. And I think if there is a trial in the House, that's what it's likely to show. And the evidence we've seen so far certainly supports that.
So I think, from an impeachment standpoint, Trump is in real trouble. Whether or not he's ultimately removed from office, we'll see. I'm skeptical. But certainly this isn't the outcome that Schweizer and GAI and I think Trump and Giuliani expected to happen when they started making noise about this over the summer.
DAVIES: Right. Well, the president's defenders are aggressively promoting other narratives. I mean, Giuliani, a couple of weeks ago, was on the ABC weekend show waiving an affidavit from Viktor Shokin, you know, the prosecutor that was fired in 2016, in which alleges that, in fact, he was investigating the company Hunter Biden's - was associated with. There are certainly reasons to doubt his credibility in the eyes of a lot of people. And then, you know, last week, Senator Ron Johnson had a heated exchange with Chuck Todd on "Meet The Press" in which he was arguing that there's all this credible evidence that people in the Ukraine were trying to hurt Trump and help Hillary Clinton in 2016. [RUSSIAN DISINFO] It's a very aggressive strategy to - you know, bringing up other stuff. What do you think the effect will be?
GREEN: Well, I think the intention on the part of Republicans is to muddy the waters and to turn the charges of corruption against Trump that we've seen laid out in the whistleblower report and the text messages - turn them back against the Democrats.
What is troubling to a lot of people is that a lot of these charges are based on discredited conspiracy theories. What Ron Johnson was talking about was a conspiracy theory that Trump and Giuliani have propagated that it wasn't Russia that hacked the Democratic National Committee servers in the 2016 election but Ukraine.That's something that's been knocked down by every intelligence official, U.S. and otherwise, who's looked into this. And yet, this is what's being propagated by Trump.
And I think a lot of Republican politicians, fearful of Trump's wrath and eager to toe the partisan line, have found themselves forced or obligated to repeat these wild charges in a way that bears no relationship to reality but is nonetheless, I think, muddying the waters and shaping public opinion in a way that is intended to mitigate the damage of the charges against Trump.
DAVIES: Is Steve Bannon playing a role in stoking any of these allegations?
GREEN: You know, he really isn't anymore. I mean, Bannon had a very public falling-out with Donald Trump in 2017, where Trump sort of publicly humiliated him and excommunicated him from the Republican Party. He lost his position as the head of Breitbart News, was essentially sent out into the wilderness.
I mean, Bannon is still around on the scene. He is focused more on China these days and trying to, I think, strengthen Trump's resolve to conduct the trade war. Trump did tweet favorably about him a couple of months ago. But there isn't a close relationship there in the way that there was during the presidential campaign.
DAVIES: Yeah. I asked because you wrote a book about Steve Bannon and talked to him a lot. He was also going around Europe trying to kind of build a, you know, nationalist, populist movement. How did that go?
GREEN: Well, it basically failed. I mean, the nationalist movements in Europe weren't really interested in an American political strategist coming in and telling them what to do. They didn't perform nearly as well in the May European parliamentary elections as Bannon and some of the nationalist contingent were hoping for.
And so he's focused mainly these days on kind of beating the war drums against China, going out and publicly defending Trump's aggression against China when it comes to tariffs and the trade war and that sort of thing, and seeking to remain relevant in that way. But so far, there has been no reproach with Trump and the White House, or the Mercer family, for that matter. And so he's off on his own.
DAVIES: You know, looking at the strategy of the Government Accountability Institute with this book, you know, the idea was to kind of repeat the playbook that worked with the Clinton candidacy in 2016, where you develop information, it becomes adopted by the mainstream media and becomes a scandal. And in this case, it seems like another - kind of a different weird thing happened, which is that it turned into a scandal for the president himself when he pursued a theory and then engaged in conduct which has resulted in this impeachment inquiry.
At the same time, Peter Schweizer, the author of the book funded by the Government Accountability Institute, is being quoted. I mean, the story is out there. I wonder how they view this - how it's all worked out.
GREEN:Well, the irony here is that the target was supposed to be the Bidens, not the president. And by the president becoming involved, you know, the original plan has kind of blown up. What may wind up happening - as you say, you know, Biden and these charges are very much in the news. That was part of the intention, even if the negative attention toward Trump wasn't part of the plan. What we could see end up happening is a kind of a murder-suicide where Trump really does take out his strongest Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, only, he winds up, in the process, getting himself impeached.
DAVIES: Well, Joshua Green, thanks so much for speaking with us again.
GREEN: Thank you. It's always a pleasure.
GROSS: Joshua Green is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain."
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COULD SHE HAVE GOTTEN WAXMAN MARKEY DONE?!
https://www.eenews.net/articles/7-years-later-failed-waxman-markey-bill-still-makes-waves/
7 years later, failed Waxman-Markey bill still makes waves
By Amanda Reilly, Kevin Bogardus | 06/27/2016
7 years later, failed Waxman-Markey bill still makes waves
It’s been seven years since the House passed major legislation to create a cap-and-trade system for heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, and though that legislative attempt ultimately failed, the bill’s sponsors still say it sowed the seeds for other climate change efforts.
As is well-known, the Waxman-Markey bill was not taken up by the full Senate and never became law. But looking back over the last seven years, the bill’s sponsors and their former congressional aides reminisced with E&E Daily in interviews that the unsuccessful fight was worthwhile and that it has had important repercussions.
"It is always worthwhile to fight for what you believe in," former Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California said in his office in Washington, D.C., "and if you don’t succeed at first, you keep trying."
Waxman retired at the end of the 113th Congress, and early last year he joined his son’s public affairs and government relations firm, Waxman Strategies. The bill’s other sponsor, Democratic Sen. Ed Markey, has been the junior senator from Massachusetts since 2013.
The two former House lawmakers introduced their bill, formally known as the "American Clean Energy and Security Act," on May 15, 2009. The 1,400-page bill would have established emissions caps through 2050 for several greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, and instituted a system for trading emissions allowances.
Waxman-Markey squeaked by the House seven years ago yesterday on June 26, 2009, by a vote of 219-212.
Phil Barnett, who was the Democratic staff director at the House Energy and Commerce Committee under Waxman at the time, said working on the bill was "demanding" and "challenging."
"We worked intensively on it for six months … seven days a week, long hours. The bill was a top priority for Chairman Waxman," said Barnett, now a consultant, adding, "The entire staff poured their hearts and souls into the effort because they thought it would do something to solve the climate problem as well as create economic opportunities and keep costs low."
Looking back, Markey pointed to work on the health care law, another priority for President Obama, for stymying the cap-and-trade bill’s momentum in the Senate.
"We finished Waxman-Markey in the last week of June of 2009. So we had finished our work," Markey said. "We were ready to go. And the politics of it then got much more complicated than anyone thought they would have."
The political dynamics around health care reform became complex with the death of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy in August 2009. When Republican Scott Brown won Kennedy’s seat in an upset victory in a special election in January 2010, the politics of passing major legislation became more difficult becauseBrown gave Republicans a 41st seat in the Senate, thereby robbing Democrats of a filibuster-proof majority.
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Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) never brought the climate legislation, which was championed in the upper chamber by then-Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, to a vote on the floor. Many people close to the legislation have since blamed a number of factors, including Republican opposition and concessions to special interests.
"It was a disappointment that we couldn’t get a bill all the way through, but we highlighted the issue," Waxman said. "We gave it our best effort. We tried to accomplish that goal. But I know from my own history as a member of Congress, I have to work sometimes decades before some of the proposals I made eventually became law."
He cited, for example, the 15 years it took for Congress to pass the 2009 Tobacco Control Act, which gave the Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco products.
Genesis of executive branch efforts
The collapse of the Waxman-Markey bill in the Senate in 2010 spurred the Obama administration to aggressively use the executive branch to issue regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. U.S. EPA issued its final Clean Power Plan for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants last August and helped negotiate the international climate change deal in Paris last December.
In the first term, "the administration really focused on trying to get a big legislative fix to the climate change problem. As you know, that effort fell short," John Podesta, who was a top adviser to Obama and helped drive White House climate policy from 2014 to 2015, said at a recent conference in California. "In the second term, there was more focus on organizing and coordinating the agencies and the White House offices on both the domestic and international side of the equation."
Podesta, who is now campaign chairman for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, said that, if elected, the former secretary of State would likely focus on executive actions instead of attempting to pass a "grand climate fix" through Congress, even if the Senate flips to Democratic control.
Obama’s experience was "illustrative," Podesta said.
"A successful climate agenda requires a senior, serious point person in the White House," he said, "who can drive the agencies to do all they can across the whole suite of federal authorities."
But for the Obama administration, starting with a grand climate fix was "absolutely the right thing to do," Waxman said.
And Markey credited the legislation for setting the stage for the Obama administration’s second-term actions by helping to create necessary alliances.
"Much of what the president has done since then, and even if you look at the Clean Power Plan, it’s based largely on what was inside of the Waxman-Markey bill that we passed," Markey said. "So we had worked out the partnerships, the coalitions, that were still there when the president decided to develop the Clean Power Plan. So I think it was actually a very helpful political process to have gone through."
Michael Goo, another former top congressional aide who worked on the bill, agreed with the Massachusetts senator, saying, "Waxman-Markey is still the yardstick by which to measure climate programs."
"It was economywide, it set reduction pathways based on what the science was telling us, and it showed us how, by working together with industry, we could craft an effective climate program consistent with a growing economy," said Goo, now with AJW Inc. "And I think, sooner or later, we will return to something like it. "
Clinton vs. Trump
Markey called a potential Hillary Clinton administration paramount to the United States "continuing to be the world leader" on climate change.
Obama promised the globe in the time before the Paris climate negotiations that the United States would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions between 26 and 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. In Paris last December, more than 190 nations agreed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 C. The agreement also commits countries to periodically revisiting their pledged domestic emissions reductions.
Both Waxman and Markey are optimistic that Clinton will become the next president of the United States.
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"I think she would be wise to follow the example of President Obama in trying to put this as a high priority to work with the rest of the world to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause climate change," Waxman said. "I believe she’s committed to it."
Markey is harshly critical of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s inconsistent views on climate change. In 2009, before international climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, Trump signed an open letter calling global warming a problem; he’s since claimed that it is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese to hurt American business.
Trump has more recently vowed to undo the Paris climate pledge, which Obama officials are hopeful will go into force before the beginning of the next administration. Once entered into force, which happens when at least 55 countries representing at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions formally adopt it, the withdrawal process for a nation takes four years.
Markey compared Trump’s claim that climate change is a hoax to the businessman’s former claim that Obama was born in Kenya and not the United States.
If Trump is elected, Markey said, "every single promise we made to the rest of the world [on climate change] will be broken."
A campaign issue?
Markey also predicted that climate change would become a more hotly debated issue this presidential election compared with the 2008 race, when both parties’ candidates expressed support for addressing greenhouse gas emissions, and the 2012 race between Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) when climate change was largely a nonissue.
"It’s going to become a larger and larger issue that goes right to [Trump’s] credibility as a leader in our country," Markey said. "So the more he says it, the better for us because suburban swing Republicans and independent voters believe the science of climate change."
Others have said the same.
"The Clinton campaign is going to push these issues, and their allies in the clean energy business sector are going to push these issues forcefully, especially in swing states," said Paul Bledsoe, a former climate adviser for the Bill Clinton administration and an energy consultant. "I think they see it as a profound political vulnerability for Trump and the Republicans generally."
Still, a recent Gallup poll found that, of 17 policy issues, the issue gap for climate change is greatest among voters. The poll found that 72 percent of Democrats say that the issue of climate change is "extremely" or "very" important in how they vote for a presidential candidate. Just 25 percent of Republicans say that the issue is important.
Waxman lamented the hyper-partisan nature of Congress and that "compromise" has become a "dirty word" in D.C. He said he’s surprised that supporters of cap and trade were unable to harness the business community in attracting more Republican support for the legislation.
"It has been a difficult time that we’re going through in getting a more reasonable way to compromise," he said, "because so many of the Republicans that have been elected to office in the last four, six years think that their role is to say no to anything that the Democratic president, Democrats want."
Greg Dotson, who was the chief environmental staffer on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee at the time of Waxman-Markey, said that Republican support did not materialize despite support from companies in the oil and chemical sector.
"The assumption and hope was that if you got businesses on, you got Republicans on," said Dotson, who is now the vice president for energy policy at the Center for American Progress. "So we did a lot of work to address business concerns, and we got a lot of business support, and that did not translate to broad Republican support.
"For an incoming president," Dotson added, "that’s a pretty scary precedent."
At a recent hearing in the Environment and Public Works Committee, Markey said it was ironic that coal-industry allies who are complaining about EPA greenhouse gas regulations’ impact on jobs didn’t support the cap-and-trade legislation.
He complained that the coal industry rejected an offer of billions of dollars for carbon capture and storage technology via the Waxman-Markey bill. Markey argued that the bill attempted to help coal companies stay alive in a way that works "for all the interests."
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"We were trying to give them a bridge to the future," he said. "Do you think they wish they could go back to 2009 and grab that money?"
Waxman said that he was hopeful that the dynamic would change in Congress to allow for more collaboration between the parties. He predicted a disaster for Republicans at the polls in November.
"I think it’s going to change because I think they’re going to go down the tubes in this next election, and that’s going to be a lesson to them," Waxman said.
He added: "But I don’t know. I’m giving you my wishful thinking."
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/hillary-clinton-warning/
cdv
During a speech in September 2016, Hillary Clinton — then the Democratic presidential nominee — warned the American people and the world of the dangers represented by Donald Trump and his followers. She described the "volatile political environment" of that moment:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
In many ways, Clinton was too kind. If anything, she underestimated how many Americans were in fact committed and enthusiastic human deplorables.
After that speech, Clinton was pilloried by the mainstream news media, some leading Democrats, and of course the Republican Party and right-wing propaganda hate machine. Clinton's characterization of Trump's "basket of deplorables" was described as insensitive and unfair to the "white working class" Americans that elites and out-of-touch Democrats had too often ignored.
That reaction to Clinton's truth-telling helped to legitimate Trumpism and American neofascism (operating under the mask of "populism") as something that was reasonable and understandable, rather than as a manifestation of racial resentment, a racist temper tantrum and a declaration of white supremacy.This reflected our society's deep investment in a narrative of white racial innocence. In that logic, America is a great and exceptional country, and by implication, this is especially true of white people — especially those "real Americans" whose supposed patriotism and presumed Christian values render them a bit more American than anyone else.
Many members of the news media likely agreed with Clinton's warnings in private, but the institution as a whole had been beaten into submission by Republican fictions about so-called liberal bias. So it was that Clinton's warning about Trump and his "deplorables" — and their embrace of fascism — was deemed to be outside the limits of approved public discourse.
If Clinton's warnings had been heeded in 2016, we might be living in a quite different country today. America would not necessarily be drowning under a fascist tide which has imperiled our democracy and our future. Had Hillary Clinton been elected president, it's also likely that far fewer Americans would have been killed by the coronavirus pandemic, and the nation's economy might not have been pushed to the edge of a second Great Depression.
Matters are now so dire that it is now not a question of whether* American democracy will succumb to a nightmare reign of full-on fascism but rather *whenthat will happen. If America's neofascist movement continues to gain momentum, Joe Biden will be relegated to the role of a speed bump or an asterisk in American history.
In the five years since the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton has continued her efforts to rally America's pro-democracy forces against the right-wing and its fascist assaults. Last Tuesday, during a Guardian Live interview, she continued her warnings. The Guardian summarized her interview:
Hillary Clinton has said that the US was still in a "real battle for our democracy" against pro-Trump forces on the far right, seeking to entrench minority rule and turn back the clock on women's rights. ... Clinton fended off suggestions that the world was now witnessing the twilight of US democracy, but said: "I do believe we are in a struggle for the future of our country"…
"The January 6 insurrection at our capitol was a terrorist attack," Clinton added, noting the parallel with the 9/11 attacks. ... Clinton was also asked about the abortion ban passed in Texas at the beginning of this month, reversing gains for women's rights won a generation ago.
"So you ask if I'm surprised or discouraged. I'm neither. I'm not surprised because I've been involved in the women's movement, the civil rights movement," she said. "I've seen the forces that are arrayed against progress when it comes to women's autonomy, when it comes to the advancement of civil and political and economic rights. I know very well that the other side never gives up.
"They are relentless in their view of what is a properly constructed society, and in that view, white men are at the very top and nobody else is even close."
Clinton's observations are once again correct. Unfortunately, her recent comments also reveal how many other members of the American political class have failed to accurately describe the Republican Party and the neofascist movement.
Today's Republican Party is in fact a right-wing extremist organization, and fascist in all but name. Its followers and voters embrace and act upon those values and beliefs. To claim that there is some other Republican Party, somehow separate and distinct from right-wing extremism — as too many commentators and political observers do — is to assert a difference that does not substantively exist. Ultimately, Hillary Clinton's Guardian interview makes clear that she too fails to consistently and accurately describe the party that she warned us about five years ago.
Why does this error keep recurring? The American political class is emotionally, psychologically and professionally invested in the idea of "normal politics," and a belief that our system and its governing institutions will survive all possible challenges.
That is an illusion. The Age of Trump and the ascendance of American neofascism represents the old order being cast aside and replaced by something different — in this case, something dreadful. Hillary Clinton and so many other American political insiders are deeply invested in the familiar, nostalgia-colored mores of American politics. To acknowledge the existential threat of the Jim Crow Republicans and the Trumpist movement is too traumatic and terrifying for the political class to properly contemplate. Indifference, fantasy and soothing lies about how everything will inevitably be OK in America appear to offer a much easier path than doing the difficult and dangerous work required to save American democracy.
The slippage of language and its attempt to normalize the American fascist movement and Republican Party's assaults on democracy will soon lead to ridiculous claims by the American commentariat and larger political class — if this hasn't happened already — about a distinction between violent fascists and extremists and those who wear nice suits and prefer to operate without bloodshed. We can negotiate with the "reasonable" fascists, we will surely be told, in the interests of "consensus" and "bipartisanship."
But in fact, words have actual meanings. Fascism cannot be separated from violence, and it is incoherent beyond its fantasies of dominance and power and its desire to vanquish democracy and the truth. In the final analysis, there is no way to negotiate with fascists, because for them victory is all that matters. Reasonable compromise with such a force in a liberal democratic society is impossible, and any quest for it amounts to surrender.
America's political elites remain deeply and compulsively attached to the dream, hope and delusion that "traditional" Republicans will soon salvage the Republican Party and make it respectable and honorable again. In fact, the Republican Party's "honorable" past is greatly exaggerated. Supposedly "reasonable" Republicans may have backed away from Donald Trump's most egregious efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but they supported almost all of his policy goals.They were fully complicit, in other words, with his personal and political evil and destruction.
Donald Trump and his followers are now purging those remaining Republican politicians who are deemed to be traitors or otherwise disloyal to the movement.
While some establishment Democrats, such as President Biden, cling to outmoded notions of bipartisan compromise, numerous prominent former Republicans — including Tom Nichols, Steve Schmidt, Richard Painter and Max Boot — have warned that their onetime political home cannot be salvaged and must be burned down or completely rebuilt if American democracy is to be saved. These former Republicans are experts on the monster they helped to birth and sustain.
Political scientists and other researchers have repeatedly documented the decades-long drift from a median point of consensus, where there was considerable overlap between more liberal Republicans and more conservative Democrats on basic questions of public policy, to the present, when the Republican Party is far outside the mainstream of American politics.
Today's Republican Party has more in common with neofascist political parties in Hungary, Poland, Turkey or Brazil than it does with mainstream democratic parties in advanced Western democracies. Public opinion polls and other research have also made clear that the Trump-controlled Republican Party is a personality cult. Its leaders and followers now embrace terrorism and other forms of political violence, as shown by their response to the events of Jan. 6 and Trump's attempted coup.
Other research has shown that white supremacist views are the most important predictor of support for Trump and the Republicans, and that ordinary Republican voters have been almost fully propagandized into believing Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election — and the many little lies that support it.
In her seminal 1951 book "The Origins of Totalitarianism", Hannah Arendt offered the following description of how fascist-totalitarian movements such as Hitler's Nazi Party were organized:
All the extraordinarily manifold parts of the movement: the front organizations, the various professional societies, the party-membership, the party hierarchy, the elite formations and police groups, are related in such a way that each forms the facade in one direction and the center in the other, that is, plays the role of normal outside world for one layer and the role of radical extremism for another….
The great advantage of this system is that the movement provides for each of its layers, even under conditions of totalitarian rule, the fiction of a normal world along with a consciousness of being different from and more radical than it. Thus, the sympathizers of the front organizations, whose convictions differ only in intensity from those of the party membership, surround the whole movement and provide a deceptive facade of normality to the outside world because of their lack of fanaticism and extremism while, at the same time, they represent the normal world to the totalitarian movement whose members come to believe that their convictions differ only in degree from those of other people, so that they need never be aware of the abyss which separates their own world from that which actually surrounds it. The onion structure makes the system organizationally shock-proof against the factuality of the real world.
Arendt's description is a perfect fit for today's Republican Party and neofascist movement. It is past time for America's political class and the Fourth Estate, which claims to be a defender of American democracy, to use more accurate language and call this moment and movement what it is. To avoid doing that, out of some misguided impulse toward civility, is to do the work of aiding and abetting the fascist attack on American democracy and society.
Today's Republican Party is using fascism to create a new 21st century American apartheid. With all due respect to Hillary Clinton, who tried to warn us, we must not mince words. Let us call such an abomination what it truly is.
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an 621 igor salon
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., is returning to her QAnon roots to push a conspiracy theory suggesting that the Clintons may be behind the death of a journalist who is believed to have died by suicide.
Boebert suggested on Twitter that the "Clinton Crime Syndicate" may be behind the death of local Alabama news anchor Christopher Sign, who broke the story about former President Bill Clinton's tarmac meeting with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch during the 2016 presidential campaign and FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server, which itself has been the target of countless Republican conspiracy theories. Local police have given no indications of foul play in Sign's death and told NBC News that the death is being investigated as a suicide.
"Why is it that so many who cross the Clinton Crime Syndicate end up dead?" Boebert tweeted along with a clip of Sign promoting his book about the meeting during a 2019 interview on Fox News. Sign said in the interview that he left his job in Phoenix to move back to Alabama because he and his family "received significant death threats shortly after breaking this story." [twt vid?]
it's not the first time Boebert has pushed conspiracy theories about Clinton. Asked during a town hall in March about whether Hillary Clinton and the former heads of the CIA and FBI would be arrested, the freshman congresswoman echoed QAnon-style conspiracy theories claiming that "with that information that I have, I believe we will see resignations begin to take place and I think we can take back the majority in the House and the Senate before 2022 when all of this is ended."
Boebert has previously expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory but denies being a follower. QAnon conspiracy theories have long targeted Clinton, baselessly alleging that she is part of a globalist child trafficking ring that cuts the faces off babies and wears them on video.
Donald Trump Jr., who has a long history of spreading conspiracy theories himself, also suggested that Sign's suicide may be some nefarious plot.
"Has anyone ever seen so many suicide coincidences EVER???" he wrote on Instagram while sharing a screenshot of a headline about Sign's death.
Trump Jr. similarly pushed long-debunked conspiracy theories about the murder of Seth Rich, a former Democratic National Committee staffer who was killed in Washington D.C. in what police suspected to be an attempted robbery. Conservatives pushed conspiracy theories that Rich was killed because he was somehow connected to the release of stolen Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign. The conspiracy theories were also promoted on Fox News, which ultimately retracted its reporting and settled out of court with Rich's family.
Debunked conservative conspiracy theories about the Clintons' "body count" date back to Bill Clinton's days in the White House, when right-wingers claimed that many of those connected to the Clinton's had died under "suspicious" circumstances even when they hadn't. Many have focused on the suicide of Vince Foster, Clinton's former deputy White House counsel who died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head in 1993. Multiple investigations, including the infamous Ken Starr probe, concluded that the death was a suicide but Republicans like Trump Jr. have continued to refer to in the decades since. Former President Donald Trump and others renewed the conspiracy theory in 2019 after the suicide of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump shared tweets alleging that the Clintons, longtime associates of Epstein, were behind his death even though Trump also frequently hung out with the disgraced financier.
"This conspiracy just sort of hung around," Joe Uscinski, a University of Miami professor and author of the book, "American Conspiracy Theories," told NBC News. "Mainly because the Clintons have been in power for so long and because she's the most recent face of the Democratic Party. She's a good boogeyman for Republicans to use now still."
Uscinski said the conspiracy theory has become especially popular with "QAnon" followers, who have gone even further than the nutty conservative claims in the 1990s.
"Q also absurdly implied that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible for the tragic plane crash that killed JFK Jr. in 1999," Travis View, a podcaster who tracks QAnon, told NBC. "A minority sect of QAnon followers believe that Clinton merely tried and failed to kill JFK Jr, and he is still alive today."
Clinton recently responded to the decades-old conspiracy theories in a video with "Borat" star Sasha Baron Cohen."It's hurtful, I'll be really honest with you," she said. "It's hurtful not just to me and my family, but, you know, to my friends, and other people who know that this is not just false, but you know, sometimes painfully false."
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contrast benghazi bs to lack of 1/6 comm]
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-fueled-rise-new-host-trey-gowdy
matt g
Trey Gowdy, a former Republican congressman turned Fox News contributor, joins the ranks of the network’s hosts on Sunday night with the debut of his creatively named weekly program, Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy.
Fox looms large in the career ambitions of Republican politicians thanks to its large audience of GOP primary voters and its prominent, kingmaking hosts. It has been a launching pad for the party’s rising stars over the years, from Sen. Marco Rubio and former House Speaker Paul Ryan to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. And those who leave office or lose elections, from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to Rep. Liz Cheney, have sought out a Fox landing spot as a way to collect a steady paycheck, stay in the network’s spotlight, and plan their next move.
But even with the network’s historic intertwining with Republican politics in mind, Gowdy’s rise is remarkable.
As a South Carolina congressman during President Barack Obama’s tenure, Gowdy gained prominence by stoking Fox’s obsession with the2012 Benghazi attacks, ultimately becoming chairman of a select committee that House Republicans formed at the network’s urging to investigate them.
After his Fox-fueled committee failed to find much new information (but succeeded in the GOP goal of defeating Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid), he turned to defending President Donald Trump in Congress and in Fox appearances, before leaving office to do the same thing on the network’s payroll.
And now he has his own show, a platform he can use to promote his ideas and make money while he waits to see if a return to politics is worthwhile.
Fox launched Gowdy to prominence as Benghazi prosecutor
Fox spent years obsessively trying to turn the deadly 2012 terrorist attacks on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, into a political scandal for Obama and Clinton. Gowdy became one of the network's go-to congressional guests to discuss the attacks, using his regular appearances to push the same dishonest claims about the administration’s response to the attacks that Fox’s hosts championed.
Then in the spring of 2014, Fox seized on a newly released email from an Obama national security aide, distorting it to falsely suggest that the administration had lied about the attacks for political gain. The network’s commentators began demanding yet another congressional probe of the administration’s response based on this manufactured scandal, and then-House Speaker John Boehner obliged, with House Republicans voting to form a select committee to investigate the attacks.
Appointed to chair the committee was none other than Fox’s Benghazi favorite, Gowdy. He used the role to hold a series of high-profile hearings on the network’s preferred topic -- and garner more Fox airtime.
Gowdy’s committee shed little new light on the already extensively investigated attacks and found no new evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton, who had been secretary of state at the time. But it did achieve what both Fox hosts and Republican leaders had admitted was its real goal -- damaging Clinton’s political strength as she ran for president, particularly through its focus on her much-maligned use of a private email server.
The overwhelming press fixation on Clinton’s emails, particularly in the waning days of the campaign, ultimately helped ensure Trump’s 2016 victory.
Gowdy cuts political career short for Fox gig
Gowdy didn’t have to wait long to reap his rewards for helping to elect Trump.
He took over the chair of the House Oversight Committee in 2017, using that post largely to conduct oversight of Obama’s administration while defending Trump’s. But in late January 2018, he announced that would not seek another term in office and was returning to practicing law in South Carolina. A few days later, Fox announced that it had hired him as a contributor. He joined former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, his predecessor as Oversight Committee chair, who had similarly left office for a slot at the network in 2017.
Gowdy’s role, according to Fox’s press release announcing his new job, was offering “political and legal analysis.” In practice, that meant that when he appeared on Fox to defend Trump and his allies from investigations into their various scandals, his paycheck came from the network instead of Congress.
That brand of commentary apparently captured Trump's attention. Fox briefly cut ties with Gowdy in October 2019 amid reports that he had been hired as an outside legal counsel to the then-president, who was fighting his first impeachment (the arrangement quickly fell apart and Gowdy rejoined the network that December).
It also caught the eye of Fox’s brass. Gowdy did multiple stints earlier this year as one of the revolving guest hosts on Fox News Primetime, the network’s new 7 p.m. EST show.
Gowdy was apparently not ready for Primetime. But Fox is happy to give him a chance on Sunday Night.
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hunter kos ref NYT
no lnx
NEWS ANALYSIS
Taking Page From Authoritarians, Trump Turns Power of State Against Political Rivals
President Trump took a step even Richard M. Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct, immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was ordered by President Trump to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
By David E. Sanger
Oct. 10, 2020
President Trump’s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., takes his presidency into new territory — until now, occupied by leaders with names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan.
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Mr. Trump has long demanded — quite publicly, often on Twitter — that his most senior cabinet members use the power of their office to pursue political enemies. But his appeals this week, as he trailed badly in the polls and was desperate to turn the national conversation away from the coronavirus, were so blatant that one had to look to authoritarian nations to make comparisons.
He took a step even Richard M. Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct, immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign.
“There is essentially no precedent,” said Jack Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush and has written extensively on presidential powers. “We have a norm that developed after Watergate that presidents don’t talk about ongoing investigations, much less interfere with them.”
“It is crazy and it is unprecedented,” said Mr. Goldsmith, now a professor at Harvard Law School, “but it’s no different from what he has been saying since the beginning of his presidency. The only thing new is that he has moved from talking about it to seeming to order it.”
Mr. Trump’s vision of the presidency has always leaned to exercising the absolute powers of the chief executive, a writ-large version of the family business he presided over. “I have an Article II,” he told young adults last year at a Turning Point USA summit, referring to the section of the Constitution that deals with the president’s powers, “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president, but I don’t even talk about that.”
Now he is talking about it, almost daily. He is making it clear that prosecutions, like vaccines for the coronavirus, are useless to him if they come after Nov. 3. He has declared, without evidence, that there is already plenty of proof that Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden and Mrs. Clinton, among others, were fueling the charges that his campaign had links to Russia — what he calls “the Russia hoax.” And he has pressured his secretary of state to agree to release more of Mrs. Clinton’s emails before the election, reprising a yearslong fixation despite having defeated her four years ago.
Presidential historians say there is no case in modern times where the president has so plainly used his powers to take political opponents off the field — or has been so eager to replicate the behavior of strongmen. “In America, our presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes — that’s for other countries with authoritarian systems,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian,wrote on Twitter after Mr. Trump returned from the hospital where he received Covid-19 treatment and removed his mask, while still considered contagious, as he saluted from the White House balcony.
Long ago, White House officials learned how to avoid questions about whether the president views his powers as fundamentally more constrained than those of the authoritarians he so often casts in admiring terms, including Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. They have something in common: Mr. Trump’s State Department has criticized all three for corrupting the justice systems in their countries to pursue political enemies.
(Russia, the State Department complained in its 2019 Human Rights report, engaged in a “crackdown on political opposition and other critics before and after presidential elections that Vladimir Putin won.” Turkey, it said the same year, has conducted the “arbitrary arrest and detention of tens of thousands of persons, including former opposition members of parliament.”In recent weeks. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been particularly outspoken about the state’s use of a new national security law to arrest activists and political opponents of the Chinese Communist Party.)
Mr. Pompeo has always bristled when reporters have asked him to explain what the world should believe when it reads Mr. Trump’s most authoritarian-sounding tweets. He answers that what distinguishes the United States is that it is a “rule of law” nation, and then often turns the tables on his questioners, charging that even raising the issue reveals that the reporters are partisans, not journalists, intent on embarrassing Mr. Trump and the United States.
But his anger is often wielded as a shield, one that keeps him from publicly grappling with the underlying question: How can Washington take on other authoritarians around the world — especially China, Mr. Pompeo’s nemesis — for abusing state power when the president of the United States calls for political prosecutions and politically motivated declassifications?
“We’ve never seen anything like this in an American election campaign,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state who is now an informal adviser to Mr. Biden. “It reduces our credibility — we look like the countries we condemn for nondemocratic practices before an election.”
“I have worked for nine secretaries of state,” Mr. Burns said. “I cannot imagine any of them intervening in an election as blatantly as what we are seeing now. Our tradition is that secretaries of state stay out of elections. If they wanted to release Hillary Clinton’s emails, they could have done it in 2017, 2018 or 2019. It is an abuse of power by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.”
Another career diplomat who served as both ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns, said that what Mr. Trump had ordered is “exactly the kind of behavior I saw so often in authoritarian regimes in many years as an American diplomat.”
“In dealing with Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey, we would have protested and condemned such actions,” he said. “Now it’s our own government that’s engaging in them.”
“The result,” said Mr. Burns, now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “is the hollowing out of our institutions at home, and deep corrosion of our image and influence abroad.”
In the current cases, it is unclear whether Mr. Trump will get his wish — or whether his loyal appointees will slow-walk his requests. There is some evidence they are already looking for escape hatches.
Mr. Pompeo, the administration’s most conspicuous ideologue, Mr. Trump’s most vocal loyalist and a lawyer, was clearly taken aback when the president expressed displeasure, saying he was “not happy” that the State Department had not released emails sent through Mrs. Clinton’s home server.
“You’re running the State Department, you get them out,” the president told Fox Business in an interview this week. “Forget about the fact that they were classified. Let’s go. Maybe Mike Pompeo finally finds them.”
Mr. Pompeo, one of his aides said Saturday, was in a box: The complaint about Mrs. Clinton’s home server was that she was risking exposing classified emails by not using the State Department email system — a system Russia had already infiltrated — yet Mr. Trump was demanding that they be released in full. Just days before, he had announced, over Twitter, that he was using his executive power to declassify all of them, without redactions.
“We’ve got the emails,” Mr. Pompeo responded on Fox News. “We’re getting them out. We’re going to get all this information out so the American people can see it.”
But he also hinted that many of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, mostly those that were stored on the State Department’s own system, have already been posted on the agency’s website, after an unusually diligent effort by the department to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests from Mr. Trump’s supporters. (They are often heavily redacted — to the point of containing no content — despite the president’s order to the contrary.)
“We’re doing it as fast as we can,” Mr. Pompeo told Dana Perino, a Fox News anchor who once served as President Bush’s press secretary. “I certainly think there’ll be more to see before the election.”
Mr. Pompeo clearly understands the problem: Even if he makes all of them public, they are unlikely to satisfy the president. Last year, the State Department’s own inspector general found that while Mrs. Clinton had risked compromising classified information, she did not systematically or deliberately mishandle her emails.
William P. Barr may face an even greater challenge in satisfying the president. No attorney general since John N. Mitchell, who served Mr. Nixon and brought conspiracy charges against critics of the Vietnam War, bent the Justice Department more in a president’s direction. And Mr. Nixon himself, while urging the I.R.S. to audit political opponents, stopped short of publicly calling for individual prosecutions. Yet in February, Mr. Barr told ABC News that Mr. Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.” At the same time, he complained that the president’s tweets about the Justice Department “make it impossible for me to do my job.”
Now, clearly, the president has asked Mr. Barr to act in a criminal case — and not in a quiet phone call. Instead, he did it on Twitter and Fox News, expressing his deep disappointment with his second attorney general, for essentially the same reason he fired his first one, Jeff Sessions: insufficient blind loyalty.
His complaint appears to have been driven by Mr. Barr’s warning to the White House and other officials that there are likely to be no indictments before the election from the investigation being run by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut. Mr. Durham is searching for evidence that the inquiry into Russia was a politically motivated effort to undercut his presidency.
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Mr. Trump says the case is clear-cut. He told Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host to whom he gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the last State of the Union address, that Mr. Durham has had “plenty of time to do it.”
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“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crime in the history of our country — then we’ll get little satisfaction, unless I win,” Mr. Trump said on Fox Business.
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“If we don’t win,” he said, “that whole thing is going to be dismissed.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/newly-released-fbi-documents-reveal-extent-of-roger-stones-direct-communications-with-julian-assange-report/
veteran GOP operative and long-time Donald Trump ally Roger Stone, who was sentenced to three years in federal prison in February for felonies that included witness tampering and lying to Congress, continues to vie for a presidential pardon. Meanwhile, FBI documents continue to offer insights on Stone’s past communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: according to FBI documents made public this week, Stone asserted in a 2017 direct message via Twitter that if prosecutors came for him, “I will bring down the entire house of cards.”
The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that FBI documents show that Stone sent that message weeks after former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed to head the Russia investigation. According to AP reporters Eric Tucker, Colleen Long and Michael Balsamo, the FBI records “reveal the extent of communications between Stone and Assange, whose anti-secrecy website published Democratic e-mails hacked by Russians during the 2016 presidential election, and underscore efforts by Trump allies to gain insight about the release of information they expected would embarrass Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.”
FBI records, according to AP, show that in a direct Twitter message sent inJune 2017, Stone “reassured Assange that the issue was ‘still nonsense’ and said, ‘As a journalist, it doesn’t matter where you get information — only that it is accurate and authentic.”
Stone, AP reports, mentioned a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for newspapers and magazines to publish the Pentagon Papers — documents about the Vietnam War that had been classified. The Trump ally, via Twitter, told Assange, “If the US government moves on you, I will bring down the entire house of cards. With the trumped-up sexual assault charges dropped, I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for — best regards. R.”
Stone, in that message, appeared to be referring to the Swedish government’s sexual assault case against Assange, which was dropped.
McDonald, an unmitigatedconspiracy theorist who was recently welcomed to Capitol Hill by Republican Rep. Phil Roe of Tennessee, interviewed self-proclaimed “political occultist expert” Cory Daniel about Bryant’s death.
After Daniel asserted that Bryant was undoubtedly a witch and McDonald declared that his death was obviously a “ritual sacrifice,” McDonald asked the question that was on everybody’s mind:Could Hillary Clinton have orchestrated Bryant’s death through witchcraft?
“This is the only wild conspiracy theory I am going to ever toss out there on this program,” McDonald laughably asserted. “I normally don’t do this, but this is just a food for thought question.”
“We all know that it is pretty much a given that Mrs. HRC … is a witch,:{” }
:{. “Can a witch cast a spell on something like this to cause death and not be [known]? I’m just throwing that out. I don’t know anything about this stuff, you do. Is that possible if she wanted to get rid of Kobe? Please, Right Wing Watch, don’t be putting in that me and Cory are saying this; this is just a food for thought question. Do you think Hillary would be able to do it if she wanted to do it?”}:
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/rick-wiles-hillary-clinton-intended-to-put-conservatives-in-concentration-camps/
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no lnx
Conservative columnist: Hillary is the most ‘exonerated’ politician ever. Trump? Not so much
Written by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing / Daily Kos January 13, 2020
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin is one of those Never Trumpers you hear so much about. Donald Trump, of course, thinks Never Trumpers are part of some evil, America-hating cabal, and for that reason alone he believes they have zero credibility.
Personally, I think we should stop referring to them Never Trumpers and call them what they are: members in good standing of the sane community.
Because if you’re a Trumper you think Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt politician of all time and Trump is a deep state-fighting warrior whose only sin is ocher skin.
In other words, if you’re a Trumper, you’re fucking blind. And stupid. And morally bereft.
But Rubin? Well, she’s a conservative, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s nuts. And in her Sunday column, she points out the obvious.:“Crooked” Hillary is actually pretty pure, whereas Donald Trump may well be bound for gaol when his reign of torpor is over:
Hillary Clinton has a unique distinction: She has been exonerated twice after extensive federal investigations, the latest entirely unjustified and the result of a politicized Justice Department. President Trump of course was NOT exonerated in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, which found 10 or so categories of conduct that but for the present policy of Justice Department guidelines would serve as the basis for obstruction-of-justice charges. If Trump is defeated in November he can still be criminally charged the moment he leaves office.
What Rubin is talking about here is the fact that Hillary was recently exonerated again following a politically motivated (and Trump-requested) investigation into all things Clinton. Donald Trump and his thugs threw a bowl of pasta primavera against the DOJ door, and not a damn thing stuck.
But has Trump’s clearly partisan (and petty) investigation brought forth conservative mea culpas and stinging rebukes? More importantly, has it given the DOJ pause and forced them to consider whether such banana republic tactics are corrosive to our democracy?
Bwah ha ha ha ha ha!
Of course not!
Simply put, Trump used the Justice Department to conduct a baseless investigation of a political opponent, and no one seems to have been held accountable. Legal analyst and professor Maya Wiley observes: “Targeting power of the state on a person you hate or just simply to distract is absolutely abuse of power and a danger to democracy.”
When the time comes under a future president for a housecleaning at the Justice Department and for referrals to state bar organizations, the Clinton investigation should be included. Lawyers have a responsibility to refuse to initiate or to conduct spurious investigations, as occurred with Trump’s inquest into Clinton. That said, at least Clinton can tout her two exonerations. Trump doesn’t have even one.
No. No he doesn’t. And for someone who shouts “witch hunt!” more often than he cleanses his undercarriage, you’d think he’d know a real witch hunt when he sees one.
And he owes Hillary Clinton and the rest of America an apology.
Uh huh. I’ll wait … forever, it seems.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-ordered-doj-investigation-into-hillary-clinton-goes-out-with-a-whimper-now-what
no lnx
Trump-ordered DOJ investigation into Hillary Clinton goes out with a whimper. Now what?
Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement January 12, 2020
It was October 9, 2016. Candidate Donald Trump at the second presidential debate promised – and threatened – Hillary Clinton that if he became president she would go to prison.
“It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” a grinning Secretary Clinton on stage told the audience.
“Because you’d be in jail,” a grimacing Trump gloated.
It was such a stunning moment, a gut punch to American democracy and presidential politics. We don’t investigate our political opponents and presidents don’t promise – or threaten – to lock them up.
It was cheered by the far right, and to this day extremists celebrate the anniversary of those horrific words.
Students For Trump
@TrumpStudents
3 years ago today, President @realDonaldTrump had one of the greatest debate moments of all time...
When Hillary Clinton said it was a good thing he wasn't in charge of the justice system,
To which President Trump responded, "Because you'd be in jail."
Priceless. ??
Embedded video
One month later to the day, in the wee hours of the morning, the news networks would call the election for Trump, despite Clinton winning the popular election by nearly three million more votes.
Less than one year in to office, President Donald Trump used the power of social media to lie repeatedly about his former political opponent, and forced his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to open an investigation into Clinton.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn't looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems..
78.8K
2:57 AM - Nov 3, 2017
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42.5K people are talking about this
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Many people in our Country are askingwhat the “Justice” Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and “acid washed”33,000 Emails? No justice!
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There were no grounds. She had been investigated before by the FBI and cleared. She had been investigated before by Congress multiple times and cleared. She had sat before Congress for 11 hours in a sham Benghazi hearing (one of many sham Benghazi investigations by Republicans on Capitol Hill), and even the top Republican announced at the end of that grueling day – during which Clinton performed, some said brilliantly – that they had learned nothing new.
Sessions’ investigation cast a big net, as The Washington Post reported Thursday.
Attorney General Sessions directed John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, in November of 2017 to, as the Post details, review “a wide array of issues related to Clinton. They included the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One matters, along with the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state and alleged leaks by former FBI director James B. Comey.”
“Your recommendations should include whether any matters not currently under investigation warrants the opening of an investigation, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources or further investigation, and whether any matters would merit the appointment of a Special Counsel,” Sessions told Huber.
More than two years later the investigation is concluding.
It has found nothing – ending “with no tangible results,” the Post notes, because there was never any “there” there.
Both current and former “law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.”
The cost to taxpayers is unknown.
The cost to Clinton’s reputation can be guessed, given also that the investigation is ending in silence.
There will be no FBI Director holding a press conference clearing Clinton. There will be no Attorney General apologizing. There will be nothing but yet another failed attack on Hillary Clinton, millions more of the taxpayers’ dollars taken from the Treasury’s coffers, all to prop up an actual political witch hunt and conspiracy theories that have made Republicans and the conservative media rich.
The beneficiaries, of course, are President Trump and the GOP, who have raised countless fortunes from suckered voters certain that “Crooked Hillary,” as Trump has called her – on Twitter alone – 379 times, is guilty.
She is not.
What happens next?
Nothing.
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1219 an
OJ IG report debunked Trump’s claims — but found anti-Hillary bias among FBI agents
"I didn’t want a criminal to be in the White…
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cryptic note 1119 that she kiboshed a peace plan? lizy wiki??
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DC press whitewashes its role in 2016 email fiasco after State Department exonerates Clinton
an 1019
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https://www.salon.com/2016/10/24/the-clinton-bs-files-hillary-didnt-decorate-the-white-house-christmas-tree-with-condoms-and-syringes/
AMANDA MARCOTTE
OCTOBER 24, 2016
Bill and Hillary Clinton have been plagued by conspiracy theories throughout most of their life in the public eye, perhaps more than any other politicians in history. The Clinton BS Files are a weekly in-depth look at the stories behind some of these conspiracy theories. Read last week’s post.
At Wednesday night's debate, Donald Trump, frustrated by once again being so easily defeated by Hillary Clinton, cracked and called her a "nasty woman." A deeply strange moment was made even stranger by the off-kilter use of the word "nasty." It wasn't Clinton, after all, who had to stand there and defend herself against allegations of grabbing people's genitals against their will and bragging about it afterwards.
But it's never been enough for Clinton detractors to bag on her for being ambitious, smart and feminist — all qualities they barely conceal their loathing for, especially in a woman. No, in the fever dreams of the right-wing imagination, Clinton is frequently portrayed as downright nasty, a gross person who likes gross things, the grosser the better.
And a critical piece of evidence that the conspiracy-theory right has for this theory is the claim that, in 1994, First Lady Hillary Clinton decorated the White House Christmas tree with condoms, cock rings and syringes.
For context, it's important to remember that the paranoid right is absolutely obsessed with painting Clinton as some kind of sexual deviant. In some cases, she's accused of simple lesbianism, which, in certain corners of the right, is still regarded as some kind of out-there kink.
But some conspiracy theorists, realizing that simply being gay is hardly considered deviant behavior in our enlightened times, juice up the tales of Clintonian perversion: Cuckoldry, multiple affairs with various men at once, a lesbian entanglementwith a woman accused of being in the thrall of the Muslim brotherhood, "sexual paganization."
Decorating the Blue Room Christmas tree with penises and coke spoons might seem like an ill-advised move even for someone who is having crazy pagan sex orgies nightly in the Lincoln bedroom. But many people on the outer fringes of the conservative movement apparently believe Hillary Clinton's freakiness was so overwhelming she simply couldn't help but desecrate a Christmas tree for the sheer hell of it.
While most urban legends about the Clintons start somewhat small and then grow in the telling, this one appears to have sprung fully formed from the deranged imagination of Gary Aldrich, a former FBI agent who worked on the security team for the Bush and Clinton White Houses. Aldrich had an unending contempt for the Clintons, who he clearly viewed as a couple of dirty hippies with their Fleetwood Mac records and daughter named after a Joni Mitchell song. After he left, he decided to cash in on that hatred with a 1996 book entitled "Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House."...
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Bill and Hillary Clinton have been plagued by conspiracy theories throughout most of their life in the public eye, perhaps more than any other politicians in history. The Clinton BS Files are a weekly in-depth look at the stories behind some of these conspiracy theories. Read last week’s post.
At Wednesday night's debate, Donald Trump, frustrated by once again being so easily defeated by Hillary Clinton, cracked and called her a "nasty woman." A deeply strange moment was made even stranger by the off-kilter use of the word "nasty." It wasn't Clinton, after all, who had to stand there and defend herself against allegations of grabbing people's genitals against their will and bragging about it afterwards.
But it's never been enough for Clinton detractors to bag on her for being ambitious, smart and feminist — all qualities they barely conceal their loathing for, especially in a woman. No, in the fever dreams of the right-wing imagination, Clinton is frequently portrayed as downright nasty, a gross person who likes gross things, the grosser the better.
And a critical piece of evidence that the conspiracy-theory right has for this theory is the claim that, in 1994, First Lady Hillary Clinton decorated the White House Christmas tree with condoms, cock rings and syringes.
For context, it's important to remember that the paranoid right is absolutely obsessed with painting Clinton as some kind of sexual deviant. In some cases, she's accused of simple lesbianism, which, in certain corners of the right, is still regarded as some kind of out-there kink.
But some conspiracy theorists, realizing that simply being gay is hardly considered deviant behavior in our enlightened times, juice up the tales of Clintonian perversion: Cuckoldry, multiple affairs with various men at once, a lesbian entanglement with a woman accused of being in the thrall of the Muslim brotherhood, "sexual paganization."
Decorating the Blue Room Christmas tree with penises and coke spoons might seem like an ill-advised move even for someone who is having crazy pagan sex orgies nightly in the Lincoln bedroom. But many people on the outer fringes of the conservative movement apparently believe Hillary Clinton's freakiness was so overwhelming she simply couldn't help but desecrate a Christmas tree for the sheer hell of it.
While most urban legends about the Clintons start somewhat small and then grow in the telling, this one appears to have sprung fully formed from the deranged imagination of Gary Aldrich, a former FBI agent who worked on the security team for the Bush and Clinton White Houses. Aldrich had an unending contempt for the Clintons, who he clearly viewed as a couple of dirty hippies with their Fleetwood Mac records and daughter named after a Joni Mitchell song. After he left, he decided to cash in on that hatred with a 1996 book entitled "Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House."...
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/hillary-clinton-conspiracy-theories/
no lnx pix
POLITICS
JUNE 9,2014
The Definitive Guide to Every Hillary Clinton Conspiracy Theory (So Far)
From killing cats to faking concussions, all the dastardly deeds attributed to the former secretary of state and first lady.
TIM MURPHY
Senior Reporter
Long before she let Benghazi happen, Hillary Clinton was the center of a swirl of inventive rumors about sex, drugs, and murder. For entertainment purposes only, we’ve rounded up some of the greatest (i.e., most scurrilous). We’ll add more as they inevitably bubble up in the run-up to the 2016 race.
BENGHAZI ON THE BRAIN
Concussiongate
Rumor: Then-Secretary of State Clinton faked the flu and a concussion in December 2012 to avoid testifying to Congress about Benghazi.
Rumormongers: 2016 presidential dark horse John Bolton and Fox News contributor Monica Crowley
#TCLOT
Rumor: As if a phony head injury wasn’t bad enough—Hillary faked a blood clot, an even more serious medical condition, to further delay her Benghazi testimony.
Rumormonger: Glenn Beck, who added that “if she really had some weird thing in the hospital, then it should prohibit her from ever becoming president.”
Brained by Bush’s brain
Rumor: The clot was real, and Hillary suffered lingering brain damage that could render her unfit for office.
Rumormonger: Fox News analyst Karl Rove, who backtracked the next day.
THE CLINTON BODY COUNT
Fostering doubts
Rumor: Various theories hold that former Clinton White House chief of staff Vince Foster didn’t commit suicide in Virginia’s Fort Marcy Park. One posits that he was killed because he was having an affair with Hillary Clinton.
Rumormongers: Former Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) once shot a watermelon (or a pumpkin—it’s unclear) to prove that Foster was shot by someone else. Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine took out an ad in the New York Times to note that the FBI had failed to investigate “semen in Foster’s shorts, blond hair on his T-shirt and trousers and multicolored carpet fibers on all his clothing.” (Bonus: Anne Coulter once joked, “If you attack the Clintons publicly, make sure all your friends know that you are not planning suicide.”)
Ron Brown’s body
Rumor: Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others were killed in a plane crash orchestrated by the Clintons to prevent him from spilling the beans to special investigators about selling seats on trade missions.
Rumormonger: The Clinton Body Count, a website linking the first family to more than 90 deaths.
Whitewater whitewash
Rumor: After agreeing to cooperate with special investigator Ken Starr, Whitewater partner James McDougal died in prison—allegedly at the hands of Clinton henchmen. “Chalk up another body to Clinton,” as one Rush Limbaugh caller put it. An alternative theory: McDougal faked his death to avoid ratting out his benefactors.
Rumormonger: The Clinton Body Count
Kittycide
Rumor: Former Clinton aide Kathleen Willey alleged that after her cat went missing, a suspicious-looking jogger told her to watch what she said. Then her new cat turned up dead.
Rumormonger: Willey, in the the 2007 pseudo-documentary Hillary: The Movie (which triggered the Citizens United Supreme Court decision).
The condoms must be on the other side of the tree. AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee
THE SEX STUFF
Gay until inauguration
Rumor: After majoring in lesbianism at Wellesley, Hillary entered into a sham marriage with Bill Clinton to cover up the truth. At one point, a former classmate moved to Little Rock to continue an affair with Hillary.
Rumormonger: Edward Klein, author of The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President
Bisexual after inauguration
Rumor: Bill confided that his wife was a bisexual who, as she put it, “had eaten more pussy than he had.”
Rumormonger: Former Clinton mistress Gennifer Flowers, in a 2013 interview with the Daily Mail
Webb of lies
Rumor: Associate attorney general Webb Hubbell was really Chelsea’s father. (And Vince Foster was possibly killed because he knew.)
Rumormonger: This guy on the Internet who keeps emailing me and every other DC journalist.
Bermuda shorts
Rumor: Forget Webb Hubbell. Chelsea was conceived when Bill forced himself on Hillary during a vacation in Bermuda.
Rumormonger: Klein, keeping it classy.
Troopergate
Rumor: Hillary looked the other way when then-Gov. Bill Clinton used Arkansas state troopers to set up sexual liaisons with dozens—maybe hundreds—of women.
Rumormonger: Former right-wing operative-turned-Media Matters honcho David Brock, who later wrote in his book, Blinded by the Right, that “none of the trooper allegations that could be independently checked turned out to be true.”
Bill’s black love child
Rumor: Bill fathered a son after after luring a prostitute into a cocaine-fueled orgy. Hillary dutifully covered it up.
Rumormongers: Little Rock businessman Robert McIntosh circulated a flier noting the resemblance between 13-year-old Danny Williams and a young William Jefferson Blythe during the 1992 campaign. A 1999 Drudge Report exclusive featured Williams’ mother’s on-tape confession. “What becomes immediately obvious to the viewer watching the videotaped confession is that this is clearly not gossip, rumor, or anonymous charges being maliciously directed at a politician,” wrote Drudge, before learning three days later that the child was not Clinton’s.
Come all ye faithful
Rumor: As first lady, Hillary decorated the White House Christmas tree with condoms, cock rings, and lords-a-leapin’ with erect penises.
Rumormongers: Disgruntled former FBI agent Gary Aldrich, in his 1996 tell-all, Unlimited Access; and Texas activist “Doc Marquis,” who seized on Aldrich’s claims as “proof positive that Hillary Clinton is a power, practicing witch.”
Sexual pagan
Rumor: No, it’s not the name of my new metal band—it’s Hillary Clinton’s orientation.
Rumormonger: Southern Evangelical Seminary president Richard Land, who leveled the charge in response to the secretary of state’s advocacy for gay rights in Africa.
THE DRUG STUFF
Powder hungry
Rumor: When Bill was governor, the Clintons covered up a multimillion-dollar cocaine smuggling ring based in Mena, Arkansas.
Rumormonger: The Clinton Chronicles (below), a 1994 pseudo-documentary distributed by the Reverend Jerry Falwell
Boys on the tracks
Rumor: Seventeen-year-olds Kevin Ives and Don Henry weren’t hit by a train after passing out on an Arkansas railroad track; they were brutally murdered after witnessing a Clinton-assisted drug drop.
Rumormongers: Former Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-Calif.) and The Clinton Chronicles
ASSORTED POWER MADNESS
Four martini punch
Rumor: Reporter LJ Davis didn’t, as he claimed, pass out on his floor after drinking one too many martinis—he was assaulted in his Arkansas hotel room in 1994 by Clinton goons and robbed of four “significant” pages from his notebook. His crime: Asking too many questions about Clinton’s work at a Little Rock law firm.
Rumormongers: The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which cited the incident as evidence that Arkansas is a “congenitally violent place,” and Rush Limbaugh, who told his listeners, “journalists and others working on or involved in Whitewatergate have been mysteriously beaten and harassed in Little Rock; some have died.”
PC police
Rumor: As first lady, Clinton formed her own clandestine police force. Agents embedded in the FBI, the CIA, and the IRS harassed and eliminated critics.
Rumormongers: Richard Poe, author of Hillary’s Secret War, and American Evita author Christopher Andersen
Con air
Rumor: Hillary purged the White House Travel Office in order to set up a system of kickbacks for an Arkansas airline helmed by a childhood friend of Bill’s.
Rumormongers: Brock and current Virginia congressional candidate Barbara Comstock
Red, not blue
Rumor: A “meticulously documented” report exposed the Clintons’ links to a Marxist terrorist plot to take over the country, inspired by the Italian communist and grad-student favorite Antonio Gramsci. Exhibit A: Hillary’s failed health care reform plan.
Rumormonger: WorldNetDaily columnist Samuel Blumenfeld
Filegate
Rumor: Classified FBI files were requested and misused by first lady Hillary Clinton to target enemies of the administration. White House Office of Personnel Security Craig Livingstone took the fall when Republican investigators caught wind.
Rumormonger: Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who demanded FBI files be swiped for the first lady’s fingerprints.
Brazilian whacks
Rumor: The Clintons forced former Hillary donor Peter Paul to spend two years in a Brazilian prison—including two months in a cellblock known as the “Corridor of Death”—after he filed a lawsuit against the couple claiming they knew about his illegal campaign finance dealings.
Rumormonger: Paul, in the 2007 pseudo-documentary Hillary Uncensored
Black helicopters
Rumor: Team Hillary used helicopters to surveil the Southampton home of 2006 Republican Senate challenger—and current Fox News contributor—K.T. McFarland.
Rumormonger: McFarland, at a campaign event on Long Island
Rush to judgment
Rumor: Rush Limbaugh’s 2006 drug bust for painkillers possession was a set-up by the Clinton machine.
Rumormonger: Poe again
Dressed to kill in 1993 AP Photo/James Finley
THE MUSLIM STUFF
Muslim Sisterhood
Rumor: Clinton and top aide/alleged lover Huma Abedin (wife of ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.)) are in cahoots with the ladies’ auxiliary of the Muslim Brotherhood. Which explains why Clinton has been secretly pushing us to spread Sharia law in America.
Rumormongers: “Huma’s mom is best friends with the new so-called first lady of Egypt, who is also a member of the Sisterhood,” explained Rush Limbaugh. “Folks, it’s Peyton place—it’s too much to keep up with.” Rep. Michele Bachmann’s allegations of collaboration between Clinton and the Brotherhood was cited by protesters in the streets of Cairo.
Mullah moolah
Rumor: Clinton’s Islamofascist sympathies were secured with a bribe from Iran.
Rumormonger: Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman, who conscientiously adds, “I cannot prove it at this time.”
Ban on churches
Rumor: Clinton was working with Islamists to shut down Christian houses of worship in the United States before she left office in 2013.
Rumormonger: Conservative speaker and self-described “former terrorist” Kamal Saleem
Hillary Clinton with fellow Muslim sympathizer Barack Obama in Cairo, 2009. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
JUST PLAIN BIZARRE
Cold-blooded
Rumor: Like most of the Washington elite, Hillary is in fact a blood-drinking extraterrestrial lizard in disguise.
Rumormonger: “Reptoid hypothesis” creator David Icke
Everything is Illuminati’ed
Rumor: Wake up, sheeple. The Clintons belong to an 18th-century secret society that controls global governance and finance.
Rumormongers: Lots of crazy people on YouTube
Contra dancing
Rumor: In the 1970s, Hillary worked at a Little Rock law firm that helped funnel weapons to the Contras.
Rumormonger: The late Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn
Blood money
Rumor: The Clintons consented to the harvesting and selling of HIV- and hepatitis C-positive blood from prison inmates to China in the 1980s.
Rumormongers: Klein and WorldNetDaily conspiracy guru Joseph Farah
Starr crossed
Rumor: Why did the Clintons enjoy impunity for their myriad crimes? Easy: Ken Starr, the man tasked with investigating them, was a secret Clinton crony.
Rumormonger: Poe again
Get behind me, thetan
Rumor: Why did the did the movie version of Primary Colors, in which John Travolta plays a thinly-veiled Bill Clinton, go so easy on the first couple? Maybe because President Clinton pressured the German government to extend religious protections to the Church of Scientology.
Rumormonger: The New York Post reported that Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.) demanded an investigation into the matter; Faircloth denied this.
It’s a tax!
Rumor: As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was pushing a secret United Nations takeover of the Internet, to be paid for by a secret tax on American billionaires.
Rumormonger: Former Clinton aide Dick Morris
Goo goo for Gaga: Clinton’s State Department betrayed its true function as an “agent for Lady Gaga” when it helped the “Bad Romance” singer secure a gig at a gay pride event in Italy.
Rumormonger: Mission: America founder Linda Harvey
HERE WE GO AGAIN…
Face the nation
Rumor: Clinton got a face-lift after leaving the State Department to “glam up” for 2016.
Rumormonger: Fox and Friends’ Steve Doocy, who tweeted afterwards that he was referring only to Clinton’s website.
Hey sole sister
Rumor: Clinton hired a mentally ill woman to throw a sneaker at her while giving a speech to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries in Las Vegas in April.
Rumormongers: Limbaughand former Republican presidential front runner Herman Cain
Hill’s angels
Rumor: Hillary is a tool of the Dark Lord Lucifer sent to oppose Jesus Christ in the Last Days.
Rumormonger: Montana Republican congressional candidate Ryan Zinke, who called Clinton the “anti-Christ” at a January campaign event.
It takes a child
Rumor: Chelsea Clinton became pregnant at the behest of her parents, who believe that the former secretary of state will be viewed more favorably if she has grandkids.
Rumormongers: Fox News host Howie Kurtz, the Washington Free Beacon‘s Michael Goldfarb, and the New York Times‘ Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Vanity press
Rumor: The Clintons arranged for Vanity Fair to publish Monica Lewinsky’s recent essay two-and-a-half years before the next presidential election, so it would be forgotten by 2016.
Rumormonger: Prolific children’s author Lynne Cheney, who asked Bill O’Reilly, “Would Vanity Fair publish anything about Monica Lewinsky that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t want in Vanity Fair?” (Yes.)
To be continued…
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/sean-hannitys-bizarre-fixation-on-hillary-clinton-exposed-in-new-review-of-his-primetime-show/
no lnx
Sean Hannity’s bizarre fixation on Hillary Clinton exposed in new review of his primetime show
Written by Shira Tarlo / Salon September 11, 2019
It has been nearly three years since President Donald Trump clinched the White House, however Fox News host Sean Hannity has remained fixated on the Democrat nominated in the 2016 elections: Hillary Clinton.
During the last presidential election cycle, Hannity labeled his primetime show the “Stop-Hillary Express” because of its sustained focus on defeating the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. In the more than two years since Trump defeated Clinton and seized control of the White House, it appears the one-time conductor has continued taking his viewers for a ride on the anti-Clinton train.
From Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 through August 2019, Hannity mentioned Clinton in 505 of the 587 episodes of his program — a figure that represents 86 percent of his shows — according to a review conducted by Media Matters for America, a progressive news watchdog. And if you include mentions from guests, Clinton’s name was dropped in a staggering 91 percent of the episodes Hannity hosted over that time period.
Hannity’s apparent obsession with Clinton is “largely a reflection of his show’s focus on the dizzying conspiracy theory he constructed to defend Trump” from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters.
Gertz further explained: “Hannity places Clinton at the center of several key strands of that web. In his telling, 1) federal investigators should have been charging Clinton for crimes related to her email server rather than looking into Trump’s associates; 2) some of the attorneys involved in the probe had conflicts of interest because they supported her election; and 3) the investigators ignored the ‘real’ collusion with Russia that she supposedly engaged in through the Uranium One pseudoscandal and via an anti-Trump dossier that became part of the investigation.”
Since Clinton largely receded from the national political spotlight in the wake of her defeat, Hannity’s references to the former presidential hopeful decreased in each of the first four months of Trump’s administration, according to Media Matters.
In 2017, Hannity mentioned Clinton in 88 percent of the episodes he hosted in January after Trump’s inauguration, 76 percent in February, 70 percent in March and just 39 percent in April, the lowest total over the course of the study. That figure spiked to 79 percent in May. Since then, Hannity’s mentions haven’t fallen below 60 percent in any month since October of 2017.
Gertz noted that the longest consecutive streak in which Hannity mentioned Clinton on the shows he has hosted was 60 — from April 8, 2019 to July 12, 2019. Hannity did not mention Clinton on five shows he hosted between April 26, 2017, through May 2, 2017, the longest consecutive streak in which the Fox News host did not name-drop Clinton.
“When Hannity takes a night off, the ‘stop-Hillary express’ rolls on, as the show typically features the same guests and themes, including the Clinton-focused anti-Mueller conspiracy theory,” Gertz concluded. “His guest hosts mentioned Clinton in 63% of their episodes, and she was mentioned in 85% of the episodes they hosted during the period of the study.”
Watch the astonishing supercut of Hannity’s Clinton name-drops here:
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bktv 9/8/19
https://www.c-span.org/video/?462768-1/american-carnage
JULY 18, 2019
American Carnage
Politico Magazine chief political correspondent Tim Alberta explored divisions in the Republican Party that led to the election of President Trump.
2016 debate newt losing by attacking other cands, so goes after media 2 nuke ["no" i don't want to address current scandal?], won NC primary when he was in single dig?
mcconn dangled scotus seat to hard rw and evang;
;pence team sure beat until comey re-open hillary emails
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zombie
House hearing to shine spotlight on Clinton Foundation
Posted By -NO AUTHOR- On 11/22/2018 @ 3:45 pm In APP Frontpage,Politics,U.S. | No Comments
Hillary Clinton at the American Federation of Teachers Union on July 13, 2018 (Video screenshot)
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., told Hill.TV on Wednesday that U.S. Attorney John Huber, who has been working with the DOJ and the FBI on the the probe, will testify before the House Oversight Committee Dec. 5,the Daily Caller reported.
Meadows said Huber was tasked in part with investigating possible “improper activity” by the Clinton Foundation.
The allegations center on “pay for play” donations to the charity while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
Critics, including investigative journalistPeter Schweizer, have presented evidence Clintons exchanged political favors for donations and pushed favorable policies to receive donations.
The New York Times reported Trump told his White House counsel earlier this year he wanted the DOJ to prosecute Clinton.
In March, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided a special prosecutor was not needed to investigate Hillary Clinton regarding allegations the sale of Uranium One to a Russian state-owned company while she was secretary of state was related to donations made to the Clinton Foundation.
Sessions said Huber also was reviewing the allegations of Republican lawmakers that the FBI used the unsubstantiated anti-Trump dossier to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016.
Meadows said in a Twitter message at the time that Sessions’ decision not to appoint a special counsel was “disappointing.”
“So the Obama DOJ can open a legally questionable investigation into the Trump campaign — allegedly based on a campaign volunteer mouthing off at a London bar — but this DOJ can’t appoint a second special counsel after all the troubling documents we’ve seen? Disappointing,” he wrote.
Schweizer, the author of “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” was the first to report nine foreign investors in the Uranium One deal gave $145 million to the Clinton Foundation. The New York Times confirmed in an April 2015 story Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. The Times found that the Clintons, however, did not publicly disclose the contributions, despite an agreement Hillary Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors.
In addition, Bill Clinton received a $500,000 speaking fee from a Russian bank tied to the Kremlin in 2010, when Hillary Clinton opposed sanctions on Moscow. She reversed her position the following year.
Article printed from WND: http://www.wnd.com
URL to article: http://www.wnd.com/2018/11/house-hearing-to-shine-spotlight-on-clinton-foundation/
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wapo
TOP POLITICAL PATRONS OF BOTH BILL AND HILLARY
Haim and Cheryl Saban
- Haim and Cheryl Saban, media executive; women's advocate/author. $2.42 million.
- American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, public employees union. $1.684 million.
3. Communications Workers of America, labor union. $1.682 million.
Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw
- Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, film director; actor. $1.5 million.
Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg
- Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation chief executive; philanthropist. $1.35 million.
- National Education Association, teachers' union. $1.31 million.
George Soros
- George Soros, hedge fund executive. $1.26 million.
Barbara F. Lee
- Barbara F. Lee, women's advocate/philanthropist. $1.24 million.
S. Donald Sussman
- S. Donald Sussman,hedge fund executive. $1.18 million.
- Plumbers & Pipefitters Union, labor union. $1.16 million.
Note: Totals do not include donations to the Clinton Foundation.
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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hillary-and-media-dreadful-coverage-2016-had-echoes-past
i am
not going to review Hillary Clinton’s book “What Happened,” since there are approximately 12,576 reviews out there already, with more to come. But I do want to discuss one issue that came up in the book that has been addressed in a couple of those reviews. That would be the fact that the press regularly and tiresomely slags Clinton for her failures in the 2016 campaign but have still completely failed to acknowledge their own.
There are many aspects of this story that are unique to Clinton. As Politico’s Jonathan Allen, then of Vox, wrote at the beginning of the campaign, there was an establishment media groupthink about her that was obvious, although the press itself seemed completely oblivious to it. (I wrote about this on Salon in real time as it unfolded and after the race was over.)
Allen put it bluntly:
The Clinton rules are driven by reporters’ and editors’ desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family’s political empire. At least in that way, Republicans and the media have a common interest.
Indeed they did. (As it turns out, maybe some members of the Russian government did too.) And one aspect of the coverage verged on outright corruption: the “deal” The New York Times and The Washington Post made with a Steve Bannon associate to publish excerpts of a book of lies called “Clinton Cash” that set the tone for much of the coverage to come.
The Atlantic’s James Fallows addressed the press obsession with the Clinton email story in his review of “What Happened”:
No sane person can believe that the consequences of last fall’s election — for foreign policy, for race relations, for the environment, for anything else you’d like to name (from either party’s perspective) — should have depended more than about 1 percent on what Hillary Clinton did with her emails. But this objectively second- or third-tier issue came across through even our best news organizations as if it were the main thing worth knowing about one of the candidates.
David Roberts at Vox took on the subject by analyzing in depth the way the media reported one particular incident in the campaign: Hillary Clinton’s alleged “coal gaffe,” which he described as “navigating a hall of mirrors.” Her comment about putting coal miners out of business was poorly phrased, but as it was reported, it was also truncated and taken out of context. The way her response was then distorted by the GOP and the press as an illustration of Clinton’s disqualifying character flaws was the real crime, Roberts writes:
Mainstream news outlets should stop treating “how it looks” as though it’s some fact in the universe that they discover. They are the arbiters; they decide how it looks. They build and reinforce narratives. They seek out confirming evidence and ignore disconfirming evidence. They amplify some voices and not others. They direct attention, which is the coin of the realm in modern politics. If they draw attention to a bullshit scandal, they are the ones ensuring that it damages the campaign. If they play along with the ludicrous notion that Clinton loves firing coal miners, they are sanctioning and disseminating misinformation. They are not doing their jobs.
Whether you are convinced by these arguments or not, it’s tempting to write them off as something that only pertains to Hillary Clinton. There is no doubt that the narratives spun around her in the campaign and for years prior were informed by systemic sexism. The press is no different from the rest of society in being unable to grapple with that reality. But in fact, this wasn’t the only time this happened.
The coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign, and to a lesser extent the 2004 campaign as well, had similar characteristics. In the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the media mercilessly abused the latter with a series of shallow character attacks that were both unfair and untruthful. Roberts’ analysis of Clinton and the “coal gaffe” is exactly the same sort of prejudicial coverage the media gave Gore for his “I invented the internet” and “Love Canal” gaffes, among a dozen others.
One vivid illustration of journalists’ collective disdain for Gore was reported in Time’s article about an early New Hampshire debate between Gore and his Democratic primary rival, Sen. Bill Bradley:
The 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out. Whenever Gore came on too strong the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of fifteen-year-old heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.
Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank explained why the press corps was so hostile:
Gore is sanctimonious, and that’s sort of the worst thing you can be in the eyes of the press. And he has been disliked all along, and it was because he gives a sense that he’s better than us — he’s better than everybody, for that matter, but the sense that he’s better than us as reporters. Whereas President Bush probably is sure that he’s better than us — he’s probably right, but he does not convey that sense. He does not seem to be dripping with contempt when he looks at us, and I think that has something to do with the coverage.
Reporter Margaret Carlson explained in her book that one of the reasons the media gave Bush such good coverage was that he served Dove bars and designer water on the press plane, while Gore only offered granola bars and sandwiches.
As far as I know, the media have still never given their coverage of that campaign a second thought. Four years later, John Kerry was mocked for ordering the wrong cheese and drinking green tea and otherwise being a snobby New Englander without the common touch of George W. Bush, originally of Kennebunkport, Maine. And then there was 2016 and “her emails.”
None of this is to say that these candidates weren’t flawed or bear no responsibility for the outcome of those races. The point is that the press corps made a collective decision that they didn’t “like” these people and obsessively covered them in a trivial manner, as if they had been running for homecoming queen instead of president of the United States. With fake news and social media and foreign propaganda distorting our democracy, it’s past time for the press to stop behaving like the mean girls of D.C. High.
Heather Digby Parton
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hard to tell is this swill matters, but shows a vast reservoir of lies built up from pjt ark days:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/sean-hannity-gives-platform-to-man-who-claims-hillary-is-evil-bisexual-secret-sex-freak.html
no links
Sean Hannity Gives Platform to Man Who Claims Hillary Is ‘Evil,’ Bisexual ‘Secret Sex Freak’
Before interviewing Mike Pence and Kellyanne Conway on Monday night, the Fox News personality had an ‘EXCLUSIVE’ interview with Jeff Rovin, a man with a shocking ‘secret.’
ASAWIN SUEBSAENG
BETSY WOODRUFF
10.24.16 10:00 PM ET
On Monday night, unpaid Donald Trump adviser and current Fox News host Sean Hannity broadcasted his “EXCLUSIVE” interview with Jeff Rovin, novelist and self-identified “fixer” for Hillary and Bill Clinton. Rovin first told his story to supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer last week, opening up about his alleged past as a Clinton ally who would help the powerful couple manipulate the press and (also!) set up secret, extramarital sexual liaisons.
Hannity emphasized that Fox News could not “independently verify” Rovin’s story. He also noted that the Clinton presidential campaign—“shockingly”—did not respond to his team’s multiple requests seeking comment.
“I was fixing [for the Clintons], I really don’t like that term, but there it is,” Rovin told Hannity. “I was fixing something for an actor who was in their inner circle.”
Hannity proceeded to gently and credulously ask Rovin about his explosive claims about working to kill negative Clinton stories in the press, and about the Clintons’ “open marriage” and how he’d “help them hide their scandals.”
Rovin, who said he wanted to appear on Hannity’s program to offer a “less hyperbolic” version of the Enquirer cover story, was awfully cagey for someone who was outing himself as a notorious Clinton “fixer.” He did assert that it was an “open secret” among his fellow Clintonite cohorts that Hillary Clinton had a romantic relationship with Vince Foster,the former White House aide who committed suicide and has since become a fascination of Clinton conspiracy theorists. Rovin said he’d been at the Clinton White House “twice.” He discussed how “the world is upside down [and] we have to set it right, again.”
He apparently identifies as a libertarian, who is ABSOLUTELY NOT doing this to help the Trump campaign. When pressed by Hannity on who he’d be voting for in November, Rovin demurred but conceded, “I like Trump, sure.”
…OK, there’s a lot to unpack here.
First, the Enquirer “bombshell,” of which Rovin was the star subject, is a “WORLD EXCLUSIVE 9-PAGE SPECIAL INVESTIGATION.” The story breathlessly details how the former secretary of State and first lady is a sex-crazed, “evil,” “polyamorous,” bisexual (or at least bi-curious), and “ruthless power-hungry” supervillain, one prolific in the dark arts of criminal conspiracy and character assassination aimed at Bill’s “bimbos.”
The Enquirer article is jam-packed with clandestine sex romps, mysterious death, prostitutes, “LIES AND SPIES,” and a woman (now the Democratic presidential nominee!) hell-bent on manipulating her sex-crazed self all the way to becoming leader of the free world.
Rovin—who was interviewed anonymously by the Enquirer and labeled Hillary’s “BAGMAN”—spilled his guts to the tabloid about the Clintons’ alleged sex-hypocrisy, detailing an “endless string of sexual stories arising from what effectively was the Clintons’ open, polyamorous marriage.”
“[Her fixer] arranged a lesbian romp for bisexual Hillary with a prominent Hollywood identity!” the Enquirer reported. “[He] squealed about a lusty rendezvous he arranged for Hillary that FINALLY proves the lesbian rumors that have dogged her for decades!”
“I arranged a meeting for Hillary and a woman in an exclusive Beverly Hills hotel,” he told the publication. “From the moment the Clintons found their feet in Los Angeles and began to meet the stars, they became addicted to power… It’s ironic their own scandalous truths are worthy of a movie script!”
Compelling stuff.
Rumors that Hillary is a lesbian murderer—or that Bill is a cocaine-addled deviant—have proliferated in fringe corners of the internet and right-wing circles for ages. Authors Robert Morrow, Edward Klein, and Trump’s longtime adviser and political ally Roger Stone have written books making outlandish claims about supposed Clinton drug habits, sexual preferences, and bloody, bloody history. (Trump himself suggested this month that Hillary was screwing around on former president Bill.)
Rovin has had a decently impressive career as a fiction writer. He has co-authored sci-fi novels with William Shatner and X-Files star Gillian Anderson. He took over Tom Clancy’s Op-Center novel series after the author died in 2013.And his Penguin Random House author page notes he is “a student of the martial arts”—much like Hannity himself.
...
Rovin also edited theWeekly World Newstabloid for a time. As The Atlantic has noted, the publication “highlighted tabloid journalism’s thin line between fiction and nonfiction,” until its print edition folded in 2007. The tabloid pushed self-consciously outlandish stories, like the classic “BAT CHILD ESCAPES!” It also had its fair share of Hillary Clinton-related tall tales.
“BILL CATCHES HILLARY WITH SPACE ALIEN!” blared one headline.
“HILLARY ADOPTS ALIEN BABY,” read a 1993 cover.
When Rovin started editing the publication, he stressed the importance of its coverage of space aliens.
“National, international, and even interplanetary events are being suppressed,” he wrote in an editor’s note on May 2, 2005. “Newspapers, television, and the internet are feeding us what dolphins call ‘meep… meepahh… marp’—Literally, lies as deep as the ocean.”
“When the government tries to cover up visits from space aliens and time travelers, we’ll be there,” Rovin continued.“(Weekly World News will even tell you what investments, if any, people from the future are making in the stock market. You won’t find that in Forbes!)”
The Trump campaign did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment on whether Republican nominee sees any merit in this Enquirerstory on his Democratic rival. However, the *Enquirer* (a Trump-endorsingtabloid long famous for printing unsubstantiated gossip and stories about space aliens and the Illuminati) and Hannity have become two of Trump’s most reliable allies in the media during this election—and sometimes in concert.
Hannity, for his part, has gone full-on conspiracy theorist during this presidential election, during which he has been doing everything in his power—including starring in an official Trump campaign ad—to get Trump elected president.
Earlier this year, when the Enquirer ran a baseless story suggesting that Ted Cruz’s dad, Rafael, was in New Orleans passing out pro-Castro pamphlets with Lee Harvey Oswald,President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Trump widely promoted the “news,” and got his allies in the mainstream media, including Hannity, to help him in the effort.
When Trump went on Hannity’s radio show in May, the host allowed Trump to give more oxygen to the Enquirer’s supposed JFK-Cruz scoop.
At the time, when asked by The Daily Beast if Hannity would comment further—and if he felt not pushing back bolstered criticism that he is too deferential to the GOP nominee—the host emailed back: “I was saying that photo was not verified.”
Asked if he believed the Enquirer is a reliable source, Hannity said, “If [you] want to interview me, contact Fox PR.” Hannity later emailed The Daily Beast, “So is the picture authentic or not? You don’t have a clue either. Lol.”
(Well, we do have a clue: Rafael Cruz did not play a role in JFK’s death, but Hannity and the Enquirerdid their thing, regardless.)
And now Hannity is back at it again, elevating National Enquirercontent, all in the service of targeting the Clintons and talking up Trump on national TV.
Hannity would not comment on the record for this story. Fox News public relations did not respond to emails seeking comment. The Clinton campaign similarly did not respond to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment, so WHAT ARE THEY HIDING???
Following the Rovin interview on Monday’s episode of Hannity, the Fox News personality interviewed Trump running mate Mike Pence and Team Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, two highly respected figures within the Republican Party who spent their Monday-night airtime talking about how great Trump is. Neither uttered one word about Rovin, the Enquirer’s story, or Hillary Clinton’s alleged past as a villainous sex freak.
Why would they, when they have a supermarket tabloid and Fox News to do their work for them?
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digby
This election is about voters choosing the least worst candidate. That's where we are in our politics.
— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix)September 4, 2016
That tweet from Chris Cilizza of The Washington Post’s The Fix blog is cleverly framed to be about the voters’ view of this campaign. Both candidates do have high unfavorable ratings among the public (as does the Congress and pretty much every other institution, including the press.) That jaded comment by a member of the media, however, illustrates something important. Some members of the press are not just commenting on a reality; they are pushing the theme of two equally unpalatable candidates and it just isn’t true.
The main problem for Clinton is that people think she is a congenital liar. When asked what it is she lied about, most people can’t point to anything specific; they just know she’s dishonest and corrupt. The fact that she’s been dogged by political enemies and investigated by special prosecutors, the media and Congress with unlimited budgets and every possible means of getting to the truth and has been exonerated doesn’t seem to register. Indeed, the fact-checkers all find her to be more honest than virtually anyone in politics while Donald Trump, by contrast, lies more than he tells the truth.
To understand how this came to be, go back to a column from 1996 in The New York Times by vicious right-wing columnist William Safire who first dubbed her a “congenital liar.” All the crimes that he accused her of committing and lies he insisted that she had told later proved him to be the liar (or badly misinformed), but it didn’t matter. For many reasons, not the least of which was simple sexism, it was set in stone that this feminist, lawyer first lady was devious, calculating and power mad — Madame Defarge and Evita rolled into one. The political press has filtered its coverage of her through that lens ever since.
As Amanda Marcotte has documented, the current “lock her up!” fever, that burning desire to see her her humiliated and imprisoned (or in some cases executed for treason) goes back to the 1990s as well. And it’s no less disturbing now than it was then.It’s fed by the press’ insatiable appetite for juicy tidbits doled out piece by piece by right-wing operatives, each story building on itself to create a narrative of crisis and criminality despite there being no evidence of it being true.
The assumption behind the “Clinton Foundation scandal” is that the mere possibility of “impropriety” is a form of corruption despite there being absolutely no proof that any favoritism or transaction actually took place. (The fact that all politicians in Washington from President Barack Obama to lowly congresspeople have contacts every day with people who give them money for their campaigns directly doesn’t put any of that in perspective for some reason.) She alone is being held liable for the big money problem that infects our system from top to bottom.
Recently, there has been some pushback coming from several journalistic quarters, which is new. The erroneous AP report that Clinton had pretty much given exclusive access to Clinton Foundation donors was ably dispatched by Matthew Yglesias of Vox. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has challenged several stories, including the breathless “exposé” about a Clinton associate asking for diplomatic passports to rescue two journalists in North Korea. James Fallows in The Atlantic revisited his book from 20 years ago called “Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy” and lamented how current coverage shows little improvement since then.
Paul Waldman in The Washington Post took on the two competing “foundation” scandals, Trump’s being an actual case of flat-out bribery and Clinton’s being nothing. And The New York Times’ Paul Krugman devoted a column to a scathing critique of the press, comparing its coverage to the treatment of Al Gore in 2000, when a fake “liar” meme circulated, propagated by right-wing opposition organizations to tar him as dishonest and mentally unstable.We all know how well that turned out.
I had to laugh at Sunday’s silly New York Times story about Hillary Clinton hobnobbing with wealthy donors as if that were a shocking display of arrogant elitism. Compare and contrast that with this story from 2012 about President Obama hobnobbing with wealthy donors portrayed as an unpleasant but necessary duty in a time of big money dominance. One cannot escape the fact that Clinton is being held to a different standard.
Much of the criticism in general is focused on The New York Times which seems to have a strange institutional vendetta against both Clintons.It’s hard to understand why this would be true over so many years but perhaps Jonathan Allen explained it best in this brutally honest piece called “Confessions of a Clinton reporter: The media’s 5 unspoken rules for covering Hillary.” This, I think, can fairly be said to apply across the board not just to the Times:
The Clinton rules are driven by reporters’ and editors’ desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family’s political empire. At least in that way, Republicans and the media have a common interest.
This problem has deep roots in our political culture and it’s potentially creating a serious crisis in 2016. If Donald Trump were to pull out a win, the ramifications would be extreme. And he could. Nate Silver and the 538 gang of statisticians don’t give him good odds but they do not believe it’s impossible:
[Our model] shows Trump as having gained about 2 points over two weeks. If Trump keeps gaining 1 percentage point a week, he’ll beat Clinton by a couple of percentage points on Nov. 8. Hence, Clinton should probably not be picking out the White House drapes just yet....
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/us/politics/hillary-clinton-transition-team.html?_r=0
Hillary Clinton’s campaign announced on Tuesday thatKen Salazar, the former interior secretary and Colorado senator, would become chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s transition planning team.
The effort, which will be based out of Washington, is aimed at preparing Mrs. Clinton and her team to enter the White House after the November election if she wins — an operation intended to be largely separated from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign apparatus in Brooklyn.
The campaign said Mr. Salazar would lead four team members: Tom Donilon, who served as national security adviser under President Obama; Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan; Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress; and Maggie Williams, the director of Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a longtime Clinton confidante.
Two top campaign policy advisers for the Democratic nominee, Ed Meier and Ann O’Leary, will also shift full-time to the transition efforts. Heather Boushey, the executive director of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, will be the team’s chief economist.
“While our campaign remains focused on the task at hand of winning in November, Hillary Clinton wants to be able to get to work right away as president-elect on building an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top,” John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman and the transition team president, said in a statement. “These individuals, who bring a deep level of experience in the work of presidential transitions, will help us build a team that is ready to govern after the general election.”
The White House has been preparing for months to help oversee a transfer of power in January. Representatives of both the Clinton and Trump campaigns have been invited to begin attending transition-planning meetings and to arrange for intelligence briefings.
Donald J. Trump has put Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in charge of his transition planning.
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aei hillary hit 8/16
http://www.aei.org/publication/a-constitutional-amendment-overturning-citizens-united-really-how/
One jarring note in Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention was her statement that she would press for a constitutional amendment to overturnCitizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. This 2009 Supreme Court case held that corporations had the same rights as individuals to make statements for or against the election of a candidate for public office. Particularly difficult to understand was her linking Citizens United to the fact that our economy is not functioning well for many Americans.
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http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/267083-tom-delay-feds-ready-to-indict-clinton
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http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/05/05/fox-s-kilmeade-i-let-myself-down-not-following-when-trump-brought-jfk-conspiracy-fox-friends/210256
lakof direct causation problem again?
Chris Christie’s Debunked Clinton Claim About Boko Haram Comes Straight From Right-Wing Media
Research
July 20, 2016 1:05 PM EDT ››› CYDNEY HARGIS
During his speech at the Republican National Convention, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie echoed the right-wing media myth that as secretary of state, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton personally “fought” to keep Nigerian group Boko Haram off the terror watch list, which resulted in the abduction of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls -- a claim media fact-checkers debunked.
Christie Claimed Clinton “Fought” To Keep Boko Haram Off Terrorism Watch List In Convention Speech
Christie: Because Clinton “Fought For Two Years To Keep An Al Qaeda Affiliate Off The Terrorist Watch List, ... These Terrorists Abducted Hundreds Of Innocent Young Girls.” During his speech at the July 19 Republican National Convention, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie claimed that “In Nigeria, [presumptive Democratic presidential nominee] Hillary Clinton amazingly fought for two years to keep an Al-Qaeda affiliate off the terrorist watch list,” referring to the extremist group Boko Haram. Christie argued that “because of this reckless action … terrorists abducted hundreds of innocent young girls.” From the July 19 speech:
Since the Justice Department refuses to allow you to render a verdict, let's present the case now, on the facts, against Hillary Clinton. She was America's chief diplomat. Look around at the violence and danger in our world today every region of the world has been infected with her flawed judgment.
[...]
In Nigeria, Hillary Clinton amazingly fought for two years to keep an Al-Qaeda affiliate off the terrorist watch list.
What happened because of this reckless action by the candidate who is the self proclaimed champion of women around the world? These terrorists abducted hundreds of innocent young girls two years ago.
These schoolgirls are still missing today.
What was the solution from the Obama/Clinton team? A hashtag campaign! Hillary Clinton, as an apologist for an Al-Qaeda affiliate in Nigeria resulting in the capture of innocent young women guilty or not guilty? She fights for the wrong people. [NJ.com, 7/19/16]
Right-Wing Media Previously Hyped This False Claim
Fox & Friends: Clinton “Made Sure” Boko Haram Was “Not Placed On The Terror List,” Which “Perhaps Could Have Saved These Girls Earlier." Fox hosts Steve Doocy and Elisabeth Hasselbeck blamed Clinton for refusing to designate Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), claiming that if she had done so, it "could have saved these girls earlier." From the May 8, 2014, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends:
STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): This is really something. We've with been telling you over the last couple of days about this terrorist group called Boko Haram out in Africa, how they've killed an entire village. They have since, in the last couple of weeks, they have kidnapped 300 young girls. They're going to sell them into slavery.
BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): And prior to that, boys.
DOOCY: They burned a bunch of boys. They burned down a village. It's all bad. And now, word is, because we did not place them on the terror list, of officially known terrorist groups, it's going to be harder to go after them. And who exactly made sure that they were not placed on the terror list? Hillary Clinton.
[...]
ELISABETH HASSELBECK (CO-HOST): And the rights of women and young girls, those were pillars of what she wanted to accomplish in her time at the State Department. But right here, what she didn't actually tweet, and perhaps because it was over 140 characters, was the fact that her own State Department, as Steve just mentioned, did not place Boko Haram on the list of foreign terrorist organizations, which would have forbidden any sort of authority to increase securities to them, increase assistance to Nigerian security forces in that area, and perhaps could have saved these girls earlier. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/8/14]
National Review: "The Excuses Now Being Offered In Explanation Of Clinton's Dereliction Are Specious." National Review's Andrew McCarthy claimed that Clinton “protected” Boko Haram as secretary of state and that “the excuses now being offered in explanation of Clinton’s dereliction are specious" and "ridiculous." McCarthy wrote that Clinton was "appeasing Islamists." From the May 8, 2014, article:
The excuses now being offered in explanation of Clinton’s dereliction are specious. As Rogin explains, Clinton’s State Department claimed that Boko Haram was merely a local group with parochial grievances that was not a threat to the United States. Have a look, though, at the State Department’s list, here. Several of the listed groups are waging local terrorist campaigns that do not threaten our country—the Basque ETA, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Real Irish Republican Army, etc. A significant reason for having the list is to promote international cooperation against terrorism and discourage its use against anyone anywhere. The fact that a terrorist organization may have only local grievances and may not directly imperil the U.S. has never been thought a reason to exclude it from the list.
Fox News has further reported another rationale of Clinton apologists: Hillary did not want to raise Boko Haram’s profile and assist its recruiting which, they reason, would be the effect of designation by the Great Satan. That is ridiculous. The main point of having the list, and the sanctions that accompany a terrorist designation, is to weaken the organization by depriving it of assets and material support. The logic of what Clinton supporters are claiming is that U.S. counterterrorism law — much of which was put in place by the administration of President Bill Clinton — does more harm than good. Does anyone think they really believe that?
What happened here is obvious, although the commentariat is loath to connect the dots. Boko Haram is an Islamic-supremacist organization. Mrs. Clinton, like the Obama administration more broadly, believes that appeasing Islamists--avoiding actions that might give them offense, slamming Americans who provoke them--promotes peace and stability. [National Review, 5/8/14]
Hot Air: "The Responsibility For This Failure Rests Directly With Hillary Clinton." The conservative blog Hot Air wrote that “the responsibility for this failure” to designate Boko Haram a terrorist organization was Clinton’s and that the decision enabled the group to commit acts of terrorism, including the mass kidnappings. Hot Air also brushed aside Clinton's support of U.S. intervention in the Nigerian kidnappings, writing, "Now Hillary wants to fight Boko Haram with hashtags. Too bad she didn't fight them with real resources when she had the chance." From the May 8, 2014, post:
Boko Haram has wreaked havoc in Nigeria and portions of surrounding nations since 2009, when the Nigerian government tried to crack down on their arms-gathering operations. The group of Islamist terrorists had been known for much of that time to have ties to al-Qaeda, both ideological and tactical. Hundreds, perhaps thousands died in terrorist attacks from 2009 to 2013, many of them targeted for their Christianity. And yet, not until November 2013 did the US finally list Boko Haram as a terrorist group.
Why? We should ask Hillary Clinton
[...]
It’s true that not every local grievance requires a State Department designation, but Boko Haram allied itself with al-Qaeda and provided it tactical support, at least. That should have prompted State to act, especially with the consensus within the national-security communities demanding it — repeatedly. Instead, Hillary Clinton refused to act in order to keep up a pretense that “al-Qaeda was on the run.”
Now Hillary wants to fight Boko Haram with hashtags. Too bad she didn’t fight them with real resources when she had the chance. [Hot Air, 5/8/14]
Newt Gingrich: State Department Under Clinton “Wouldn’t Even List [Boko Haram] As A Terrorist Group.” Former Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich blamed Clinton for not listing Boko Haram a terrorist organization in 2015 speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit, even though. “last year Boko Haram killed more people than Ebola.” From CSPAN’s broadcast of the Iowa Freedom Summit:
NEWT GINGRICH: You see people all around the planet, this is a global war, and yet they insist on talking about it by geography. So, we’re going to really focus on Northern Syria. Well, there are thousands of jihadists who have come to Northern Syria from all around the world, over a thousands from France alone. Over 600 from Great Britain. over 100 from the United States. This is a global war. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has 10,000 fighters, and last year Boko Haram killed more people than Ebola. But the State Department, for years under Secretary Clinton, wouldn’t even list them as a terrorist group, even though their initial base camp was called Afghanistan, in honor of the Taliban. Now, you would think somewhere in here, people would get a hint. [CSPAN, Iowa Freedom Summit, 1/24/15]
Fact-Checkers Point Out Christie’s Claim Has Long Been Debunked
Politico: Clinton “Was Heeding The Advice Of Numerous Regional Experts” And There Is Doubt About “Whether The Designation Could Have Prevented” The Abduction Of School Girls. Politico fact-checked Christie’s claims about Clinton’s foreign policy record as secretary of state, noting that Clinton “was heeding the advice of numerous regional experts who argued in an open letter that” designating Boko Haram a terrorist group “could elevate the group's prestige” and that “It is not clear that the group ever pledged formal allegiance to al Qaeda, and the two groups were sometimes described as rivals.” Politico also explained that Boko Haram was designated a terrorist group a year before the Nigerian schoolgirls were abducted, “raising the question of whether the designation could have prevented their abduction.” From the July 20 Politico report:
Christie said that Clinton "fought" to keep the radical Islamist group Boko Haram off an official State Department terrorism watch list before she left government in 2012. In 2014, the group abducted hundreds of young women and girls who are still missing. Clinton, Christie concluded in perhaps his most explosive allegation, was "an apologist for an al Qaeda affiliate in Nigeria resulting in the capture of hundreds of young women."
It's true that Clinton opposed designating Boko Haram a Foreign Terrorist Organization, an act that imposes financial sanctions and other legal penalties on named groups and their supporters. While that may be hard to understand—the group already had a clear record of violence and radicalism — she was heeding the advice of numerous regional experts who argued in an open letter that doing so could elevate the group's prestige. The Nigerian government also opposed the designation.
John Kerry did name Boko Haram a terrorist organization after succeeding Clinton in 2013. But the girls were kidnapped the following year, raising the question of whether the designation could have prevented their abduction.
Finally, Christie described Boko Haram as "al Qaeda affiliate." It is not clear that the group ever pledged formal allegiance to al Qaeda, and the two groups were sometimes described as rivals. (Boko Haram publicly pledged allegiance to ISIS last year.) [Politico, 7/20/16]
CNN: “No Evidence” Clinton Personally “‘Fought’” To Keep Boko Haram Off Terror List. CNN’s Reality Check Team gave Christie’s claim a “false” rating, noting the lack of evidence that Clinton “was personally responsible for the delay in the designation.” CNN also pointed out the “delay” did not result in the kidnapping of Nigerian school girls, which occurred after Clinton left the State Department. From the July 20 fact-check (emphasis original):
Boko Haram, an affiliate of al Qaeda, was never designated a foreign terrorist organization during Clinton's leadership of the State Department. The department eventually labeled the group a terrorist organization while under Kerry in December 2013.
[...]
The kidnapping of the 200 Nigerian school girls occurred in April 2014.
While Clinton was head of the State Department at the time, Christie says she "fought" to keep them off the list and there is no evidence that she herself was personally responsible for the delay in the designation. Our verdict: false. [CNN.com, 7/20/16]
Wash. Post: “No Evidence That Clinton Played A Role Or ‘Fought’ To Keep Boko Haram Off The List” Or “That A Terrorist Designation Any Sooner Would Have Prevented” The Mass Kidnappings. Washington Post fact-checkers Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee wrote that “Christie grossly simplifie[d] a complex debate at the State Department -- which actually did not involve Clinton personally.” The Fact Checker blog noted that State Department officials conceded they could have moved faster with Boko Haram’s designation, but that “there is no evidence that Clinton played a role” and that there is also “no evidence” that the terrorist designation “any sooner would have prevented the kidnapping of the girls.” The fact check also pointed out that the hashtag campaign “came after Clinton had left the State Department.” From the July 19 article:
Christie grossly simplifies a complex debate at the State Department — which actually did not involve Clinton personally.
In 2014, the Fact Checker closely examined this issue, concluding that claims that Clinton was responsible for the decision betrays a misunderstanding of how the State Department works. Yes, Clinton was secretary of state in 2012. Designations of foreign terrorist groups are ultimately issued by the secretary of state. But the decision on how to handle the group was resolved before it ever reached her level, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.
State Department officials in 2012 vigorously debated how to treat Boko Haram, with the Bureau of Counterterrorism, headed then by Assistant Secretary Daniel Benjamin, leaning toward designation, and the Africa bureau, headed then by Assistant Secretary Johnnie Carson, urging caution. One big issue was that Nigeria was a government close to the United States — and Nigeria was adamantly opposed to the designation, arguing it risked entrenching Boko Haram. Nigerian officials also argued that a terrorist designation — which halts any flow of funds to the entity or people associated with it — would make it difficult for humanitarian aid to continue in the region where Boko Haram operated.
There was another, complicating issue: U.S. officials thought the Nigerian army had engaged in brutal human rights abuses in its efforts to fight Boko Haram. So a compromise was reached internally: The administration would name three leaders of Boko Haram as specially designated global terrorists while holding out the possibly of a broader designation of the entire group as a means of improving the behavior of Nigerian forces battling Boko Haram.
In any case, in 2013, the State Department formally designated Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization. Officials later conceded that, in retrospect, they could have moved a bit faster, but there is no evidence that Clinton played a role or “fought” to keep Boko Haram off the list. The internal debate did not rise to her level; it was handled by the deputy secretary of state.
There is no evidence that a terrorist designation any sooner would have prevented the kidnapping of the girls. As for the hashtag campaign, that came after Clinton had left the State Department. [The Washington Post, 7/19/16]
ABC: Clinton “Publicly … Denounced [Boko Haram].” An ABC News fact check rebutted Christie’s claim that Clinton personally “fought” to keep Boko Haram off the terrorist organization list and “responded to its mass kidnapping with a ‘hashtag strategy,’” noting that she publicly denounced the group and that “she was not Secretary of State when the kidnapping happened.” From the July 19 fact check (emphasis original):
Claim: Hillary Clinton is an “apologist” for Boko Haram. She and Obama responded to its mass kidnapping with a “hashtag campaign.”
Rating: False. It is based on a true fact, that Clinton’s State Department declined to list Boko Haram as a terrorist group out of concern that doing so would raise the group’s profile. But publicly Clinton has denounced the group, and she was not Secretary of State when the kidnapping happened.
[...]
Background: In 2011, Hillary Clinton’s State Dept. declined to list Boko Haram, the terrorist group that would abduct more than 200 schoolgirls from Chibok in 2014, as a foreign terrorist organization, against the recommendations of DOJ, FBI, CIA, and lawmakers, Josh Rogin reported for The Daily Beast in 2014.
That move, however, appears to have been based on a disagreement over whether listing Boko Haram would elevate its status. A State Department official said as much to Rogin in the same story. The assertion that she is an “apologist” appears to be a rhetorical exaggeration criticizing that decision. But publicly, Clinton has denounced Boko Haram. [ABC News, 7/20/16]
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