boyle, matthew

3 24 just popped back up q comment at trump presser led to job offer?

MATT BOYLE (GUEST): The Republicans have brought like a Nerf football to a gun fight, right? Like the Democrats are playing for a bloody war and the Republicans are playing Nerf football in the backyard, right? They’re not fighting like their country is on the line.

…

I think the biggest thing that the Republicans could do if they want to get this impeachment inquiry done right, is they should do, every Republican involved in it, so that means every member of the Judiciary Committee and every member of the Oversight Committee, and the Weaponization Committee, et cetera, all in the House Republican leadership should do a 90-day moratorium on Fox News Channel interviews, right? They should no longer go on that channel. And the reason why is because all they're doing is they're just doing this for these little 30 second, 60 second clips that they can then go send around to their fundraisers to make it look like they're doing something on social media, rather than actually drilling down and doing something, because as you laid out there, I mean, Congressman Donalds laid it out in that excellent clip there, they've got the evidence, right? Like, we know money made it from the Chinese into Joe Biden's bank account, right? Like, there's a check with Joe Biden's name on it, right? Like, why is that not front page news everywhere?

It's because the media infrastructure among Republicans is there is a perverse incentive to – for these, like the 30 second, 60 seconds little clips that they get when they go on Sean Hannity's program.

breitbart.com› environment › 2021 › 01 › 24 › expert-biden-actions-against-american-oil-gas-energy-production-could-kill-many-1-million-jobs

Jan 24, 2021Frank Macchiarola, senior vice president of Policy, Economics and Regulatory Affairs at the American Petroleum Institute (API), said in an interview onSiriusXM's Breitbart News Saturday with host Matt Boyle that if President Joe Biden puts a permanent ban on oil and gas development on federal waters and land, it could cost 1 million American jobs.

After Social Security cut comments, Trump turns to Breitbart reporter who said he’d consider serving as his next communications director

WRITTEN BY JUSTIN HOROWITZ

PUBLISHED 03/14/24

Prior to serving as clean-up man for Trump’s disastrous comments that he would cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, Breitbart Washington Bureau Chief Matt Boyle said he would consider serving as White House communications director in a hypothetical second Trump term.

During an interview with CNBC on March 11, Trump suggested that the country could bring down spending by cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.

“There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting, and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements,” Trump told CNBC.

Following his comments, Trump turned to Breitbart and Boyle to help with damage control. Boyle published an interview with Trump where he pledged to “never touch Social Security or Medicare.”

Several Trump-aligned figures and accounts are touting Breitbart’s story to cover for Trump’s gaffe.

Boyle covering for Trump comes after he said he would be interested in being the former president’s next communications director if he wins another term in November. Boyle made that comment during an interview with podcaster and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

“Are you trying to be the comms director of the Trump White House?” Bannon asked.

“Look, if President Trump ever asked me to do that I would definitely consider it,” Boyle responded.

Video CitationFrom the February 22, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Boyle also said he would be “open” to roles in Trump’s White House during a January interview with Bannon.

“I would do anything I could to help the cause,” Boyle said.

Video CitationFrom the January 11, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

According to Bannon, Trump has heaped praise on Boyle and his reporting.

“You’re the single best reporter covering President Trump and this is what he tells me all the time,” Bannon told Boyle during an interview.

Video file

Video CitationFrom the January 29, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Boyle has not been coy about his support for Trump, telling Bannon during a March 14 interview that a vote for Trump will solve America’s problems.

“It’s the immigration stuff, it’s the inflation stuff, every bit of your life is worse off now because Joe Biden is the president, because the Democrats are in power” Boyle told Bannon. “And it’s really simple how to change it, right? Like, all you have to do is vote for Trump.”

Video CitationFrom the March 14, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

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Frank Gaffney calls Sen. Chuck Schumer a “Court Jew” and claims the “psychology” of Jews is “pretty twisted”

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03/15/24 12:57 PM EDT

“Satanic" plant and facilitator of “genocide”: Right-wing media’s unhinged response to Olivia Rodrigo concert attendees receiving emergency contraceptives

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Pagination

Steve Bannon: “You have to be prepared to go to prison” for the Trump movement

03/15/24

ref

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/us/politics/trump-allies-news-media.html

no lnx

Trump Allies Target Journalists Over Coverage Deemed Hostile to White House

The operation has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at prominent news organizations.

By Kenneth P. Vogel and Jeremy W. Peters

Published Aug. 25, 2019

Updated Aug. 26, 2019

WASHINGTON — A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.

It is the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting. Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.

The group has already released information about journalists at CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times — three outlets that have aggressively investigated Mr. Trump — in response to reporting or commentary that the White House’s allies consider unfair to Mr. Trump and his team or harmful to his re-election prospects.

Operatives have closely examined more than a decade’s worth of public posts and statements by journalists, the people familiar with the operation said. Only a fraction of what the network claims to have uncovered has been made public, the people said, with more to be disclosed as the 2020 election heats up. The research is said to extend to members of journalists’ families who are active in politics, as well as liberal activists and other political opponents of the president.

It is not possible to independently assess the claims about the quantity or potential significance of the material the pro-Trump network has assembled. Some involved in the operation have histories of bluster and exaggeration. And those willing to describe its techniques and goals may be trying to intimidate journalists or their employers.

But the material publicized so far, while in some cases stripped of context or presented in misleading ways, has proved authentic, and much of it has been professionally harmful to its targets.

It is clear from the cases to date that among the central players in the operation isArthur Schwartz, a combative 47-year-old conservative consultant who is a friend and informal adviser toDonald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. Mr. Schwartz has worked with some of the right’s most aggressive operatives, including the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon.

“If the @nytimes thinks this settles the matter we can expose a few of their other bigots,” Mr. Schwartz tweeted on Thursday in response to an apologetic tweet from a Times journalist whose anti-Semitic social media posts had just been revealed by the operation. “Lots more where this came from.”

The operation is the latest step in a long-running effort by President Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting.

The information unearthed by the operation has been commented on and spread by officials inside the Trump administration and re-election campaign, as well as conservative activists and right-wing news outlets such as Breitbart News. In the case of the Times editor, the news was first published by Breitbart, immediately amplified on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. and, among others, Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, and quickly became the subject of a Breitbart interview with Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary and communications director.

The White House press office said that neither the president nor anyone in the White House was involved in or aware of the operation, and that neither the White House nor the Republican National Committee was involved in funding it.

The Trump campaign said it was unaware of, and not involved in, the effort, but suggested that it served a worthy purpose. “We know nothing about this, but it’s clear that the media has a lot of work to do to clean up its own house,” said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director.

The campaign is consistent with Mr. Trump’s long-running effort to delegitimize critical reporting and brand the news media as an “enemy of the people.” The president has relentlessly sought to diminish the credibility of news organizations and cast them as politically motivated opponents.

[Latest Updates: 2020 Election

Asked about Russian bounties, Trump says his phone call with Putin focused on ‘other things.’

A new poll shows Biden tied with Trump in Georgia.

The president floats the idea of giving his renomination speech in Washington, a likely Hatch Act violation.

See more updates]

Journalism, he said in a tweet last week, is “nothing more than an evil propaganda machine for the Democrat Party.”

The operation has compiled social media posts from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and stored images of the posts that can be publicized even if the user deletes them, said the people familiar with the effort. One claimed that the operation had unearthed potentially “fireable” information on “several hundred” people.

“I am sure there will be more scalps,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide to Mr. Trump who is a friend of Mr. Schwartz.

Mr. Nunberg and others who are familiar with the campaign described it as meant to expose what they see as the hypocrisy of mainstream news outlets that have reported on the president’s inflammatory language regarding race.

Image

Arthur Schwartz, a conservative consultant who is a friend and informal adviser to the president’s eldest son.]

“Two can play at this game,” he said. “The media has long targeted Republicans with deep dives into their social media, looking to caricature all conservatives and Trump voters as racists.”

But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for — or as a warning not to pursue — coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power.

“If it’s clearly retaliatory, it’s clearly an attack, it’s clearly not journalism,” said Leonard Downie Jr., who was the executive editor of The Post from 1991 to 2008. Tension between a president and the news media that covers him is nothing new, Mr. Downie added. But an organized, wide-scale political effort to intentionally humiliate journalists and others who work for media outlets is.

“It’s one thing for Spiro Agnew to call everyone in the press ‘nattering nabobs of negativism,’” he said, referring to the former vice president’s famous critique of how journalists covered President Richard M. Nixon. “And another thing to investigate individuals in order to embarrass them publicly and jeopardize their employment.”

A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, said in a statement that such tactics were taking the president’s campaign against a free press to a new level.

“They are seeking to harass and embarrass anyone affiliated with the leading news organizations that are asking tough questions and bringing uncomfortable truths to light,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “The goal of this campaign is clearly to intimidate journalists from doing their job, which includes serving as a check on power and exposing wrongdoing when it occurs. The Times will not be intimidated or silenced.”

In a statement, a CNN spokesman said that when government officials, “and those working on their behalf, threaten and retaliate against reporters as a means of suppression, it’s a clear abandonment of democracy for something very dangerous.”

The operation is targeting the news media by using one of the most effective weapons of political combat — deep and laborious research into the public records of opponents to find contradictions, controversial opinions or toxic affiliations. The liberal group Media Matters for America helped pioneer close scrutiny of public statements by conservative media personalities.

Those familiar with the campaign described it as meant to expose what they see as the hypocrisy of mainstream news outlets that have covered the president’s inflammatory language regarding race.Credit...George Etheredge/The New York Times]

The conservative operative James O’Keefe has twisted that concept in ways inconsistent with traditional journalistic ethics, using false identities, elaborate cover stories and undercover videos to entrap journalists and publicize embarrassing statements, often in misleading ways, to undercut the credibility of what he considers news media biased in favor of liberals.

In the case of the pro-Trump network, research into journalists is being deployed for the political benefit of the White House. It is targeting not only high-profile journalists who challenge the administration, but also anyone who works for any news organization that members of the network see as hostile to Mr. Trump, no matter how tangential that job may be to the coverage of his presidency. And it is being used explicitly as retribution for coverage.

Some reporters have been warned that they or their news organizations could be targets, creating the impression that the campaign is intended in part to deter them from aggressive coverage as well as to inflict punishment after an article has been published.

Trained as a lawyer, Mr. Schwartz has endeared himself to members of the president’s family by becoming one of their most aggressive defenders, known for badgering and threatening reporters and others he believes have wronged the Trumps.

He has publicly gone after Republicans he views as disloyal, including the former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, about whom he admitted spreading an unsubstantiated rumor.He has called himself a “troll on Twitter,” which is where he has boasted of being aware of, or having access to, damaging information on dozens of journalists at CNN and The Times that could be deployed if those outlets ran afoul of Mr. Trump or his allies.

The operation’s tactics were on display last week, seemingly in response to two pieces in The Times that angered Mr. Trump’s allies. The paper’s editorial board published an editorial on Wednesday accusing Mr. Trump of fomenting anti-Semitism, and the newsroom published a profile on Thursday morning of Ms. Grisham, the new White House press secretary, which included unflattering details about her employment history.

One person involved in the effort said the pro-Trump forces, aware ahead of time about the coverage of Ms. Grisham, were prepared to respond. Early Thursday morning, soon after the profile appeared online, Breitbart News published an article that documented anti-Semitic andracist tweets written a decade ago by Tom Wright-Piersanti, who was in college at the time and has since become an editor on the Times’ politics desk. The Times said it was reviewing the matter and considered the posts “a clear violation of our standards.”

Mr. Schwartz tweeted a link to the Breitbart piece before 7 a.m., which Donald Trump Jr. retweeted to his 3.8 million followers— the first of about two dozen times that the president’s son shared the article or its contents.Other prominent Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, joined in highlighting the report.

Image

Mr. Schwartz is a friend and informal adviser to Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times]

Breitbart’s article quoted several people or groups with close ties to Mr. Schwartz, including Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Germany, and the Zionist Organization of America. It was written by the site’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, whose relationship with Mr. Schwartz started when Mr. Bannon ran the website.

Mr. Boyle’s article included a reference to the Times profile of Ms. Grisham, which it characterized as “attacking White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham.” Mr. Wright-Piersanti was uninvolved in the editing of the article about Ms. Grisham.

The tweets revealed in the Breitbart article quickly spread to other conservative outlets favored by the president and his allies, including the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin.

Mr. Wright-Piersanti apologized on Twitter on Thursday morning and deleted offensive tweets. Mr. Schwartz then issued his warning that he had further damaging information about Times employees.

Mr. Wright-Piersanti, 32, said the tweets, posted when he was a college student with a Twitter following consisting mostly of personal acquaintances, were “my lame attempts at edgy humor to try to get a rise out of my friends.”

But he said “they’re not funny, they’re clearly offensive,” adding, “I feel deep shame for them, and I am truly, honestly sorry that I wrote these.”

He said he had forgotten about the tweets as he started a career in journalism.

“For my generation, the generation that came of age in the internet, all the youthful mistakes that you made get preserved in digital amber, and no matter how much you change and mature and grow up, it’s always out there, waiting to be discovered,” Mr. Wright-Piersanti said.

Like Mr. Wright-Piersanti, other targets of the pro-Trump network have been young people who grew up with social media and wrote the posts in question when they were in their teens or early 20s, in most cases before they became professional journalists.

Image

The photojournalist Mohammed Elshamy in 2014 in South Sudan. Tweets he wrote in his teens became the basis for articles in conservative news outlets.Credit...Andrei Pungovschi]

A week after a White House reporter for CNN sparred with Mr. Trump during a news conference, Mr. Schwartz highlighted a tweet by the reporter from 2011, when the reporter was in college, that used an anti-gay slur. Other similar tweets quickly surfaced, and the reporter apologized, though Mr. Schwartz has continued to antagonize the reporter on Twitter.

In recent months, Mr. Schwartz highlighted a nearly decade-old tweet in which a reporter for The Post had repeated in an ambiguous manner a slur used by a politician.

In March, Mr. Schwartz tweeted a link to an article from Breitbart, written by Mr. Boyle, about a reporter from Business Insider whose Instagram account included anti-Trump references and a photograph of the reporter demonstrating against the president.

In July, around the time CNN published an article exposing old posts by a Trump appointee spreading suggestions that Barack Obama was a Muslim whose loyalty to the United States was in question, Mr. Schwartz resurfaced anti-Semitic tweets from 2011 by a CNN photo editor. Mr. Schwartz suggested that a CNN reporter who specializes in unearthing problematic archival content should “look into the social media activities of your employees.”

The tweets became the basis for several articles in conservative news outlets and hundreds of tweets from conservatives targeting the photo editor, Mohammed Elshamy, which did not stop even after he resigned under pressure from CNN and apologized.

“It felt like a coordinated attack,” said Mr. Elshamy, who said he had received death threats. “It was overwhelming.”

Mr. Elshamy, who is now 25, said he posted the tweets when he was 15 and 16 years old, growing up in Egypt, when he was still learning English and did not fully grasp the meaning of the words.

“I was repeating slogans heard on the streets during a highly emotional time in my nation’s history,” he said. “I believe that my subsequent work and views over the years redeems for the mistakes I made as a kid.”

While he said he understands “the severity and harm of my comments,” he questioned the motivation of the campaign that cost him his job. “It is a very dirty tactic that they are using to cause as much harm as they can to anyone who is affiliated with these media outlets,” he said. “It actually feels like a competition and every termination or vilification is a point for them.”

Mr. Bannon, at the time the head of Breitbart, oversaw the site’s efforts in 2015 to attack Megyn Kelly, then of Fox News, after she called out Mr. Trump for tweets disparaging women as “fat pigs,” “dogs” and “slobs.” In an interview, he said the work that Mr. Schwartz was undertaking should be seen as a sign that Mr. Trump’s supporters were committed to executing a frontal assault on news media they considered adversarial.

“A culture war is a war,” he said. “There are casualties in war. And that’s what you’re seeing.”

https://thinkprogress.org/know-about-peter-w-smith-fd05b9284cbd

...

A couple of decades later, Gingrich was a top adviser to Trump and his campaign. Smith was seeking to connect with Russian hackers to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton.

Smith had ties to Breitbart, the online news outlet run by Trump’s chief strategist

While Smith’s ties to Gingrich goes back decades, he more recently became acquainted with Matt Boyle, the Washington Political Editor of Breitbart. That publication was run by Steve Bannon until he left, first to join the Trump campaign and then the White House as chief strategist.

Smith’s connection to Boyle was revealed, ironically, when his emails were hacked and released on a website called DC Leaks. The emails have been taken offline but are [doc] accessible through archive.org.

http://web.archive.org/web/20170217164707/http://dcleaks.com:80/index.php/the-united-states-republican-party/

Smith was collaborating with Boyle on efforts to try to force out Paul Ryan as speaker, a cause shared by Bannon.

Boyle was closely connected to the Trump campaign. After Trump was elected, Boyle was granted a rare Oval Office interview.

ref

http://web.archive.org/web/20170217164707/http://dcleaks.com:80/index.php/the-united-states-republican-party/

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/5-manufactured-news-scandals-produced-and-promoted-breitbart-news-and-new-trump

groundswell

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/breitbart-editor-the-goal-is-the-full-destruction-and-elimination-of-the-entire-mainstream-media

Breitbart Editor: The Goal Is The ‘Full Destruction And Elimination Of The Entire Mainstream Media’

BySafiyah Riddle | July 20, 2017 3:11 pm

At yesterday’s Phyllis Schlafly Collegians D.C. Summit, an event for college students hosted by the late Schlafly’s group Eagle Forum, Breitbart’s Washington political editor Matt Boyle boasted that his publication’s goal is to completely destroy and eliminate the “mainstream media,” leaving Brietbart and other fringe organizations as the only available media outlets.

“The goal eventually is the full destruction and elimination of the entire mainstream media,” Boyle said. “We envision a day where CNN is no longer in business; we envision a day where The New York Times closes its doors. I think that day is possible, I think that we can get there.”

“But when that happens,” he added, “the public still needs an information stream. And again, as much as we love Trump’s Twitter account, as much as we love the White House press releases and briefings and all that, there needs to be an independent and strong media in the United States, and that’s where we come in.”

Breitbart posted about Boyle’s comments yesterday and we obtained audio at the event:

http://mediamatters.org/blog/**2011**/10/20/report-daily-caller-employees-were-embarrassed/183946

Last month, Daily Caller reporter Matthew Boylepublished a story that was basically catnip for the anti-regulation crowd. Citing a court brief from the Environmental Protection Agency,Boyle wrote that the EPA was "asking for taxpayers to shoulder the burden of up to 230,000 new bureaucrats -- at a cost of $21 billion -- to attempt to implement" new climate change regulations. Boyle also took to Twitter to broadcast how EPA administrator "LISA JACKSON wants an ARMY OF 230k BUREAUCRATS."

Predictably, the story got picked up by Fox News, the office of Sen. James Inhofe, and the usual climate-change-denial suspects. Unfortunately for them, Boyle's story was 100% false. Boyle completely misread the court brief, which detailed how the EPA had avoided the scenario he described.

Boyle's misfire was widely ridiculed, but rather than admit fault and correct the error, the Daily Caller stuck to their guns. Executive editor David Martosko compounded the damage to the publication's credibility by issuing a snide comment to Politico and following that with a misleading editor's note on the Caller website.

Apparently outside observers weren't the only ones aghast at Daily Caller's complete lack of standards. According to a report this morning by FishbowlDC's Betsy Rothstein, "newsroom sources" at the Caller were dismayed by Martosko's defense of Boyle's "pointedly bogus" story and "feared their reputations would be sullied by the widespread negative attention":

Martosko has undoubtedly been a controversial figure from the start. Newsroom sources say his profound defense of reporter Matthew Boyle and his recent EPA piece troubled reporters who believed the story was false and feared their reputations would be sullied by the widespread negative attention the ordeal received in publications such as Politico and parts of the right-wing media. They couldn't conceive why their editor was defending a story many considered pointedly bogus.

I suppose it's slightly reassuring that at least some people at the Caller are capable of acknowledging facts and reality -- too bad their executive editor doesn't seem to be one of them.

UPDATE (11/18):Politico reports that the EPA debacle "has raised larger questions" about the "rigor" of Daily Caller's reporting:

Five months after Martosko's hiring, that spur-of-the-moment decision is looking less inspired. Martosko's background and approach to the job - particularly his decision to run, and then double down on, an erroneous report that the Environmental Protection Agency was proposing to hire 230,000 new employees - has embarrassed some Daily Caller staffers and contributed to their departures. And it has raised larger questions about whether Carlson is serious about his promise of a publication that may approach stories with a conservative point of view, but is dedicated to reporting them out with the same rigor as the New York Times.

The EPA story was published in September and ended up as a Drudge-linked and Fox-fueled viral hit cited by members of Congress.

[...]

[A]s the Daily Caller took round after round of fire in the left-leaning blogosphere over the story and Martosko defiantly stood by the story in a subsequent editor's note, some staffers cringed.

"People were just really embarrassed, and a lot of us were upset with how it was being handled," one former staffer told POLITICO.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/09/29/updated-daily-caller-compounds-error-with-bad-r/182971

This week we caught Daily Caller reporter Matthew Boyle completely misreading a court brief to claim that the "EPA is asking taxpayers to fund up to 230,000 new government workers" to process greenhouse gas regulations "at an estimated cost of $21 billion." In reality, EPA was describing a scenario that it avoided by issuing a rule in May 2010 significantly reducing the number of facilities required to obtain permits for greenhouse gas emissions.

Boyle's report -- which was circulated by Sen. Inhofe's office and made its way to Fox News -- was just wrong. But rather than issue a correction, Daily Caller doubled down, telling Politico that "anyone who has spent more than a few months in Washington knows" EPA wouldn't try to "limit its own power." As more commentators noticed this brazen disregard for the facts, The Daily Caller came up with a more substantive response, still insisting the story "was spot-on and accurate":

Our story about the EPA was spot-on and accurate. It's true that the agency's court filing outlined a "tailoring rule" as a more gradual approach to hiring 230,000 people at a cost of $21 billion. But the EPA was clear that "the Tailoring Rule is calculated to move toward eventual full compliance with the statutory threshold" -- meaning it's not a question of if the EPA wants to triple its budget, but when.

Nope. The brief did not present the tailoring rule "as a more gradual approach to hiring 230,000 people at a cost of $21 billion." It presented the rule as a way to circumvent a scenario in which state and local agencies would need 230,000 employees to review 6.1 million permit applications. The rule phases in compliance, "thereby relieving the overwhelming regulatory burdens on both permitting authorities and literally millions of stationary sources."

You don't need 230,000 new workers if you don't have a massive flood of permit applications to process all at once. Instead of 6.1 million sources requiring operating permits, EPA expects 15,550 -- 97 percent of which can add greenhouse gases to the permits they already have for other pollutants.

The brief adds that "this phase-in process would also allow EPA time to develop streamlining measures" necessary for broader enforcement:

After considerable study and receipt of public comment, EPA determined that by phasing in the statutory thresholds, it could almost immediately achieve most of the emission benefits that would result from strict adherence to the literal 100/250 tpy [tons per year] threshold while avoiding the permit gridlock that unquestionably would result from the immediate application of that threshold. This phase-in process would also allow EPA time to develop streamlining measures that could eventually ease administration at the statutory thresholds. Thus, EPA promulgated the Tailoring Rule to 'phase[] in the applicability of these programs to GHG sources, starting with the largest GHG emitters.'

According to the Supreme Court, greenhouse gases are an "air pollutant" under the Clean Air Act. The threshold for regulation of conventional pollutants under the Act is 100-250 tons per year, but emissions of greenhouse gases are much greater than, for instance, lead and sulfur dioxide. So the tailoring rule allows EPA to regulate emission permits starting at 75,000-100,000 tons per year, which still "captures approximately 86% of the emissions of greenhouse gases that would be captured by immediate, full application of the statutory 100/250 tpy threshold." The threshold will not be lowered past 50,000 at any point before April 2016.

The brief also states that by May 2016, EPA will have conducted "a five-year study" of the greenhouse gas regulations and will issue a rule "addressing what action can be taken" regarding smaller sources of emissions. The tailoring rule, EPA says, is designed to "move toward" compliance with the 100-250 tpy threshold, unless the "impossibility of full administrative implementation persists."

As the National Journal reported, industry groups know they can't overturn the Supreme Court's 2007 decision establishing EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, "so instead industry lawyers are homing in" on the tailoring rule, which if successfully challenged "will force EPA back into the politically and practically untenable position of regulating all those millions of entities."

But there's no evidence that Boyle was aware of any of this until today, when his editors began scrambling for an explanation. In fact, the article didn't even address the tailoring rule at all.

UPDATE:

Daily Caller now has an editor's post up defending the story (read: writing what they wish the initial article had said and claiming that's "what we've been saying since Monday.") The post notes that "Sen. James Inhofe weighed in, supporting our report." Oh good.

Daily Caller remains in the wrong for the reasons explained above. And they still don't seem to understand the basics of the issue, claiming EPA is "in court to ask a court for permission" to use the tailoring rule and that "new regulations (as written) would force it to hire those 230,000 new federal employees." EPA is already implementing these permitting requirements and is in court to defend the tailoring rule. EPA didn't write new regulations that would require 230,000 employees, it wrote a regulation to avoid that scenario after the permitting requirements were automatically triggered by the vehicle emissions rule.

But you don't need to get into those details to know that Daily Caller simply published a bad report. Just read the story. Boyle wrote (twice!) that EPA is "asking for taxpayers to shoulder the burden of up to 230,000 new bureaucrats -- at a cost of $21 billion -- to attempt to implement the rules." And after the story was posted, Boyle tweeted this:

tag:

http://mediamatters.org/people/matthew-boyle

POWER PLAY

2016’s Angry Populist Enforcer

Breitbart.com’s Washington political editor is an anti-establishment zealot, whose support even The Donald craves. How did Matthew Boyle gain such power in the presidential race?

Lloyd Grove

LLOYD GROVE

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/23/2016-s-angry-populist-enforcer.html

11.22.15 10:01 PM ET

Matthew Boyle—the recently named Washington political editor of Breitbart.com, the right-wing populist news site founded by the late controversialist Andrew Breitbart—will never be mistaken for a slick Beltway insider.

Yet in just a few short years, the 28-year-old Boyle—pudgy, rumpled, and baby-faced, possessed of a manic energy fueled by Marlboro Lights and Mountain Dew—has leveraged his Stakhanovite zeal and pugnacious reporting style, described by operatives and competitors alike as bullying and relentless if occasionally misguided, to become a gravitational force in the Republican cosmos.

“You’ve got a political elite, but also a financial elite and a cultural elite out in Hollywood, and you have to be aggressive with these people to get answers out of them,” he tells me over lunch at Bistro Bis on Capitol Hill, just the sort of expense-account Washington watering hole where Boyle is an alien presence.

Breitbart News’s Machiavellian publicist, former GOP congressional aide Kurt Bardella, has chosen the upscale venue for our meeting.

“It’s not like it’s fun for me,” Boyle continues concerning his combative M.O. “I’d much rather not have to do this. But I feel like to get information from people who don’t give it out, you have to be a little bit rough-and-tumble with them.”

He pauses to give free rein to a hacking cough—a symptom, no doubt, of endless days on the road chasing presidential candidates, sleep-deprived nights filing 30 stories a week (a Brobdingnagian output barely reduced by his new management responsibilities), and his customary pack a day.

Along with ever-present bottles of his favorite sugary, caffeine-infused soft drink, plus a river of hot coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, it adds up to a perfect storm of unhealthy living.

“I’m highly caffeinated at all times,” Boyle declares.

Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon—tagged as “the most dangerous political operative in America” by Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Green—has had his eye on the hyperkinetic Boyle since 2011, when the American University journalism school dropout joined the staff of The Daily Caller and began posting rabble-rousing stories on the conservative website.

Notoriously, Boyle’s methodical campaign to ask hundreds of GOP lawmakers, one by one, if they favored the immediate resignation of then-Attorney General Eric Holder over the “Fast and Furious” scandal, and then publish a running tally of Holder’s critics, prompted a public paroxysm of indignation by Holder in November 2011.

“You guys need to—you need to stop this,” he sputtered at Boyle’s Daily Caller colleague Neil Munro, now a fellow editor at Breitbart, when Munro approached Holder after a press conference. “It’s not an organic thing that’s just happening,” the attorney general complained. “You guys are behind it.”

Bannon believed that Boyle fit like a velvet glove over an iron fist into Breitbart’s renegade, anti-establishment ethos that appeals to an estimated 18 million readers who comprise a fired-up activist base in Republican presidential primary politics.

Thus Boyle enjoys direct access to many of the White House wannabes attempting to woo that base; before Rick Perry ended his anemic campaign, Boyle watched the former Texas governor hem a pair of trousers with a needle and thread in his hotel room.

More recently he took a ride in a small helicopter with Dr. Ben Carson, and was planning to spend six days in Haiti watching ophthalmologist Rand Paul perform cataract surgeries until the Kentucky senator’s poll numbers began to erode and Boyle decided he couldn’t spare the time.

Boyle says he has the personal cellphone number of the Republican frontrunner he refers to privately, in a tone of respect if not reverence, as “Mr. Trump.”

Donald Trump, for his part, has returned the favor by granting an endless stream of “exclusives” to Boyle—notably Trump’s vicious personal attack on BuzzFeed political reporter McKay Coppins, a former writer forThe Daily Beast when it was merged with Newsweek, for Coppins’s unflattering profile of the reality television star/real estate mogul.

Boyle’s February 2014 hatchet job so faithfully took Trump’s side of the controversy that the press criticism site Mediaite reported the flap under the headline: “Breitbart Now Donald Trump’s PR Firm.”

More recently, Coppins wrote a BuzzFeed story quoting anonymous Breitbart employees to the effect that Trump provides financial support to his favorite news site in return for positive coverage—a charge vehemently denied by Bannon, who says the frontrunner, unlike other GOP candidates, hasn’t even bought advertising space.

“There’s a revolt going on in this country, and the old paradigm—controlled and financed by a collection from the Party of Davos—is cratering,” says Bannon, a wealthy former Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood producer who, by a strange circumstance, owns a lucrative stake in Seinfeld.

“There’s a tsunami of rage from populist conservatives,” he says. Breitbart News—and Boyle—seek to harness it.

***

In early 2012, after Andrew Breitbart’s untimely death of a heart attack at age 43, Bannon assumed control of the news site’s content, attracted investors (reportedly including hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a major donor to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz) and supervised the operation’s rapid expansion at Breitbart News’s headquarters in a mansion near the Capitol Building.

“We had a punch list, seven new verticals, and we knew we had to hire a whole bunch of people,” Bannon says. “Andrew thought the world of Matt, was kind of his mentor when he was at The Daily Caller, and Matt was our No. 1 draft pick. He was a young guy, and had a fighting spirit and aggressiveness which was perfect for us—and which you can’t coach.”

Hiring Boyle away from The Daily Caller the month after the 2012 election cycle ended, “we built a whole team around him to take this whole thing to the next level,” Bannon says. “He’s really a fascinating young man.”

Boyle, who was raised until his early teens in the Boston suburb of Canton, Massachusetts, moved with his family to Idaho, Minnesota, and ultimately Florida as his father, a produce and dairy buyer for supermarket chains, kept changing jobs as a result of corporate takeovers.

Today, Boyle lives with his younger brother, an insurance actuary for Geico, in a two-bedroom apartment in the suburbs of Maryland, far from the Washington social swirl.

Before he took on his new editorial duties, he toiled long into the night, working his sources on the phone, and seldom awoke before noon.

Boyle apparently sees little value in the musty journalistic traditions of objectivity, balance, and dispassionate analysis—an impression held by several Republican staffers toiling in Congress and the current presidential campaign.

“He’s more of an activist than a journalist,” claimed one presidential campaign operative, who, like half a dozen other GOP staffers interviewed by The Daily Beast, spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to arouse Boyle’s ire.

Freelance writer and fire-breathing blogger Charles C. Johnson, whose Gotnews.com website mixes politics and celebrity scandal, says the prevailing view of Boyle as a would-be player, rather than a mere observer, is not far off the mark.

“I think the tension within him is the tension between being an activist and being sort of a straitlaced reporter,” says Johnson, who himself is so far from being a “straitlaced reporter”—indeed, he’s infamous for his unquenchable belligerence—that he was recently banned from Twitter, a punishment yet to be visited upon supporters of the Islamic State.

Yet Johnson is probably in a position to understand Boyle’s passions better than most, having collaborated with him at The Daily Caller on widely criticized stories alleging that New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez had patronized underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic.

Menendez was later indicted by the feds on unrelated corruption charges, although the FBI stated in a court filing that it found some “corroboration” for the still-unproven sex allegations—which Boyle took as vindication.

“I think he has more chosen the straitlaced reporter role,” says Johnson. “I think his dislike of the Washington establishment comes not from an ideological point of view, but more from a temperamental dislike. He feels the establishment of this country has betrayed the country, and no one really covers them with the attention they deserve.”

***

Boyle’s own account of himself is in sync with Johnson’s, but it also contains the sort of conversion narrative that is reminiscent of explanations of how zealous Trotskyites transformed themselves into fervent Neocons.

“I used to be a liberal—I voted for Obama in 2008,”Boyle confides. “I don’t regret that decision. It was based on what he said he was going to do. He said he was going to change the country. He didn’t do that, though.”

Boyle’s ideological epiphany, if that’s what it was, occurred with the explosion of the Tea Party movement in early 2010, when he was co-editor of The Gargoyle, the campus newspaper of Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida.

Curious about widespread news reports that tea partiers displayed a racist streak in their ad hominem trashing of the nation’s first black president, Boyle attended a Tea Party rally in St. Augustine—and freelanced his first story for The Daily Caller.

The experience of interviewing rally participants convinced him that the racism charge was a big lie perpetrated by the media-political establishment. The scales fell from his eyes.

“I’m somebody who believes journalists should be open about their personal beliefs and whatnot,” Boyle says. “I’m a conservative. I believe that the federal government is too big. I think they’re ineffective, they’re incompetent, and both political parties are to blame—not just Democrats or Republicans. It’s an out-of-touch political class in Washington.”

Like the rowdy outlet Boyle now represents, he’s by no means bound by the conventional rules of reportage as taught in the nation’s journalism schools and practiced, or at least peddled, by such establishment bulwarks as The New York Times and The Washington Post. He gets emotionally involved.

For instance, Boyle had a visceral reaction to the Fox News-sponsored Republican candidate debate last August in Cleveland, where the moderators peppered Trump—a Breitbart favorite because of his angry-populist appeal and harsh stance on immigration—with questions about his “temperament” and business failures, and singled him out for his refusal, at the time, to pledge his support to whoever becomes the Republican nominee, and not to run as a third-party candidate.

“They came after him with gotcha questions… He was unfairly treated,” says Boyle, who by his own account went into a tailspin.

“I felt like a part of me died inside when I watched that debate,” he says. “I was mad. The first question that was asked”—Bret Baier’s hand-raising “endorse-your-rival” challenge to the 11 contenders onstage—“was out of line. ‘Will you pledge to support whoever wins the Republican nomination?’ So they all endorsed each other except for Trump. Jeb, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, they all endorsed each other! That’s exactly what’s wrong with politics. They put politics over country! They put politics over public safety! Every single one of them on that stage, except for Trump!”

After that debate, Boyle soothed his wrath and depression by heading over to the nearby Horseshoe Casino and gambling into the wee hours at the craps table.

In his previous visits to the casino while in Cleveland for the debate, Boyle says he was up $500. But in his pre-dawn, post-debate doldrums, “I probably lost $300 of that back.”

Needless to say, he has plenty of detractors.

Betsy Rothstein, who writes a media column for his former employer, The Daily Caller, seldom loses an opportunity to mock him.

Recently, she recounted a “semi-erotic” incident in which Trump took a black sharpie and autographed a shoulder of Boyle’s shirt.

“Suffice it to say,” Rothstein wrote, “Boyle is never washing his shoulder or his shirt again.”

His admirers, meanwhile, include Trump supporter Ann Coulter, who says: “Boyle is a one-man investigative news division, the most productive person in media and amazingly cheerful for someone with such a gargantuan output. I assume his critics are mostly driven by envy.”

Yet Boyle’s apparent distaste for Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, allegedly a tribune of the Beltway establishment, led him to write a series of anti-Ryan stories in the run-up to last month’s election of the new speaker of the House—stories that did little to enhance his reputation for clairvoyance. Sample headlines: “Conservatives Rally Against ‘Mafioso-Style’ Paul Ryan Speakership Demands”; “At Least 75 Percent Opposed: Freedom Caucus Likely To Nix Paul Ryan’s Speakership Bid”; “Paul Ryan Silent As Permanent Political Class Cooks Up Giant Backroom Big Government Budget, Debt Ceiling Deal.”

And later, after Ryan was elected speaker with the support of a supermajority of the Freedom Caucus: “Paul Ryan, House GOP Leaders Set The Stage For Coming Cave To Obama’s Syrian Refugee Resettlement Program.”

On the other hand, Boyle can take a measure of credit for relentlessly reporting—and possibly stoking, according to GOP Hill staffers—the internal right-wing opposition to House Speaker John Boehner, who resigned last month under mounting pressure.

***

Several operatives interviewed by The Daily Beast said they have the impression that Boyle habitually decides what the story is before he gathers the facts, using evidence that supports his thesis and discarding evidence that contradicts it.

Boyle argues otherwise.

“When you’re doing a big investigative story about people in power, you’re not looking at it like a prosecutor who’s trying to put somebody in jail, proving that they broke the law,” he says, “but it’s similar to that. What you’re doing is building a case in the court of public opinion, so what you’re doing is gathering information and evidence that’s going to back up a theory… It’s a constant quest for more information.”

If the evidence backing up the theory isn’t forthcoming, he says, then he simply doesn’t publish.

Such was the case with a rather eccentric theory that he still believes that he had good reason to credit, but could never confirm.

Even now, Boyle refuses to dismiss the idea that New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson lost her job in May 2014 not because of her divisive management style, as the ample public record indicates, but instead as a direct result of her decision to kill a damaging story about the love life and questionable bank loans of Mississippi’s senior senator, Republican Thad Cochran, who was involved in a nasty primary race against Tea Party opponent Chris McDaniel.

Boyle, who spent two months in Mississippi covering the ugly campaign in which several McDaniel supporters videotaped Cochran’s Alzheimer’s-suffering wife in a nursing home, while another McDaniel partisan committed suicide in the aftermath of criminal charges, wrote about Cochran’s foreign taxpayer-funded travel with his administrative assistant (now wife) Kay Webber.

Times Washington reporter Jonathan Weisman was plowing similar ground, but his story never saw print—leading Boyle to embark on a convoluted chase to confirm that Abramson personally spiked the story and was fired as a result.

Apparently Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. was so embarrassed that his top editor was a closet Cochran supporter that she had to go.

“Clearly we did not find enough evidence on this, as is the case with many stories we look into,” says Boyle, who disputes the assertion by Cochran campaign staffers and other reporters who covered the race that his stories for Breitbart reflected a pro-McDaniel bias.

“There were plenty of sources at the time with positions of knowledge who had suspected something,” Boyle says. “There were also plenty of coincidences that may have pointed to something like that… I can’t close the book on this until further evidence comes out.”

Weisman, now an editor in the Times Washington bureau, calls Boyle’s Jill Abramson theory “the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard… The idea that a story about Thad Cochran and his now-wife had anything to do with anything going on in the executive suites at The New York Times is nuts.”

Weisman adds: “It doesn’t necessarily surprise me that Matt Boyle made that assumption.”

Echoing the Breitbart gospel, Boyle says the Washington establishment’s fondness for omnibus trade agreements and comprehensive immigration reform is a manifestation of a phenomenon in which “the political elites are consistently trying to checkmate the American worker.”

He adds: “I’m not writing for the people on Capitol Hill. I’m not writing for the Acela Corridor, or the island of Manhattan, or the District of Columbia, or the Beltway crowd. I’m writing for the people in Middle America, the people all around the country who are interested in learning what’s happening in these power structures.”

Charles Johnson, meanwhile, says of Boyle: “He hates a lot of people… I think in the final analysis he wants to call the shots on things.”

This he seems adept at in the foothills of the presidential campaign, before the first votes are cast; whether Boyle’s influence increases or wanes nearer the political peak will be its own fascinating subplot in the storms and scrambles ahead.

bs bio

ASHINGTON D.C. October 1, 2015 – The Breitbart News Network (@BreitbartNews) announced today that it has promoted reporter Matthew Boyle to the role of Washington Political Editor and will focus on investigating reporting and major campaign coverage of the 2016 cycle.

“Boyle is a machine who has been at the forefront of covering every major trend in politics in recent years,” said Breitbart’s Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon. “To our audience, Boyle has been recognized as one of the few reporters in Washington who isn’t afraid to ruffle the feathers of the establishment and relentlessly tell the stories grassroots conservatives care about.”

Breitbart.com is now the 265th most trafficked website in America, according to top web analytics firm Alexa. By comparison, Breitbart is outperforming other news organizations such as Politico (319), Vox.com (346), RollingStone.com (338), MSNBC.com (404), the New Yorker (468), and NYMag.com (497).

“I am honored that the team at Breitbart News has put me in a position to continue exposing the permanent political class,” said Boyle. “My friendship with Andrew Breitbart has always been a guidepost for me throughout my career and I’m excited to continue working to carry on his legacy by building a team of world-class journalists who will fight against the establishment media and career politicians.”

Breitbart.com has more than 20 million unique visitors and 100 million page views per month, a loyal and interactive readership making more than 5 million comments per month on the site. In July, NewsWhip, a social media analytics company, released a study that found Breitbart News ranked #19 among Facebook’s largest publishers on total engagement and #25 on Twitter.

“You cannot underestimate the impact that Matt’s reporting has had on the Republican Presidential Primary by staying ahead of the curve and highlighting issues like illegal immigration that strike a chord with conservatives but oftentimes go ignored by the establishment media,” said Breitbart News CEO Larry Solov.

Boyle has interviewed almost every Republican running for president in 2016, including billionaire front-runner Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former New York Gov. George Pataki.

Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow added, “Matt has a unique ability to take on the Washington and media establishments and come out vindicated in the end. He typifies the ‘fighting spirit’ we value at Breitbart News.”

A native of Canton, Massachusetts, Boyle graduated from Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida, with a Bachelor’s degree in Communications with an emphasis on journalism. He joined Breitbart News in December 2012 after two and a half years as an investigative reporter for The Daily Caller.

http://dailycaller.com/2014/09/18/department-of-justice-media-matters-coordinate-to-attack-reporter/

ref

Tracy Schmaler, Attorney General Eric Holder’s top press defender, will resign her position on March 8. This reporter recently caught Schmaler colluding with far leftwing advocacy organization Media Matters for America to attack the reputations of whistleblowers, members of Congress, and people in the new media.

People who were targets of the collusion between Department of Justice press aide Schmaler and far leftwing advocacy organizations called for her resignation in September 2012, when evidence of her activity emerged. Now, they are getting their wish.

...

Emails uncovered last year show Schmaler worked with Media Matters to smear people trying to uncover details about Justice Department scandals. As far back as 2010, Schmaler worked with the George Soros-funded media hit squad to attempt to defame whistleblowers from the New Black Panther Party scandal with regard alleged voter intimidation at a Philadelphia polling place on election day in 2008.

Schmaler worked with Media Matters’ Jeremy Holden to smear former DOJ Civil Rights division attorneys J. Christian Adams and Hans Von Spakovsky in 2010. She also worked to smear now-former Civil Rights division attorney Christopher Coates, who was an active employee of the Department of Justice at the time.

In 2011, Schmaler took over as Holder’s top press aide when Matt Miller left the DOJ. (Miller has since been hired by embattled New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez). When she took over, the scandal surrounding Operation Fast and Furious began heating up.

Schmaler turned to her friends at the advocacy organization Media Matters for help again. Over the coming years, emails show she colluded to smear House oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa and other lawmakers; Fox News’ William LaJeunesse, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Martha MacCallum, Bill Hemmer, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity; this reporter, who at the time worked for The Daily Caller; Townhall Magazine’s Katie Pavlich; Breitbart News editor Joel Pollak and writer Ken Klukowski, among others; Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips; National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney; and many other including bloggers who have covered the story from the very beginning.

After this reporter uncovered those emails while writing for The Daily Caller in September, Issa described those who were targeted by Schmaler and Holder via their collusion with Media Matters as President Barack Obama’s “enemies list.”

“Not since Richard Nixon have we seen a president who puts together an enemies list and has a whole team pursuing it,” Issa said about the collusion. “That’s what’s happened in this administration. It’s sad. It’s not the America I want to see going forward. I sincerely hope that after the election, regardless, the American people will have made a statement that they won’t tolerate this.”

Issa ally South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy promised, too, that there would be a congressional hearing on Schmaler’s and Holder’s collusion with groups like Media Matters. A hearing date has not yet been set, but Schmaler’s decision to resign from the DOJ may be an effort to avoid having to answer to Congress about her behavior.

Schmaler has not answered when asked by Breitbart News whether her resignation has anything to do with the coming hearings on DOJ collusion with groups like Media Matters.

Even though she’s resigning, Holder still spoke highly of Schmaler. “While I am sad to lose one of my closest and most trusted advisors, I am grateful to Tracy for her wise counsel, loyalty, good humor and unwavering support of me and the Justice Department over the last four years,” Holder said in a statement. “Tracy has been a valued member of my senior staff and a good friend whose tireless spirit and keen judgment have served me and this Department well. She will be truly missed, though I wish her all the best in her future endeavors.”

Schmaler is expected to take a job working for David Axelrod.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2013/02/15/holder-flack-resigning-after-colluding-with-media-matters-to-make-obama-s-enemies-list/