TheHill 2

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oops, see main, two words

this one wd more for bogus

see john solomon

dr scott

partic holo?

EID energy in depth

roger pielke

sidney powell

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GOP POL OP

DECLARED HIMSELF RIGHT [NO SAID SCI WERE]

CELEBRITY

An Inconvenient Truth' Predictions DEBUNKED — Al Gore Was WRONG: Erin Maguire | RISING

75,542 views Jun 18, 2026 #ClimateChange #AlGore #ErinMaguire

OPINION: Erin Maguire gives her monologue on the 20th anniversary of Al Gore's documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth,' and looks back at the predictions he made about climate change. #AlGore #ClimateChange #ErinMaguireAbout Rising: Rising is a weekday morning show with bipartisan hosts that breaks the mold of morning TV by taking viewers inside the halls of Washington power like never before. The show leans into the day's political cycle with cutting edge analysis from DC insiders who can predict what is going to happen. It also sets the day's political agenda by breaking exclusive news with a team of scoop-driven reporters and demanding answers during interviews with the country's most important political newsmakers.

0:05

5 seconds

All right, welcome back to Rising Aaron. What is on your mind today?

0:08

8 seconds

Yes, let's get into it. 20 years ago, former Vice President Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth. 20 years ago, it

0:16

16 seconds

was 2006. I was 17 years old, getting ready to graduate from the Aquinus Institute of Rochester, blasting Fallout

0:23

23 seconds

Boy in my pickup truck. A lot can change in 20 years. The film won an Oscar. It helped earn Gore a Nobel Peace Prize or

0:30

30 seconds

peace prize prize. Yep. Schools showed it to children. News organizations treated it as required viewing. And this

0:38

38 seconds

week, 20 years later, Al Gore declared victory.

0:42

42 seconds

When you see the film, do you feel like it still holds up?

0:45

45 seconds

Unfortunately, yes. And the scientists were dead right.

0:50

50 seconds

Right. Those are his words. But before we hand out another trophy, let's remember what actually made this movie famous. Because Al Gore didn't become a

0:59

59 seconds

global celebrity for observing that temperatures might gradually raise over time. He became famous for the warnings,

1:05

1 minute, 5 seconds

the predictions, the timeline, the visuals of a very possible reality.

1:11

1 minute, 11 seconds

Those weren't side notes. Those were the headlines. Those were the claims that transformed an inconvenient truth from a

1:18

1 minute, 18 seconds

documentary into a movement. History remembers Gore standing on that stage declaring that within a decade there would be no more snow on Mount

1:27

1 minute, 27 seconds

Kilimanjaro. Two decades later there's still snow on Kilamanjaro. In fact, there is now double the ice coverage.

1:35

1 minute, 35 seconds

Gore famously declared Glacier National Park would become quote the park formerly known as Glacier. Federal agencies put up signs warning visitors

1:44

1 minute, 44 seconds

the glaciers would be gone by 2020. You know what happened in 2020? They took the signs down because the glaciers were

1:52

1 minute, 52 seconds

still there. An Inconvenient Truth predicted an ice-free Arctic within years. At Copenhagen in 2009, Gore cited

2:00

2 minutes

a 75% chance of an ice-free Arctic within 5 to 7 years. The Arctic still

2:07

2 minutes, 7 seconds

has summer ice. And the researcher Gore cited said afterward he didn't even know where the 75% figure came from. The

2:16

2 minutes, 16 seconds

record remembers dramatic graphics of a 20 foot sea level rising, flooding Manhattan, Miami, San Francisco, not in

2:24

2 minutes, 24 seconds

centuries, in the near future. Those cities are still standing. Gore described in an inconvenient truth how

2:32

2 minutes, 32 seconds

much cities, including New York City and the grounds of the World Trade Centers, would be underwater. He talked about how

2:39

2 minutes, 39 seconds

scientists could map the water overtaking cities and coastlines with certainty, even saying, quote, "A lot of people live there." To add fear to the

2:48

2 minutes, 48 seconds

visuals of these areas overrun with water. And that's what bothers me about this anniversary celebration. You don't grade predictions based on intentions.

2:57

2 minutes, 57 seconds

You grade them based on outcomes. You compare what was said to what actually happened. When you do that, the claim

3:05

3 minutes, 5 seconds

that Gore was dead right on all important elements becomes very difficult to defend because the important elements weren't buried in an

3:13

3 minutes, 13 seconds

appendix. They were the claims that made the movie famous. In fact, even a British high court reviewing the film

3:20

3 minutes, 20 seconds

just one year after its release, not 20 years later, one year, concluded that schools needed to provide students with

3:28

3 minutes, 28 seconds

additional guidance of nine distinct scientific inaccuracies and what the co court called partisan political views. A

3:38

3 minutes, 38 seconds

court didn't say the film couldn't be show. A court didn't say climate change wasn't real. It said students needed more information because of the partisan

3:46

3 minutes, 46 seconds

framing by Gore. Yet somehow that never became the story because the goal wasn't skepticism. The goal was persuasion.

3:55

3 minutes, 55 seconds

And that's the same unagnowledged story 20 years later. The left never seems to be held to the standards of accountability for reality because in

4:03

4 minutes, 3 seconds

modern politics there appears to be no penalty for being wrong in your prediction if your prediction was scary enough. For 20 years, the left, the

4:13

4 minutes, 13 seconds

media, Hollywood, academia, and the environmental movement told Americans to trust them because they followed the science, because they dealt in facts.

4:22

4 minutes, 22 seconds

Now, 20 years later, one of the biggest icons of the movement is still insisting that movie got it right. Not mostly

4:29

4 minutes, 29 seconds

right, not directionally right, dead right. And maybe that's the most inconvenient truth of all. The

4:38

4 minutes, 38 seconds

remarkable part isn't that he got some things wrong. Everybody gets things wrong. The remarkable part is that after

4:45

4 minutes, 45 seconds

20 years of mist timelines, exaggerated certainty, and moving goalpost, we're still expected to pretend he was dead, right? The snow still on Kilimanjaro.

4:55

4 minutes, 55 seconds

The glaciers are still in Glacier National Park. New York City still stands. There's a parade going on there today. The only thing that disappeared was the reckoning.

5:06

5 minutes, 6 seconds

The big point here I think is that I know ABC they're saying oh most of this was right the that's not what made the movie famous was that Al Gore was tepid

5:14

5 minutes, 14 seconds

and saying oh it's gradual. It was these images of Kilimanjaro with no snow, Glacier Park empty, all these big the

5:22

5 minutes, 22 seconds

New York City and ground zero being flooded and that didn't come to fruition. But now 20 years later, we're supposed to celebrate and pretend, wow,

5:29

5 minutes, 29 seconds

what a monumental movie of greatness and the environment and it was a huge part of the environmental movement and the work we saw by the left and Democrats in

5:37

5 minutes, 37 seconds

this country for ever since the last 20 years. I just find that to be the hardest part of an inconvenient truth.

5:44

5 minutes, 44 seconds

I'm for protecting the environment, even if it's overexaggerated so that we can make sure that our kids kids kids have a good life here. And so if we

5:52

5 minutes, 52 seconds

overexaggerated to protect them even more and we went too far, let's bring it back in. But I certainly don't want to do what the opposite what this administration is doing is paying wind

6:01

6 minutes, 1 second

farms that are being built offshore to be removed and actually paying the companies to take them down and not protect the country from fossil fuel

6:08

6 minutes, 8 seconds

usage at an overt amount. And so this is like what's happening right now with the president. He's getting rid of wind farms.

6:13

6 minutes, 13 seconds

Wind farms are are are proven to show that they do not make a mass so then we're going to rely on fossil fuels which then deteriorates.

6:21

6 minutes, 21 seconds

And so but the point is the president is not proposing ideas to protect the environment and the administration is not proposing ideas to protect the environment. If they are, I'd surely

6:28

6 minutes, 28 seconds

like to hear them. But I don't mind that he got most things right. Like you said, I don't care that he said I got all right. Okay. He can believe what he wants to believe. But the earth is

actually getting hotter. No, but you named one. You named Mount W. Let me finish this. May I finish?

6:42

6 minutes, 42 seconds

He said dead right. That's the problem though. You got to admit that dead right is dead wrong.

6:46

6 minutes, 46 seconds

May he could say whatever he wants. But the fact that change came after his documentary is the point that I care about most. And so the earth did get

6:53

6 minutes, 53 seconds

warmer. CO2 gases did get trapped in the environment. We did talk about melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland

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7 minutes, 2 seconds

and how that's still happening even though you have one example description of Greenland at the time. if he went too far. My point is that we the things that he named are happening just not at the

7:10

7 minutes, 10 seconds

rapid pace that that he suggested. And so no, it means that we still need to protect the environment. So if we instituted an overall correction, we can

7:18

7 minutes, 18 seconds

reel it in, but we don't have to then go back to what we used to rely on to speed up the process of deteriorating our environment.

7:24

7 minutes, 24 seconds

Everybody's arguing that we need to go back. But also this overcorrection we took didn't hold those who are the most

7:31

7 minutes, 31 seconds

nefarious actors about greenhouse gas emissions through the left ever. We're not going The left did not go after India and hold them to account for

7:39

7 minutes, 39 seconds

greenhouse gas emissions that did not go after China, the two largest nations that pursue and have greenhouse gas

7:46

7 minutes, 46 seconds

emissions. No, we demanded it here. And it cost jobs. and the president. There's no reason we can't protect the environment and have natural gas and do

7:55

7 minutes, 55 seconds

fracking and believe in energy independence and dominance. You can do both at the same time. It's 2026 in the United States. We've got the technology to send people to the dark side of the

8:03

8 minutes, 3 seconds

moon. I feel we can do both at the same time. But Al Gore continues to be lauded and that movie for how correct it was.

8:10

8 minutes, 10 seconds

And we all need to acknowledge dead right was dead wrong. Him saying, "Well, you're saying okay, well maybe he overexaggerated.

8:16

8 minutes, 16 seconds

He's getting some stuff right on our test. You got a zero." Why do you want him to say he's dead wrong? Because if he got, let's say he got 80% on a test, did he not still do well to push the conversation forward?

8:26

8 minutes, 26 seconds

Because that's not what he did, though.

8:27

8 minutes, 27 seconds

He gave the definitive. He said dead right. He gave the definitive. That is why that's a zero. Dead right is dead

8:35

8 minutes, 35 seconds

wrong. He said the definitive. And that's the issue. And people continue to say that. That was the headline of that ABC piece. That was the sign.

8:42

8 minutes, 42 seconds

And Al Gore said about his own documentary that he got it dead right.

8:45

8 minutes, 45 seconds

Yes. And you know what? That's what they continue to put out there. That the inconvenient truth movie was dead right.

8:52

8 minutes, 52 seconds

That's the problem. We continue to pursue in these headlines and clicks an opportunity to try and push push the

9:00

9 minutes

cultural environmental lobby of the left for the sake of their own, not for the betterment of man. And so right now,

9:07

9 minutes, 7 seconds

what they are doing is pursuing an ideology and not pursuing the facts because putting that headline out is dead wrong. Even if it's a clip and a portion of what he said.

9:17

9 minutes, 17 seconds

That's what he said.

9:17

9 minutes, 17 seconds

But but to put that out. Now what he said though to to not provide the context on it in the headline, you need to provide both sides. This was a

9:25

9 minutes, 25 seconds

celebration of a movie where it was talking about New York City flooding.

9:29

9 minutes, 29 seconds

We've been watching beautiful shots of the Knicks parade. And I have not seen a person in a rain boot or a canoe on the streets of New York City and Manhattan.

9:38

9 minutes, 38 seconds

The way he talked about it. Greenland, if you go back and watch it, he showed that country dramatically decreasing in size by now. That didn't happen. And if

9:45

9 minutes, 45 seconds

you're trying to argue that the overcorrections might have prevented this, it didn't because India and China still remained the largest and most nefarious people when it came to climate

9:54

9 minutes, 54 seconds

change in this country, in this world, globally. It was not Al Gore and Inconvenient Truth that somehow stopped all of this. The nefarious actors were

10:03

10 minutes, 3 seconds

still acting nefariously. And so you continue to say and allow him to say that this movie got it right isn't a

10:10

10 minutes, 10 seconds

fact. And we need to call that out because the more we perpetrate the inconvenient truth that Al Gore got it wrong and that he used hyperbole to try

10:20

10 minutes, 20 seconds

and scare people instead of doing what he should have done which hey you want to talk about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. You need to talk about it globally and you need to talk about going after the other countries

10:28

10 minutes, 28 seconds

which Democrats didn't want to do. So I just you got to call it out for what it is and that's what I'm saying here.

10:34

10 minutes, 34 seconds

Maybe I'm disconnected from the attachment to Al Gore here or his movie The Inconvenient Truth. And I'm more connected to the idea that we did something about trying to protect the

10:42

10 minutes, 42 seconds

country, the environment, and climate change. And I'm more inclined to say that when we put Lee Zelden in position and he's slowly deteriorating some protections that we had for our environment, then that's problematic.

10:52

10 minutes, 52 seconds

And that not might not be the response.

10:53

10 minutes, 53 seconds

We have to be able to strike a balance between overcorrecting and not doing anything, right? And so if if Al Gore wants to

11:01

11 minutes, 1 second

keep saying he's right for egotistical reasons, I don't really care. I care about the actions being taken place.

11:07

11 minutes, 7 seconds

He's not even a leader in the party. He didn't win an election. He didn't uh he's not in Congress. He's not making any laws. So if he wants to go on as an

11:14

11 minutes, 14 seconds

individual in this country and say my documentary that won all these awards is still great, he can do that. But if we are striking a balance trying to figure

11:21

11 minutes, 21 seconds

out Yeah. I care about the climate change portion, the actual story. And that's what this is about though. And while you're talking about you're talking about overcorrection and that we

11:29

11 minutes, 29 seconds

might have overcorrected, have you ever thought that what Lee Zeldon might be rolling back are the overcorrections that went too far are the ones you know the waters of the United States rule

11:38

11 minutes, 38 seconds

that exists? It tries to regulate things the size of puddles on farmers property by the federal government. That is

11:45

11 minutes, 45 seconds

ridiculous oversight in an attempt to push forward this climate change narrative when puddles and small ponds

11:52

11 minutes, 52 seconds

on farmers property are now being overrun by the federal government. That is where climate change became overreach and you continue to see it in the United

12:01

12 minutes, 1 second

States and it's detrimental to the people in this country. That there's no reason the federal government should be watching puddles and small ponds on

12:10

12 minutes, 10 seconds

farmers property. So, you should also consider that if Lee Zeldon's rolling things back, it might be because it was too far reached in the first place. And

12:19

12 minutes, 19 seconds

for the media to continue to give even Al Gore the oxygen to make such a false statement about what that movie was,

12:26

12 minutes, 26 seconds

that's a problem as well. Also, real quick aside, my favorite Al Gore fact, all of the vice presidents of the United States are the president of the Senate.

12:34

12 minutes, 34 seconds

They all get a bust in the capital. Al Gore doesn't have his yet. You want to know why?

12:38

12 minutes, 38 seconds

Why? Because of this movie. No, obviously because he put on too much weight after the vice presidency and wanted to lose it before he got his little bus made allegedly. One of my favorite facts.

12:48

12 minutes, 48 seconds

Okay. [laughter] Well, so I mean, but you want to talk about ego seems to be the man of Al Gore.

12:53

12 minutes, 53 seconds

And I said he's an individual. He can go on ABC. No, I'm saying right now he lives as an individual among us. Yes, he's former vice president. But my point

13:00

13 minutes

is that he can go on TV and say he's not in office right now, but the media shouldn't continue to give him oxygen to continue to espouse that

13:08

13 minutes, 8 seconds

his movie was dead right when New York City is not a canoe land today. It is still full of streets and not flooded and they didn't hold the people to

13:16

13 minutes, 16 seconds

account who are actually the most nefarious actors when it comes to climate damage and change.

13:21

13 minutes, 21 seconds

So even if you have people like Bill Gates who recently said, you know, I went a little bit too far. People condemned him like, no, you shouldn't even saying that years ago. What can

13:29

13 minutes, 29 seconds

people do who went too going too far trying to protect the No, but Bill Gates said, "You know what? I'm scaling back some of my predictions from He said that

13:36

13 minutes, 36 seconds

in the last few months and I Robbie and I sat here and argued about he should have never Bill Gates should have never been involved in this conversation." It's like, what can people do? They said they went too far. They said they got it

13:45

13 minutes, 45 seconds

dead right. Nobody's happy. That's why I'm saying let's talk about the environment. But also this led to, if you want to talk about the environment, this led to an environmental movement

13:53

13 minutes, 53 seconds

and cause in the United States that was based on a hyperbolic movie that ended up being inaccurate. And so there were

14:01

14 minutes, 1 second

several things in the movie that were true that I named. So if twice a day, if action came from that, then what's

14:08

14 minutes, 8 seconds

the problem? because the overregulation and the continued pursuit of fidelity to climate change and that if you do not believe in what that movie specifically

14:16

14 minutes, 16 seconds

espoused, then you are the problem and that you do not believe in science.

14:22

14 minutes, 22 seconds

Well, those are all the arguments I've heard from the left. But right now, science says Glacier National Park still

14:28

14 minutes, 28 seconds

exists. Science says Greenland still exists. Science says California still exists and it's not underwater. That's the inconvenient truth of this movie.

14:37

14 minutes, 37 seconds

That's the incontinent truth of the whole climate change lobby. This whole environmental movement. I am for protecting the environment of the United

14:44

14 minutes, 44 seconds

States. I love this country. We are a beautiful diverse environmental nation.

14:49

14 minutes, 49 seconds

We are also rich in environmental resources. We can be good stewards of both. But we can't do it at the behest and continuing to push false narratives

14:57

14 minutes, 57 seconds

and false facts because he was the former vice president. You can challenge it, too. And that's what this was about.

15:03

15 minutes, 3 seconds

All right. All right. Senator Bernie Sanders is introducing legislation [music] to give the American public ownership in AI companies. We'll be right back.

---

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wiki 2 26

...

The Hill TV

In June 2018, The Hill launched Hill.TV, a digital news channel. Four years later, the channel expanded to a FAST streaming service and was rebranded as The Hill TV.^[27] It is distributed by Haystack, LG, LocalNow, Plex, Roku, and Vizio. Programming includes Rising, a morning news program hosted by Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave four days a week (initially by Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton.)^[28][29] In May 2021, long-time hosts Ball and Saagar Enjeti announced they were departing in order to release their own independent project, Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar.^[28][30]

---

THEHILL

“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.

===/.

---

9 24

The Hill's Rising (or simply Rising) is an American daily news and opinion web series produced by Washington, D.C. political newspaper The Hill. The series is available on The Hill's website and YouTube.

Gradually gaining popularity on YouTube throughout 2019 and 2020, the show's longest-serving hosts were Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, until their departure in May 2021. The show was hosted by journalist Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky until they also left in September 2022.^[1] The current host is journalist Robby Soave.

About

[edit]

Rising features commentary and analysis of political news and current events, in-studio interviews with politicians, campaign staff and surrogates, political advisors and strategists, and members of the news media. When Ball and Enjeti hosted, the show presented a synthesis of populist left and populist right viewpoints.^[2]

The series is available on The Hill's website, YouTube, and a streaming channel.^[3]

Format

[edit]

Rising typically produces five episode a week, Monday-Friday. There are usually about eight pre-taped segments per episode. Each host presents a "radar" segment which analyze current events and present commentary in a monologue format, usually organized into three or four bullet-points. This is followed by an open discussion.

History

Logo the Buck Sexton and Krystal Ball-hosted iteration

In 2018, The Hill announced Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton as presenters of a new slate of original programming to be produced by John Solomon. Rising launched in June 2018 as Rising with Krystal & Buck with Buck Sexton as host. Sexton departed in June 2019, with Saagar Enjeti replacing him. In the press release, Ball was slated as the "progressive co-host on a morning show with a conservative co-host".^[4][5][non-primary ^source ^needed] The show focused on attacking "establishment Democrats such as Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg."[citation ^needed]

In late 2019, it had an average of 600,000 viewers daily. As of October 2020, the Hill's YouTube channel averaged 1.48 million views per day,^[6][7] and had around 1.2 million subscribers. Enjeti and Ball also co-authored a book, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising.^[8][9][10] In 2020, the show did a few live-stream analysis programs for important political events like the 2020 Democratic primary and the 2020 general elections.[citation ^needed]

In March 2022, YouTube suspended Rising's channel for seven days for allegedly "violating the platform's rules around election misinformation". Then-Rising host Ryan Grim stated in The Intercept: "Two infractions were cited: First, the outlet posted the full video of former President Donald Trump's recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on its page. Second, Rising played a minutelong clip of Trump's commentary on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which included the claim that none of it would have happened if not for a “rigged election.”"^[11]

Since 2021

In May 2021, Ball and Enjeti announced they were departing Rising in order to release their own independent project, Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar. editor Emily[12][4] They were temporarily replaced with Ryan Grim and [The Federalist Jashinsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Jashinsky). In July 2021, Kim Iversen took over from Jashinsky,^[13][14] who said on Twitter that she had never intended to do Rising full time.^[15][non-primary ^source ^needed] According to The Daily Beast, Iversen was a controversial figure:

Aside from her COVID-19 vaccine skepticism, she also sparked complaints from Hill employees after she defended the Chinese government’s harsh treatment of Uyghurs (prompting co-host Ryan Grim to push back on-air) and seemed to peddle pro-Russian propaganda about Ukraine... [and] Iversen recently got into a back-and-forth with fellow Rising co-host Olayemi Olurin over deadnaming actor Elliot Page.^[13]

From early 2022, its regular weekday presenters were left-wing Briahna Joy Gray (a former Bernie Sanders campaign spokesperson) and libertarian Robby Soave (an editor for Reason magazine).^[13]

Iversen, a vaccine skeptic, left the show in July 2022 after Batya Ungar-Sargon rather than her was picked to interview Anthony Fauci (of whom Iversen had previously been critical) with Soave.^[13]

Grim and Jashinsky, who were the regular Friday hosts of Rising, resigned in September 2022.^[16] Also in September 2022, Rising refused to air a segment on their show in which left-wing political commentator Katie Halper called Israel an "apartheid government". She was subsequently fired from the show.^[17]

As of 2023, Jessica Burbank and Amber Duke presented Rising on Fridays.^[18]

On June 7, 2024, Briahna Joy Gray, who had frequently courted controversy during the 2023 Israel–Hamas war,^[19] was fired from Rising after allegedly "rolling her eyes" during an interview with the sister of an Israeli woman held hostage by Hamas, who urged her to believe Israeli women’s accounts of sexual assault on October 7. Joy Gray responded by saying “There should be no doubt that @RisingTheHill has a clear pattern of suppressing speech — particularly when it’s critical of the state of Israel.”^[20][21]

Hosts

References...

 ===

wiki 0 24

Emily Jashinsky is an American journalist and commentator.^[1] She serves as the director of the National Journalism Center.^[2]

She is a culture Editor for The Federalist,^[3] host of the Federalist Radio Hour, and co-host of the weekly news show Counter Points.^[2]

Jashinsky is originally from Wisconsin.^[2] She graduated from George Washington University.^[2]

She was previously the spokesperson for Young America's Foundation.^[2][3]

Jashinsky has also contributed to the Washington Examiner,^[4] Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics,^[5] Fox News Sunday, Media Buzz, The McLaughlin Group^[2] and the British The Telegraph.^[6]

Jashinsky hosted Rising on The Hill with Ryan Grim before they both left The Hill for Breaking Points.^[7] In 2024, Jashinsky joined UnHerd to host the show Undercurrents.

Robert Emil Soave Jr. (/swɑːveɪ/, SWAH-vay)^[1] is a libertarian American journalist. Soave is a senior editor for Reason and co-host of The Hill's web news commentary series program Rising.^[2][3]

Early life and education

[edit]

Soave was born in and grew up in the Indian Village district[citation ^needed] of Detroit and graduated from the University of Michigan.^[4]

Career

[edit]

In 2015, he won a Southern California Journalism Award from the Los Angeles Press Club for his writing about the Rolling Stone story "A Rape on Campus".^[5][6] He was named in *Forbes*' "30 under 30" list in 2016.^[6] In 2019, he gained media attention for his writings defending the Covington Catholic High School students involved in the Lincoln Memorial confrontation.^[7][8][9]

In Soave's first book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, he profiles young progressive activists as well as those on the political right, and discusses issues such as intersectionality, political correctness, and free speech on college campuses.^[10][3][11] Writing in The Guardian, reviewer J. Oliver Conroy called Panic Attack "a methodical, earnest and often insightful work of reporting and analysis, not a fiery polemic."^[12]

In his second book, Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn't Fear Facebook and the Future, Soave questions conventional wisdom about the negative effects of social media,^[13] and argues that increased regulation of platforms like Twitter and Facebook could stifle free speech and do more harm than good.^[14]

Personal life

He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Carrie, and he serves on the D.C. Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.^[4]

Bibliography

• Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump (All Points Books, 2019)
• Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn't Fear Facebook and the Future (All Points Books, 2021)

References

2020

for better or worse, the 50 states serve as the laboratories of democracy. Sometimes states pass laws that are overwhelmingly beneficial, causing other states to follow suit. Other times, states pass laws that are destructive, causing other states to learn valuable lessons about what not to do.

Over the past few decades, California’s embrace of socialist policies is a classic example of the latter. In other words, California’s adoption of far-left ideology, and the devastating toll it has wrought on the Golden State, should serve as a canary in the coal mine for any state wishing to follow California’s example.

The list of California’s socialist policies is extensive. For starters, California has been ground zero for the radical, socialist environmental movement that seeks to upend America’s energy system.

In California, the renewable movement, which is front-and-center in the Green New Deal, has caused massive problems. Energy prices are skyrocketing. According to a recent report by the Center for Jobs and the Economy at the California Business Roundtable, “These outcomes mean that even as many households struggle under the current economic conditions, the state’s energy policies continue to take an increasing share of household incomes both directly in gasoline and utility bills and indirectly as these costs are incorporated into the prices of every other component of the costs of living.”

As if sky-high prices for energy were not bad enough, in California, blackouts have become commonplace because the state’s energy grid, which is more reliant on wind and solar power than any other state, simply cannot meet energy demand.

California Assemblyman Jim Patterson, vice-chair of the Committee on Utilities and Energy, recently said, “I have been warning over and over again that the policies coming out of the Democrat-controlled legislature and governors’ office are creating the conditions for blackouts and brownouts and here we are seeing the evidence.” Patterson is 100 percent correct.

Due to California’s far-left’s Green New Deal-like energy policies, Golden State residents pay extraordinarily high prices to power their homes and fuel their cars. But even worse, these ridiculous policies have led to massive energy shortages for millions of Californians.

But then again, shortages and socialism go together like peanut butter and jelly, so this should not be all that surprising.

Aside from the energy debacle that has harmed Californians, far-left Golden State leaders have also enacted onerous taxes and regulations, which are causing a mass exodus of residents and businesses.

In June, California proposed hiking taxes on the state’s most productive residents yet again. If enacted, it would increase the top tax rate on millionaires in the Golden State to an unprecedented 54 percent. “The tax hikes would be the tipping point for many taxpayers, prompting them to book a one-way trip to one of the 49 states with lower taxes,” said Robert Gutierrez, president of the California Taxpayers Association.

In California, wealth redistribution via super high taxes, a central tenet of socialism, is causing massive turmoil. U.S. Census Bureau data show that 691,145 residents fled the Golden State in 2018.

As multiple reports show, California’s burdensome taxes are the overwhelming reason residents are feeling the state. Unsurprisingly, this has been a common theme in many socialist countries, as well.

There are several other socialist policies that California has implemented over the past few decades that are causing havoc and economic ruin. From outrageous housing costs and water shortages due to asinine environmental regulations to a huge increase in homelessness because of California’s generous welfare payments, the list goes on and on.

And, as these problems fester, California is doubling down on even more radical socialist policies. Already there is a universal basic income pilot program, “free college,” and all sorts of other failed socialist policies in place or on the docket.

In 1932, liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

Amen to that. If California’s decades-long romance with socialism has taught the rest of the country one thing, it is that these policies do not work and should not be implemented anywhere. Maybe one day Californians will realize this as well and reverse course.

Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is an editor at The Heartland Institute.

TAGS CALIFORNIAGREEN NEW DEALPOLITICAL IDEOLOGIESSOCIALIST ECONOMICS

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-martha-maccallum-having-differences-opinion-science-surrounding-covid-19-something-we

wrongshow?

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/trumps-new-coronavirus-adviser-right-wing-media-talking-head-who-consistently

Donald Trump announced this week that Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, will serve as a new “adviser” to the president on COVID-19. Atlas, whose background is in diagnostic radiology, is not an expert in infectious disease but rather a pundit and frequent Fox guest who has been repeatedly wrong about the pandemic.

Atlas, who has appeared 20 times on Fox News since the end of April, predicted in March that there would only be 10,000 deaths from COVID in America, said in April that the pandemic “appears to be entering the containment phase,” and claimed in May that “the curves have been flattened.” More recently, he has taken to making unproven claims downplaying the risk of COVID-19 in considering whether to reopen schools for in-person learning.

But Fox News and other right-wing outlets have elevated his politically convenient though dubious commentary; and on August 12 he gave brief remarks during a White House press briefing after Trump asked him to come up to the podium.

Here is a noncomprehensive list of Atlas’ false claims, incorrect predictions, and pro-Trump sycophancy that preceded his new role at the White House.

• Atlas claimed in a March 16 tweet, “Virus infections typically have seasons. This is temporary.”
• In a March 26 op-ed in The Washington Times, Atlas wrote, “This virus could cause about 10,000 deaths in the United States overall.”
• In a March 26 “:{Hoover:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: Virtual Policy Briefing,” Atlas claimed, “All reasonable numbers point to the fact that our number of severe outcomes will be peaking around three weeks or so.”
• In an April 1:{ op-ed in The Hill:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, Atlas wrote that “Americans should not panic. The United States has the most advanced medical care in the world for situations like this.”
• As the national curve of daily deaths continued to rise, Atlas wrote in an April 13 op-ed in The Hill that “we now need to reenter normal life” and that “continuing full-population isolation and waiting for a vaccine would be doubling down and yielding to panic.”
• Atlas opened his April 22 op-ed in The Hill by declaring, “The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase.”
• In an April 26 appearance on Fox News' The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton, Atlas told the host, “Young people under 18 have virtually no risk of serious illness or death, so it's logical to open most schools. It's logical to open most businesses.”
• Atlas claimed on the :{April 27 edition of Fox News’ *Tucker Carlson Tonight*:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, “It’s actually good news that the virus spreads widely and without high risk to the vast majority of people … because that means we have a better chance of developing population immunity.” The Mayo clinic describes “major problems” with the idea that herd immunity can be achieved through natural infection as it is unknown to what extent an individual is immune to further infection after exposure. Also, according to the Mayo clinic, even if it was possible for herd immunity to be achieved this way, it “could also lead to serious complications and millions of deaths, especially among older people and those who have chronic conditions.”
• On the May 11 edition of Fox News' *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, Atlas referenced the social distancing measures and claimed that “the cure is bigger than the disease at this point.” He also told the audience that “the curves have been flattened.”
• On the June 8 edition of *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, Atlas falsely claimed “there is really no risk to young people” when it comes to COVID-19.
• On the June 22 edition of *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, host Martha MacCallum mentioned to Atlas former Food and Drug Adminstration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb’s claim that 25% of hospitalizations in Texas are among people aged 20 to 29. Atlas responded that he didn’t believe the number, saying, “I question if those people who are positive for COVID-19 and being hospitalized for something else are classified as COVID-19 hospitalizations. That's a big difference.”
• On the June 29 edition of Fox News' :{Tucker Carlson Tonight:(style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, Atlas falsely claimed young people “do not have a significant problem, they do not have the serious complications, they do not die” from COVID-19. (The data showed at the time of this appearance and continues to show that young people do in fact die or suffer serious complications from the virus.) He also said it’s “fantastic news that we have a lot of cases,” which common sense and real-time data show to be false.
• On the July 6 edition of *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, Atlas repeated the falsehood that “it doesn’t really matter how many cases, it only matters who gets the cases” because young people die at a lower rate than older people. But increased caseloads lead to an increased strain on the capacity of health systems and may spread the virus to people who are more vulnerable to serious complications from the disease, even if the vast majority of young people who make up the increased number of cases do not.
• Atlas downplayed the potential risks that COVID-19 poses to people under 70 on the July 7 edition of Fox News' *The Ingraham Angle*, claiming, “The risk of this has been grossly overblown.”
• On the July 15 edition of *America's Newsroom*, Atlas falsely claimed, “It doesn’t matter if children get the disease. ... The data shows that they do not significantly transmit to adults.”
• On the July 25 edition of Fox News’ *Watters World*, Atlas uncritically shilled for the Trump’s disastrous COVID-19 response, saying, “I think the president’s briefings that were done this week were excellent, and I think it’s obvious to everyone that there’s a focus on the data, that they’re closely monitoring the situation.” He also falsely claimed that it’s been “established” that “ children are not significant spreaders,” when in fact the science on this issue remains unsettled.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/reporter-disgraced-by-ukraine-scandal-gets-scathing-review-from-his-former-outlet-but-key-details-are-missing-from-the-story/

no lnx

Reporter disgraced by Ukraine scandal gets scathing review from his former outlet — but key details are missing from the story

Written by Cody Fenwick February 19, 2020

President Donald Trump’s sprawling Ukraine scandal consumed Washington politics for months and led to the third Senate impeachment trial of a president in U.S. history. Among the casualties in the uproar was the reputation of John Solomon, a writer for The Hill and personality on its online streaming channel, who was directly implicated in spreading misinformation at the heart of the scandal.

A new piece published by The Hill on Wednesday heavily scrutinized Solomon’s work for the outlet, pointing out conflicts of interest, errors in judgment, and failures on his part and that of the editorial process. But there are key questions that remain unanswered about Solomon’s role at The Hill, questions that demand more scrutiny for the outlet itself as it enabled the disgraced reporter.

Solomon and the Biden story

Solomon, who no longer works for The Hill but contributes to Fox News, received a scathing review in the new piece. In particular, his writing about former Vice President Joe Biden’s connections to Ukraine demonstrate significant failures on journalistic ethics.

His writing played a major role in supporting the false narrative that Biden had corruptly involved himself as vice president in Ukrainian politics to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who was working for the energy company Burisma in the country. As is now well known, Biden, with the backing of President Barack Obama’s administration, intervened in Ukraine in 2016 to oust Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Solomon’s columns, The Hill noted, supported the widely debunked notion that Biden was attempting to protect his son by undermining Shokin’s efforts to investigate Burisma. This allegation formed the basis of Trump’s demand over the course of many months in 2019 that Ukraine investigate Biden, his potential 2020 rival. The House of Representatives later determined this action to be a corrupt abuse of power, an illegitimate interference in the upcoming election, and an attempt to solicit a bribe.

But the claim remains unsupported and is contradicted by known facts, and Solomon’s basis for pushing the allegations appears highly dubious. Shokin, who was widely viewed as corrupt, was one of the people Solomon interviewed for his research, The Hill reported, even though his “reliability as a source is in question.”

“In certain columns, Solomon failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources, including the fact that they had been indicted or were under investigation,” the piece noted.

And Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer who acted as his point person in the Ukraine matter, said he was a key source for Solomon’s reporting as well, though Solomon denies it. Solomon did, however, work with Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who has since been indicted on charges of conspiracy and campaign finance law violations. The Hill said the extent and nature of Solomon’s work with Parnas “remain unclear but potentially troubling.” Parnas has turned over evidence that indicates extensive involvement with Solomon, Giuliani, and others.

Solomon also quoted or referred to lawyers Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, who represent clients with interests in Ukraine and some of the figures in the broader scandal. But Solomon did not disclose when referencing the pair that they also represented him legally. And The Hill noted that Solomon shared a draft of one of his columns with Parnas, diGenova and Toensing, in violation of the outlet’s editorial policy.

Was The Hill concerned about Solomon before his role in the Ukraine scandal was revealed?

In response to these and other serious problems in Solomon’s work, The Hill announced it will devote itself to implementing eight lessons learned from the episode. It also has added editor’s notes to Solomon’s columns to add more context or disclosures “that should have been highlighted at the time of his writings.” While this kind of public admission of failure and commitment to accountability is welcome and appropriate, there are some gaps in the outlet’s account.

Most notably, one event recounted in the piece remains underexplained: “Solomon also wrote numerous news articles for The Hill in 2017 and 2018. An editorial decision was made to label Solomon’s work as opinion as of May 14, 2018.”

For close followers of political journalism, this fact was always notable about Solomon’s work. Though The Hill typically has a sharp delineation between opinion pieces and news pieces, Solomon’s writing clearly blurred the line. For example, one headline read: “Ukrainian Embassy confirms DNC contractor solicited Trump dirt in 2016.” This sounds like it would be a normal news story at The Hill, but it was nevertheless labeled as an opinion piece.

The Hill acknowledged this problem:

While Solomon’s columns on Ukraine were labeled as opinion, they largely read like news stories.Adding to the potential confusion between opinion and news, Solomon was identified as “an award-winning journalist” in his column tagline. When appearing on television to discuss his Ukraine columns, Solomon was not typically labeled an opinion writer by the broadcast programs. The Hill did not contact television producers to label Solomon as an opinion columnist. It should have.

Lending further support to an impression that the columns were more like news stories, rather than opinion columns, Solomon’s Ukraine columns were longer than typical opinion pieces, in many cases contained what could be viewed or was identified by him as original reporting, and stuck to one general topic. This may have suggested to many readers it was an investigative series, which normally resides in the news department, rather than opinion. Solomon’s subsequent appearances on Fox News where he was often identified as an investigative journalist further potentially blurred the distinction between news and opinion in the minds of some readers.

Every news outlet is free to set its own standards, and the delicate balance between news, analysis, and opinion can be handled in a variety of ways. But The Hill acknowledged that Solomon’s work violated the standards it tried to set for itself, with the effect of potentially confusing readers.

But most critical is that The Hill changed the way it described Solomon’s columns’ in 2018. While once they were considered news, they were afterward considered opinion. What changed? No explanation is given.

The change is critical because it points to The Hill’s responsibility for Solomon’s work. Were his editors suddenly concerned about the nature of his work? Did they feel he was less credible than he had been before? Did they believe his previous credibility had been overrated? Importantly, pieces by opinion contributors such as Solomon in The Hill bear the tagline: “The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill.”

If there were concerns about Solomon’s reliability and the accuracy of the reporting, they were certainly warranted. As the review and subsequent events have shown, Solomon’s claims and reporting in his columns were highly dubious and in violation of journalistic standards.

But if this was the reason for designating his columns as opinion rather than news, the switch was wholly insufficient. As the review published Wednesday noted, “opinion” pieces aren’t free from the standards of journalism; they are “vetted for accuracy, conflicts of interest, and other relevant factors; when statements of fact are found to be incorrect, or conflicts of interest are found to have been undisclosed or overlooked, The Hill routinely corrects those or adds clarifications to columns.”

The worry, then, is that The Hill had reason to suspect Solomon’s reporting was dodgy, but it kept printing his columns anyway. Why would it have done this? One possible reason: Solomon’s pieces were quite popular and gained traction in right-wing circles. As the review noted:

Starting in March 2019, Solomon wrote a series of columns on Ukraine, former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, as well as U.S. diplomats in Ukraine. Solomon discussed his columns on television, most notably on Sean Hannity‘s opinion show on Fox News. These appearances amplified the reach of Solomon’s work at The Hill.

The publication of Solomon’s columns was enormously consequential. It helped further a negative narrative about Biden that is, by all appearances, entirely baseless, which could have impacted his standing in the 2020 primary election. It may have even helped lead to the impeachment of Trump.

It’s worth asking, then, what The Hill’s editors knew about Solomon’s work and when they knew it.

AlterNet reached out to The Hill with questions about Solomon’s role and why his pieces were designated as opinion. This story will be updated with any response.

==

==

https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/11/16/gop-accuses-trump-of-lying-to-mueller-in-latest-defense-against-impeachment/

JIM JORDAN ACCUSES TRUMP OF LYING TO MUELLER IN LATEST DEFENSE AGAINST IMPEACHMENT

November 16, 2019/46 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, Impeachment /by emptywheel

Among the efforts Republicans employed to excuse the President’s inexcusable behavior in yesterday’s impeachment hearing, they tried to lay out reasons why Trump could legitimately think Ukraine was out to get him. Among the things Steve Castor laid out includes an op-ed Ukraine’s then Ambassador to the US Valeriy Chaly placed in the Hill in early August 2016, laying out how outrageous it was that Trump had recently suggested he would entertain recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

“Can you see how the simple fact of writing an op-ed, the Ukrainian Ambassador to the US might create a perception that there are elements of the Ukrainian establishment were advocating against then-candidate Trump,” GOP counsel Steve Castorasked about an op-ed in which Ukraine’s Ambassador defended the territorial integrity of his country and invoked resolutions where the US had committed to do so too. “That’s a tremendously sensitive issue in Ukraine,” Marie Yovanovitch explained, as if it weren’t evident.

In spite of how obvious that explanation for the op-ed is, Jim Jordan nevertheless returned to this attack, claiming that the op-ed was an example of an Ambassador trying to influence a host country election and suggesting Yovanovitch was negligent in not telling Ukraine to stop defending its territorial integrity. (Jordan also lobbed the Nellie Ohr attack that even Devin Nunes seems to have recognized constituted an attack on an experienced organized crime researcher being paid by GOP billionaire Paul Singer.)

Republicans are not outraged by John Solomon’s hit job in the Hill targeting an Ambassador who has served presidents of both parties, they’re not outraged that Mike Flynn was writing an op-ed to be placed in the Hill that was paid for by the Turkish state even while getting Top Secret briefings with Trump as candidate.

They are, however, outraged that a Hill op-ed by Ukraine’s Ambassador to the US points out that America has made past commitments to protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

But there’s something still crazier about this line of defense.

Chaly’s op-ed could only be viewed as an attack on Trump if he did, in fact, advocate recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Otherwise, the op-ed would simply be a matter of policy, as Yovanovitch patiently explained to Castor.

And it turns out that Trump has represented, in an answer submitted under oath to Robert Mueller, that he had no policy stance on Crimea. Mueller asked whether the very comments that the Chaly op-ed addressed represented an intention to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

On July 27, 2016, in response to a question about whether you would recognize Crimea as Russian territory and lift sanctions on Russia, you said: “We’ ll be looking at that. Yeah, we’ll be looking.” Did you intend to communicate by that statement or at any other time during the campaign a willingness to lift sanctions and/or recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea if you were elected?

1. What consideration did you give to lifting sanctions and/or recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea if you were elected? Describe who you spoke with about this topic, when, the substance of the discussion(s).

And while this answer was the most unresponsive among a slew of unresponsive answers, Trump nevertheless stated, under oath, that his statement did not amount to a policy position.

My statement did not communicate any position.

Republicans can’t have this both ways. The only way this op-ed could be an attack on Trump is if Trump really was supporting annexation of Crimea. He may well have been — except he has stated, under oath, that he was not.

Treating this op-ed as an attack on Trump, then, is also an accusation that Trump lied in his sworn answers to Mueller.

Why is Jim Jordan defending President Trump against impeachment by accusing him of lying under oath?

Tags: Jim Jordan, John Solomon, Marie Yovanovitch, Mike Flynn, Steve Castor, Valeriy Chaly

==

==

Trump lies a lot. We all know it. That doesn't mean that news outlets need to spend all day repeating his lies ad nauseum in a race to chase every single click.

Parker Molloy explored how The Hill’s coverage of Trump’s Ukraine scandal -- specifically, its tweets on the topic -- has helped the president spread false narratives for his own benefit. The outlet takes everything that Trump says at face value -- even if The Hill has previously debunked it -- and slaps it in a tweet and in a headline. In essence, the outlet is a giant nihilism machine.

The outlet published then-columnist John Solomon's columns that were part and parcel of the Ukraine conspiracy theory itself. And yes, it is well and good that The Hill is now reviewing Solomon’s work, but the damage has been done, and there is no indication that anyone in charge at the site has learned a single lesson.

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/hill/hill-cant-stop-spreading-misinformation-about-trumps-impeachment

the site’s social media strategy sows confusion and spreads lies

WRITTEN BY PARKER MOLLOY

PUBLISHED 12/20/19 8:37 AM EST

President Donald Trump lies. A lot. On topics big and small, consequential and petty, Trump can’t seem to help himself from saying things that are just flat-out disconnected from reality. The Washington Post’s running total as of December 10 is 15,413 false or misleading claims from the president since he took office. By the time you read this, that number will likely have inched higher. He will lie tomorrow just as he lies today, just as he lied yesterday.

While there isn’t much journalists and news outlets can do to make him tell the truth -- especially since he tends to grant his interviews to friendly outlets -- there’s something they can do to stop his lies from infecting the public consciousness. Namely, the press can stop printing lies free from context.

In May, Media Matters published a study highlighting how frequently major news outlets amplify Trump’s lies on Twitter. While we found that nearly every outlet we considered was guilty in some form or another, none pumped out the president’s false talking points with more regularity than The Hill. (A follow-up study we published this month again found The Hill to be the worst offender at amplifying Trump misinformation.)

The Hill’s coverage of Trump’s Ukraine scandal -- specifically, its tweets on the topic -- has helped the president spread false narratives for his own benefit.

Earlier this week, Trump conducted a rally in Michigan while the House of Representatives was voting to impeach the president over the Ukraine abuse of power scandal. In response, The Hill did what it always does: Promote the president's spin about the events without any context, pushback, or attempt to assess the validity of what he was saying.

As has been the case throughout his presidency, The Hill tends to take everything Trump and his allies say at face value, sharing their statements repeatedly without indicating whether they’re actually true. Promoting Trump's impeachment spin at this Michigan rally was nothing new for the outlet. Here’s just a small sample of recent misinformation about the Ukraine saga boosted by the Hill without context or clarification.

Ukraine did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election, Russia did hack the Democratic National Committee email server, Trump does know Ambassador Gordon Sondland, the whistleblower’s report has been corroborated, former House Speaker Paul Ryan did subpoena the Obama administration, and Trump is not facing a “coup.”

What’s particularly frustrating about The Hill’s tendency to regurgitate the administration’s talking points is that the paper does this even when it has previously debunked the claim in its own reporting. For instance, The Hill repeatedly tweeted out Sen. John Kennedy’s (R-LA) assertions that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by hacking the DNC email server even though the paper had previously called the claim “debunked.”

In recent months, The Hill has also spread Trump’s false claim about predicting the 9/11 attacks, his obviously incorrect assertion that the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution is “phony,” and his laughable lie about being an environmentalist.If it comes out of the president’s mouth, The Hill will be there to uncritically share it with the world.

The Hill also played a role in the creation of some of the conspiracy theories promoted by the administration, which it has yet to address in a meaningful way.

While testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch called out former Hill columnist John Solomon for his role in smearing her. In fact, Solomon, whose sources allegedly included Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, created a convoluted mess of unfounded conspiracy theories around Yovanovitch and Ukraine, making him a favorite in conservative media. His work was regularly cited by Republicans during impeachment hearings.

Eventually Hill Editor-In-Chief Bob Cusack announced that the site would be reviewing and updating Solomon’s past columns.

Weeks later, Cusack reinforced that message, tweeting that The Hill was in the process of “conducting a meticulous review” of Solomon’s work.

While it’s no doubt a good thing that the Hill is reviewing Solomon’s work, the damage has been done, and the site continues to promote people repeating his narratives.

The Hill has played an outsized role in misinforming the public, and it needs to take real steps -- more than simply reviewing and updating past columns -- to prevent future harm. Solomon should have been a red flag from the start, given his lengthy history of shoddy work. Beyond that, the site needs to grapple with the brutal reality of today’s politics.

Publishing in an age of social media comes with its share of potential pitfalls. The specific way the Hill uses social media, sharing the same misleading posts several times over the span of about a day, is both extremely basic and extremely dangerous. The Hill’s tweets fuel what’s known as the “illusory truth effect,” a concept by which a lie begins to seem more true the more it’s repeated. A 2017 Wired article explains this as “a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth” and quotes University of Toronto psychologist Lynn Hasher as saying it’s “likely more powerful when people are tired or distracted by other information.” “Distracted by other information” is more or less Twitter in a nutshell.

If people are bombarded with a dozen tweets repeating the same false claim about Crowdstrike or the whistleblower’s report, there’s a chance they’ll come to believe those claims. Even if they know deep down that they’re not true, the statements might begin to feel true.

In a follow-up to his tweet announcing the “meticulous review of opinion columns written by John Solomon,” Cusack touts the Hill’s supposed “decades-long history of commitment to fair and non-partisan reporting ... without bias or agenda.” If that’s his actual goal, he needs to address his site’s reckless distribution of false information on Twitter.

==

omg this could finish djt? 10/18/19

==

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-a-veteran-reporter-worked-with-giuliani-associates-to-launch-the-ukraine-conspiracy

no lnx many

How a Veteran Reporter Worked with Giuliani’s Associates to Launch the Ukraine Conspiracy

Lev Parnas, recently indicted for foreign influence in U.S. elections, collaborated closely with The Hill’s John Solomon to fuel spurious allegations involving the Bidens and Ukraine.

by Jake Pearson, Mike Spies and J. David McSwane Oct. 25, 2:10 p.m. EDT

John Solomon in his office as executive editor of The Washington Times, in 2008. (Gerald Martineau/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

The 45th President and His Administration

Last March, a veteran Washington reporter taped an interview with a Ukrainian prosecutor that sparked a disinformation campaign alleging Joe Biden pressured Ukrainians into removing a prosecutor investigating a company because of its ties to the former vice president’s son. The interview and subsequent columns, conducted and written by a writer for The Hill newspaper, John Solomon, were the starting gun that eventually set off the impeachment inquiry into the president.

Watching from the control booth of The Hill’s TV studio was Lev Parnas, who helped arrange the interview.

Parnas and his partner Igor Fruman were working with the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to promote a story that it was Democrats and not Republicans who colluded with a foreign power in the 2016 election. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted the duo this month on allegations that they illegally funneled foreign money into U.S. political campaigns.

Interviews and company records obtained by ProPublica show Parnas worked closely with Solomon to facilitate his reporting, including helping with translation and interviews. Solomon also shared files he obtained related to the Biden allegations with Parnas, according to a person familiar with the exchange. And the two men shared yet another only recently revealed connection: Solomon’s personal lawyers connected the journalist to Parnas and later hired the Florida businessman as a translator in their representation of a Ukrainian oligarch.

Solomon’s interview and columns were widely amplified. Giuliani praised them, and Trump said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize. Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Lou Dobbs trumpeted them. They later become a key point in the CIA whistleblower complaint that set the impeachment inquiry in motion.

Parnas’ unusual and extensive involvement in the production of the stories has not been previously reported.

Solomon, 52, told ProPublica his reporting was accurate and defended his sourcing, saying, “No one knew there was anything wrong with Lev Parnas at the time.”

“Everybody who approaches me has an angle,” he said. “My mother has an angle when she calls me.” A lawyer for Parnas, who along with Fruman has pleaded not guilty, didn’t return requests for comment.

More than a year before his Ukraine columns published,The Hill had serious concerns about Solomon’s credibility and conflicts of interest. Hill staffers began raising alarms, including the paper’s publisher at the time, who warned in an internal memo that Solomon was engaged in “reputation killing stuff” by mixing business with journalism.

In response, The Hill’s management took steps to limit Solomon’s reporting — rebranding him as an opinion writer — but did not prevent him from writing his Ukraine series.

“Nothing I did would have put The Hill’s reputation at risk,” Solomon said.

Solomon came to The Hill, which specializes in inside-the-Beltway news, in July 2017 after adecades long career that included stretches at The Associated Press, The Washington Post and The Washington Times. His work has earned accolades, including a series examining what the FBI knew ahead of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He is now a contributor to Fox News.

Brought in as an executive vice president overseeing a new digital video enterprise now known asHill.TV, Solomon continued to operate as a journalist, publishing news articles in the paper, while also playing a role on The Hill’s business side. That began to trouble colleagues within months of his hiring, according to internal memos and interviews with current and former staffers.

In late October 2017, The Hill published a story on the decisive role of Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in the upcoming vote on the Trump administration’s tax bill. The article, authored by two journalists who reported to Solomon, included a quote from the executive director of Job Creators Network, a conservative group that claimed the bill would help small-business owners in Maine.

Soon after, Johanna Derlega, then The Hill’s publisher, wrote two memos to the company’s president, Richard Beckman, worrying that Solomon was tearing down the traditional wall separating the business side and the news coverage. She noted that Solomon had negotiated a nearly $160,000 advertising deal with Job Creators Network, targeting business owners in Maine. Solomon then had a quote from that group’s director inserted in the story.

Solomon “pops by the advertising bullpen almost daily to discuss big deals he’s about to close,” Derlega wrote, adding, “If a media reporter gets ahold of this story, it could destroy us.”

“While I highlight this one example, John has been given the freedom, and possibly financial upside, to work with advertisers while clearly sitting within editorial,” Derlega wrote.

Six months later, in April 2018, Derlega was forced out of The Hill. The Hill’s owner, president and top editors haven’t responded to detailed questions about Derlega’s memos and Solomon’s tenure at the paper. A spokesman for the advertiser, Job Creators Network, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

In interviews with ProPublica this week, Solomon repeatedly declined to discuss his activities on The Hill’s business side, saying, “I just simply can’t talk about anything business related with The Hill.”

A month later, the paper’s editor in chief, Bob Cusack, emailed staff that “effective immediately” Solomon would no longer publish stories under the banner of news but instead would be an “opinion contributor.”

From this new perch, Solomon broke in early spring what seemed to be an explosive piece of news: claims by Yuriy Lutsenko, then Ukraine’s top prosecutor, that a U.S. diplomat, serving under President Barack Obama, presented him a list of people and groups he could not prosecute. Additionally, Lutsenko said that he was reviving a probe into the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings, seeking to determine whether Joe Biden, as vice president, interfered with the initial inquiry to protect his son Hunter, who sat on Burisma’s board.

Behind the scenes, Parnas had been central to connecting Solomon with Lutsenko. In a March 2019 email that included the businessman, the columnist wrote that he’d “just got word from Lev that the prosecutor general has agreed to do an interview tomorrow.”

Parnas watchedLutsenko’s interview live, inside the control room of The Hill’s TV studio. Solomon explained that he called in the businessman to act as a translator, but in the end his services were not needed.

Solomon recalls first encountering Parnas through Pete Sessions, the once-powerful Texas Republican member of Congress who is now in the middle of the Trump impeachment inquiry. Sessions accepted campaign donations from Parnas and Fruman, and had met with the two men as they sought to oust an American diplomat in Ukraine. Later, Sessions wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, urging him to replace the envoy Marie Yovanovitch, who had been the subject of extensive criticism in the conservative media. She was later fired and is a key witness for House Democrats trying to impeach the president.

Sessions, who has denied knowledge of the campaign finance scheme laid out by prosecutors, told ProPublica that he has no connection to Solomon.

“I don’t know John,” he said.

Solomon says his personal attorneys, Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, a husband-and-wife legal team that regularly represents conservative luminaries, set up his first formal meeting with Parnas. He asserted that his editors “were aware” that he was seeking help from diGenova and Toensing on matters concerning Ukraine.

“I was doing that as an extra layer of protection,” Solomon said. “And so everything — everything — was above board. Everybody knew about it. I was just trying to be careful.” diGenova and Toensing did not respond to a request for comment.

[Read More

A Brief Guide to Giuliani’s Questionable Friends in Ukraine — “Trump, Inc.” Podcast

Rudy Giuliani has been looking for “corruption” in Ukraine. It’s easy to find among the very people he’s befriended.]

As he compiled material for subsequent columns, Solomon and Parnas continued to work closely. In late March, less than a week after the first piece featuring Lutsenko appeared in The Hill, Solomon sent files via Dropbox to Parnas containing financial records purporting to be connected to Biden’s son. Around the same time, Solomon also sent Toensing and diGenova what appeared to be an advance copy of a Ukraine-related story. The Daily Beast reported that the email was included in a State Department Inspector General’s Office package of material turned over to lawmakers.

Solomon acknowledged that Parnas helped set up the Lutsenko interview, but he says he had originally requested it through official channels. Solomon maintains his relationship with the businessman was a typical one a reporter would have with a source. “Lev would call me,” he said, “and offer things he was hearing on the ground and I would look into some things.”

As Solomon’s relationship with Parnas developed, he learned over time that the businessman “was working for many people or several people in Ukraine,” including Giuliani and Solomon’s lawyers. Politico first reported Solomon’s lawyers also represented the Ukrainian oligarch. Giuliani hasn’t responded to messages seeking comment.

Solomon defended his work, including his reporting on the so-called do-not-prosecute list, which he said he went through “enormous efforts” to verify. “At the end of the day,” Solomon said. “it doesn’t matter what Lev Parnas did. It matters what I did.”

But a month after Lutsenko’s Hill TV appearance, the former Ukrainian prosecutor backed off of his allegations.He told a Ukrainian-language publication that he himself was the one who asked the U.S. ambassador for the list of supposedly untouchable figures. The State Department said there was never any list, calling it an “outright fabrication.” And Lutsenko told the Los Angeles Times last month that he saw no evidence of wrongdoing that would justify an investigation into Biden’s son’s business dealings in his country.

Justin Elliott contributed to this report.

Filed under: Trump Administration

https://www.mediamatters.org/john-solomon/how-conservative-writer-john-solomon-served-conduit-rudy-giulianis-ukraine-conspiracy

At the center of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump lies a disinformation campaign led by his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani that was aided and abetted by conservative writer John Solomon. Through Solomon, Giuliani injected his disinformation campaign straight into the heart of conservative media -- Fox News -- with seemingly full knowledge of at least some at Fox. And eventually, Solomon landed a job at the network.

It is now known that Trump blessed Giuliani to run a shadow foreign policy campaign in Ukraine, in which he sought information that would undermine the intelligence community's findings that Russia interfered in our 2016 election to benefit Trump. Giuliani was also trying to dig up dirt to smear former Vice President Joe Biden, a front-runner to challenge Trump in the 2020 election.

Much attention has focused on Giuliani’s actions and the shady cast of characters he worked with, but less has been paid to the right-wing media figures who colluded with the president’s lawyer to make his smear campaign public -- a plan that came dangerously close to succeeding.

What follows is a case study in how right-wing media work hand in hand with Trump cronies to smear his enemies, undermine democracy, and defend the president at all costs.

Here’s how it went down.

Key Takeaways

• Rudy Giuliani, working with con men and Trump cronies, pursued an “investigation” in Ukraine that he claimed showed both Ukrainian collusion with Democrats in 2016 and evidence that then-Vice President Joe Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine to benefit his son.
• In March, Giuliani sent the results of his investigation to the State Department to be investigated and to conservative columnist John Solomon.
• The same month, Solomon began publishing a series of columns that mirrored the sourcing and claims Giuliani made in his State Department dossier.
• Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which focused primarily on Ukraine.
• During that same time period, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times.
• Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that deep state elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump.
• On October 5, John Solomon landed a job at Fox.

Key players

Rudy Giuliani -- the president’s personal attorney who has traveled around the globe attempting to dig up dirt on Democrats and discredit the Russia investigation on Trump’s behalf.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman -- two Soviet-born con men with ties to Ukraine who worked with Giuliani to concoct the disinformation campaign and to get the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine fired, reportedly in the hopes of advancing their business interests in the country. The two have since been arrested for campaign finance violations related to making allegedly illegal campaign donations to Republican candidates and committees, as well as a pro-Trump super PAC. They also reportedly worked for Dmitry Firtash.

Dmitry Firtash -- a Ukrainian pro-Russian oligarch and former businessassociate of Paul Manafort who is in Austria fighting extradition to the United States to face charges related to a bribery conspiracy. At the same time Parnas and Fruman were working with Giuliani, the two were reportedly also working on Firtash’s behalf to push for the removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine as part of a plan to install new leadership at Ukraine’s Naftogaz gas company. Part of this plan reportedly would have included Naftogaz paying “Firtash a debt of more than $200 million that Firtash believes he is owed by the company.” NBC reported that while this was happening, Firtash “was playing a key role in the effort by Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani to hunt for dirt on Donald Trump's political opponents in Ukraine.”

Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova -- two attorneys closely tied to Trump who also worked with Giuliani to support his efforts in Ukraine. The duo are known for their role in bolstering conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation and at one point were considered to join Trump’s personal legal team. The two quietly represent Dmitry Firtash in fighting his extradition to the United States. They hired Parnas as an “interpreter” to work with them on the Firtash case while Parnas was also working with Giuliani.

John Solomon -- a conservative columnist who until recently was the executive vice president of The Hill. Solomon was the conduit through which Giuliani, Parnas, Toensing and diGenova planted their stories in order to spread their coordinated disinformation campaign through the media.

Sean Hannity -- Fox News host who is close to Trump and worked with Giuliani to make his show an integral part of their media strategy, providing a place where they could sow the seeds of the smear campaign against Biden. Giuliani and Hannity discussed this strategy in January, and Solomon became a staple on Hannity’s prime-time programming.

The plan

According to Parnas, his friendship with Giuliani began two years ago as they were running in similar political circles and attending the same events. In late 2018, Parnas and Fruman began connecting Giuliani to a network of disgraced former and current Ukrainian officials and prosecutors to dig up dirt on Biden and the 2016 election.

The conspiracy theory they concocted went like this: Ukrainian officials worked with Democrats to find dirt on Trump’s one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort in order to damage Trump. They did so, Giuliani claimed, by fabricating the “black ledger” that showed that Manafort had received millions of dollars from the former pro-Russia Ukrainian ruling party that had been recently overthrown. The revelation of this ledger helped force Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign, and Manafort was eventually prosecuted and convicted of a wide range of crimes as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian electoral interference in the 2016 election.

In addition, according to Giuliani’s conspiracy theory, the Ukrainian Embassy was working with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and in return, the American Embassy and the Obama administration actively blocked investigations in Ukraine that Giuliani claims targeted Democrats’ political allies. As with most conspiracy theories on the right, George Soros is involved in this one too. The theory posits that a Ukrainian good governance, anti-corruption group -- the Anticorruption Action Centre (AntAC) -- was involved in framing Manafort and was corruptly tied to an FBI agent who was investigating Manafort. Giuliani also claims that an investigation into the group was shut down due to U.S. pressure and that the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine provided Ukrainian officials with a “do not prosecute” list that included people linked to AntAC. As a bonus, through the “investigation,” Giuliani claims to have been presented with evidence that then-Vice President Biden acted corruptly by withholding U.S. aid to force the resignation of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son.

Nothing about this conspiracy theory is true. First, there’s no evidence that the infamous “black ledger” was fraudulent, and several payments listed in the document have been confirmed to be accurate. The Intercept reported: “Sergii Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist and reformist member of parliament who helped publicize the off-the-books payments” said that “Giuliani ‘is a liar’ for saying that the black ledger was a forgery. ‘It is a real document, with real signatures,’ Leshchenko said in a telephone interview, explaining that it had been examined by Ukrainian law enforcement experts.” Giuliani seems to have adopted the false claim about the ledger from Manafort, whose legal team has embraced it since 2017 and whom Guiliani has been meeting with to discuss the materials.

As for Giuliani’s claims that investigations into AntAC were dropped due to political pressure,  the State Department has called claims of a so-called “do not prosecute” list “complete poppycock.” And an investigation into the group’s handling of foreign aid money was widely believed to be politically motivated retaliation for the group’s anti-corruption work. Finally, while Biden did pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was roundly criticized for blocking corruption investigations, there’s no evidence that he did so to benefit his son. In reality, the push to get the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin, fired was a part of an anti-corruption effort by advocates and international supporters of Ukraine. The United States’ well-established position was that ousting Shokin was a critical aspect of anti-corruption measures. The investigation into the energy company whose board included Hunter Biden was long dormant, and Hunter Biden was never the subject of the investigation.

Nonetheless, Giuliani says he completed his “investigation” in March and sent his findings to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with the understanding that Pompeo would investigate. (NBCNews.com, however, reported: “A source with knowledge of the events said ... that Pompeo never promised Rudy Giuliani that he would investigate the contents of the envelope or anything related to Ukraine.”) Giuliani also sent the materials to Solomon.

NBCNews.com obtained a copy of the documents that Giuliani sent to the State Department in March and reported that they contained “a glimpse of an intricate media strategy to spread the story including segments being placed on Fox News.” NBC said the “documents also show that Giuliani, through conservative writer JohnSolomon’s columns in The Hill, attempted to tie former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to the liberal donor George Soros as part of a massive conspiracy to take down Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election.” The materials Giuliani sent included interview notes from interviews he conducted with then-current and former Ukrainian prosecutors that “paint the picture of the narrative that Giuliani has been pushing involving the Bidens.”

The media strategy

Giuliani and associates feed story to Solomon

Around the same time Giuliani sent his packet of materials to the State Department, he also sent the materials to Solomon, who began reporting on its contents through the opinion pages of The Hill without identifying the materials as having originated with Giuliani. Solomon’s writing for some time had focused heavily around trying to discredit the Mueller investigation and the notion that Russia meddled into the 2016 elections to help Trump. On March 20, he published the first of many scoops specifically related to Ukraine’s involvement in this effort. Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which primarily focused on Ukraine.

In his reporting, Solomon spelled out Giuliani’s conspiracy theory in detail. For instance:

• He reported that Ukrainian officials claimed to have “evidence of wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes,” at least some of it related to Biden.
• Solomon reported that these officials tried to “deliver their evidence to Washington” but were unable because the American ambassador (Yovanovitch) “blocked” them “from obtaining a visa” to the U.S.
• He weaved an elaborate story about Americans working with Ukrainians to dig up dirt on Trump’s one-time 2016 campaign manager Manafort, in order to damage Trump.
• He claimed that the infamous “black ledger” that showed Manafort had received millions in undisclosed payments from Ukrainian officials was fabricated andreleased to damage Trump. He also suggested that in January 2016, Obama’s Department of Justice pressured Ukraine to help the department investigate Manafort in response to Trump’s rise in popularity in the Republican primary race (Manafort did not join the Trump campaign until March 2016).
• He strongly suggested that the Obama State Department pressured Ukrainian officials to drop an investigation into a Ukrainian good governance group linked to Soros because Soros backed Clinton.
• He also claimed the U.S. ambassador’s “do not prosecute” list included people related to this organization, and he strained to link the group to the Manafort investigation by claiming that an FBI agent involved in the investigation is tied to the same group.
• And, of course, he claimedthat Biden withheld a billion dollars worth of U.S. aid to shut down an investigation into Burisma Holdings and Biden’s son Hunter through his position on the company’s board.

Solomon’s reporting relies heavily on the sources Giuliani fed him. In an interview with The Washington Post, Giuliani named three current and former Ukrainian prosecutors as persons he interviewed, specifically former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko, and Nazar Kholodnytsky, head of Ukraine’s Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Giuliani is also known to have met with a former Ukrainian diplomat named Andrii Telizhenko and is linked to Kostiantyn Kulyk -- Lutsenko’s deputy who was indicted on corruption charges in 2016. Eight of the twelve columns Solomon wrote on the topic featured at least one of these five sources.

At least three of Solomon’s columns feature information meant to undermine the validity of the Russia investigation that may have been leaked from the Ukrainian pro-Russia oligarch Dmitry Firtash’s legal team, which included diGenova and Toensing. Toensing and diGenova have been working with Firtash since at least July -- and indeed Solomon published an entire column in July based exclusively off material and anonymous sources from Firtash’s legal team. They appear to have been involved with his case much earlier than July, though. 

Included in the material Giuliani sent to the State Department is a March 26 email from Solomon -- titled “Fwd: Outline of Soros reporting, including embedded documents” -- in which Solomon forwarded a draft of his article before it was published to the same three people working with Giuliani who are also known to have been working with Firtash -- Parnas, Toensing, and diGenova. The column was the first of three that mentioned Firtash, and it attempted to tie AntAC -- and through it Soros -- “to highly visible U.S. actions against the oligarch Dmitri Firtash, a major target of the Soros group, and Manafort.” Solomon repeated the suggestion in his August 7 column on Soros’ “secret 2016 access” to State Department officials. In a fourth column, Solomon reported on an affidavit of a former Ukrainian prosecutor that he exclusively received. The affidavit was prepared “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash … for use in legal proceedings in Austria.”

Solomon brings the conspiracy theory to Fox

The next stage in the plan involved Solomon taking his “scoop” to Fox News, specifically to SeanHannity. From March 20 -- when Solomon published his first story on the Ukraine conspiracy theory -- through October 2, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times. Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that “deep state” elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump. Giuliani also appeared on those networks frequently, clocking in at least 64 appearances on Fox News and Fox Business during that time period. Toensing and diGenova appeared over 75 times on the two networks during this period. 

The fact that they were working together on these stories, or -- in the case of Toensing and diGenova -- that they were legally representing Firtash, was certainly not transparent to viewers. In perhaps the most egregious example, on the September 26 episode of Hannity, Hannity hosted Solomon to report on an affidavit he obtained from the disgraced prosecutor Shokin, who claimed he was forced to resign to stop the investigation into the company connected to  Hunter Biden. Hannity then hosted diGenova and Toensing to discuss it, and the two hailed the affidavit as proof of their conspiracy theory and declared it would “shoot a hole in” Biden’s defense.

However, the affidavit states that it was prepared “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash … for use in legal proceedings in Austria.” In other words, diGenova and Toensing were part of the legal team that produced the affidavit that Solomon later exclusively obtained, wrote up, and then took to Hannity -- a fact not mentioned by any of them. Giuliani has since repeatedly referenced this affidavit in numerous media appearances to support his claims about Biden’s alleged corruption.

Hannity repeatedly gave clues suggesting he knew the full range of stories Solomon would be reporting. For instance, despite the fact that Solomon’s March 20 column did not mention Biden or corruption, Hannity teased on his radio show that day that “I just happen to have a little birdie telling me in my ear that, well, Joe Biden may have an issue here that is bigger than anything ever alleged about Donald Trump.” On September 23, Hannity and Giuliani admitted to having talked about the Biden Ukraine story as early as January.

The payoff

Giuliani repeatedly touted and praised Solomon’s “blockbuster” reporting. He has at least twice opined that Solomon should “get a Pulitzer Prize” and has taken to Twitter to sing Solomon’s praises:

Hannity, too, repeatedly praised Solomon’s “great reporting” as he hyped Solomon’s columns. He regularly described Solomon as a “friend” of the program and declared that mainstream news outlets, like The New York Times, “peddled lies, conspiracy theories and hoax[es]” about the Russia investigation whereas Solomon “was right” all along. On April 25, Hannity asked Trump about Solomon’s and others' reporting around the Russia investigation, and the president replied: “These are great reporters. … These are people that should be getting Pulitzers.” Trump added, “These are the ones that should be winning. It sounds like big stuff. It sounds very interesting with Ukraine.”

Solomon’s efforts paid off. On October 5, Fox News confirmed that John Solomon had joined the network as a contributor. During his first appearance on Hannity as an official Fox News employee, Hannity said: “John Solomon, welcome to the family. It’s been a long time coming, sir.”

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-is-about-to-become-the-right-wing-smear-machines-greatest-unintended-casualty/

no lnx

Trump is about to become the Right-wing smear machine’s greatest unintended casualty

Written by Daily Kos October 6, 2019

It’s commonly said that the “wheels of justice turn slowly,” and that’s usually true. But once in a while those wheels suddenly pop into reverse, jolting the car backwards and crushing whoever happens to be standing behind the truck.

In what is truly the richest of ironies, Donald Trump is now poised to become just another piece of right-wing roadkill, an unintended casualty of his own disinformation machine, the exact same machine that cemented his electoral victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. By extorting foreign leaders to manufacture dirt involving Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Trump stupidly fell into the trap of believing his own team’s propaganda, a result that those who created the Biden/Ukraine fairy tale in the first place completely failed to foresee. And now he’s looking at impeachment for believing their lies and taking them to their logical conclusion.

The warning signs for Team Trump were there from the start, but they went unheeded. It’s well-documented that Trump the politician (as opposed to Trump the phony media creation) is at his core a deeply stupid, credulous man whose ”agenda” and worldview are shaped entirely by what he sees on Fox News. Couple that with a tendency to surround himself with sycophantic “yes-men” who assure him that all his actions are examples of some titanic genius, and it should have been predictable that this president, watching dumbly as his Hannity-fed heroes droned on and on about supposedly nefarious dealings by the one political opponent he feared the most, would do something extraordinarily idiotic with that information at some point.

Jane Mayer of the New Yorker explains how the “Biden/Ukraine” hoax was invented and spread by the same people who invented the “Uranium One” fiction which Fox News and other Republican sludge generators spawned in order to smear Hillary Clinton in the 2016. The cast of characters for both smears is remarkably similar.

Anyone trying to track the Ukrainian conspiracy stories that were eventually embraced by President Trump is likely to get mired in the same echo chamber of right-wing news purveyors that misinformed voters in 2016. A pivotal source of the allegations against the Bidens, for instance, is the Government Accountability Institute, a Florida-based opposition-research operation that was founded by the former Trump political adviser Stephen Bannon—the same conservative nonprofit that ginned up questionable stories about the Clintons during the last Presidential campaign. In both instances, much of the coverage of the scandal was kicked off by Peter Schweizer, a longtime conservative political writer who is an editor-at-large at Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute.

The “Government Accountability Institute” or GAI is funded by a “libertarian” (i.e., I’ve got mine so fuck you)  billionaire named Robert Mercer, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, whose interests apparently lie in shaping American society in tandem with his grotesque social whims.  As Stephen Bannon himself acknowledged in an email to Mayer, the GAI acted as the primary source for the Biden/Ukraine “story.” Mayer’s article describes the purpose of the GAI as intended to generate baseless smears and worm them surreptitiously into the “mainstream” media where they can be repeated by more “credible” sources, even if those sources are simply busy debunking them.

Bannon designed the organization as a means of transmitting partisan dirt-digging to the mainstream media. He realized that, though mainstream reporters were suspicious of partisan opinion, they were open to damning facts about public figures, regardless of the sourcing. He set out, with Schweizer, to produce material that would generate mainstream coverage, and right-wing outrage.

In 2016 Schweizer published the book “Clinton Cash” which made the baseless accusation that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, had essentially traded away American national security by selling uranium mines to Russia in exchange for contributions to the Clinton foundation. By hawking this over and over through their mouthpieces on Fox News, Mercer, Bannon and Schweitzer had no trouble convincing susceptible viewers eager to believe any right-wing drivel spoon-fed to them that the Clintons were wholly, unimaginably  corrupt. The fact that these insinuations were totally false was beside the point. As it turned out, several government agencies having nothing to do with Hillary Clinton approved the deal, which ultimately involved a “negligible” amount of uranium.

Just as with the “Clinton Cash” fable constructed to inflame a drooling base of Fox News knuckledraggers, we now have practically the exact same cast of characters behind the latest baseless smear against Joe Biden—that he somehow intervened with Ukraine to protect his son’s profits.

In March of 2018, Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute once again produced a book that was perfectly timed for the Presidential campaign. “Secret Empires” devoted a chapter to the subject of “Bidens in Ukraine,” which laid out the conflicts of interest posed by the wheeling and dealing of Biden’s son Hunter.

Even though Schweizer conveniently omitted the fact that there was no prove to his insinuations about Ukraine and Joe Biden, that didn’t stop the conservative media from jumping on the bandwagon like flies on the proverbial shit. And, just as before, again we had the same hawking on Fox News of a shabbily-source tome of lies that every credible media source has shot down. But this time an attention-whoring sleazebag named Rudy Giuliani became involved, traveling to Ukraine under the guise of being Donald Trump’s “private attorney,” and attempting to solicit Ukrainian acquiescence and participation in the scam. And as Mayer points out, a couple new characters were now recruited by the Trump campaign itself to stoke the phony story. In particular, John Solomon, formerly a respectable reporter for the Hill but now entrenched in the more lucrative occupation of churning out right-wing trash for profit, was tapped to spread the manure around.

As Giuliani conspired this past spring with questionable Ukrainian sources, Solomon pumped out a string of eye-catching stories echoing those sources’ claims about the Bidens. This appears to have been no coincidence. According to NBC, the Giuliani documents show that Solomon’s columns were part of the Trump team’s strategy. (The New Yorker was unable to reach John Solomon, and a question e-mailed to the editor of The Hill, about whether the publication stood by Solomon’s stories, went unanswered.)

(As you may have noticed, Mayer’s article notes several people whom the New Yorker contacted for comment, but refused to respond)

She explains how the story was churned by Solomon and Schweizer, with lots of mutual dick-sucking apparent on both sides:

In Solomon’s April 1st column, he cited Schweizer’s book. Two days later, Schweizer sent “kudos” to Solomon during an interview on Breitbart News, and added, “We’re talking about potentially legal jeopardy involving the Vice-President’s family.” Schweizer opined that it was “all the sort of thing that needs to be investigated and looked into by a grand jury,” and added, “it’s pretty clear that you have a pattern that the for-sale sign was open with the Biden family . . . and that in itself demands investigation in the United States.”

Republican state television (also known as Fox News) then proceeded to run twelve or more segments hyping this wholly  in a single month, seeding it into the right-wing swamp. Of course, dumb Donald was watching like any other addled fool, slurping up every word. Sean Hannity mentioned it on seven separate shows, prompting Trump to respond personally to his hero with this Tweet, praising Solomon’s reporting:

“John Solomon: As Russia Collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges.” @seanhannity @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019

If Trump was capable of generating a hard-on, it must have happened during April of this year, as measured by the rapid, subsequent merging of the White House and Fox News,  first by Giuliani, then of Trump himself, who called the network to declare that further action was needed, and in particular, that he wanted to involve his stooge William Barr in the investigation.

By this time, the stodgy New York Times had become involved in “covering” the “controversy,” and even though the Times threw in a casual disclaimer–nineteen paragraphs into their own story– confirming that the entire farce was bullshit (”No evidence has surfaced that the former vice president intentionally tried to help his son by pressing for the prosecutor general’s dismissal.”), as far as Bannon, Schweizer and Mercer were concerned, they had already won the battle. Nevermind that several credible news sources spent the next few months confirming that it was all an invented hoax—the damage was done, and high-fives and clinking shot glasses were doubtlessly being exchanged all around.

Except no one stopped to consider what an irrational, power-mad sociopath like Trump would do with this information, swirling around busily in his brain. As it turns out, he went with his instincts, which, unlike the arc of history, do not bend towards justice but towards extortion. And his attempt to extort Ukraine by withholding Congressional aid until they manufactured some non-existent dirt about Joe Biden has ended up biting him squarely in the ass. He’s going to be impeached, something he existentially has dreaded since he assumed office, because it will forever leave a stain on his presidency that people will use to compare his tenure to that of an untarnished,  impeccable, Barack Obama.

Thanks to his slavish devotion to the right-wing propaganda machine, Donald Trump is about to become just another piece of collateral damage.  And he has no one but himself to blame.

==

new

jrnl fail

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/new-study-exposes-how-the-media-is-complicit-in-trumps-assault-on-reality/

When using social media to report on President Donald Trump’s comments, many major corporate media outlets often succeed only in amplifying his misinformation and lies instead of setting the record straight, according to a new study.

After examining about 2,000 tweets from more than 30 Twitter accounts controlled by major news sources over three weeks earlier this year, Media Matters for America (MMFA)reported Friday that the accounts simply spread Trump’s lies 65 percent of the time, without providing context or disputing his remarks.

Study: Major media outlets’ frequently amplify false Trump claims on Twitter https://t.co/M3vSST2tTV pic.twitter.com/EAHR7cTqLn

— Media Matters (@mmfa) May 3, 2019

You aren’t imagining it. Major news outlets amplify false or misleading Trump claims without debunking them an average of 19 times per day. https://t.co/8OV2FFVBMN**

The group found Trump’s lies about subjects including the Mueller report, North Korea, and his claim that former President Barack Obama was spying on him were amplified by NBC, ABC,and other sources more than 400 times over the course of the study, or an average of 19 times per day.

The findings left MMFA convinced that the news media is failing during Trump’s presidency in many of the same ways it did during his 2016 presidential campaign.

“News outlets are still failing to grapple with a major problem that media critics highlighted during the Trump transition: When journalists apply their traditional method of crafting headlines, tweets, and other social media posts to Trump, they end up passively spreading misinformation by uncritically repeating his falsehoods,” said Rob Savillo, a senior fellow and data analyst at MMFA, who co-authored the report.

This is a pretty damning article and one that suggests that #Trump‘s nonstop propaganda (a nice word for lies) can is being aided the news media. #journalism #journalists #emjrn https://t.co/W47NPkhVVh

— Jerry Lanson (@jerrylanson) May 3, 2019

About 30 percent of the tweets MMFA examined contained quotes from the president, with the quotations often making up the entire tweet.

The findings have major implications for how the press is helping Trump to spread misinformation, MMFA said, pointing to anearlier study by the American Press Institute which showed that manysocial media users only read a tweeted article’s headline or the text within a post instead of reading whatever context exists in an article, which outlets often link to in their tweets.

“The way people consume information in the digital age makes the accuracy of a news outlet’s headlines and social media posts more important than ever,” wrote Savillo and co-author Matt Gertz. “But journalists are trained to treat a politician’s statements as intrinsically newsworthy, often quoting them without context in tweets and headlines and addressing whether the statement was accurate only in the body of the piece, if at all.”

Most of the lies were spread after Trump hosted informal news briefings known as press gaggles and after his interviews with the press. News outlets passed along his false statement without debunking them 92 percent of the time during the former and 73 percent of the time during the latter.

The online news source The Hill amplified the most lies and misinformation, according to MMFA. The website’s Twitter account sent 40 percent of the misleading or false tweets containing Trump’s quotes or ideas, and passed along incorrect information from the president 88 percent of the time it tweeted about him.

“The Hill also frequently resends the same tweet at regular intervals, not only amplifying his falsehoods, but also making it more likely that the misinformation will stick with its audience through the power of repetition,” wrote Savillo and Gertz.

ABC News amplified Trump’s lies about 74 percent of the time, and even major cable networks that spread misinformation less frequently did so more than half the time. NBC News amplified bad information 52 percent of the time it tweeted about Trump and MSNBC did so 55 percent of the time.

NPR and the Washington Post were among the best performers. The Post disputed the president’s claims 33 out of the 37 times it tweeted about them, and NPR tweeted Trump’s quotations only 20 times. The outlet corrected Trump’s false statements all four times it shared them with the public.

“The results were striking,” the researchers wrote, “demonstrating that media outlets have a serious, ongoing problem dealing with passive misinformation.”

==

ref hmmn

the hill

ho would have thought that, this deep into the Russia collusion probe, we'd be learning about yet another dossier connected to Hillary Clinton? And, as it turns out, it was sort of a family secret.

By his own account, senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr played an essential — and unorthodox — role, carrying politically tainted allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion to the FBI during the 2016 election.

First, it was unverified intelligence starting in July 2016 from Trump-hating former British spy Christopher Steele,the author of the infamous Russia dossier.

Next, it was sketchy intelligence starting in August 2016 from Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, an opposition-research contractor who hired Steele and was paid to help Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign develop political dirt on Trump.

And now we learn, from testimony that is still being kept secret from the public, that Ohr admitted to Congress last year that he also took Russia information that his wife, Nellie, assembled against Trump on a computer drive and delivered that to the FBI in 2016 — a revelation that has raised fresh concerns in Congress about a possible conflict of interest.

Nellie Ohr worked for Fusion GPS and, for a time, worked on the same Clinton-financed Russian research project as Steele, according to the testimony.

DOJ ethics rules forbid department officials from working in cases where a spouse has a financial interest, a prohibition that Bruce Ohr said he knew about when he forwarded his wife’s evidence to the FBI.

The way Ohr described it, his wife’s research was like an additional dossier assembled from Fusion GPS research to augment what Steele was separately providing the FBI.

“She (Nellie Ohr) provided me with a memory stick that included research she had done for Fusion GPS on various Russian figures,” Ohr told congressional investigators.

“And the reason she provided that information to me is, my understanding was, it related to some of the same — it related to the FBI’s Russia investigation. And she gave me that stick to give to the FBI.”

Ohr’s revelation about his wife adds yet another example of people connected to the Clinton machine flooding the FBI with anti-Trump Russia research during the 2016 election.

Steele’s dossier was the opening salvo. A document sent to the State Department by Clinton proteges Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal was another. A thumb drive given by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman to FBI general counsel James Baker was a third. Simpson's thumb drive given to Bruce Ohr was a fourth. And Nellie Ohr’s thumb drive would be a fifth. At least three of those work products — those from Steele, Shearer/Blumenthal and Nellie Ohr — resemble what many people might consider a dossier.

==

==

rudy g booster:

Jonathon Hauenschild - American Legislative Exchange Council

https://www.alec.org/person/jonathon-hauenschild/

Jonathon Paul Hauenschild, J.D. is the director for the ALEC Task Force on Communications and Technology. Mr. Hauenschild has a particular interest in the ...

Jonathon Hauenschild - American Legislative Exchange Council

https://www.alec.org/author/jhauenschildalec-org/

... Workforce Development · Lawsuit Reform · Transportation · Cronyism · Health · Human Services · Agriculture. more. Name: Jonathon Hauenschild Description:

Jonathon Hauenschild | LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathon-hauenschild-a05b6816

scrape:

Brian Hawkins

Public Policy Analyst

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J.D./Ph.D. student at The University of Chicago

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Graduate Student in Communication

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Partner Relations Coordinator at Charles Koch Institute

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Research Analyst - Free Speech at American Legislative Exchange Council

Eric Bledsoe

Director of Curricular Improvement and Academic Outreach at American Council of Trustees and Alumni

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MA Fellow, Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Michael Puskaric

Northeastern Regional Vice-Chairman at Young Republican National Federation, Inc.

Michael Farren

Research Fellow at Mercatus Center at George Mason University

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Security Operations Intern at Freedom Partners Shared Services

Washington D.C. Metro Area - ?Director, Task Force on Communications & Technology at American Legislative Exchange Council - ?American Legislative Exchange Council

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Jonathon Hauenschild to Oak Brook College of Law Alumni Association. August 31, 2015 ·. If anyone knows of a OBCL student or recent graduate with an ...

Biographies - Franklin Adams & Company, LLC

franklinadamsllc.com/biographies/

Jonathon Paul Hauenschild, Esq. Founder and Principal of Franklin Adams & Company, LLC. Mr. Hauenschild received his Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from ...

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Jonathon Paul Hauenschild - #249615. Current Status: Active. This member is active and may practice law in California. See below for more details.

Jonathon Hauenschild | TheHill

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See Registration Card, N/A, N/A, N/A. Oak Brook College of Law & Gov't Policy, N/A, N/A, N/A ...

==

In case still had faith in the political media machine's integrity, several big outlets have cleared that misconception right up for you. They’ve decided to offer news interviews up for sale at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

This means these outlets not even trying to hide their sleaze anymore. As Lee Fang wrote in a July 1 article for The Intercept, which broke the story:

“For high-rolling special interests looking to make an impression at the presidential conventions next month, one option is to pay a lot of money to a media outlet. Lobbyists for the oil industry, for instance, are picking up the tab for leading Beltway publications to host energy policy discussions at the convention, including The Atlantic and Politico.

And for the right price, some political media outlets are even offering special interviews with editorial staffers and promotional coverage at the convention.”

The Hill newspaper, for example, is sponsoring events at both party conventions and is promising its sponsors who pay $200,000 convention interviews with The Hill editorial staffers for “up to three named executives or organization representatives of your choice,” according to a brochure obtained by The Intercept. “These interviews are pieces of earned media and will be hosted on a dedicated page on thehill.com and promoted across The Hill’s digital and social media channels,” the brochure promises.

The Hill ignored The Intercept’s inquiries, Fang wrote.

Fang's article mentionsThe Economistand its subsidiary CQ Roll Callas having similar deals on the table.

Even for big media, this is a slimy new low. These once-journalistic news organizations are undeniably morphing into paid advertising and PR for the 1-percenter corporations and billionaires who control the political lobby.

People who care even a little bit about the importance of journalistic integrity, or the checks and balances of the press—which are a necessary piece of any healthy democracy—should immediately boycott any news organization willing to stoop this low. This kind of behavior erases the already-too-fuzzy line between the news media and the moneyed class's greedy interests.

Maybe you aren’t shocked by this new low because this is simply a blatant version of what you already knew has been going on behind the scenes for years—but still. That they are so brazen about it is terrifying. What does it say about the state of the press when these well-known, long-time trusted publications are straight-up going, "Hey, rich people: ever wanted to buy off a journalist? Now's your chance!"

It's upsetting on a whole new level.

You can read the full Intercept article here.

==

energy headlines seems sorta balanced

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment

wiki

The Hill is a non-partisan American political newspaper published in Washington, D.C. since 1994.^[3][4][5] It is owned by News Communications, Inc., which is owned by Capitol Hill Publishing, Chairman James A. Finkelstein.

Focusing on the intersection of politics, policy, business and international relations, The Hill coverage includes Congress, the White House and federal campaigns. It has policy verticals on Cybersecurity, Defense, Energy & Environment, Finance, Healthcare, National Security, Technology, and Transportation.

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 History
• 2 Current columnists
• 3 Past columnists
• 4 References
• 5 External links

History:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Hill's first editor was Martin Tolchin, a veteran correspondent in the Washington bureau of The New York Times.^[5]

In 2003, Hugo Gurdon,^[4] who was previously a foreign correspondent (New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Washington, industrial editor at The Daily Telegraph (London) and founding managing editor of the Toronto-based National Post, became The Hill's editor in chief. Gurdon turned The Hill from a weekly paper into a daily during congressional sessions. In 2014, Gurdon left for Washington Examiner and was replaced by his managing editor, Bob Cusack.^[1]

The newspaper has the largest circulation of any Capitol Hill publication, with more than 24,000 print readers.^[4] It also operates a news website which features six blogs dedicated to specific political and policy issues: Ballot Box, Blog Briefing Room, Congress Blog, Floor Action, In the Know and Twitter Room.

Current columnists:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

• A. B. Stoddard
• Bill Press
• Brent Budowsky
• David Webb
• Dick Morris
• John Feehery
• Juan Williams
• Judd Gregg
• Katie Pavlich
• Lanny Davis
• Mark Mellman
• Markos Moulitsas

Past columnists:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

• Byron York
• David Keene
• James Carville
• Josh Marshall
• Ron Christie

References:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

1. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hill%28newspaper%29#cite_ref-Cusack_1-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hill%28newspaper%29#cite_ref-Cusack_1-2) Yingling, Jennifer (2014-07-28). "The Hill names Bob Cusack Editor in Chief". The Hill. Retrieved 2014-08-07.
2. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "The Hill: ‘An investment in the arts is an investment in economic growth’". Arts Action und. February 2015. Retrieved June 20, 2015.
3. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "Contact Us". TheHill.
4. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hill%28newspaper%29#cite_ref-about_4-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hill%28newspaper%29#cite_ref-about_4-2) "Who we are". TheHill.
5. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hill_%28newspaper%29#cite_ref-nytimes_5-1) "New paper to vie for readers on Capitol Hill". nytimes.com.

External links:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

• Official website

Categories: 

• Legislative branch of the United States government
• Newspapers published in Washington, D.C.
• Weekly newspapers published in the United States
• American political media
• Publications established in 1994