michael caputo bak

mAIN FOrmat messed up

old pal of roger back to sheriff of wall st elliot spitzer hit

But the scale of Trump's exploitation of public resources, his incessant stealing with both hands, is exponentially worse than any theft previously perpetrated by Democrats or Republicans. At a time when voters expected this president to look out for their pocketbooks, he does nothing but stuff his own, plundering them and profiting hugely. Polls suggest that they have at last begun to notice — and don't like what they see.

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President Donald Trump’s former adviser Michael Caputo has reportedly filed the first known claim to the new $1.8 billion fund established for supposed victims of lawfare.

“I was the target of the illegal Crossfire Hurricane investigation and our family suffered greatly during that dark era of political weaponization,” Caputo claimed in a letter to the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, according to a report by CNN.

The fund will be controlled by five members selected by Blanche and one selected with congressional input. The group has not established any guidelines as to who will be paid, but they have not ruled out paying Jan. 6th insurrectionists or agencies directly connected to Trump himself. They also have not explained how they will determine the amounts to be dispersed. The fund itself is controversial because Trump sued his own IRS, reportedly did not permit his Justice Department (which is supposed to defend the IRS from lawsuits) to advocate for the IRS in good faith and then skirted a judge’s order to make sure his suit was legal by having the two agencies he controlled settle without third-party oversight.

The settlement also bars the IRS from ever investigating Trump or his family members for past tax issues. Legal experts agree that there is no precedent for a sitting president pocketing money from his own IRS for himself and those he personally deems to have been wronged by the federal government. Skeptics argue that, despite Trump’s promises to not self-deal or dispense the money for partisan reasons, his past of self-dealing and using federal money to help allies suggests his promises should not be believed.

"Because the Notice does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement, there is no settlement of record," Judge Kathleen M. Williams, the judge assigned to oversee the case, commented on Monday. When the case had been referred to Williams, she argued that the potential for illegality was so great that she needed to consult legal experts before the parties could continue. Trump quickly rushed to come up with the settlement before Williams’ May 20th deadline.

"Unfathomable levels of corruption,” legal reporter Chris Geidner told Politico, adding that "it's the underscore waiting to fill in the date that really does it for me."

Geidner was referring to the document's date at the top of the page which read "May ___, 2026,” with a “19” later added in.

"New addition just inserted in settlement agreement: a promise that the IRS won't go after Trump, his companies, and his families for unpaid taxes,” legal analyst Harry Litman wrote. “Potential huge additional cost to Treasury -- i.e., us -- all in exchange for, well, nothing, an uncognizable lawsuit."

Another legal expert argued the settlement is an impeachable offense.

"I assumed we would never see the 'settlement agreement,' or whatever you want to call it, but evidently, DOJ went ahead and posted it on its website,” New Mexico civil litigator Owen Barcala posted on Bluesky. “A couple things are interesting if you can steel your mind for the outrage and horror of its general nature.”

After reviewing the various ways in which the settlement is unprecedented and arguably illegal, Barcala concluded that it "must be nice to have figured out the One Neat Trick to avoid Congressional appropriations. Just sue yourself, direct yourself to settle for billions, and agree with yourself that you can put that money wherever you want.”

He concluded, “Entities can also make claims, making it possible that Trump Org could make a claim for the NY litigation. To be eligible for relief, you only have to make a 'legal claim' stating that you were a victim, presumably in some kind of crayon."

Finally Christian Mott, a criminal law expert, argued that the settlement’s language suggests Trump plans on personally drawing from the fund.

"It seems like you'd only do this if you are anticipating that Trump will make a claim," Mott said. "The agreement also appears to allow Trump to continue pursuing his monetary damages claims through the Fund set up in the agreement. See Sec. III.B. So, he has effectively created a more favorable forum for himself, which is a huge benefit given that several of his claims were very weak."

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2018, a year which like 2026 included midterm elections, Caputo argued then what Trump supporters are arguing today: That he needs to prevail in the midterm elections in order to avoid being impeached for his alleged crimes.

“I agree with Steve Bannon 100 percent: the mid-term elections are a referendum on the President and a vote for Republican House candidates is a vote to stop a bogus partisan impeachment,” Caputo, who worked as a communications adviser for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and later as his assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, told this reporter at the time. “I understand why some in the White House and official GOP organs may not behind this message — they have many reasons. But I’m not buying it: impeachment will definitely be on the Democrat agenda if they win the House, and this must be stopped. I’m not afraid to talk about this, regardless of where the Washington Republicans consultant class comes down on it.”

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mma 12 22

Conservative Spanish-language media portrayed the 2022 midterm elections as a referendum on crime and a supposed communist takeover of the government, and spread false claims that tabulation problems in Arizona and pandemic-induced vote by mail efforts were evidence of a Democratic plot to steal the election.This misinformation largely reached radio audiences but was bolstered by often murky and poorly enforced election misinformation policies on major social media platforms.

Leading up to the midterms, conservatives predicted Latino voters would deliver a “red wave” across the United States. However, the election’s results suggest Republicans struggled to engage Latino voters outside of Florida – potentially distancing themselves from an increasingly Latino electorate in the United States.

In September, Micheal Caputo, a former Trump Administration official and current Chief Communications Officer for Americano Media, announced the Spanish-language conservative media network would be moving its platform from SiriusXM to Florida AM radio. Nevertheless, in the weeks leading up to the midterm, Americano Media managed to grow its online presence significantly – releasing an interview with former President Donald Trump in the midst of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover that got the attention of high-profile right-wing personalities. It also invested in a new Television studio for its streaming service.

Spanish-language right-wing media fearmongered about communism

Right-wing media often attempt to generational anxieties about communism in Latino communities to attack Democratic candidates and attract Latinos to the Republican party. In the weeks leading up to the 2022 midterm election, Spanish-speaking right-wing misinformers on both radio and the internet fearmongered about a “radical” leftist agenda seeking to bankrupt the middle class and take over the government.

On her Americano Radio show En Perspectiva, for example, Dania Alexandrino called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) a “fake socialist” who makes millions from Netflix but “wants to redistribute everyone else’s wealth,” adding that she is “an imbecile of little intelligence.” Alan McAbee, a right-wing commentator who sometimes hosts En Perspectiva, told listeners about a “secret, socialist, leftist force” that is “in charge and making [executive] decisions.” In an earlier episode, McAbee suggestedthe “socialist, communist wing” of the Democratic party wants to “bankrupt the middle class” through socialized medicine “like in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.” On their show Cada Tarde, Carines Moncada and Agustin Acosta even suggested Lizzo’s performance with James Maddison’s flute was somehow part of a socialist agenda to “erase” and “degrade” American history.”

Online, popular right-wing social media figures urged conservatives to show up on election day in order to “expel communism and globalism from the United States.” On Facebook, Nelson Albino, a conservative political pundit with over 39,000 followers, and Estamos Unidos, a right-wing blog with over 18,800 followers, shared Americano Media's translation of Trump’s call to “crush the communists at the ballot box” during a Save America rally in Miami, Florida. El American shared a Spanish-language ad calling Democratic candidate Annette Taddeo (FL-27) a “socialist witch.” On Facebook, El Poeta Político, a right-wing blog with over 9,900 followers, shared a post urging Florida Republicans to “involve their whole family” and defend “the last bastion of American freedom” against Democrats who “want to drown our liberties in a socialist swamp of misery.”

Spanish-speaking conservatives attacked Democrats for supposedly being soft on crime

As the midterms grew closer, Spanish-language conservatives followed mainstream right-wing media’s lead in attempting to turn crime into a political cudgel against Democrats – blaming the “defund the police” movement and liberal policies for recent upward trends in violent crime.

On radio, Americano Media hosts leaned heavily into narratives about drugs and violence, often attacking Democrats for being soft on crime. On an episode of Entre Lineas, for example, host Freddy Silva claimed people in cities governed by Democrats are “looting for fun” since “they are no longer afraid of authority.” In an episode of Battleground Americano, host Jesús Márquez claimed that “Biden and the Democrats” “started a war against the police.” Carines Moncada and Agustin Acosta also spread misinformative crime narratives on Cada Tarde, where they suggested Democratic state legislators and mayors are cutting police resources. On En Perspectiva, Alexandrino claimed George Soros funded “progressively-regressive District Attorneys” that have ruined American cities and “radical leftist prosecutors” that care more about the criminals than they do about the police.

On social media, Americano Media claimed “cities governed by Democrats [are] suffering the consequences” of homelessness and hard drugs like heroin and fentanyl, and shared a translated clip of Trump’s false claims that Democratic cities are “drenched in the blood of innocent victims” thanks to the crime wave. On election day, Americano Media’s Vanessa Vallejo suggested Republican Lee Zeldin could win against New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) because Americans “are fed up with the drugs and insecurity caused largely by the Democrats’ ‘defund the police.’” On Facebook, The Republican National Hispanic Assembly’s verified account with over 35,000 followers shared a segment from The Epoch Times En Español's Al Descubierto, a known source of Spanish-language misinformation, that blames President Joe Biden for the “open border crisis” responsible “for the free-flowing [fentanyl] that is killing our youth.”

Spanish-language right-wing media spread claims that tabulation issues in Arizona were evidence of mass voter fraud

Much like their English-language counterparts, who spent the last two years making claims that Democrats were plotting to steal elections, Spanish-speaking misinformers took to social media and radio to spread misleading claims about the Arizona election. In particular, they honed in on printer issues that slowed the vote counting process in Maricopa County, Arizona, and were found by a court to have precluded no voter “from turning in a ballot.” Despite this and without evidence, misinformers claimed that these issues disenfranchised “tens of thousands” Republican voters.

In the days that followed the election, Americano Media hosts were determined to cast a shadow over the validity of the results. On Battleground Americano, for example, guest host Lucia Navarro argued that the integrity of the governor’s race in Arizona could not be verified, given Democratic winner Katie Hobbs’s “conflict of interest” as Arizona’s then-acting Secretary of State. Navarro’s guest Cristina Junge also falsely claimed, “what happened here in Arizona was the same thing that happened in 2020 — they robbed us,” arguing 17,000 votes in Maricopa County had been “lost” and been tampered with. On his show Cada Tarde, Agustin Acosta also compared the 2022 midterms to the Big Lie of 2020, claiming evidence of “very strange results in two or three states” in “a repeat” of “what happened in 2020.”

Online, Spanish-language misinformers claimed tabulation issues in Arizona were evidence of a Democratic plan to steal the election. On Twitter, La Derecha Diario, a right-wing outlet with more than 254,000 followers, shared a subtitled clip of Fox News' misleading reporting on Maricopa County to suggest there could have been fraud in “the most Republican parts of the state.” On Twitter, Albino, a pundit for Americano Media with over 3,000 followers, claimed Democrats “want to steal the election in Arizona again” and accused Hobbs of “violating” voters’ rights. James Nava, a right-wing Spanish-speaking misinformer, spent the month following the election “updating” his 22,000 followers with false claims about “the Democrats’ outright fraud in Arizona.” Eduardo Menoni, a known misinformative Spanish-language YouTuber who often rantsabout censorship, took to fringe platforms like Telegram and Rumble to claim tabulation problems in Arizona “prove elites will do anything to prevent patriot candidates from winning.”

Spanish-language right-wing media echoed conservative claims that vote-by-mail is cheating

In the days that followed the 2022 midterms, Spanish-language misinformers also sought to discredit vote-by-mail efforts, claiming Democrats manipulated the voting rules in states like Pennsylvania and Nevada to rig the election in their favor.

Shell-shocked by Republicans’ underwhelming midterm performance, Americano Media personalities spent the days after the election spreading conspiracy theories about Democrats illegally altering voting procedures to manipulate results in their favor. On Battleground Americano, Jesús Márquez argued Democrats used “the pretext of the pandemic” to “make changes to the electoral rules in several states,” claiming pandemic-induced vote-by-mail initiatives like Nevada automatically sending out absentee ballots are “dirty,” claiming that Democrats can send absentee ballots to anyone – “even dead people” – and accept “any vote that goes their way.” On his show, J&J Prime host Jimmy Nieves claimed election-reporting delays were unconstitutional and make the United States “look like a banana republic.

Online, misinformers claimed that U.S. Senator-elect John Fetterman (D-PA) campaign’s suit to count all mailed-in ballots was proof of a Democratic plot to change voting rules and prevent Republicans from winning. On Twitter, La Derecha Diario shared a piece claiming Democrats “were trying to steal the election” by “accepting late and undated mailed-in ballots.” Rafael Capacho, a misinformative YouTuber, celebrated the Pennsylvania court’s decision not to count improperly dated mailed-in ballots and shared right-wing claims that polling places in Pennsylvania that ran out of paper were “disenfranchising voters.”

YouTube's inadequate policies allow Spanish-language channels to allege fraud in US midterms

11/10/22 5:54 PM EST

With midterms approaching, Spanish-language election misinformation remains a problem on Facebook

11/01/22 10:01 AM EDT

On Marketplace Tech, Media Matters’ Brennan Suen explains how YouTube can mitigate Spanish-language election misinformation

10/21/22

igor salon

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/dress-rehearsal-for-2024-senate/

Former President Donald Trump is already laying the groundwork to challenge the results of the Pennsylvania Senate race, viewing the election as a "dress rehearsal for Trump 2024," according to Rolling Stone.

Trump last month met with Republican allies at Trump Tower to demand they "do something" about the Senate race between Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Republican challenger Mehmet Oz, claiming that there was a "scam" happening in Philadelphia and elsewhere around the state.

"During our briefing, he was concerned that 2020 is going to happen again in 2022," Michael Caputo, a former Trump administration official who attended the meeting along with Bradford County Commissioner Doug McLinko and retired CIA officer Sam Faddis, told Rolling Stone. "Our team encouraged him to be concerned … [Furthermore], I'm advising Republicans to recruit and train election observers and a team of attorneys to oversee historically problematic precincts," Caputo said.

The meeting was one of several in which Trump has discussed plans to challenge the 2022 midterm results, and not just in Pennsylvania, four sources told the outlet, discussing "scorched-earth legal tactics they could deploy."

TrumpWorld is planning "aggressive court campaigns" if there is any hint of doubt about the results, according to the report. Trump himself has been briefed on plans in multiple states, including in Georgia, but he has been particularly fixated on the Pennsylvania race. If Oz does not win or the results are close, sources told Rolling Stone, Trump and other Republicans are already planning to "wage a legal and activist crusade against the 'election integrity' of Democratic strongholds such as Philly," according to the report.

One source told the outlet that Trump is particularly focused on Pennsylvania because he sees the Senate race as a "dress rehearsal for Trump 2024."

Trump during the September meeting urged GOP allies to work to limit mail-in voting in the state, pushing debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen in Philadelphia and demanding officials focus on the heavily Democratic and diverse area, according to the report. Trump has asked several advisers what Republicans are doing to prevent Democrats from "steal[ing] it in Philadelphia [like] they did last time," sources told the outlet.

Numerous Trump allies are ready to help wage another campaign to stoke doubt in election results before any votes are even cast.

"It's important to prepare for legal fights that will inevitably arise," Hogan Gidley, a former Trump White House spokesman who now works at the America First Policy Institute,told Rolling Stone. "The effort that the Center for Election Integrity is focused on started at the beginning of this year…We've been seeding efforts across the country in important states…[because] having people on the ground locally is key to these efforts — because if you're not at the table, you're on the menu."

MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who has spent millions pushing lies that voting machines flipped votes from Trump to President Joe Biden, also vowed to fight over the 2022 results.

"No matter what happens, I'm not giving up on getting rid of those voting machines … I will not stop until the machines are gone," Lindell, who is facing a $1 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, told Rolling Stone.

Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock CEO who has likewise poured his own money into the "Big Lie" crusade, has teamed with former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn to form the so-called America Project.

"We have made proper preparations for post-election challenges if necessary, but our overwhelming focus is on having a clean, transparent election, which obviates the need for post-election legal scuffles," Byrne told the outlet.

The Republican National Committee is already involved in the race, pushing the state to stop counting mail-in ballots that are missing handwritten dates.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this year ruled that tossing such ballots would result in "disenfranchising otherwise qualified voters" over a "meaningless requirement" that does not affect the voters' eligibility. The Supreme Court last week tossed the court's decision but did not rule on whether the ballots are required to be counted. A state court previously ruled that undated ballots can be counted and the state's Supreme Court in 2020 ruled that such ballots should be counted that year but not in future elections.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman issued guidance urging counties to count the undated ballots but the RNC and a group of Pennsylvania Republicans sued last week, asking the state Supreme Court to rule that the undated ballots should not be counted. The lawsuit is led by attorneys Kathleen Gallagher and john Gore, who previously represented Pennsylvania Republicans in their attempt to overturn the 2020 results over late-arriving mail-in ballots.

It's a trend that could play out across the country as numerous election deniers seek midterm wins, including Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and New Hampshire Senate candidate Don Bolduc. And pro-Trump media has boosted the message.

"If it is fair, Kari Lake's going to win," Fox News host Tucker Carlson said recently.

Pro-Trump radio host Mark Levin accused Democrats of "trying to steal the election for Fetterman," citing the dispute over the undated ballots.

The Rolling Stone report noted that Trump's obsession with bolstering the Republican legal infrastructure to challenge the election stands in stark contrast with the "relatively small sums" he has poured into the campaign to boost Oz's chances. His super PAC has spent just $770,000 on TV ads for [OZ?] Trump, compared to $34 million from the Senate Leadership Fund, which is allied with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Some Republicans have taken notice.

"There's a lot of people that were Trump supporters, who backed him through thick and thin," a Pennsylvania Republican attorney told Rolling Stone. "That's not lost on them."

alexander et al suppress covid #, kids

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/trump-administration

veema s on task force? pix]

Former President Donald Trump's administration is under fire for hindering the government's pandemic response and rolling back Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) coronavirus mitigation guidelines in an effort to protect his interests.

According to CNBC News, the latest reports stem from documentation compiled during the House Oversight investigation launched back in September 2020. Based on the documents, the Trump administration is said to have intentionally suppressed COVID-19 testing by rolling back the CDC guidelines.

To justify the scaling back of COVID testing, former Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) scientific advisor Paul Alexander argued there was little significance in testing asymptomatic individuals, according to emails obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

"Testing asymptomatic people to seek asymptomatic cases is not the point of testing, for in the end, all this accomplishes is we end up quarantining asymptomatic, low-risk people and preventing the workforce from working," Alexander wrote shortly after HHS officials received an update about the CDC's guidelines. "In this light, it would be unreasonable based on the prevailing data to have widespread testing of schools and colleges/universities. This will not allow them to optimally re-open."

According to the Daily Beast, another report — which would have highlighted elevated death totals in young people — was an area of concern for Alexander. Although the report was true, Alexander emailed White House COVID Task Force Senior Adviser Scott Atlas warning that it was "very duplicitous to damage the administration."

Alexander said, "The timing of this is meant to interfere with school re-opening and we need to get something out fast to preempt this in the next day or so and I can work with you on it."

According to the documentation, Alexander also attempted to convince Atlas to "craft an op-ed .. disputing the reporting for on face value, it is meant to mislead."

After deep scrutiny about the rollback of guidelines, the CDC quietly backpedaled on the changes, replacing the previous guidance with recommendations suggesting that anyone who "has been in close contact with an infected person needs a Covid-19 test."

In December, email correspondence to HHS public-affairs adviser Michael Caputo also highlighted Alexander's attempt to advocate for the former president to consider a "herd immunity" strategy" for the United States in handling the coronavirus.

"There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high-risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD," Alexander's letter read. "Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle-aged with no conditions, etc. have zero to little risk…. so we use them to develop herd… we want them infected…."

The latest report comes less than one week after veteran election consultant Tony Fabrizio and Republican pollster John McLaughlin both released assessments of the 2020 election and what led to Trump's loss. Despite the former president's claims of voter fraud, both analyses suggest Trump's failed leadership amid the pandemic contributed significantly to his electoral defeat.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-2649521037/

according to a new report from POLITICO, a former top Trump appointee urged for health officials to adopt a "herd immunity" approach to the coronavirus pandemic, allowing for millions of people to be infected.

"There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD," then-science adviser Paul Alexander wrote on July 4 to his boss, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, and six other senior officials.

"Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected…" he added.

The news sparked a wave of outrage from President Trump's critics on Twitter....

no lnx

A new lawsuit accuses East Aurora political consultant Michael R. Caputo of serving as a public mouthpiece for indicted Republican politico Roger Stone, who is under a federal gag order barring him from discussing the criminal case against him.

In an unusual courtroom clash of conservative figures, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi and Freedom Watch founder Larry Klayman sued Caputo and Stone in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia earlier this month, accusing Caputo of defamation.

It's all because of what Caputo had to say on MSNBC last month about special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. There, Caputo speculated that Corsi will testify against Stoneat his upcoming trial on charges that Stone tried to get and share emails from WikiLeaks that would damage Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign.

"The Mueller team finds himself at the end of the hallway at the end of this entire game and they're staring at Jerry Corsi, who believes the most wild conspiracies in the world," Caputo said on "The Beat with Ari Melber" on March 29. "Dozens of years of Yale law school education and they end at the freak show tent."

But Corsi isn't mad enough to sue just because Caputo called him part of a "freak show." Corsi and Klayman, his lawyer, allege that Stone enlisted Caputo to serve as his media surrogate – in violation of the gag order barring Stone and his associates from speaking out about his case.

In addition to filing a lawsuit, Corso and Klayman delivered a statement to U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is presiding over Stone's case,to accuse Caputo and Stone of breaking Jackson's order that Stone remain silent and avoid media appearances.

"Stone is employing surrogates, specifically in this instance his longtime associate Michael Caputo, to continue to smear and defame Dr. Corsi and his counsel Larry Klayman, while directly violating this court's February 19 'gag' order," Klayman wrote in the statement.

Caputo referred all questions on the matter to his attorney, Dennis C. Vacco.

"I think it's a publicity stunt more than anything," Vacco said, noting that neither Caputo nor Stone have been served with the court papers Klayman filed. "So from our perspective, the litigation has not commenced."

Asked about the lawsuit's specific allegations – that Caputo acted as Stone's mouthpiece and then slandered Corsi – Vacco said: "From our perspective, the allegations contained in the complaint are are frivolous."

The case seems to be an extension of one that Corsi and Klayman filed against Stone in U.S. District Court in D.C. in February.

According to Corsi's complaint in that case, "even before Defendant Stone was indicted, he began a public relations campaign in this district, nationally and internationally to smear, intimidate and threaten Plaintiff Corsi, a material witness in the 'Russian Collusion' investigation."

The Corsi/Klayman clash with Stone and Caputo marks another unusual chapter in the lives of four men with unusual political careers.

Corsi is best known as the co-author of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry," a widely criticized book that included questionable allegations about then-Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. Corsi then went on to play a prominent role in the "birther" movement that inaccurately said then-President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Klayman founded Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, right-wing organizations that filed repeated lawsuits against President Bill Clinton and later Hillary Clinton on issues ranging from the president's alleged affairs to his wife's role in the 2012 terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Stone has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back and a long-standing close relationship with President Trump.

And Caputo is an East Aurora political consultant and sometimes radio show host with a colorful history that includes a period of time working in Russia during its 1990s experiment with democracy and serving for a time on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign staff. Mueller's investigators interviewed Caputo as part of their probe, which ended without any charges against him.

Mueller report comes as relief to Caputo

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/reality-might-no-longer-be-an-option-reporter-details-the-cognitive-dissonance-trump-defenders-grapple-with-in-support-of-the-president/

One of the most jarring aspects of watching Fox News or One America News Network is the mental gymnastics President Donald Trump’s supporters must perform in his defense. Being a Trump supporter often means defending the indefensible. Journalist Anne Applebaum describes those extremes in an article published in The Atlantic on September 25, stressing that their defenses of the president require a total defiance of logic and reason.

Applebaum cites Trump loyalist William B. Crews as one of the wildest examples. Crews, Applebaum notes, was an employee of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci. Crews, the Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markey recently reported, was angry because Fauci’s messages on the coronavirus pandemic sometimes conflicted with what Trump had to say — and Crews responded by attacking Fauci on the Red State website using the pen name “Streiff.”

As “Streiff,” Applebaum notes, Crews also defended Trump on everything from the Ukraine scandal to the George Floyd protests.

“Nothing that (Crews) wrote was clever or surprising,” Applebaum explains. “Day after day, he produced boringly predictable pablum — the sort of average-vile stuff pumped out on Fox or Breitbart News all the time. The only thing remarkable about this writing is that Crews was doing it while simultaneously being employed by a government body whose most important task is to fight exactly the kinds of conspiracy theories he was producing.”

Another example of a Trump supporter who has gone to insane lengths to defend the indefensible, according to Applebaum, is Michael Caputo,former Trump-appointed spokesman at the Department of Health and Human Services. Caputo, Applebaum observes, “was caught meddling with scientific reports on the pandemic put out by the CDC, which, like Fauci’s agency, is part of HHS. He then posted a Facebook video claiming that scientists at the CDC were plotting ‘sedition’ and worse.”

Applebaum quotes Caputo as saying, “You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going. There are hit squads being trained all over this country. If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”

The “cases” of Crews and Caputo, Applebaum writes, indicate “that people whose jobs require them to provide ‘alternative facts’ on a regular basis might eventually break under the strain. Maybe there is a price to be paid, in loss of mental clarity, for supporting the fantasy world needed to sustain this president.”

Trumpworld, Applebaum warns, has become so unhinged that even supporters of the far-right QAnon cult are now welcome in the GOP.

“In order to make sense of the world they can see all around them, (QAnon) have created an elaborate and obviously false explanation — that an omniscient Trump is fighting a cabal of deep-state Satanists and pedophiles,” Applebaum observes. “No wonder Republicans, instead of shunning QAnon believers, are working to elect some of them to Congress in November. They genuinely serve a function, helping Trump supporters navigate the gap between the reality they live in and the fiction they see on Fox and Facebook.”

Applebaum wraps up her piece by warning that if Trump wins a second term in November, his administration could become even more divorced from reality.

“Voters can still choose to grapple with reality — to read real news, to seek accurate information, to use our daily experience as a guide before deciding what to believe —without fear,” Applebaum stresses. “But for people like ‘Streiff’ — people who actually work in this administration, and people who would choose to work in a second Trump Administration — reality might no longer be an option.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-official-in-charge-of-shaping-policies-at-hhs-has-been-a-college-senior-report

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trump official in charge of ‘shaping policies’ at HHS has been a college senior: report

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement September 22, 2020

The Trump administration put a college senior in charge of personnel at the Dept. of Health and Human Services, Catherine Granito. She appears to have graduated this spring.

A Politico report Monday afternoon, “Trump administration shakes up HHS personnel office after tumultuous hires,” revealed the stunning placement – including that she has been “playing a role in shaping policies in the middle of a pandemic.”

HHS has an annual budget of $1.286 trillion. As of 2015 it had 79,540 employees.

“White House Liaison Emily Newmanand her deputy Catherine Granito will be shifting full-time to the Voice of America’s parent organization, the United States Agency for Global Media, HHS chief of staff Brian Harrison told senior staff on Monday,” the Politico article states.

It adds that “Granito — an undergraduate at the University of Michigan as recently as this spring — had been in charge of the health department’s personnel while playing a role in shaping policies in the middle of a pandemic.”

Granito’s LinkedIn page says she attended the University of Michigan until May as a student athlete playing lacrosse and notes shemajored in English language and literature.A Google search shows that page listed her as an “advisor” at HHS.

Her Facebook page says she “Works at U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.”

The recent Michael Caputo scandal appears to have involved Granito.

“Granito, who was in the class of 2020 at the University of Michigan, was involved in political appointees’ recent scrutiny of CDC Deputy Director Anne Schuchat, a career civil servant. Caputo and his team raised concerns about Schuchat this spring after she publicly acknowledged missed opportunities in the nation’s response to the coronavirus.”

ref nyt

no lnx

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/us/politics/trump-cdc-coronavirus.html

Emails Detail Effort to Silence C.D.C. and Question Its Science

Emails from a former top Trump health official and his science adviser show how the two refused to accept Centers for Disease Control and Prevention science and sought to silence the agency.

Michael R. Caputo, the Department of Health and Human Services’s top spokesman, went on medical leave this week, days after he attacked C.D.C. scientists in a bizarre Facebook video.

Noah Weiland

By Noah Weiland

Sept. 18, 2020

WASHINGTON — On June 30, as the coronavirus was cresting toward its summer peak, Dr. Paul Alexander, a new science adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, composed a scathing two-page critique of an interview given by an experienced scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, a 32-year veteran of the C.D.C. and its principal deputy director, had appealed to Americans to wear masks and warned, “We have way too much virus across the country.” But Dr. Alexander, a part-time assistant professor of health research methods, appeared sure he understood the coronavirus better.

“Her aim is to embarrass the president,” he wrote, commenting on Dr. Schuchat’s appeal for face masks in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association.

“She is duplicitous,” he also wrote in an email to his boss, Michael R. Caputo, the Department of Health and Human Services’s top spokesman who went on medical leave this week. He asked Mr. Caputo to “remind” Dr. Schuchat that during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak in 2009, thousands of Americans had died “under her work.”

ImageFrom a Trump science adviser’s critique of the C.D.C. scientist Dr. Anne Schuchat.

From a Trump science adviser’s critique of the C.D.C. scientist Dr. Anne Schuchat.

Of Dr. Schuchat’s assessment of the dangers of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, he fumed, wrongly, “The risk of death in children 0-19 years of age is basically 0 (zero) … PERIOD … she has lied.”

Dr. Alexander’s point-by-point assessment, broken into seven parts and forwarded by Mr. Caputo to Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director, was one of several emails obtained by The New York Times that illustrate how Mr. Caputo and Dr. Alexander tried to browbeat career officials at the C.D.C. at the height of the pandemic, challenging the science behind their public statements and trying to silence agency staff.

On Friday, two days after Mr. Caputo went on medical leave and Dr. Alexander was dismissed from the Department of Health and Human Services, the C.D.C. reversed a heavily criticized recommendation suggesting that people who have had close contact with a person infected with the coronavirus do not need to get tested if they have no symptoms.The emails shed light on the monthslong fight that led to their departures.

Far from hiding what they knew about the virus’s danger, as Bob Woodward’s new book contends President Trump was doing, the emails seem to indicate that aides in Washington were convinced of their own rosy prognostications, even as coronavirus infections were shooting skyward.

At the same time, Mr. Caputo moved topunish the C.D.C.’s communications team for granting interviews to NPR [// Hansen?] and trying to help a CNN reporter reach him about a public relations campaign. Current and former C.D.C. officials called it a five-month campaign of bullying and intimidation.

Read the Email Between Caputo and Dr. Alexander

In late June, as coronavirus infections were surging to their heights,Dr. Paul Alexander, a science adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, emailed a scathing critique of an interview given by Anne Schuchat, a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The email shows how aides in Washington bullied and tried to silence the C.D.C. at the height of the pandemic.

For instance, after Mr. Caputo forwarded the critique of Dr. Schuchat to Dr. Redfield, C.D.C. officials became concerned whena member of the health department’s White House liaison office — Catherine Granito — called the agency to ask questions about Dr. Schuchat’s biography, leaving the impression that some in Washington could have been searching for ways to fire her.

In another instance, Mr. Caputo wrote to C.D.C. communications officials on July 15 to demand they turn over the name of the press officer who approved a series of interviews between NPR and a longtime C.D.C. epidemiologist, after the department in Washington had moved to take ownership of the agency’s pandemic data collection.

“I need to know who did it,” Mr. Caputo wrote. A day later, still without a reply, Mr. Caputo wrote back. “I have not received a response to my email for 20 hours. This is unacceptable,” he said. “I need this information to properly manage department communications. If you disobey my directions, you will be held accountable.”

On Friday, a department spokeswoman said Mr. Caputo, in his comments about interview approvals, had been trying to make sure that the C.D.C. followed protocols dating to prior administrations that the department clear interview requests for health officials. The C.D.C. did not have an immediate comment, nor did Mr. Caputo.

[Dr. Paul Alexander, a Department of Health and Human Services science adviser, criticized the C.D.C.’s principal deputy director.

In the months leading up to their exits, the two had routinely worked to revise and delay the C.D.C.’s closely guarded and internationally admired health bulletins, called Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, in an effort to paint the administration’s pandemic response in a more positive light.

Far from apologetic, Dr. Alexander told The Globe and Mail of Toronto this week that the C.D.C. had written “pseudoscientific reports” and that he was better suited to examine data than agency scientists.

“None of those people have my skills,” Dr. Alexander said. “I make the judgment whether this is crap.”

The judgments he rendered — and the punishments that Mr. Caputo appeared intent to mete out — had a demoralizing effect on the agency.

One C.D.C. communications official became so worried about Mr. Caputo’s threat that she wrote to other senior staff asking how to reply, saying that she was “uncomfortable turning over our employee’s name to Mr. Caputo, given the hostility of the message.”

In another email to an agency communications officer who had directed a CNN reporter to contact Mr. Caputo about a vaccine public relations campaign, Mr. Caputo shot back, “In what world did you think it was your job to announce an administration public service announcement campaign to CNN?”

The C.D.C. press official then apologized, which did not satisfy Mr. Caputo. “We will discuss this on a teleconference tomorrow,” he wrote. “I want your H.R. representative in attendance.” He then scolded the official for removing Dr. Redfield from the email thread after Mr. Caputo had added the director in a prior email.

In the emails obtained by The Times, Mr. Caputo repeatedly added Dr. Redfield, who was overseeing an 11,000-person agency, to email chains about news media disputes. People familiar with the emails said it was an attempt to use Dr. Redfield to shame his own staff.

People familiar with Dr. Redfield’s responses to the emails said that he would call senior aides sounding resigned to the orders and asking how to navigate Mr. Caputo’s demands. Often, he tried to delay or ignore Mr. Caputo until the tension subsided.

Perhaps most illuminating in the emails was the way the top officials at the C.D.C. saw the disease in fundamentally different ways than confidants and loyalists of Mr. Trump’s. In the interview that provoked Mr. Caputo and Dr. Alexander, Dr. Schuchat referred to “a lot of wishful thinking around the country that, ‘Hey, summer, everything is going to be fine, we’re over this.’”

“And we are not even beginning to be over this,” she said. “I think we need to continue to learn and continue to apply what we’re learning and be humble about our assumptions.”

At the time of her interview, the United States was setting record levels of new infections and was weeks away from an even more catastrophic peak of almost 70,000 new cases a day. States like Arizona were pausing the reopening of their businesses.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease expert, testified to a Senate panel that the country could hit 100,000 new cases a day.

That portrait of the virus was at odds with the one the White House had strained to present. The day Dr. Schuchat lamented there was “way too much virus across the country,” Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, told reporters, “We’re aware that there are embers that need to be put out.”

Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network that week that he believed the virus was “at some point” going to “sort of just disappear, I hope.”

Dr. Alexander also had his own ideas of the virus’s staying power. He disputed Dr. Schuchat’s claim that children were vulnerable to it. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that while it is rare, the virus can be lethal to children, who can readily transmit it to more vulnerable family members.

“It also causes no symptoms as it is so mild … you don’t even know you have it,” Dr. Alexander wrote. “Many people never knew they had it. Not one indication. It is very false her statement that it causes death in children.”

At one point in his response to Dr. Schuchat, Dr. Alexander appeared to endorse the largely rejected strategy of “herd immunity,” or allowing the virus to freely spread until enough people develop antibodies that it dies for lack of human hosts.

“Importantly, having the virus spread among the young and healthy is one of the methods to drive herd immunity,” he wrote. “This was not the intended strategy but all must be on deck now and it is contributing positively at some level.”

The clashes between the White House and C.D.C. intensified this week, when Mr. Trump publicly slapped down congressional testimony Dr. Redfield gave, in which he praised masks and estimated that a vaccine might not be widely available to the public until the middle of 2021.

“I think he made a mistake when he said that,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

On Friday, the president told reporters the broad American public would have access to a coronavirus vaccine by April, again snubbing his C.D.C. chief.

Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting.

The New Civil Rights Movement

https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/?s=Michael+Caputo

Search results for "Michael Caputo" some is marc

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AMERICAN FASCIST7 days agoHHS Spokesperson Caputo Weighing Medical Leave or Resignation After Issuing Paranoid Armed Insurrection Warning: ReportMichael Caputo, the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Dept. of Health and Human Services, is weighing a medical leave of absence after calling an...

AMERICAN FASCIST7 days ago Calls Grow for HHS Spokesman Caputo to Resign or Be Fired for Doctored Reports and Paranoid Violent Conspiracy RantCalls are growing for Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Michael Caputo to resign or be fired after he went on a bizarre Facebook live video...

NEWS18 hours ago‘Shaping Policies’: Trump Official in Charge of Personnel at HHS Has Been a College Senior – ReportThe Trump administration put a college senior in charge of personnel at the Dept. of Health and Human Services, Catherine Granito. She appears to have graduated...

DANGEROUS INCOMPETENCE4 days agoShocking Emails Document Trump Administration’s Scheme to Muzzle the CDC — and Misinform AmericansEmails obtained by The New York Times detail how Trump administration political appointees sought to silence the Centers for Disease Control during the coronavirus pandemic. “On...Michael Caputo

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WTH? 5 months agoTrump’s New HHS Spokesperson Made Racist Remarks and Accused Democrats of Wanting Coronavirus to Kill Millions: Report President Donald Trump’s new spokesperson for the Dept. of Health and Human Services recently made racist remarks about Chinese people, accused Democrats of wanting the coronavirus to...

3 years ago Trump Defends Son’s Russia Meeting, Attacks Clinton, Media for ‘Distorting Democracy’ in Latest Twitter Tantrum Says Trump Jr. 'Scorned' by 'Fake News Media'

4 years ago

WATCH LIVE: Trump Tries To Stop The Bleeding With Campaign Rally In Florida President's Approval Rating At Historic Low 3 years ago After Roy Moore, Steve Bannon Backs Second Candidate – Who Is Also Anti-GayBannon Choosing Candidates Who Will Fulfill His Dream 'To Destroy the State'

4 years ago Reporters Covering Trump Criticized for Attending President-Elect’s Private Off-the-Record Holiday Gathering 'Insane and Spineless' 'Seems Like a Manipulation'

https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2016/12/reporters_covering_trump_being_criticized_for_attending_private_off_the_record_holiday_gathering/

The New Civil Rights Movement

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/us/michael-caputo-coronavirus.html

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/senator-demands-hhs-official-michael-caputo-be-fired-for-unhinged-sedition-tirade/

no lnx twt

Senator demands HHS official Michael Caputo be fired for unhinged ‘sedition’ tirade

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams September 15, 2020

Sen. Patty Murray late Monday night demanded the immediate firing of Michael Caputo, the top communications official at the Health and Human Services Department, after the former Trump campaign aide over the weekend launched into an unhinged tirade accusing CDC scientists of “sedition” against the president and urging White House supporters to “buy ammunition” in preparation for a post-election conflict.

During a Facebook live session Sunday that has since been removed from the social media platform along with his entire personal account, Caputo baselessly claimed that “there are hit squads being trained all over this country” to prevent President Donald Trump reelection. Without a shred of evidence, Caputo also accused the CDC of forming a “resistance unit” to harm the president even at the cost of worsening the Covid-19 pandemic.

CDC scientists “haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants except for meetings at coffee shops” to decide “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next,” Caputo said, according to the New York Times. “There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president.”

“When Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” said Caputo. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.” [refers to oregon guy shot in Wa]

Following Caputo’s rant, Murray—the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee—called on HHS Secretary Alex Azar to fire the communications official, who has also reportedly been attempting to alter the CDC’s weekly coronavirus reports behind the scenes despite his complete lack of medical experience.

“As the leader of our nation’s health department during a pandemic that has claimed more than 190,000 American lives, Secretary Azar has a basic responsibility to ensure our public health experts are able to do their jobs, our Covid-19 response is not undermined by misinformation or conspiracy theories, and the data used to inform our efforts is free of political interference,” the Washington Democrat said in a statement late Monday.

“It is clear Secretary Azar cannot meet his basic responsibilities while allowing Michael A. Caputo, a yes-man for President Trump with no scientific expertise who publicly attacked CDC scientists and privately interfered with key CDC reports, to continue serving in such an influential role,” Murray continued. “If Secretary Azar believes his responsibility is to the American public and not to President Trump, he should demand Mr. Caputo’s resignation today.”

As Caputo’s rant drew national news coverage and condemnation from Democratic lawmakers and other critics, HHS issued a statement to CBS News backing Caputo, calling him “a critical, integral part of the president’s coronavirus response, leading on public messaging as Americans need public health information to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic.”

In a segment Monday evening, MSNBC‘s Chris Hayes called Caputo “a dangerous crank who is undermining science and raving about delusional conspiracy theories.”

“This guy isn’t just pushing this nonsense—this disgusting, paranoid, dangerous nonsense—from his government perch,” Hayes said. “He is in fact actively working to manipulate what the CDC tells the public about the pandemic in what is arguably the single most important public health publication in the world.”

Watch:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/hhs-official-who-manipulated-cdc-reports-on-19-has-deep-russian-ties-report/

no lnx twt

On September 11, Politico reported that Michael Caputo, assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, interfered in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s reports on COVID-19 in order to make them conform to President Donald Trump’s claims about the pandemic. And Caputo, journalist Mary Papenfuss reports in HuffPost, is drawing scrutiny for another reason as well: his ties to the Kremlin.

Caputo, Papenfuss notes, lived in Russia for six years and served as an adviser to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin from 1995-1999 before Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president. The HHS assistant secretary was an adviser to a subsidiary of Gazprom, an energy company owned by the Russian government — and Papenfuss points out thatCaputo “reportedly helped shore up Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reputation.”

“Caputo’s Kremlin ties were so concerning that he became a target of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election,” Papenfuss explains. “He was questioned but was not charged with any offenses. He also testified before the House Intelligence Committee that he had no contact with Russians while serving on the Trump campaign.”

Caputo, a long-time ally of veteran GOP operative Roger Stone, has promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that it was the Ukrainian government, not the Kremlin, that interfered in the 2016 presidential election — and that the interference was in support of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, not Trump.Papenfuss notes that Caputo “has spread baseless accusations concerning activities in Ukraine by Joe and Hunter Biden. A key source of that Ukrainian smear, Andrii Derkach, turned out to be a Russian spy attempting to interfere in the current U.S. election, the Treasury Department revealed last week.”

During Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, Trump denounced the impeachment as “phony” — and he was also highly critical of the Russia investigation.

The Mueller report says of Caputo, “In the spring of 2016, Trump campaign advisor Michael Caputo learned through a Florida-based Russian business partner that another Florida-based Russian, Henry Oknyansky — who also went by the name Henry Greenberg — claimed to have information pertaining to Hilary Clinton. Caputo notified Roger Stone and brokered communication between Stone and Oknyansky. Oknyansky and Stone set up a May 2016 in-person meeting.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/hhs-official-who-manipulated-cdc-reports-on-19-has-deep-russian-ties-report/

During Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, Trump denounced the impeachment as “phony” — and he was also highly critical of the Russia investigation.

https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/caputo-reacts-to-mueller-report-all-the-haters-can-go-to-hell

[change story on whether he was at mtg in fla w/ stone and end russ fla guy?

Apr 18, 2019

and last updated 8:22 PM, Apr 18, 2019

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — A local political consultant is speaking out after the release of Robert Mueller's investigation on Thursday.

Michael Caputo was called to testify about his role in President Donald Trump’s campaign. Now, Caputo is listed in the nearly 500-page report.

“In the spring of 2016,” the report reads, “Trump Campaign advisor Michael Caputo learned through a Florida-based Russian business partner that another Florida-based Russian, Henry Oknyansky (who also went by the name Henry Greenberg), claimed to have information pertaining to Hilary Clinton. Caputo notified Roger Stone and brokered communication between Stone and Oknyansky. Oknyansky and Stone set up a May 2016 in-person meeting.”

“He had a very brief meeting with the guy and told him to hit the road,” says Caputo.

The meeting listed in the report is the reason that Caputo was questioned by both Robert Mueller and lawmakers in both the House and the Senate.

The report points to “contradictory recollections” as to whether Caputo was actually at the meeting, which is something he strongly denies.

“The FBI and the Mueller investigation knows for a fact that the meeting was in Florida and I was in Trump Tower in New York City,” says Caputo.

At the end of the day, Caputo says he is ready to move forward.

“I really don’t care because I’m completely vindicated and my family is moving on from here and all the haters can go to Hell,” says Caputo.

washington (CNN)Conservative political provocateur Roger Stone met in May 2016 with a Russian who offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton in exchange for $2 million,Stone and former Trump campaign communications official Michael Caputo told CNN on Sunday.

The meeting was first reported byThe Washington Post.

Stone and Caputo say the meeting was part of a larger effort by law enforcement to set up the Trump campaign, citing records suggesting that the man Stone met with is a Russian national who has claimed to be an FBI informant.

In letters to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes obtained by CNN, lawyers for Caputo and Stone say Caputo arranged a meeting between Stone and the Russian man who called himself Henry Greenberg.

Caputo's lawyer writes that his client facilitated the meeting through his Russian business partner. Greenberg told Caputo he "had information about Hillary Clinton he wanted to provide to the Trump campaign," the letter says.

Caputo and Stone did not disclose the meeting to congressional investigators, but it has become a focus in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the Trump campaign, according to the Post.

In the letters to Nunes, the two political operatives assert that they were transparent in their testimony before the committee, despite not disclosing the meeting with Greenberg.

Caputo told CNN he communicated with Greenberg by phone, and while he recognized that Greenberg had an accent, Caputo "assumed he was a US citizen."

"It was May 2016," Caputo added. "Nobody was talking about Russia, collusion, etc."

Caputo said he now believes the Russian who met with Stone was an FBI informant because "the OSC (Office of Special Counsel) knew more about it than I did." He added that it was not until prosecutors informed him that Greenberg was Russian that he learned the man he had spoken with in 2016 was not a US citizen.

"I was under the understanding that he was an American citizen of Russian descent," Caputo said. "I had no reason to believe that, I just assumed it."

The letter from Caputo's lawyer states that during his testimony with the House Intelligence committee, he "answered all questions with candor and to the best of his recollection."

However, Caputo's lawyer wrote that during his interview with the special counsel, which took place more than a month ago, "his recollection was refreshed regarding one brief interaction with a Russian national in May of 2016."

"In the course of his interview with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, this specific contact was not discussed since at the time of this interview, Mr. Caputo had simply forgotten about this brief encounter in 2016," the letter states.

Caputo's lawyer relayed that he would be willing to brief the committee on the matter.

In his letter to Nunes, Stone's lawyer similarly called the testimony "entirely truthful,"adding that Stone "feels obligated" to disclose the meeting because of "information brought to his attention after his appearance."

The letter states Greenberg approached Stone "wearing a Trump MAGA hat and T-shirt and spoke with what was possibly a Russian accent."

"Prior to meeting, Mr. Stone did not know anything about Mr. Greenberg, including his background or nationality. At the meeting, Mr. Greenberg proudly showed Mr. Stone photos of Mr. Greenberg and friends at several South Florida Trump rallies," the letter states.

Stone's lawyer described the encounter as a "one-time, 20-minute interaction" and stated that Greenberg offered Stone the "non-specific, damaging Clinton information" in exchange for a $2 million payment from Trump, but that Stone declined.

Stone told CNN he was disclosing the meeting now because "Mr. Caputo only brought this to my attention recently."

He also said he never discussed the meeting with the Trump campaign, nor anyone else, adding that it was "so ludicrous that I forgot about it."

California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Stone's testimony "appears inaccurate or deliberately misleading" and that the offer to Caputo "could not plausibly have escaped his recollection." Schiff called for the committee to provide the special counsel investigation with transcripts of their interviews and knocked the Republicans who control the panel.

"The truthfulness of many of our witnesses has been difficult to ascertain, which is why I have urged the committee to make the transcripts available to special counsel Mueller for a determination whether any witnesses committed perjury before our committee," Schiff said. "The majority's unwillingness to do so demonstrates that protecting the President remains its paramount objective, even when it means shielding witnesses who may have testified before us untruthfully."

President Donald Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday that he doubts Trump knew about Stone's meeting.

"I doubt it. I certainly didn't know about it. It's news to me," he said.

Greenberg, who the Post said sometimes went by the name Henry Oknyansky, had difficulties with the American immigration system, and spent two years in the custody of immigration services before returning to Russia. In 2015 court filings related to his immigration status cited by Stone and Caputo, Greenberg claimed that he worked as an FBI informant for 17 years.

However, Greenberg denied he was acting on the FBI's behalf when he met with Stone, according to the Post, and the court filing the newspaper obtained said his work with the FBI halted sometime after 2013.

The letters from the two political operatives' lawyers mention a text exchange after the meeting with Greenberg and say Stone's impression was that the meetup had been a waste of time and he viewed Greenberg as "a nut."

The exchange was obtained and published by the Post.

"How crazy is the Russian?" Caputo asked.

"Wants big &$ for the info- waste of time," Stone replied.

Caputo then texted, "The Russian way. Anything at all interesting?"

"No," Stone said.

An FBI spokeswoman and a spokesman for Mueller's office declined to comment to the Post.

The meeting with Stone reportedly took place a few weeks after former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos was told about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton and two weeks before senior members of the Trump campaign met with Russian nationals -- including a lawyer with ties to the Kremlin -- in Trump Tower.

Greenberg initially denied Stone's account of the meeting but later changed his story, giving the Post a brief description of the meeting that matched Stone's depiction in part.

While Stone told the Post that Greenberg was alone for the meeting, Greenberg relayed that he was accompanied by a Ukrainian man only identified as Alexei. Greenberg told the Post that Alexei was fired from the Clinton Foundation. He also denied he asked for money, saying played a limited role in the meeting and left it to Alexei to talk with Stone while he sat at a nearby table.

Stone told CNN he had never heard of Alexei, nor was this person present at the meeting.

The Clinton Foundation also told the Post that they had never hired someone with the first name Alexei.

A news release from Caputo following the Post story states that in his meeting with the Special Counsel's Office, he "noted the Mueller team knew far more than he did about the Greenberg approach."

After his meeting with Mueller, Caputo investigated Greenberg, the release said, and he put the information he found intoa dossier online.

The disclosure of the meeting comes a month after multiple reports that the FBI dispatched a confidential source to speak with at least two advisers to Trump's presidential campaign after the bureau obtained evidence that the aides had ties to Russia. The revelations have prompted Trump to accuse the FBI of spying on his campaign and trying to frame him.

CNN's Clare Foran, Manu Raju and Eli Watkins contributed to this report.

hg had been fbi informant but says not at time to roger mtg; both caputo and roger deny contact w/ russ 9at least roger did) until text msg refresh memories [video cnn]

oops, but context:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/heres-what-the-senate-intel-report-tells-us-about-trump-and-roger-stones-39-phone-calls-during-the-2016-election/

on August 18, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its bipartisan report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. One of the things addressed in the report is Donald Trump’s phone conversations with veteran GOP operative Roger Stone during the election — and according to an August 19 article by New York Times reporter Julian E. Barnes, the Senate Intelligence report sheds even more light on those interactions than the Mueller report and Stone’s criminal trial.

Barnes notes that according to court records, Stone and Trump had 39 phone conversations from March-November 2016 — one of which Barnes describes as “an intriguing phone call, on October 6, 2016, to Mr. Trump.”

“According to the Senate report,” Barnes explains, “Mr. Stone received a call that afternoon from a number belonging to an aide to Mr. Trump, who regularly used others’ phones to make calls. The topic of the conversation was not known, Senate investigators wrote, but they noted that Mr. Stone was focused on a potential WikiLeaks release.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report concludes, “It appears quite likely that Stone and Trump spoke about WikiLeaks."

in October 2016, WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic e-mails that had been stolen by Russians.

Barnes points out that in its report, the Senate Intelligence Committee “laid out a range of evidence that Mr. Stone was focused on WikiLeaks. He and Mr. Trump had spoken a few days earlier, on September 29, also on the aide’s phone. Another campaign aide, Rick Gates, witnessed it and told investigators that the two men discussed WikiLeaks. After that call, Mr. Trump told Mr. Gates that ‘more releases of damaging information would be coming.’”

The Times reporter also notes that Stone “said the Senate conclusion that he had discussed WikiLeaks with the president was based solely on testimony by Mr. Gates and Mr. Trump’s former lawyer Michael D. Cohen. Mr. Stone called their testimony tainted by agreements with prosecutors to answer their questions.”

Stone has insisted that he did not know that people connected to the Russian government were behind the stolen Democratic e-mailsthat WikiLeaks published in October 2016 — and that he never discussed WikiLeaks with Trump. Barnes, notes, however, “The Senate report made clear that WikiLeaks, at least, ‘very likely’ knew the e-mails were coming from Russian intelligence, and that Mr. Stone knew about the most critical WikiLeaks release before it happened.”

Stone is among the many Trump associates who has faced criminal charges: he was convicted of charges ranging from witness tampering to lying to Congress and sentenced to 40 months in federal prison by Judge Amy Berman Jackson, a Barack Obama appointee. But Trump commuted Stone’s sentence in July, saving him from the prison sentence he was about to begin.

Barnes notes that the Senate Intelligence Committee “rejected Mr. Trump’s statement to prosecutors investigating Russia’s interference that he did not recall conversations with his long-time friend, Roger J. Stone Jr., about the e-mails, which were later released by WikiLeaks.”

In the Mueller report, former special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians — however questionable — did not rise to the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy. And Barnes points out that the Senate Intelligence report does not accuse Trump of lying. But Barnes also points out that the report “laid out extensive contacts between Trump advisers and Russians” and “detailed even more of the president’s conversations with Mr. Stone than were previously known, renewing questions about whether Mr. Trump was truthful with investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, or misled them.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-team-sought-to-water-down-and-block-cdc-warnings-of-s-danger-to-us-children-emails/

hunter kos

On Friday, Politico broke a story since confirmed by The New York Times and The Washington Post: Trump Health and Human Services appointee Michael Caputo and his aides have been continuously interfering with, either demanding alterations to or holding up publication of, the Center for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports. This follows a Politico report on Caputo’s appointed senior “adviser” (Caputo, the appointed assistant secretary for public affairs, hired his own “adviser” to vet CDC science and public statements) Paul Alexander weighing in—in harsh, partisan, and conspiratorial terms—in emails to career CDC experts.

Michael Caputo is a conspiracy crank who has already been identified as reaching deep into HHS to attempt to enforce loyalty to Trump’s proclamations and false statements. That he and Alexander have specifically attempted to insert themselves in the Morbidity and Mortality reports, CDC products intended to update the nation on the nonpartisan medical facts, on the pandemic and everything else, is another sign of how corrupted—and how cultish, conspiracy-minded and authoritarian—the nation’s government continues to become.

Politico reports that Caputo and Alexander have made efforts to “add caveats” to CDC findings, “retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated” pandemic risks. Most alarming, however, is Alexander’s apparent partisan ranting at the CDC career staff, rantings that very strongly suggest Alexander is a conspiracy crank on order of, if not worse than, Caputo himself.

In late August, reports Politico, Alexander emailed his “vehement” disagreement with what Dr. Anthony Fauci planned to tell an interviewer about the spread of COVID-19 in schools and in universities. “I continue to have an issue with kids getting tested and repeatedly and even university students in a widespread manner … and I disagree with Dr. Fauci on this. Vehemently."

alexander also demanded, of Fauci’s press team, that they “ensure Dr. Fauci indicates masks are for the teachers in schools. Not for children. There is no data, none, zero, across the entire world, that shows children especially young children, spread this virus to other children, or to adults or to their teachers. None. And if it did occur, the risk is essentially zero.”

This is a familiar refrain, from inside the Trump camp—but as plenty of evidence now demonstrates, it has been a vicious hoax. Children absolutely do transmit COVID-19 to other children and to adults. Alexander appears to either be lying outright or astonishingly uninformed. Politico even reports that Alexander added “without evidence,” in the email, “that children take influenza home, but not the coronavirus.”

At the time of Alexander’s demand, the CDC was in possession of evidence proving peer-to-peer and peer-to-adult transmission among children. Not only did CDC experts rebut Alexander’s claims with published studies, but a CDC report issued one month earlier demonstrated such transmission, taking evidence from an outbreak at a Georgia summer camp.

There’s no way Alexander was unaware of that report. The report had itself been delayed, by Caputo and Alexander, in part because Alexander launched into an email tirade about its findings, making the conspiratorial claim that it was an attempt to sabotage Trump’s administration.

“CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration. CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school reopening. … Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear.”

The sheer incompetence of Alexander’s claims “disagreeing” with Fauci on the need for testing of school and university students was already self-evident at the time he made those objections known, and has been demonstrated in now-famous cases ever since. The nation is awash with university decisions to reopen that university administrators had to hastily scramble to cancel, shifting back to remote learning, after the immediate discovery of campus outbreaks. Ditto, for high schools and other schools: Not only is it self-evidently false that there is “essentially zero” risk to students, teachers, and parents from COVID-19, it is—and was—delusional bullshit.

Caputo and Alexander have been vetting CDC science and declaring that the science represents “hit pieces” on Trump when the science disagrees with whatever Trump last blurted out, or when the science presents an inconvenience to the administration’s past statements. It is authoritarian nonsense.

In blocking those reports and pushing nonsensical, false claims at odds with the known science, Caputo and Alexander have undoubtably murdered Americans who ought to be alive right now.

We cannot become immune to this. The radicalization of all government departments, the purging of watchdogs, firing of inspector generals, the incessant claims that news that upsets conservative Republican claims is a conspiracy, by government experts or by the press, to harm Dear Leader and his associates—it is anti-American. It is authoritarian gibberish, of the most venal and stupid and pathetic sort. Whatever meager qualifications Trump’s appointees and sub-appointees once held are rendered void, the first time they pronounce measurable reality to be a partisan conspiracy against them.

The number of ways Trumpism has betrayed the country is becoming uncountable. It has not just one death toll, but many. And in the new mantras declaring that even the election itself cannot now be trusted, not if it is bending against Donald, they are moving into a final fascist gamble.

ref wapo

no lnx

Trump officials seek greater control over CDC reports on coronavirus

Political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services have sought to change, delay and prevent the release of reports about the coronavirus by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg)

Lena H. Sun

September 12, 2020

Michael Caputo, the top HHS spokesman, said in an interview Saturday that he and one of his advisers have been seeking greater scrutiny of the CDC’s weekly scientific dispatches, known as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, for the past 3½ months. The adviser, Paul Alexander, has sent repeated emails to the CDC seeking changes and demanding that the reports be halted until he could make edits.

The emails, first reported late Friday by Politico, describe the CDC documents, widely known as the MMWR, as being “hit pieces on the administration.” Caputo confirmed the authenticity of the emails.

The emails echo the sentiments from an earlier attack by Alexander, reported in The Washington Post in July, about an MMWR on the potential risk of the coronavirus to pregnant women. In that email, Alexander also accused the CDC of undermining the president. The emails are the latest evidence of how the nation’s top public health agency is coming under intense pressure from Trump and his allies, who are playing down the dangers of the pandemic ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election.

“Most often, the MMWRs are [issued] for purely scientific reasons,” Caputo said Saturday. “But in an election year, and in the time of covid-19, it’s no longer unanimously scientific. There’s political content.”

Caputo said his conclusions are based on reviews by Alexander, an assistant professor at McMaster University in Canada and a specialist in health research methods. Caputo hired him this spring to advise on the science of the pandemic.

Despite the changes to the MMWRs sought by HHS, the requests were “infrequently” accepted by the CDC, Caputo said.

Alexander “gets into productive discussions with the scientists who are open to criticism. They’re free to reject them,” Caputo said. “I think most of his criticisms are rejected.”

He added: “Science is disagreements. It must be difficult for [CDC] to be criticized by an Oxford-educated scientist who has been published in peer-reviewed journals 67 times.”

A former administration official with direct knowledge of the communications from HHS said a request that all reports be stopped until Alexander could review them in their entirety was rejected. On other requests, the CDC “put its head down” and did not comply and “continued to get in trouble over and over again” for doing so, the former official said. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive deliberations.

MMWRs are written by career experts for scientists and public health specialists and are considered among the most authoritative public health reports because they provide evidence-based information on a range of health topics. The reports are independent scientific publications that undergo rigorous vetting, often with multiple drafts to check data and methodology. The reports are closely held; few individuals at the CDC have access until just before publication.

The CDC editorial staff that produces the MMWRs typically sends one-paragraph summaries to HHS and other CDC officials a few days before publication.

“Whenever they come out with that list, there’s concern across [HHS] that some of the scholarship has been tainted by politics,” Caputo said. “That’s my opinion.”

Over the course of the pandemic, top officials including Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force response coordinator, and HHS Secretary Alex Azar have wanted to have a “more complete picture” of the CDC’s activity, according to an HHS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations. The MMWRs were the main focus, the official said.

“The future of the agency depends on its ability to disseminate science-based data and recommendations that are science-based,” the official said. “Putting a political lens on everything that we say is very concerning,” the official added. The CDC is not going to do that, the official said. There is no intention or attempt to undermine the president in the publication of CDC reports, the official said, referring to accusations by Alexander as “a paranoid assumption that is not based on anything.”

The CDC declined to comment Saturday.

One CDC report that drew particular scrutiny was on hydroxychloroquine. The MMWR urged clinicians to follow long-accepted prescribing guidelines for the malaria drug. Trump favored the drug as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence. The CDC was concerned the drug was potentially being misused to treat covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, and affecting supplies of the medication to treat conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

“Current data on treatment and pre- or postexposure prophylaxis for COVID-19 indicate that the potential benefits of these drugs do not appear to outweigh their risks,” the report said.

The report had been delayed for weeks, according to a former administration official with direct knowledge of the efforts.

In another instance, a report about the spread of the coronavirus at a Georgia sleep-away camp was also delayed, the former official said. That report, issued July 31, suggested that children of all ages are susceptible to coronavirus infection and may spread it to others — a finding likely to intensify an already fraught discussion about the risks of sending children back to school.

“That report gave them a lot of grief,” the former official said. “But you can’t change facts.” The report likely was delayed, the former official said, to avoid being released around the same time Trump was calling for schools to reopen in person. The changes that were sought were not included, the former official said.

The tone of Alexander’s emails is harsh, this person said, because the CDC ignored his requests. In one email, Alexander wrote to CDC Director Robert Redfield asking that the agency modify two already published reports that Alexander said mistakenly inflated the risks of coronavirus to children and undermined Trump’s push to reopen schools.

“CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration,” Alexander wrote in an email. “CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school reopening. … Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear.”

The interference by HHS political appointees in the MMWR process has infuriated career scientists, who have been frustrated for months over the inability to allow scientists to fully share and explain information.

CDC feels pressure from Trump as rift grows over coronavirus response

Disappearance of covid-19 data from CDC website spurs outcry

We ran the CDC. No president ever politicized its science the way Trump has.

Lena H. Sun

Lena H. Sun is a national reporter for The Washington Post covering health with a special focus on public health and infectious disease. A longtime reporter at The Post, she has covered the Metro transit system, immigration, education and was a Beijing bureau chief.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/revelation-that-racist-trump-stooge-tried-to-censor-cdc-reports-rocks-experts-and-critics/

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revelation that ‘racist Trump stooge’ tried to censor CDC reports rocks experts and critics

Written by Common Dreams September 12, 2020

Days after President Donald Trump admitted to knowingly downplaying the Covid-19 pandemic in his statements to the public, new reporting late Friday revealed that Trump political aides have been reviewing—and in some cases altering—weekly CDC reports about the deadly virus in an effort to bring them into closer alignment with the president’s false narrative and claims.

Politico reported Friday evening that the Health and Human Services Department’s politically appointed communications aides, led by former Trump campaign official Michael Caputo—a Republican strategist with no medical expertise—”have attempted to add caveats to the CDC’s findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior.”

The primary target of the Trump officials’ interference, according to Politico, has been the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR), a crucial resource for experts, public officials, and members of the public seeking to track the spread of Covid-19.While CDC officials have pushed back on meddling from political appointees, Politico reported that the agency has “increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording.”

According to one internal email obtained by Politico, Caputo aide Paul Alexander accused the CDC—an agency directed by Trump appointee Robert Redfield—of “writing hit pieces on the administration” and attempting to use its weekly reports to “hurt the president.”

“CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening,” wrote Alexander, an assistant professor of health research at McMaster University in Toronto. “Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear.”

Alexander demanded that Redfield allow the HHS aide to personally edit the CDC’s reports, which are authored by career scientists.

“The reports must be read by someone outside of CDC like myself, and we cannot allow the reporting to go on as it has been, for it is outrageous. Its lunacy,” Alexander, who has also attempted to alter the public messaging of Dr. Anthony Fauci, wrote to Redfield. “Nothing to go out unless I read and agree with the findings how they CDC, wrote it and I tweak it to ensure it is fair and balanced and ‘complete.'”

Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves called the emails “explosive” and said Caputo should resign immediately.

“This is just beyond the pale,” Gonsalves tweeted. “Caputo, with acquiescence of Redfield, has started to twist the science to Donald Trump’s advantage. It’s sick and disgusting.”

According to Politico, attempts by political appointees to alter the MMWR to their liking “began in earnest after a May report authored by senior CDC official Anne Schuchat, which reviewed the spread of Covid-19 in the United States and caused significant strife within the health department.”

“HHS officials, including Secretary Alex Azar, believed that Schuchat was implying that the Trump administration moved too slowly to respond to the outbreak,” Politico continued. “The HHS criticism was mystifying to CDC officials, who believed that Schuchat was merely recounting the state of affairs and not rendering judgment on the response.”

In addition to trying to change the language of CDC scientists to make it fit with the president’s rosy depiction of the pandemic, Caputo and his aides have also moved “to halt the release of some CDC reports, including delaying a report that addressed how doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine,the malaria drug favored by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence,” Politico reported Friday.

“The report, which was held for about a month after Caputo’s team raised questions about its authors’ political leanings, was finally published last week,” Politico noted. “It said that “the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks.”

Politico‘s new reporting represents just the latest evidence of the Trump administration’s ongoing interference in the activities of public health agencies, an effort lawmakers and experts have denounced as a deliberate campaign to undermine trust in Covid-19 data and advance the president’s political agenda.

“A Trump stooge with a history of racist statements and no medical background is doctoring CDC reports warning Americans on Covid because they make Trump look bad,” Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) tweeted late Friday, referring to Caputo.

Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, said the “Trump CDC is dead to me if they muzzle the MMWR.”

“To kill the MMWR,” Feigl-Ding added, “is akin to burning science.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/leaked-emails-reveal-a-trump-official-sought-to-muzzle-dr-fauci-on-vital-19-facts/

no lnx twt

Andrea Germanos / Common Dreams September 10, 2020

Reporting from Politico Wednesday revealed that a Trump-allied official within the Department of Health and Human Services tried to censor Dr. Anthony Fauci from communicating to the press dangers the coronavirus may pose to school children.

According to Politico, the messaging directives came from Paul Alexander, a Trump administration appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services. Alexander is a senior adviser to Michael Caputo, a Trump ally and assistant HHS secretary for public affairs.

Politico obtained multiple emails from Alexander that reflect his responses to what Fauci—director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—planned on telling outlets including Bloomberg and HuffPost. They included messages that “are couched as scientific arguments” but “often contradict mainstream science,” according to the reporting.

The outlet cited as one example an Aug. 27 email in which Alexander wrote that he continues “to have an issue with kids getting tested and repeatedly and even university students in a widespread manner…and I disagree with Dr. Fauci on this. Vehemently.”

In another email from Tuesday, Alexander suggested children have “essentially zero” risk if they are exposed to the coronavirus and pushed Fauci’s press team to make sure Fauci told MSNBC that children should not wear masks at school. From Politico:

“Can you ensure Dr. Fauci indicates masks are for the teachers in schools. Not for children,” Alexander wrote. “There is no data, none, zero, across the entire world, that shows children especially young children, spread this virus to other children, or to adults or to their teachers. None. And if it did occur, the risk is essentially zero,” he continued — adding without evidence that children take influenza home, but not the coronavirus.

Alexander’s repeated efforts at push Fauci to parrot the administration’s anti-science line, however, may have been for naught.

“No one tells me what I can say and cannot say,” Fauci said. “I speak on scientific evidence.”

It did not, however, mark Alexander’s first attempts at controlling the narrative from federal health experts.

The Washington Post reported in July that he made similar efforts with CDC officials. In a June email to CDC officials, Alexander wrote that the agency’s warning about Covid-19 impacts on women “reads in a way to frighten women .?.?. as if the President and his administration can’t fix this and it is getting worse.”

Virologist Dave O’Connor weighed in on the new reporting on Twitter, writing, “This sort of story will be recalled years from now as an example of the government interfering with science, with predictably disastrous results.”

Shannon Watts, founder of gun control advocacy group Moms Demand Action, also shared Politico‘s new reporting, and had harsh words for the Trump administration.

“They don’t care if our kids die. They don’t care if we die,” wrote Watts. “They just want power.”

omg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-administration-plans-250-million-ad-buy-telling-voters-not-to-worry-so-much-about-the/

Trump administration has given up on any serious attempts to curb the nation’s ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As U.S. deaths inch towards the 200,000 mark, outside experts are now warning Americans to ignore the “dysfunctional” Centers of Disease Control and Prevention after the agency issued new, Trump-favored guidelines to reduce testing, rather than expand it. There is no federal contract tracing effort. There is no standard, expert-based pandemic policy—each state has been left to its own devices, with federal officials ignoring even the most serious state outbreaks.

Don’t worry, though. It’s not like the Trump-led federal government is entirely asleep at the wheel. The Department of Health and Human Services is seeking bids for a new quarter-*billion* dollar communications contract, reports Politico. No, not to encourage Americans to social distance, wear masks, or get tested—don’t be stupid. The new publicity campaign will instead “defeat despair and inspire hope,” advising businesses how to operate “in the new normal” and instilling “confidence to return to work and restart the economy.”

Yeah, we’re all going to die.

You will note, dear tired reader, that this language sounds very much like Trump’s own anti-pandemic anti-policy. Rather than taking more aggressive steps to curtail the pandemic—as nearly every other nation on the planet has—the new publicity campaign will presume we live in a “new normal.” It will be based, says “a senior HHS official” who for some reason would not go on the record to say these embarrassing things, on “defeating the mental health challenges of the coronavirus,” which sounds explicitly like Trump’s own insistence that it’s depression over social distancing that’s killing people, not the deadly disease marked on the death certificates.

so instead of a new testing program or, say, mailing out masks to every American household, we’re getting an advertising campaign meant to “defeat despair.” Oh, and Politico reports thecontract will be managed by Trump ex-campaign guy Michael Caputo.

Odds that Trump loyalist Michael Caputo is going to sign off on a $250 million ad campaign telling Americans to “defeat despair” through the remarkably effective practice of wearing masks, against Donald Trump’s personal wishes? Zero. Less than zero. Zero minus the square root of Ivanka.

Anyhoo, the idea that the Trump-led federal government is, immediately before the (cough) November elections, going to be combatting the COVID-19 pandemic via an ad campaign telling Americans to maybe just stop being sad about it is … well, let’s be honest. It’s so on-brand it hurts.

It’s the “Be Best” of infectious disease campaigns. Sorry, we still need to limit testing—but here’s some tips on how you can restart the economy, fellow patriots. Nothing inspires “hope” like getting your unmasked face back to work, unless it’s getting legislation passed immunizing your employer from consequences if you die afterword. Now that’s inspiring.

mma 920

dHS spokesperson pushed COVID-19 conspiracy theories and praised white supremacists in unearthed podcast

This week, in a podcast uncovered by Media Matters, current Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson and former OAN personality Michael Caputo spread baseless conspiracy theories about the coronavirus, praised a white supremacist, and said Democrats are “counting” on COVID-19 fatalities in order to win the election against President Donald Trump.

The podcast highlights Caputo’s right-wing beliefs, and presents him a partisan, pro-Trump loyalist, bringing into question Caputo’s capability to serve as the spokesperson for HHS.

On the podcast, titledStill Standing with Michael Caputo, Caputo pushed the debunked conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was invented “in a bioweapons facility in Wuhan,” used racist terms to refer to the virus, and said Democrats are calculating how long they can “actually keep the coronavirus concern ball in the air” in order to win the election. He also praised various white supremacist and “alt-right” personalities, including neo-Nazi Milo Yiannopoulos and Pizzagate conspiracy theorists and “alt-right” Twitter personalities Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec. On his podcast, Caputo also pushed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about billionaire progressive donor George Sorospaying anti-Trump protesters and other conspiracy theories about Democrats, the media, and the Robert Mueller investigation.

Caputo represents a department that includes science-driven research and regulatory bodies, all of which require trust from the public at large. His history as a Trump loyalist, an ally of white supremacists, and a conspiracy theory enthusiast all raise questions as to whether the HHS has appropriate personnel in place to respond to the global pandemic.

Also: CNN previously reported on racist and sexist now-deleted tweets from Caputo.

klayman corsi

https://buffalonews.com/news/local/conservative-figures-sue-caputo-saying-he-served-as-stones-mouthpiece/article_ce18a0be-6e05-54cf-9928-fe2177cd0376.html

https://buffalonews.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/the-strange-made-up-story-of-caputo-the-spy/article_21ff6aad-b0bc-5e33-ae78-19c465c89092.html

no lnx doc graf

https://wnymedia.net/2019/05/02/reports-of-michael-caputos-death-threats-have-been-greatly-exaggerated/

WNYmedia Network – Buffalo, NY

Reports of Michael Caputo’s Death Threats Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

By WNYmedia Network -May 2, 2019

Caputo Bets on Supposed Threats

Trump Superfan Michael Caputo claims to be the victim of 59 ‘death threats’ and that he has reported ‘dozens’, yet records reveal he has made only 5 complaints to law enforcement, and in the last three years only one person has been charged

No person in public life should ever have to deal with threats of violence against them or their family. People who engage in such vile tactics should always be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.

No person in public life should manufacture ‘threats’ he has supposedly received in order to wield an unsupported political weapon and impress his friends in the mainstream media.

According to official documents obtained by WNYmedia Network, WNY political operative and professional storyteller Michael Caputo is dramatically overstating the number and nature of the threats he has received, largely via social media.

WNYmedia Network served FOIL requests on more than eight local, state, and federal agencies in an attempt to track down and confirm just how many credible “death threats” Mr. Caputo reported to authorities. That number does not equal 59, or anything close to it.

2017 – THE HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE

In July 2017, Caputo told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson how these “death threats” began, claiming they started in March 2017 when “Antifa” threatened to ‘burn down his house with his wife and kids inside‘ after Congresswoman Jackie Spiers mentioned him during a Public hearing:

Undoubtedly, such a serious threat to one’s family would result in a call to the police or other appropriate authorities.

Yet, WNYMedia Network found that the first official complaint filed by Caputo wasn’t until August 2017, almost six months after his initial claims of a threat from “ANTIFA”.

Caputo brought that complaint to the Erie County Sheriff’s Department in August not based on a well-founded fear for his family’s well-being but rather on the advice of his attorney.

Caputo filed that report with the Erie County Sheriff’s Department:

Throughout 2017 until April of 2018, Mr. Caputo went on a what could charitably be described as a weekly cable news parade, relentlessly touting his claims that he and his family are the victims of ‘threats’.

In April 2018, he complained to anyone who would listen that the Mueller investigation into Russian electoral interference was making his family ‘poor’ and at one point even claimed he was leaving Western New York altogether:

“We were starting to buy boxes, start sorting through our stuff. We really thought we were on our way out of town but maybe we won’t have to,” says Caputo.

He used this claim to fundraise, creating a legal trust fund and ‘GoFundMe’ page where he and his ‘colleagues’ in Erie County and other Republican circles bilked hundreds of ‘supporters’ out of more than $300,000. There has been no public accounting for how much was raised, or how that money has been spent.

THE ONE SERIOUS THREAT THAT WAS NEVER FOLLOWED UP

On April 28th, just days before his testimony in front of the Senate Intel Committee, Caputo made another claim to the National Review about ‘constant threats of violence’ and declaring that had reported “dozens of threats’ to the police:

“We endure constant threats of violence,” Caputo says, “which create security costs.” Since his name arose in Russiagate, Caputo and his family have been terrorized by people who want them dead.

“Last month, my wife received a part of a sniper rifle in the mail,” Caputo says. “We reported this and dozens of other threats to the police.”

Days later on May 4th, Caputo appeared on Sean Hannity, telling a similar story:

Through a FOIL request, we found that Caputo did file a complaint with the East Aurora Police Department on March 1st, 2018 about a ‘suspicious incident’ involving an Amazon shipment of a “vortex bubble level” – a device used on scopes to make sure a gun is level:

A year later, on March 25, 2019, the investigation into this complaint was officially closed after Caputo failed to follow up with East Aurora Police or Amazon about who might have purchased the level.

Of all the threats Caputo has discussed publicly, this one seems to be the most credible, direct, and ominous. So, why would he refuse to follow-up with investigators from the police or Amazon? Certainly, Amazon would have a record of who bought the level, using what credit card or PayPal account, the IP of the computer used, and large volumes of other data that law enforcement could have used to apprehend the perpetrator.

None of that happened. Why?

BUILDING A NARRATIVE

Caputo formally filed another complaint of a ‘perceived threat’ to local law enforcement agencies on May 21st, 2018. Caputo complained of a direct message sent via Facebook, resulting in Caputo filing for a restraining order and filing a charge of harassment against a local 19-year-old:

The suspect’s name was sealed. The police report states that the suspect decided to appear in front of a Judge without an attorney present for questioning in connection with a probable cause hearing. So far, this 19-year-old is the only person whom Caputo successfully had charged.

The reason the 19-year-old wrote nasty messages via DM to Caputo? Caputo “had messaged his father over political things and had made a comment about his mother that angered him.”

2019 – PAYDAY, JUST IN TIME FOR THE MUELLER REPORT

With the imminent release of the Mueller report, Caputo needed to spin a narrative to establish that the left was becoming unhinged. What better way to do so than to use some innocuous social media threats as a political weapon against his critics.

On March 26th and again on March 30th, Caputo filed two more complaints to the East Aurora Police department.

[vid?]

Here is the alleged ‘threat’ Mr. Caputo decided to have prosecuted through Aurora Town Court:

WE'RE ALL HAVING FUN WATCHING THE #RESISTANCE SIFT THRU THE RUBBLE OF THEIR RUSSIA HOAX, BUT REMEMBER: THE MUELLER REPORT CONCLUSION THERE'S "NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION" MAY DETONATE MANY MENTALLY ILL RESISTERS. THEIR VIOLENT THREATS WILL INCREASE; THEY MAY ATTACK. WATCH YOUR BACK. PIC.TWITTER.COM/3LLBD6YKEN

— THAT MICHAEL CAPUTO (@MICHAELRCAPUTO) MARCH 26, 2019

It’s not very well-written, but by no means does anything here rise to the level of a threat. Caputo was on WBEN Wednesday morning filling-in for Sandy Beach (aka “impeach and company’) and for three hours continued to harass the alleged suspect, dog whistling his supporters to show up in Aurora Town Court where he was to be arraigned on a misdemeanor harassment charge:

Caputo isn’t looking for justice – if he did, he would just let the police do their job, and let the courts do theirs. Instead, he’s rounding up a posse to threaten and intimidate every person he identifies to his “MAGA-QRS” followers as a person who has supposedly threatened him.

This person did not threaten Caputo. In social media land, there is always the “block” feature. Wasting police and court resources to make an example out of and threaten some dopey Facebook person is simply insane.

In addition to the multiple social posts, Caputo urged the audience to show up in Aurora Town court Wednesday night and help him ‘fight’ as he put it.

As for the March 30th incident, Caputo again blew the dog whistle via his social media accounts.

[vid?]

According to the complaint and also visible on the suspects Facebook profile, Caputo supporters attacked the man with harassing phone calls and antagonistic facebook comments:

According to the official police report, Caputo denied he had anything to do with the suspect’s counterclaims although Caputo’s facebook post shows otherwise:

This case is still pending further investigation.

CAPUTO CONTINUES TO BLOW THAT DOG WHISTLE

This isn’t the first time Caputo has taken to the media to push this convenient narrative. Since the Mueller Report was officially handed to the DOJ, Caputo has been on a month-long media tour claiming various amounts of ‘death threats’ and continuing to blame the left for the recent rise in threats and violence.

Here’s Caputo on Fox News falsely claiming the ’58’ number:

Again, of the five complaints filed over three years, none technically rise to the level of a credible death threat and as we stated earlier, the most serious claim (bubble level sent in the mail) is the one serious threat Caputo failed to follow up on.

Someone saying they’ll beat you up does not constitute a ‘death threat’. Harassment charges can be filed which Caputo has attempted to do with people he can positively identify through social media.

NONE OF THIS RISES TO THE LEVEL OF A CREDIBLE THREAT AGAINST HIS SAFETY. SAYING YOU’LL BEAT SOMEONE UP IF YOU WERE EVER TO SEE THEM DOES NOT CONSTITUTE A DEATH THREAT

A few weeks ago, instead of showing support for colleagues dealing with far more serious threats, Caputo took a calculated opportunity to dismiss the seriousness of the threats against a local politician in Erie County. He took to Twitter to publicly call them ‘Bullshit”:

A LETTER ASKING YOU FOR HELP? A LOST KNIFE ON DELAWARE AVENUE? REALLY? PIC.TWITTER.COM/IIIWOV2CPF

— THAT MICHAEL CAPUTO (@MICHAELRCAPUTO) APRIL 5, 2019

CAPUTO CONTINUES TO BLOW THAT DOG WHISTLE

While politicians and government officials across the country are dealing with what seems like ongoing threats of violence on both sides, the last thing someone like Caputo should be doing is continuing to fuel the rhetoric by going on radio and television claiming threats that are at worst benign, or in large part do not exist.

Instead, the media keeps calling and Caputo continues to do national and local TV interviews, while reporters across the country blindly print and broadcast his unsubstantiated claims, almost verbatim.

Caputo has continued his never-ending media blitz by re-starting his GoFundMe, bilking more than $11,000 out of more supporters and went so far as to promote a book that has yet to be written, all while egregiously mocking others who are on the receiving end of far more serious threats.

Again, no one should have to deal with any threats of violence against them or they’re family and people perpetuating this nonsense should be held accountable to the fullest extent possible. But at the same time, Mr. Caputo shouldn’t be allowed to go unvetted to local and national media while he continues to incite others to commit similar threats.

All this fabrication for a few final minutes in the national spotlight before he’s merely a footnote in history, crawling back into obscurity.

https://buffalonews.com/news/local/the-radical-adventures-of-conservative-radio-host-mike-caputo/article_d3f47fc7-1f23-5bd3-9cd0-29c592f33ecd.html

no lnx

...

Grateful Dead fanatic who spread propaganda for anti-communist rebels in Central and South America.

He brought MTV’s Rock the Vote concept to Russia and hung out with mobsters there.

He learned hardball tactics from GOP strategist Roger Stone, fought eBay, lost small fortunes, and fled with a parrot to a tugboat off the Florida coast after getting death threats.

And now he’s part of the team working to land Donald Trump the Republican nomination for president in New York State.

But there’s one thing conservative radio talk show host Michael R. Caputo insists he never has been – a rogue CIA agent.

A vetting of Caputo’s life story, including interviews with roughly 20 people who know him, disproves the cloak-and-dagger spy claim made against him. But Caputo certainly has done enough to make the claim seem plausible.

“If I were to run for office,” he said, “my skeletons would come dancing out of the closet in a can-can.”

RELATED: The strange (made-up) story of Caputo the spy

At 53, Caputo now lives modestly in a rented East Aurora home with his young family. He’s gone from a college student resembling a geeky version of Elvis Costello to becoming a tea-drinking corporate relations specialist with slightly receding salt-and-pepper hair.

Perhaps best known as the campaign manager for Carl Paladino’s 2010 run for governor, Caputo now regularly fills in as a political talk show host on WBEN radio.

And he is now working with Paladino as part of the New York political team trying to organize support to help Trump win the state’s Republican nomination.

Caputo makes a pittance of what he used to. He owes the federal government a huge sum in back taxes. And he irritates local Democrats, who label him a paid attack dog.

But Caputo professes not to care. For once, he’s happy.

“I’m home, finally,” he said.

Restless childhood

An admitted small-time thief and juvenile delinquent growing up in the Southtowns, Caputo said his first enounter with Paladino occurred when he accompanied his father to work in the Ellicott Square building and tried stealing change from the blind man running the first-floor convenience store. Paladino caught him, repeatedly kicked him in the legs and threw him out.

After Caputo graduated from high school, his father dropped him off at the Army enlistment station in downtown Buffalo.

“If you come back from the service the same way you’re going in,” Raymon Caputo recalled telling his son, “you’re not welcome in my house.”

The change in him started fast. The day Caputo realized that President Ronald Reagan was responsible for his 10 percent Army raise, he became a Republican. He threw his restless energy to the political right and never looked back.

After leaving the Army in 1983, he enrolled in college. That’s when his name first appeared in The Buffalo News. Stories appeared about his political, pot-stirring efforts at the University at Buffalo, including conservative students’ plans to spy and report on “radical,” liberal professors believed to be “closet Marxists.”

Caputo signed on as a writer for Congressman Jack Kemp in his White House bid.After that campaign failed, he moved on to Central and South America – where he rubbed elbows with Iran-Contra figure Oliver North – doing his part to spread Reagan’s anti-communist doctrine through PR and propaganda.

Caputo was one of half a dozen young “light-skinned gringos” who connected politicians, journalists and other public opinion influencers with rebels and other political allies in Latin America, according to J. Michael Waller, who oversaw Caputo’s work for the now-defunct Council for Inter-American Security.

“We believed in the cause,” Waller said, “and we were willing to work for next to nothing.”

Caputo later employed his media skills with the House of Representatives and the failed George Bush/Dan Quayle re-election campaign. He also took on side projects, like the successful push to resurrect the canceled “Twin Peaks” television series.

“It’s the cutting edge of television,” Caputo told the Associated Press in 1991. “When ABC realizes what they’ve lost, they’re going to look like monkeys.”

Going to Russia

When tumultuous change shook the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, with Russian leaders struggling to build a more democratic and free-market society after more than 50 years of communist rule, Caputo staked out his next adventure.

He moved there in 1994 as a staff member with the U.S. Agency for International Development, describing Moscow as “Paris in the 1920s with automatic weapons.”

Caputo was one of hundreds of Westerners who flocked to the new Russia to advise people there on how democracy works, said David Hoffman, former Moscow Bureau chief for the Washington Post.

“It really was a pioneering time, and not for the faint of heart,” said Hoffman, who traded gossip with Caputo back then.

Caputo took up residence in an upscale artists neighborhood, and lived next to a cafe that he said was owned by the local mafia. It was the kind of place where one could hear soaring opera music in the morning and find a body dumped at night.

Though friendly with senior Kremlin officials, he butted heads with his superiors at the U.S. State Department. The Washington Post reported in 1995 that Caputo, “an obscure adviser to the Russian election commission,” got his phone, fax and office keys confiscated for refusing to support a State Department position to the media.

He thought about returning stateside. But he stayed, heartbroken over the death of Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia but in love with a Russian astrophysics student whom he later married.

He also opened a public relations firm to help Western companies get a foothold in the newly opened country.

“It was the ideal time for someone like Michael to open shop,” said Michael Conforti, who hired Caputo to help get GTECH’s online lottery system established in Russia.

It was also a dangerous time. Business people regularly faced threats and more. Roughly 40 were killed in just one year, but few were foreigners, Hoffman said.

Caputo recalled one night of heavy drinking with someone he was vetting as a potential local partner for GTECH, and unknowingly insulting the mob-connected man. The man’s bodyguards dragged him out the restaurant’s kitchen door, threw him into a car and took him for a ride before they left him unattended and he got away, he said.

Caputo proved adept at navigating the byzantine Russian bureaucracy, Conforti said, but in the end, it didn’t matter. The ruble crashed in the late 1990s. Businesses pulled out, leaving companies like Caputo’s in ruins.

So in 2000, Caputo finally returned to the United States.

He co-founded Rainmaker, a PR firm for budding telecom and Internet companies based in Washington, D.C., but also worked for Russians on this side of the Atlantic. He helped President Vladimir Putin weather U.S. government criticism for taking over an independent TV station.

“I’m not proud of the work today,” he said. “But at the time, Putin wasn’t such a bad guy.”

When Rainmaker failed following the dot-com bust, Caputo took his communications expertise to Allegiance Telecom, a Dallas company fighting to stay in business. That company went bankrupt two years later, and with it went his retirement money wrapped up in Allegiance stock.

Low on money and his marriage to the Russian woman ending, Caputo seemed to run out of steam.

He left Dallas and was loafing on his dad’s couch in Orchard Park when he got a call from his mentor and close friend, Roger Stone. The bare-knuckled conservative strategist told Caputo to join him in Miami Beach.

From there, Caputo launched Michael Caputo Public Relations, the firm he runs today.

Tugboat tasks

When Forbes Magazine correspondent Paul Klebnikov was shot to death in Moscow in 2004, Caputo penned a Washington Post column decrying the “brutal billionaires” of Russia and one in particular, Boris Berezovsky.

Soon after, Caputo said he started getting death threats.â?©So he bought a tugboat and armed himself with a .40-caliber Glock. Off the Florida coast for much of the next five years, he let his hair grow, rarely wore shoes and ran his PR office from his boat with a laptop and a phone. He kept a white parrot as company.

His PR stunts included hiring a guy in a chicken suit to stand outside the office of a Miami senator who refused a debate invitation. He also hired women dressed as strippers to bring bad press to a proposed constitutional amendment in Florida.

But Caputo’s most well-known PR work was done on behalf of MercExchange, an online auction outfit that took the corporate giant eBay to court over patent infringements.

“It really turned into a David and Goliath story,” said MercExchange CEO Thomas Woolston. “Then the whole thing came before the Supreme Court, and now the whole industry is looking at your fight.”

Caputo worked to build public sympathy for MercExchange by reducing an arcane legal case to “kitchen table language,” painting eBay as a corporate monster and finding reporters and opinion writers to publish stories about the matter in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. After a six-year battle, the companies settled.

Caputo left his tugboat for a spell in 2007 when he agreed to consult on a parliamentary campaign in the Ukraine. That’s where he met his second wife, Maryna Ponomarenko.

She insisted he give up politics. He agreed.

Determined to finally set down roots, the couple moved to East Aurora in 2009, and Caputo made plans to join his father’s insurance company.

Caputo immediately broke his promise, and signed on to manage Paladino’s Republican campaign for governor in 2010. Occasional conflicts erupted between the two during and after the campaign. Paladino recalled preparing to speak to Orthodox Jewish leaders in Brooklyn and being given a speech Caputo was supposed to vet. The speech, written by Jewish community leaders, was laced with anti-gay rhetoric. Caputo, who said he was exhausted, didn’t catch any of it.

The backlash was ferocious. Caputo offered to resign, but Paladino kept him on.

Caputo and Paladino are once again friends and working together on the New York for Trump campaign.

“We had our ups and downs on the campaign, but I think of him as a friend because I really think he was trying,” Paladino said. “He’s a good reactor to chaos.”

A taxing business

Caputo’s office sits above a shoe repair shop in East Aurora. Behind his desk, a statuette of Ronald Reagan stands alongside Jerry Garcia’s guitar-wielding figure.

Three employees work for him down the hall, three more in Miami Beach and three in Moscow. He advises clients like Sergio’s, a major Cuban restaurant chain, and Weisbrod Matteis & Copley, a D.C.-based firm handling Superstorm Sandy litigation.

And he started a branding and events company called Zeppelin Communications.

He says he’s not on anyone’s local campaign payroll and does work for the Republican Party free of charge.

Though Caputo says he is a proud American, he owes the U.S. government more than $100,000 in back taxes and penalties and has multiple liens against him. He paid off his back state taxes last year.

Caputo said he did a poor job managing his lucrative PR business from 2003 to 2009, and has since hired professionals to handle his books and to work out a settlement with the IRS.

The large skull ring Caputo wears on his right hand speaks to his roots. He can offer insightful political observations one moment, then in the next, make crude sexual references to a critic’s mother online.

Caputo recently labeled Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz “cowardly” and called a promoter for Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz a “stupid bitch” on Twitter.

Poloncarz said he used to have pleasant conversations with Caputo, before the Republican-controlled Erie County Water Authority awarded Caputo a three-year PR and marketing contract in August worth up to $5,000 a month.

“Since then, he went from saying nice things about me to criticizing me as part of the local Republican Party’s agenda to defeat my administration,” Poloncarz said.

In turn, Caputo has been the target of some creative smear campaigns. The most recent: Caputo is a rogue CIA agent working with a former Taliban ambassador connected to al-Qaida.

A supposedly classified document from 2007 was “leaked” on Twitter two months ago, including the signature of the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service at the time.

After extensive vetting, The News found the document to be fraudulent. But Gary Berntsen, who worked undercover for the CIA for 24 years, recognized how the document could fool the unwary.

“Think about the effort that someone is going through to discredit this guy,” he said. “It’s a world-class effort to screw Michael Caputo.”

Settling down

On Sunday mornings, the bells of Immaculate Conception Church call Caputo to 8 a.m. Mass. It takes him 37 steps to reach the church’s door. He counted.

Caputo converted to Catholicism in 2000, when he felt he had lost faith in almost everything. He said his conversion helped him make peace with his restless past.

Home in East Aurora has led to a more relaxed and happy Caputo, observed Stone, his mentor. “He’s gotten much fatter,” Stone joked.

Caputo no longer travels or chases adventure at the same reckless speed. With his wife, Maryna, 32, Caputo is raising three children, ages 14, 3 and 1.

He also is building a relationship with his oldest daughter, 32, who lives in Louisville, Ky. He didn’t even know about her until six years ago, when her mother called him after seeing him in the media.

Caputo’s wife and two youngest children often join him for lunch at his office. On a recent visit, Caputo looked past the crayons and toys sitting by a Trump campaign spreadsheet on his coffee table to tell his wife that a box of Pampers was waiting near the door.

This is the life, he said.

“I should never have left East Aurora,” he said. “I don’t regret anything I’ve done. But all I have to show for it are stories.”

Read more on allegations that Caputo was a rogue CIA agent at politicsnow.buffalonews.com email: stan@buffnews.com

dhs secret cops?

fauci gag? 720 FDA

100K says needs 2 million robert watkins acc't fla

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/21/trump-ally-roger-stones-crowdfunding-page-hits-100000-target.html

https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2019/02/22/roger-stones-legal-defense-fund-runs-through-tampa/

superpacs

address listed on Stone’s website belongs to Robert Watkins & Company, an accounting firm owned by its namesakes, Robert Watkins, and his wife, Nancy Watkins. They’re the go-to bookkeepers for numerous Republican candidates and campaigns — not just in Florida, but around the country.

Nancy Watkins is the treasurer for 37 active political committees in Florida, including one for Gov. Ron DeSantis, and 138 federally registered committees. She counts Super PACs benefiting President Donald Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio among her clients. They depend on her to audit millions of dollars each election cycle without error so they don’t get flagged with a campaign finance violation.

caller

ref

Caputo is opening

up his legal defense fund to other campaign aides

The former Trump aide spoke with The Daily Caller News Foundation

“We’re looking for people who can’t afford their legal fees,” he said

Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo is opening up his legal defense fund to other campaign aides ensnared in the multiple investigations into possible collusion with Russia.

Caputo, a longtime Republican political consultant, started the fund to help cover $125,000 in legal bills he’s racked up over the course of the Russia investigation, which he considers a “witch hunt.”

The grassroots fundraising campaign has far surpassed Caputo’s initial goal, drawing in over $330,000 from more than 6,400 donors.

Caputo said he’s opening up the Michael Caputo Legal Fund to witnesses interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller and the three congressional committees investigating the campaign.

Military veterans and Trump associates with more limited financial means are a priority, he said.

“We’re looking for people who can’t afford their legal fees because we think that is in keeping with the wishes of the people who donated in the first place,” Caputo, a Buffalo, N.Y., native who served on President Donald Trump’s campaign until June 2016, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “We’re not looking for hedge fund guys and millionaires.”

Caputo’s focus on veterans is one reason he picked J.D. Gordon, a former naval commander, Pentagon spokesman and director of Trump’s national security advisory committee.

Gordon has been interviewed by the special counsel’s office as well as the House Intelligence, Senate Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committees. Though he has been told he is not a target of the investigations, his role on the campaign put him at the center of several of the areas being scrutinized in the parallel probes.

The costs of document production and consultation with attorneys has led to legal bills in the “low five-figure” range, Gordon said.

“I’m delighted to see so many thousands of grassroots activists from around America answer your call to help a true patriot who has been victimized by the witch hunt of the century,” Gordon wrote to Ralph Lorigo, one of the attorneys helping with Caputo’s legal fund.

“Though my personal legal costs have been relatively minor compared to others also wrongly targeted for a political inquisition, as Michael knows, these funds are coming directly out of my military pension as a retired Navy Commander,” Gordon added.

In addition to raising funds for Trump associates, Caputo and Gordon are planning to tour the country giving speeches to grassroots organizations about their experiences at the center of the Russia firestorm.

Their main message will be that if Democrats gain control of Congress in November, they expect immediate impeachment proceedings against Trump. Democrats such as California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, have already signaled they plan to expand the Russia investigation if they take control of Congress.

Besides helping Trump associates avoid legal debt, Caputo said he hopes his legal fund will help witnesses come forward to talk more openly about the Russia investigations.

Witnesses have been afraid of speaking out for fear of being called back to testify before Congress or to meet the special prosecutor, he said. Each appearance can easily generate thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees. (RELATED: ‘God Damn You To Hell’: Former Trump Aide Blows Up During Senate Interview)

The usually outspoken Caputo is a prime example of that reticence to discuss his interactions with investigators, especially those on the special counsel’s team.

After his interview with Mueller’s prosecutors earlier this month, he was uncharacteristically reserved in his comments about what was discussed in his three-hour meeting. He praised prosecutors for their professionalism and issued vague warnings about the seriousness of the probe. He withheld his true thoughts about the lack of evidence of collusion;that is, until he raised enough money to pay his attorney, a former Justice Department prosecutor.

“I couldn’t afford the legal fees. Now that people have got my back I’m able to go out and speak freely because I don’t care if they call me back in. I don’t care,” Caputo told TheDCNF. (RELATED: Former Trump Aide Michael Caputo: Mueller Team Is ‘Managing To Manufacture Crimes’)

The fund is controlled by three trustees, Caputo said and that he is only able to access funds for his own legal fight.

Caputo also revealed on Wednesday that he will offer financial support to any FBI agents willing to speak to the Justice Department’s inspector general, which is investigating the bureau’s handling of the Russia investigation.

“We’ll pay their legal fees. If they go to the inspector general, reveal what happened, we’ll pay their legal fees,” Caputo said on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” (RELATED: Sources: FBI Agents Want Congress To Issue Them Subpoenas So They Can Reveal The Bureau’s Dirt)

Caputo was responding to a report in The Daily Caller that FBI agents are hoping for subpoenas from the inspector general in order to share what they know about how top FBI officials handled the investigation.

https://www.wired.com/story/former-trump-campaign-aide-my-russia-ties-are-not-nefarious/

...cAPUTO’S FAVORITE novel is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the story of the Devil’s visit to Moscow in the 1930s

and all the oddball characters who surround him. When the future Trump campaign official was living in Moscow in the 1990s, he moved to Patriarchs Pond, the novel’s setting, and scratched his apartment’s paint down to the color it was when Bulgakov wrote the novel in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and then repainted each room in the color it would have been then.

Today, Caputo thinks the book’s magical realism and interplay of greed, guilt, and politics captures the absurdity of our modern moment perfectly, and he has taken his own first-edition copy of the book into his closed-door testimonies before the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and, earlier this month, to meet with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators. “I figure that’ll raise its resale value,” he says. “I’ll put it on eBay someday.”

Among the odd stories surrounding the colorful cast of characters orbiting the Trump campaign and the Mueller investigation, political consultant Michael Caputo—a one-time protégé of PR dirty trickster Roger Stone and former aide to Paul Manafort—likely doesn’t even crack the top dozen. In fact, his most memorable claim to fame on the Trump campaign may be that he’s the only person to have left the campaign under totally normal circumstances, resigning after an ill-advised tweet that celebrated the firing of Corey Lewandowski. (“Ding dong the witch is dead,” he wrote, accompanying the post with a photo of a pair of legs crushed by a house.)

Caputo has attracted the attention of Congressional and Justice Department investigators, but he says he’s also wrapped up in a burgeoning Russia-gate of his own, a brewing scandal driven by left-wing bloggers in possession of leaked documents he handed over to Senate investigators, an attempt to smear his latest Russian-linked business venture, a video website he describes as filling the gap “between Netflix and YouTube.”

He spoke to WIRED in an attempt to get ahead of looming rumors about the venture, Bond.PM, which declares itself “the future of entertainment powered by Blockchain.” Given his prominence in the Trump orbit and conservative circles, he says, “I expect to get a couple kicks in the nuts.” But he’s here to tell you that claims that there’s anything untoward about his new business are baseless—and his critics are simply trying to discredit him because of general anti-Russia bias. “I’m about to be roasted,” he says. “The reason the Senate is leaking is because I’m in business with Russians.”

Caputo’s business interests in Russia stretch back to the 1990s, when he lived there working on behalf of the US Agency for International Development and later advised then-President Boris Yeltsin. He also helped run “Rock the Vote Russia.” (“When the Clinton administration asked me to go meddle in the Russian election, I jumped at the chance,” he jokes.) Though he left Russia as Vladimir Putin took office, he has remained active in the region’s politics and business, including consulting for Gazprom. But more than business, he says he’s an aficionado of Russian art and culture, a child of the Cold War who fought Soviet Communism with the Contras and with his old boss, Jack Kemp. Bond.PM—for which Caputo is listed as chief marketing officer—isn’t some sort of Russian plot, he says. It’s a startup that just happens to involve a lot of Russians.

The startup, which hasn’t launched yet, says its streaming platform aims to “take the middlemen out of the game” and connect video creators directly with an audience, allowing for crowd-investing and decentralized ownership enabled by smart contracts and its own cryptocurrency powered by the Ethereum blockchain. “This whole blockchain thing is so compelling to me—I don’t know where it’s going, but it’s such an interesting ride,” Caputo says.

His role is hardly hidden in the new venture—the flashy website is topped by a video featuring him. (“With the internet and blockchain, everything is changed,” he says on the video. “It’s the future of content.”) Other leaders of the startup include a Russian TV executive and a one-time Moscow entertainment lawyer; the effort is backed by a Hong Kong investment banker and professor of the Russian Economic University.

While the

public PowerPoint deck for the company is innocuous—and posted on Bond.PM’s website—Caputo says that the Senate Intelligence Committee leaked to liberal bloggers two non-public slides from the version he gave them that refer to the “Roseanne Effect,” the runaway popularity with Trump voters of the rebooted Roseanne sitcom this year. “Roseanne may have a domino effect on Hollywood,” the slides say, reaching the “Pro-Trump Middle America ignored by elites.”

He says he uses the slides when pitching the venture to conservative investors, who are eager for an alternative to the liberal Los Angeles elite. Caputo raised $12 million for various pro-Trump SuperPACs in 2016 and says he’s going after the same investors for his new project. “I’m taking this deck to Republican billionaires who support the president,” he says, “people who don’t like the Oscars ceremony and can’t stand the finger-wagging from Hollywood.”

Bond.PM, he says, offers a real alternative: “It completely disrupts the Hollywood business model. It’s the next step in disintermediating Hollywood.”

BUT, HE INSISTS, Bond.PM is not cozying up to the Kremlin. In fact, two of the filmmakers involved are decidedly not Putin fans: One of the company’s founders, Den Tolmar, was nominated for an Academy Award for his 2016 documentary

Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom, about that country’s revolution in 2014—a revolution that deposed Manafort and Putin’s preferred leader. Another Bond advisor, Cyril Tuschi, made a documentary sympathetic to Putin’s most famous critic, the tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The startup is aimed at letting fans support their favorite actors and directors without middlemen—and potentially even own a chunk of movies or TV shows themselves. As Caputo and his partners see it, the current economic model leaves a vast chasm between the low-end and the high-end. “If you don’t sell to Netflix or Amazon, you’re screwed. YouTube doesn’t make you any money anymore. There’s a great big chasm between Netflix and YouTube. That whole middle ground is untouched,” he says. “With blockchain and smart contracts, it’s a no-brainer. It’s an opportunity not just to make money, but also to transform the industry.”

The platform is meant to help empower both new content, like Tolmar’s documentaries, most recently Cries from Syria—which paints a sympathetic portrait of the victims of the Syrian civil war—as well as those out of step with the Hollywood elite. He points to Kevin Spacey’s banishment from House of Cards following sexual assault allegations last year. If the actor wanted to reprise his role as the power-hungry Frank Underwood, he could turn directly to stalwart fans online. “A franchise like that would find a home on Bond.PM. The gods of Hollywood have decided that the Kevin Spacey is never to be seen again—but his fans didn’t get a say in that,” Caputo says. “I understand he’s accused of dire things—and Kevin Spacey needs to make that right again. I believe in forgiveness. America loves a forgiveness story. America is the land of second chances. The gods of Hollywood will never give him a chance, but his fans would have the chance with Bond.PM.”

And don’t forget about Mel Gibson, who was ostricized for various outbursts deemed racist and anti-Semetic. He “was in Siberia for over a decade; he’s an incredible creator,” Caputo says. “We missed so much that he could have done. But if the gods of Hollywood were no longer in charge, if the fans were the deciders, it’d be very, very different. On Bond.PM, they don’t get to make that choice.”

The site, he says, is nearly ready for launch, which will include an initial coin offering. “Our ICO is imminent—it’ll be at the end of the month—and we expect to have the platform up and creators uploading their videos and films in June,” he says.

Bond.PM is not the only Russian-linked effort underway in Caputo’s life: He’s also helping launch an avant-garde ballet with star Russian ballerina Diana Vishneva, Sleeping Beauty Dreams, which will premiere in December in Miami before heading to New York and, then in 2019, a national tour. The ballet retells the classic fairy tale and includes what the production claims is “the first ever fusion of live contemporary dance of the ballet stars with 3D digital avatars projected on stage in real time.”

Both efforts share a common origin, Caputo says. “All of my Russian friends are from the creative arena,” he says. “There’s a huge brain drain of the creative class out of Russia. They’re gone—they now all live in Miami, New York, Los Angeles, London.”

The idea for the dance production grew out of a dinner party in Miami Beach, where he recalls he was sitting around with a group that included, in his words, the “Russian Andy Warhol, the Russian Bill Graham, and the Russian Ian Schrager.” The four of them, all dads with daughters, were drinking vodka and eating pickles. “We were all complaining about how we’re spending so much money on Frozen stuff and princesses,” Caputo says.

The conversation then turned to how to make money on princesses, rather than spend it, and to Sleeping Beauty, which has been continually reinvented by the Grimm Brothers, Tchaikovsky, and, most recently, Disney. Was there anything left to do with her? Then Rem Khass, the Russian Andy Warhol, asked a simple question: What was she dreaming for the hundred years that she was asleep? “We all reacted the same way—‘Oh my gosh,’” Caputo recalls. “We started getting really interested. The vast majority of the story took place in her head—and no one ever told us that.”

CAPUTO, 56, IS one of the colorful, ancillary characters who have floated in and out of the year-long Mueller investigation. Three decades ago, he worked as Roger Stone’s driver and says he has known Paul Manafort almost as long. Along the way, he worked with Oliver North, supporting the Contras in Central America, first met Trump in 1988, and once entertained Vladimir Putin at a reception at his house in Russia. He got his start in public relations in the Army, and he says that the first Russian he ever saw was through binoculars at the Korean Demilitarized Zone. “I think I’m the only American who has worked for both the White House and the Kremlin,” he says. “I plead guilty to living an interesting life—lock me up. But at the end of the day, I’ve told the truth and I’ve done nothing wrong.”

He is, to put it mildly, unapologetic. “If those Twitter sleuths Louise Mensch and John Schindler are upset I’m working with the premier Russian ballerina, they’re going to have to deal with it,” he says, referring to two of the amateur online gumshoes who have turned their Russia commentaries into mass followings. “If they’re upset that I’m working with an Academy-Award nominated Del Tolmar to change the industry, they’re going to have to deal with it.”

A longtime PR consultant, Caputo was hired by Trump in 2014 to help launch an astroturf effort to aid Trump’s ultimately unsuccessful purchase of the Buffalo Bills. He went to work for the Trump campaign in December 2015 to help in the New York primary then joined the national team in April 2016 as part of the group brought in by chairman Paul Manafort. He spent only a few weeks on the job before departing following his impolitic tweet. Despite his short tenure, his contacts with the campaign—and his manifold Russian connections—have kept him on the radar screens of the various Trump investigators for 18 months, especially since the March 20, 2017, congressional hearing where then-FBI Director James Comey testified about Russia’s interference in the election. Rep. Jackie Speier then called Caputo “Putin’s image consultant,” a charge he vehemently objects to. “I no more worked for Vladimir Putin than I did Rocky Balboa,” he says.

The investigators all grilled him on his ties to various campaign officials and Russian oligarchs. He says that while he was an “object of curiosity” to congressional investigators, Mueller’s team went at him hard. They “didn’t ask me a single question they didn’t know the answer to,” he says. “It was a colonoscopy. It felt like a proctology exam. These guys are not gentle.” (He prepared for this interview by relaxing in a Russian-style bathhouse in his hometown of Buffalo.)

None of his current work, he says, has raised the eyebrows of Mueller’s team. When he spoke to Mueller’s investigators, he says he tried to give them a copy of the Bond.PM PowerPoint too, but an investigator brushed it away, telling him, “Mr. Caputo, we don’t care about your Russian dancing.” (“It was such a drippy statement—like ‘we’re in this for serious things,’” he says.)

Throughout the investigations, he has remained a regular guest on cable news, defending Trump and condemning the investigations regularly dismissed by the president as a “witch hunt.”

Caputo says his own legal bills have topped $125,000, and that he had to cash in his childrens’ college fund to pay them. However, a GoFundMe effort this spring to defray his legal bills ended up raising $330,000 from about 6,500 donors, and earlier this week, Caputo announced he was opening up his legal defense fund to others who face mounting lawyers’ fees for their own involvement in the probe.

In a closing statement this month to the Senate Intelligence Committee that boiled over with his frustration, he called for an “investigation of the investigators,” saying he wanted to know who was leading the push against Trump: “I want to know [who] because God damn you to hell!”

He sees his two new efforts, the ballet and the video website, as a chance to restart and reorient his life. “I never want to be in politics again. This has been a terrible experience. Working for President Trump has been a terrible experience,” he says. “I never want to do another [campaign] again. It’s an opportunity to change my life and my family’s life.”

The whole inquisition, he says, has made him rethink his dismissal on TV last year of George Papadopoulos as a “coffee boy.” He apologized to Papadopoulos on Twitter this morning, lifting a sense of shame that Caputo says had led him to question whether he’s worthy of marching in this weekend’s Memorial Day parade in his hometown of East Aurora, New York. With the apology made, Caputo says, he has a clean conscience: “Now I can have a hot dog and march.”

meh

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/24/headlines/health_and_human_services_spokesperson_deletes_racist_tweets_about_chinese_people

now this

exclusive: Trump Ally Cut Ties To His Own Daughter After 2016 Election

This woman says she was "disowned" by her father, key Trump ally Michael Caputo, after he began working on the 2016 campaign.

By NowThisPublished on 10/22/2019 at 5:54 PM

Miranda Jansing says Michael Caputo disowned her after the 2016 election.

Caputo is a GOP strategist and spokesperson. He started in politics as a protégé of Roger Stone and later worked for Presidents Reagan and H.W. Bush. He was also an early staffer when Trump ran for president—and while he was on his campaign for just six months, he continued to support and defend his record after the election.

Jansing said she’s survived as a single mother and has been on government subsidies in the past. She describes herself as liberal because she doesn’t want anyone else to feel as hopeless as she has before.

As a young child, she says she grew up without Caputo in her life and didn’t meet him until 2011 when she was 27. He prefaced his conservatism to her, but said he would not allow politics to separate them.

“I grew up in Scientology, which is very limiting. They’re very manipulative. If you don’t fit into their molds they try and break you to fit into their molds,” she explained. “I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence because my whole life, my childhood, I was always told I was never good enough. I’m never going to be anything. I wish that Michael has been around to step in and be like, this is probably not a good thing.”

As the 2016 campaign trail progressed, she said that it became harder and harder to talk with her father. Their relationship hit a breaking point in 2017 when they had a fight on social media over an opinion she had about gun violence.

“In June of 2017, when the shooter attacked the Republican baseball team, I wrote a post,” she explained “I was disowned because of that. And I have not talked to him since.”

If she could give him a message, Jansing said it would be that she wishes this wasn’t the end of their relationship.

“It probably would take some time. But I’ve forgiven a lot of people [for] a lot of worse things,” she said.

https://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/

https://www.twincities.com/2018/09/27/i-called-out-his-victim-blaming-and-he-lost-it-says-kirsten-powers-after-michael-caputos-cnn-meltdown/

Late Wednesday, a name started trending on Twitter. It wasn’t Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s embattled Supreme Court nominee whose widely-anticipated Senate hearing is set to begin Thursday morning. It wasn’t Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez or Julie Swetnick, the three women who have accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct.

It was Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign aide turned political strategist and conservative pundit.

Caputo was thrust into the spotlight after having what many are calling a “meltdown” during a heated panel discussion about the controversial allegations against Kavanaugh on Anderson Cooper’s “AC360? Wednesday night.

What started as an impassioned, yet civil, debate quickly deteriorated after fellow panelist and USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers called Caputo out, as he put it, by declaring that men like him, and Trump, were in fact part of the problem. The alleged offenses involving Kavanaugh happened at “a time when women just simply were not believed and everybody sounded like Donald Trump and Michael Caputo,” Powers said. ” . . . Just listen to yourself.”

That’s when Caputo lost it.

The show within the show began after a commercial break. At that point, Caputo challenged the credibility of Kavanaugh’s accusers claiming that they don’t even remember the details of what happened to them.

“I understand something probably happened to Dr. Ford,” he said. “I just don’t think Brett Kavanaugh was involved.”

Caputo then turned to Swetnick, the latest woman to come forward, who alleged Kavanaugh was present at a party in 1982 where she and others were gang-raped. (She did not accuse Kavanaugh of raping anyone. The judge has denied all the allegations.)

“For some reason Ms. Swetnick can’t really remember whether she was gang-raped at the first [party] or the 10th [party] and my question to her is why the heck would you go back to parties where young girls were in a bedroom getting gang raped by teenagers when you’re an adult?” Caputo asked incredulously.

As the men argued, Powers, the only woman on the panel and a CNN political analyst, was noticeably silent, until Cooper prompted her.CNN’s chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, the show’s other guest, fired back sarcastically, “Yeah, and why do these women wear these short skirts? Aren’t they just asking for it? Come on, Michael.”

“It’s just this tactic of attacking a very young woman,” she said, as Caputo could be seen shaking his head and appearing to mouth the word “no,” before the screen cut to show only Powers.

Powers explained that she also went to high school in the 1980s, around the same time as the alleged events.

“This was a time when women just simply were not believed and everybody sounded like Donald Trump and Michael Caputo,” she said, effectively equating Caputo with a man, the president, repeatedly accused of committing sexual aggression as if he had a sense of entitlement to do so.

“So if you’re going to ask why women didn’t come forward, Michael, that’s your answer. Just listen to yourself.”

Caputo cut her off and proceeded to talk over her.

“Stop interrupting me,” Powers said.

“When there’s no witnesses,” Caputo said, unfazed.

“Stop interrupting me,” Powers said, her voice calm.

Caputo went on loudly: “As the father of daughters. . ..” he declared, before Powers said again, “Stop interrupting me.”

“You’re going to call me out like that?” Caputo yelled, his face now contorting with visible rage. “Let me tell you this. . ..”

Powers: “I listened to you when you were ranting and raving for two segments. Now you can listen to me.”

Caputo: “You don’t call me out like that on national television.”

Powers: “I know what it was like to be a woman during that time period and you don’t.”

“Would you give me a chance?” Caputo said, visibly exasperated.

Powers did not. Instead, she likened the treatment of sexual assault survivors in the ’80s to how “people like Michael” initially reacted when African-Americans alleged police brutality.

“They said that black people were making it up until there were videos of it,” she said, “and then you can’t deny anymore that it was made up. Unfortunately, there were no cellphones in the 1980s.”

“Enough,” said Caputo, as if it would make any difference. “I don’t get invited on here to be called out by you like this. ”

Meanwhile, Cooper’s not-entirely-convincing attempts to moderate what had become a moment of great TV, seemed to go unacknowledged by Powers and Caputo.

“This is inappropriate, all right,” Caputo shouted.

“Here’s the downside,” he said. “. . . From now on every mother of sons, every grandmother of grandsons has to fear for the future of their boys because of people like you, who sit here and take uncorroborated testimony, uncorroborated allegations, against a decent man and ruin him because it gets you ratings,” he said angrily, as Toobin and Powers shook their heads in disagreement, but did not interrupt.

After a brief, yet deafening, pause, Powers only had one comment: “That’s bonkers, like literally insane,” she scoffed.

Toobin, who, uncharacteristically, had not made a sound during the entire Powers-Caputo exchange, chimed in, saying, “I hope young men who sexually assault young women get their lives ruined. I’m not worried about that.”

Social media was already alight with reactions. By early Thursday morning, there were more than 8,700 tweets about Caputo.

“Kirsten Powers just owned Michael Caputo on CNN and he is freaking out,” New York Times reporter Cecilia Kang tweeted.

Many were quick to draw comparisons between how Powers handled herself during the segment compared to Caputo.

“This Michael Caputo just took it to CRAZY TOWN on CNN,” Miami New Times reporter Ryan Yousefi tweeted.

Others sided, and sympathized, with Caputo.

“Good for Caputo,” one person tweeted. “But I question WHY he would even consider an interview on @CNN. He should have known he couldn’t have an intelligent, non-biased, civil discussion on that network.”

The debate continued beyond the segment as both Powers and Caputo took to social media after it aired.

“Yes, I called out his victim blaming and he lost it,” Powers wrote on Twitter.

Caputo, on the other hand, did not issue his own response. Instead, he opted to retweet more than 30 different tweets in which people applauded him for his appearance on the show, agreed with his opinions, and insulted Powers and Toobin.

omfg punked

Death Threats and Drained Bank Accounts: Life on the Wrong End of the Mueller Probe

By MICHAEL CAPUTO March 28, 2019

Caputo, a former Trump campaign adviser, is managing director of Buffalo-based Zeppelin Communications. He is a 30-year veteran of Republican and international campaigns.

If you believe Attorney General William Barr, the special counsel report issued March 22 found no evidence that President Donald Trump’s campaign staff conspired or coordinated with Russia. As a former Trump senior campaign adviser and as a witness ensnared by the congressional and special counsel investigations for two years, that was vindication. I was elated.

But Barr angered a man in nearby Buffalo, N.Y., so much that he threatened my life a few hours later on Facebook. I filed criminal charges against him Tuesday. For a Trump associate trapped in the Russia collusion maelstrom, this is the norm, not an exception. This was the 58th threat of violence I received since the drama began two years ago, when my name was first brought up in a nationally televised House Intelligence hearing. Most of the perpetrators cloaked their identities. Some didn’t, and they got hit with criminal charges. I know many investigation witnesses who have lived the same nightmare of dealing with the unhinged.

Unfortunately, it won’t stop anytime soon: A criminal psychologist advising me through this period told me we’ve entered the danger zone. The mentally ill who have made Russia collusion the center of their lives will become unhinged. Some may attack.

That’s the life we’ve lived for two years—my wife, my young daughters and me. I had a tooth knocked out by Antifa at the president’s inauguration. After a televised congressional hearing during which my wife was mentioned, a man made a credible threat to burn down my house with my children inside. As a result, my office and home are wrapped in security measures, I’ve installed shotgun stations in my home, and I carry a concealed weapon wherever it’s legal.The remarkable vitriol impacts everyone. My teenager was harried by students and teachers alike; parents of my toddlers’ friends shied away. My wife carried us all on her shoulders, exponentially stronger than I am.

To deal with my anger, I turned to my church. We live across the street from our Roman Catholic parish, 39 steps away from the holy water, so close that the church bells mark every moment of our day. We wake up to the pealing, we pause several times a day to hear the beautiful songs ring out.

My parish priest regularly rebuilt me in counseling sessions with remarkable and simple advice. “It’s OK to pray that they fail, Michael,” he once said.

So I prayed and prayed for their failure. In that, I found peace and strength. Even when a USA Today columnist tweeted that my toddler daughters should be raped, I was at peace. (It helped that she was fired for it.)NOTE NO EVIDENCE]

Much of the impact is material. I lost most of my clients, lost staff, closed offices, nearly lost our home, drained my children’s college fund and struggled to pay the smallest bills. All of that will sound familiar to my Original Trump friends also caught up in this mess.

J.D. Gordon, a retired U.S. Navy commander, was interviewed multiple times by several investigations. His legal costs were significant; the blow to his communications business was even more so. But the far greater cost was his inability to serve in a senior Trump administration post. A surefire pick for a senior role in the national security team, he was cut off from working in the administration. This was a great loss for our nation.

Carter Page, with his bucket hat and sunny disposition, was destroyed. He endured unexpected legal costs while his oil and gas consulting business dwindled to nothing as reporters, investigators and well-placed partisans ripped him to shreds. Of all the people the United States of America failed in this investigation, Carter Page had it the worst.

But our nation also failed George Papadopoulos, who was destroyed, and I am ashamed to know I helped. A young man trying to make the most of a big break, he fell into traps spies set for him overseas. With news of his arrest, I called him “the Coffee Boy” on CNN, trying to spin his marginal influence on the campaign. My description was dishonorable, and fueled a fire from which he and his wife are only now recovering.

The list goes on and on: A hardworking travel aide from the campaign was subpoenaed, which rocked his young family. Others—a house painter, a translator and more—didn’t particularly care for candidate Trump, but their lives were dragged through the muck anyway.

Today, now that the special counsel has cleared the campaign and all of us of allegations of Russian collusion, we are all celebrating. The final report emerged in time for my birthday party, and a friend gave me a T-shirt to mark the occasion: “I survived the Mueller investigation and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”For two years, most of the Trump associates involved as mere witnesses have been unable to speak with friends from the 2016 campaign, convention and transition. Now, with the Mueller investigation complete, we’re all talking again, and the stories of cratered lives are innumerable. Many lost their jobs or shed clients; the husband and wife in one family lost their jobs.

The shirt got a lot of laughs that night. But, as I swirled the last of my final birthday drink, I had to wonder if the widespread personal destruction is permanent. If so, everyone else needs a T- shirt.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-head-of-the-fda-is-forbidden-from-speaking-to-press-without-a-trump-minder/

kos

the New York Times has a long look questioning whether Food and Drug Administration head Stephen Hahn is being forced into giving the nation subpar advice on the demand of the anti-science, anti-reality narcissistic idiot manchild posing as the current president. It is full of the usual back and forth, both-siding quotes while laying out reams of evidence that actually this is not a question at all. The plain history shows that Dr. Hahn has absolutely been mealymouthing FDA pandemic advice to dodge contradicting Donald Trump’s most egregiously ignorant and magic-minded proclamations. It’s the sort of piece where you get the subject, Hahn, assuring the reporter that he is absolutely not feeling “squeezed” before the reporter casually throws in:

“On the line as he spoke was Michael Caputo, a deputy to Dr. Hahn’s boss, Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. […] Dr. Hahn is not allowed to speak to the press without Mr. Caputo or another official on the phone.”

There you go, America. Question answered. The head of the Food and Drug Administration is forbidden from talking to the press about the pandemic, period, unless an administration minder is present.

Another of global authoritarianism’s most consistent policies gets plunked down into the federal government, and we learn of it in a piece questioning whether everything is fine or is maybe something odd and disturbing going on here.

while the FDA gives rush approval to a supposed Trump miracle drug, sans evidence, only to have to warn later that oops it may turn out that the drug not only doesn’t work but may result in the dangerous side effects already known and printed on the packaging.

Oh, and we also learn that Hahn was discouraged from reaching out to private companies to develop COVID-19 tests back in January, according to four administration sources. That was back when the Trump administration, meaning Donald, was absolutely determined to ignore the pandemic away from the United States and absolutely did not want health officials giving dire warnings or taking drastic actions to actually prepare for the pandemic when it arrived.

Don’t worry, though. Trump’s Health and Human Services head Alex Azar said that never happened. Those other four sources must have imagined it.

We really are just unimaginably slow on the draw, here. There are 160,000 Americans dead, and it’s going to be next to impossible to limit it to anything else than a quarter million dead by the end of the year. And the most aggressive action to date by the Trump clan is to make sure minders are minding any federal expert whose expertise might publicly contradict whatever Typhoid Hitler’s fevered brain has pushed out his mouth on any particular morning. Is this unusual? Yeah, it’s pretty damn unusual. Is this damaging the nation’s response to a pandemic? Look around the planet: It’s the defining feature of our nation’s response to the pandemic.

We are supposed to feel sympathy for Dr. Hahn, because if he wants to retain his position he is absolutely forbidden from getting on Donald Trump’s bad side—and contradicting Donald Trump under any circumstances will immediately put him on Trump’s bad side. We are supposed to be begrudgingly grateful that Dr. Hahn and others are doing their best to dodge massive, murderous incompetence to keep more Americans alive than Trump’s core team have shown interest in, because if they resigned their posts in disgust Trump, Kushner, Meadows and the rest would simply ignore whatever laws were necessary to put a loyalist in with no such moral qualms.

We have to phrase all of this delicately, with a touch of both sides do it and a large dose of yes, this is all unusual in the extreme but far be it from us to say this is any better or worse than the old way of running the country, because doing otherwise would send Americans into a panic. It would cause politicians supporting the New Way to get very, very angry.

It may be brazenly obvious that Trump’s incompetence is killing people and his staff is primarily devoted to making sure nobody in the federal government suggests anything better, but there are still no editorial pages demanding he step down. None asking that the 25th Amendment be invoked despite his obvious forays into delusion.

Nothing about this is normal. A great deal of it was previously presumed to be illegal. There is an overwhelming push to normalize it down to mere partisan controversy, though, so nobody has to too deeply consider the underlying implications.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-trump-aide-frantically-scrambles-to-scrub-russia-from-bio

former Donald Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo is determined to prove that he did not work for Vladimir Putin, and he’s using every tool at his disposal to do so—from a congressional ethics complaint, to a defamation lawsuit, to a surreptitious Wikipedia edit campaign.

Sean Dwyer, an employee of Caputo’s PR firm, Zeppelin Communications, was blocked from Wikipedia in August after he was caught using multiple pseudonymous accounts to purge Caputo’s page of alleged Putin ties, according to an investigation by the site’s editors. After the accounts were exposed as what Wikipedia calls “sock puppets”—multiple accounts run by the same person as part of a coordinated editing campaign—Dwyer admitted he had financial ties to the subjects of his edits.

It’s just the latest front in Caputo’s battles to save his reputation from, what he sees as, Russian smears. He also says he has filed an ethics complaint against Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) over comments at a congressional hearing in March, where the California Democrat accused Caputo of having been Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “image consultant.” In emails with The Daily Beast, Caputo said he will also be filing a defamation lawsuit against Zac Petkanas, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and accused Caputo of being “a Russian stooge who used to work for Vladimir Putin” in a Fox News segment last month.

In an email, Petkanas said he stands by his statements. “To my knowledge, Michael Caputo has not disputed this Washington Post report to which I referred stating that he worked for a Russian government run media company to improve the image of Vladimir Putin, who was the leader of the Russian government at the time,” he wrote. “To the contrary, according to that same report, he informed his hometown newspaper that he was ‘not proud of the work today. But at the time, Putin wasn’t such a bad guy.’”

A Republican operative from New York, Caputo ran communications for Trump’s campaign in the Empire State. Since then, he has registered as a federal lobbyist and signed on with the comeback House campaign of former congressman and convicted felon Michael Grimm.

Caputo lived in Russia more than 20 years ago. And he has a history of business dealings in the country that, though less scandalous than those of other former Trump aides, have trailed him since his work for Trump. Unlike one-time campaign chair Paul Manafort and others in Trump’s orbit, Caputo has faced no allegations of wrongdoing. But he is nonetheless determined to head off any suggestion that he is connected to the Russian government—and by extension the stench of the federal investigation into alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Congressional investigators probing that alleged influence campaign interviewed Caputo in July, and he emerged from the meeting with the same stance he had going in: insisting that there was no collusion and that he has no business dealings in Russia.

Caputo says Dwyer’s editing campaign was simply an effort to root out misinformation to the contrary. “Months ago, I was informed that a Russia conspiracy buff had posted an inaccurate biography of me, noting that I worked for Putin. I have never worked for Putin,” Caputo told The Daily Beast in an email. “I asked my staff to edit the posting, but to register properly as a paid editor.”

Dwyer did notify the Wikipedia community that he was being paid for his efforts, but he only did so after editing Caputo’s page on 10 separate occasions, primarily to tweak references to Caputo’s past work for the media arm of Gazprom, a state-owned Russian energy company with close ties to the Kremlin.

Caputo never worked for Putin. But his former PR firm, Rainmaker Interactive, represented Gazprom Media chief executive Alfred Kokh in the early 2000s, and helped burnish the company’s reputation with U.S. media and policymakers. At the time, Gazprom had just acquired NTV, one of Russia’s few major opposition media outlets, sparking an internal revolt among staff. Gazprom dispatched security services to seize NTV’s headquarters in a move that was widely condemned as an assault on independent Russian media. According to Kokh, Putin personally sanctioned the crackdown.

In an interview last year, The Buffalo News characterized Caputo’s subsequent PR work for Gazprom Media as “help[ing] President Vladimir Putin weather U.S. government criticism for taking over an independent TV station.” Caputo says that characterization is inaccurate, though he told the paper at the time, as Petkanas noted, that he is “not proud of the work today,” adding the caveat that at “at the time, Putin wasn’t such a bad guy.”

Given what Caputo characterizes as widespread—and even malicious—misrepresentations of his work in Russia, “Wikipedia inaccuracies barely even make it on my radar,” he said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Sagecandor

sock puppet

hmmn cs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Wikipietime

pr dude so fluff?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo

Michael Raymon Caputo (born March 24, 1962)[2] is a Republican political strategist, and media consultant. In April 2020, Caputo was appointed as assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services for public affairs.[1][3]

He worked for the Reagan Administration with Oliver North, and later as director of media services on the campaign for President George H.W. Bush in the 1992 United States presidential election.

Caputo moved to Russia in 1994, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and was an adviser to Boris Yeltsin. He worked for Gazprom Media in 2000 where he worked on improving the image of Vladimir Putin in the U.S. He moved back to the U.S. and founded a public relations company, and then moved to Ukraine to work on a candidate's campaign for parliament.

Caputo worked as the campaign manager for Carl Paladino in his 2010 bid for Governor of New York. Caputo worked for the Donald Trump campaign from November 2015 to June 2016, and was in charge of communications for New York. He left the campaign after publicly supporting the removal of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Caputo was investigated by the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as part of their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections

1 Early life and education

2 Career

2.1 Reagan Administration and Bush campaign

2.2 Russian advisor and media consultant

2.3 Paladino campaign

2.4 Work for Donald Trump

2.5 Activities from 2016–2020

2.6 Trump administration

3 Investigation

4 Personal life

5 See also

6 References

7 Further reading

8 External links

Early life and education[

Caputo was born in 1962; his father was Raymond Caputo[2][4] and his grandparents were immigrants from southern Italy.[5] Born in Buffalo, New York, Caputo spent bulk of his early years in the Buffalo region known as Southtowns.[4][2][6] Caputo early public relations work was in Hawaii while with the United States Army, which he joined directly after finishing high school.[4][2] In 1983, after leaving the Army, he enrolled at the University at Buffalo.[4]

Caputo was employed by Republican politicians such as Congressman Jack Kemp.[2] He gained experience in crisis management and working for the insurance company operated by his father.[2] Caputo was mentored by Roger J. Stone Jr. in the ways of political advisement, and became his personal driver.[2][4] He learned from Stone that political campaigns could be turned into wins for candidates if the public found them entertaining.[2] Caputo was influenced by Jerry Garcia and Ronald Reagan, and has written about his views supporting safeguarding the environment.[2][4] FLUFF BS

Career[edit]

Reagan Administration and Bush campaign[edit]

During the Reagan Administration, Caputo helped support the president's agenda in Central America.[2] He worked with Oliver North to foment propaganda as part of Reagan's public relations efforts in South America and in Central America.[4] After his work for the Reagan Administration he served as assistant director of the House of Representatives Gallery of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association.[7] He next worked for President George H.W. Bush as director of media services in Bush's campaign in the 1992 United States presidential election.[7]

Russian advisor and media consultant[

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Caputo established residence in Russia in 1994.[7][4][8] He served as an adviser to Boris Yeltsin in 1995.[2] In his capacity as advisor to Yeltsin, he was employed with the United States Agency for International Development.[7][9][2] He served as president of The Florence Group from 1994 to 1999, and stated he "played a pivotal role in electing Boris Yeltsin to his second term as President of the Russian Federation."[10]

Caputo was employed by Moscow-headquartered subsidiary of Gazprom, Gazprom-Media.[11][9][8] He was contracted by Gazprom in 2000 to work for Russian leader Vladimir Putin.[7][9] His task was to increase Putin's public relations standing, specifically his support level in the U.S.[11][9][8] He moved back from Russia to the U.S. in the year 2000.[4]

After returning to the U.S., Caputo was called by his former mentor Roger Stone, who convinced him to move to Miami Beach, Florida, and then Caputo founded his media advising company Michael Caputo Public Relations.[4] Caputo moved back to Europe in 2007 while advising a politician's campaign for parliament in 2007 Ukrainian parliamentary election.[4]

Paladino campaign[

Caputo worked as the campaign manager for real estate businessman Carl Paladino in the 2010 election of the governor of New York state.[2][12] During the campaign, Caputo was profiled by The New York Times, which described Caputo's "impish spirit and no-holds-barred campaign style" as a key factor helping Paladino, then a little-known figure, gain attention in seeking the Republican nomination for governor.[2]

Paladino was supported at the time by the Tea Party movement, and in an interview with The New York Times, Caputo embraced the outsider nature of Paladino's bid: "This is a campaign of junkyard dogs, not pedigreed poodles. Carl knows the background of everyone who works for him. He knows that each of us comes to the campaign with warts. And he has his own warts. We don't hide anything."[12]

Paladino explained his hiring choice of Caputo as campaign manager to The New York Times: "I'm facing some major demons here, and I needed someone who could go right back on top of them in a matter of minutes. You've got to let them know they are going to get punished."[2]

Work for Donald Trump[

Donald Trump hired Caputo in 2014 to launch an astroturfing campaign in support of his stalking-horse bid for the Buffalo Bills. Caputo established a shell organization named "12th Man Thunder" (later renamed "Bills Fan Thunder" after a trademark dispute with the Texas A&M Aggies football team) and hired a fake leader, amputee Chuck Sonntag, whom Trump and Caputo figured would earn sympathy. When Trump placed his bid and was no longer allowed to have ties to the organization, Caputo went fully rogue and launched a naked smear campaign against one of the other bidders, Jon Bon Jovi and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment. The group's publicity stunts capitalized on already-simmering anti-Toronto sentiment, but it was ultimately a competitor to both bids, Buffalo Sabres owner and natural gas tycoon Terrence Pegula and his wife Kim Pegula, that bought the Bills franchise, greatly outbidding both Trump and Bon Jovi. Bills Fan Thunder remained in operation as a charity as of 2017.[13]

In 2016, offices of Michael Caputo Public Relations were located in East Aurora, New York.[4] Caputo also had staff located in Miami Beach, Florida, and Moscow, Russia.[4] During the 2016 New York Republican primary, Caputo became a political adviser to Trump in order to help him win the primary in that state.[8][4] At the time of his hiring he was employed as a commentator on a political talk program on WBEN AM radio.[4] In order to support Trump in New York, he joined forces with his former employer from the 2010 gubernatorial race, Carl Paladino.[4] While working on the Trump campaign, Caputo was placed in charge of communications for the candidate in New York.[9]

Caputo was a senior adviser to Trump's political efforts from November 2015 to June 2016.[14][15][10] On June 20, 2016, he was fired from the Trump campaign shortly after Corey Lewandowski was replaced as campaign manager by Paul Manafort.[10][16] He had tweeted in support of Lewandowski leaving; in his resignation letter to Manafort said he regretted the statement on Twitter.[11][10]

Activities from 2016–2020[

After Trump's election, Caputo maintained contacts with associates in the Trump Administration.[17] After news reports of Donald Trump's disclosure of classified information to Russia in May 2017, Caputo told the Associated Press that leaks from within the Trump Administration were caused by "a coordinated, silent coup."[17] Caputo told USA Today that he attributed the leaks to disaffected members of the Stop Trump movement, whom he called "anti-Trump zealots."[18]

In 2019 and 2020, Caputo posted numerous sexually crude and sexist tweets directed at women.[19][20]

In early 2020, Caputo multiple derogatory and crude tweets about Chinese people;[19][21][22][23] he deleted almost all of his past tweets before assuming a position at HHS.[19]

Trump administration[

In April 2020, Caputo was appointed as assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services for public affairs.[1][3]

Investigation[

Due to his time working on the Trump campaign and the fact that he previously worked for politicians in Russia, Caputo was contacted by the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on May 9, 2017, as part of their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.[14][10][15] The House Intelligence Committee requested Caputo come in and be interviewed voluntarily and submit to the Committee relevant documents associated with their investigation.[14][10][15]

During a March 20, 2017 hearing, Representative Jackie Speier questioned FBI Director James Comey about Caputo, and cited employment with Gazprom and history in Ukraine.[14][10][15] Caputo worked with the House Intelligence Committee to respond to their queries.[11][15] Posting to social media, Caputo denied ties to Russia while on the Trump campaign.[15] Caputo told the House Intelligence Committee: "The only time the President and I talked about Russia was in 2013, when he simply asked me in passing what it was like to live there in the context of a dinner conversation."[11][15]

In May 2016, Caputo and Roger Stone had met with Henry Greenberg, a Russian national who claimed to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Caputo later denied contact with Russian officials or having discussed Russia with Trump or with other campaign aides.[15] Caputo said in June 2017 that it was not until prosecutors informed him that Greenberg was Russian that he learned the man he had spoken with in 2016 was not a US citizen.[24]

Caputo hired attorney Dennis Vacco to represent him during the investigation, and subsequently stated that he had liquidated his children's college funds to pay Vacco.[25]

Personal life[

While working in Russia in the 1990s, Caputo met and married a Russian student studying astrophysics; their marriage ended in a divorce.[4][7] Caputo became a Catholic in 2000, later saying this religious change helped him find peace.[4] While advising in Kiev, Ukraine, in 2007, Caputo met Maryna Ponomarenko, who became his second wife.[14][10][4]

As of 2016, Caputo resided in East Aurora, New York with his wife and their three children.[4]

Further reading[edit]

Hernandez, Javier C. (September 24, 2010), "The Provocateur Loading Paladino's Slingshot", The New York Times, retrieved June 7, 2017

Nance, Malcolm (October 10, 2016), "4. Trump's Agents, Putin's Assets; The Kremlin Crew; The Americans in the Pocket", The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election, Skyhorse Publishing, ISBN 978-1-5107-2332-0

Tan, Sandra (March 5, 2016), "The radical adventures of conservative radio host Mike Caputo", The Buffalo News, retrieved June 8, 2017

External links[edit]

Michael R. Caputo on Twitter

PoliticsNY.net - Caputo's political news site

HHS biography

show

vte

(2012 ?) 2016 United States presidential election (? 2020)

Categories: Living people1962 birthsAmerican campaign managersAmerican political commentatorsAmerican Roman CatholicsUniversity at Buffalo alumniDonald Trump 2016 presidential campaignNew York (state) RepublicansPeople associated with the 2016 United States presidential electionUnited States Army soldiersUnited States Department of Health and Human Services officialsTrump administration personnelPeople from East Aurora, New York

ref 2

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/25/nyregion/25caputo.html

no lnx

The Provocateur Loading Paladino’s Slingshot

Michael R. Caputo, who is Carl P. Paladino’s campaign manager, waited near reporters interviewing the candidate in Manhattan this week.

Michael R. Caputo, who is Carl P. Paladino’s campaign manager, waited near reporters interviewing the candidate in Manhattan this week.Credit...Yana Paskova for The New York Times

By Javier C. Hernández

Sept. 24, 2010

He has hired strippers to embarrass a political opponent. He cycles through eight pairs of eyeglasses to make himself more difficult to recognize. And he readily shows reporters the scar from a bullet wound he says was the result of a drunken encounter with a rival in Russia.

Michael R. Caputo’s impish spirit and no-holds-barred campaign style have helped propel his boss, Carl P. Paladino, a relatively unknown real estate mogul from Buffalo, to the Republican nomination for New York governor and have Mr. Paladino now menacing the once seemingly unstoppable Andrew M. Cuomo.

Behind each outlandish advertisement, slingshot tactic and red-meat riff of Mr. Paladino’s campaign is Mr. Caputo, his campaign manager, whose high-octane brain plays foil to his candidate’s high-velocity mouth.

From Mr. Caputo’s pen have come some memorable gibes at Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Paladino’s Democratic rival, whom they have dubbed Prince Andrew, Status Cuomo and Br’er Andrew.

From Mr. Caputo’s mind have come blistering attack advertisements, including one that featured a fake photo of Mr. Cuomo, the state’s attorney general, shirtless in the shower and covered in mud, as part of an effort to portray him as a slimy politician.

During more than two decades in politics, Mr. Caputo has advised Boris Yeltsin and promoted Reagan administration policies in Central America. At one point, he says, fearing that Russian thugs were after him, he went into hiding on a boat in South Florida with only a parrot named August West for company.

He has brought his unconventional approach to American politics as well ? deploying people wearing duck suits and blowing whistles to drown out opponents at political rallies, and dispatching comely models outside polling stations to lure more voters to his candidates.

As he operates behind the scenes, Mr. Caputo, 48, has become an indispensable coach to Mr. Paladino, who likes to say that he is still learning to be a politician. Mr. Paladino considers Mr. Caputo the campaign’s creative force, devising his go-for-the-jugular offensives.

“I’m facing some major demons here, and I needed someone who could go right back on top of them in a matter of minutes,” Mr. Paladino said. “You’ve got to let them know they are going to get punished.”

Mr. Caputo, who spent much of his childhood in Buffalo, recalls that he met Mr. Paladino the hard way.

He was 14 and a self-described juvenile delinquent. One day, he was caught by a newsstand worker stealing a box of change in a building owned by Mr. Paladino.

Within seconds, Mr. Paladino was rushing downstairs. He grabbed the boy by the ears, dragged him outside and kicked him in the legs six times.

“Don’t you ever come back,” Mr. Paladino said, according to Mr. Caputo.

(While Mr. Paladino does not recall the confrontation, he does not dispute the account.)

They did not cross paths again until March, when Mr. Paladino was considering a long-shot bid for governor. Mr. Caputo, who says he was hoping to settle into a leisurely life after spending much of his career in crisis management, had just moved back to Buffalo from Florida to work for his father’s insurance company.

But then Mr. Paladino called. He had heard good things from Roger J. Stone Jr., a Republican consultant known for his ferocious tactics who remains an influential adviser to Mr. Paladino’s campaign. Mr. Stone was a mentor to Mr. Caputo, who had once served as his driver, and told Mr. Paladino that his protégé understood that successful campaigns involved making politics entertaining.

Those who know Mr. Caputo say he shares Mr. Paladino’s sensibilities.

“He’s a colorful character who has found a candidate who is just as colorful and just as much of a character as he is,” Robert H. Ryan, a longtime Republican consultant, said.

But Mr. Caputo is his own brand of Republican. He cites Ronald Reagan and Jerry Garcia as people who have shaped his worldview (he has attended hundreds of Grateful Dead concerts). He has also written extensively on protecting the environment.

“He’s a countercultural guy,” said Mr. Stone, who is second only to Mr. Caputo’s father on Mr. Caputo’s speed-dial. “He’s as likely to show up in a tie-dyed T-shirt as a three-piece suit.”

Mr. Caputo began his career in message-managing as an Army public affairs specialist based in Hawaii.

After leaving the military, he worked for conservative politicians, including former Representative Jack Kemp. His career eventually took him to countries including Ukraine, Mongolia and Honduras. He said he was briefly kidnapped in El Salvador on a diplomatic mission for Mr. Kemp.

Mr. Caputo worked for the United States Agency for International Development as an adviser to the Yeltsin administration in 1995. It was in Russia that he got the scar, on his right ankle, from a run-in, he says, with a drunken political operative.

When he returned to the United States in 1999, he found the American political scene boring.

“In Russia, the fascists want to kill you, the communists want to starve you, and the democrats want to pick your pocket for a while,” Mr. Caputo said. “I got back to the United States and I realized that the only difference between John Kerry and George Bush was a degree of tax cut.”

He made a cameo appearance in New York politics in 2007 when Eliot Spitzer was governor, making it his mission to forward negative articles and unflattering cartoons about Mr. Spitzer to anyone with influence.

On the Paladino campaign, Mr. Caputo is part of a three-person team responsible for executing the campaign, which includes Nick Sinatra, a former confidant to Karl Rove, and John F. Haggerty Jr., a former campaign worker for Michael R. Bloomberg whom the Manhattan district attorney has accused of stealing $1.1 million of the mayor’s money.

On a recent day at campaign headquarters in Buffalo, Mr. Caputo yelled at Mr. Paladino as the candidate stumbled through a script for a YouTube video on a plan to use prison space to teach job skills to welfare recipients.

“Just think about it, Carl,” Mr. Caputo demanded as he tried to get his boss to focus.

“It’s not coming good,” said Mr. Paladino, muttering a series of expletives.

Opponents have denounced Mr. Caputo’s high jinks as crass. “Not every idea he has is a winner,” his friend Mr. Stone said.

But Mr. Caputo is unapologetic. He wasted no time in cooking up another madcap advertisement on Wednesday when Mr. Bloomberg, New York’s billionaire mayor, came out in support of Mr. Cuomo.

In an e-mail to reporters, Mr. Caputo dismissed the two men as political elites who traveled in the “same royal coach.”

“One upside to this,” Mr. Caputo wrote. “The two can stop passing Grey Poupon back and forth from their limousines. It’s holding up traffic on Park Avenue.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/aiming-to-take-down-fox-donald-trump-jr-reportedly-investing-in-far-right-oann/

Investors aligned with Donald Trump Jr. and Republican National Committee (RNC) co-chair Tommy Hicks Jr. have acquired a major stake in One America News Network (OANN), sources familiar with the deal told Vanity Fair.

“Tommy Hicks and Don Jr. have been looking to buy a station for Trump TV,” a person briefed on the negotiations told Vanity Fair.

“This is all about building a Fox competitor. Trump is really aiming to take down Fox,” the person said.

The report is the first to connect the Trump family to the acquisition, discussions of which were first reported in January by the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal reported that Hicks Equity Partners, a firm belonging to the family of Tommy Hicks Jr., the RNC co-chair, was negotiating a $250 million deal with Herring Networks, the parent company of OANN, a low-impact far-right network that offers a home to the likes of Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and has defended Roy Moore and endorsed Russian propaganda.

Sources told Vanity Fair the deal has stumbled along for months and still hasn’t closed, but that the Trump-affiliated group had reportedly talked Herring down to $200 million. VF said it was also unclear whether Donald Trump Jr. invested Trump money in the deal, or was given equity.

As the buyout talks progressed, President Trump has repeatedly expressed his growing distaste with Fox News — long perceived as the only network he likes, and certainly the only network that consciously slants coverage and analysis in his favor.

Last month Trump accused Fox News of “being on a bad path,” and has asked twice now “what the hell is happening” at the network. He attacked Fox reporters twice last month during White House coronavirus briefings, and has taken several potshots at several of the channel’s shows and personalities, tweeting in January that Fox News was “really pathetic” and “so politically correct,” singling out Chris Wallace’s impeachment coverage.

After it was reported that Fox had fired MAGA-world luminaries Diamond and Silk for hawking ludicrous coronavirus conspiracy theories, Trump tweeted his support for the duo: “But I love Diamond and Silk, and so do millions of people!”

In late April, Trump took to Twitter once again to call for an alt-Fox, pro-himself network:

“The people who are watching @FoxNews, in record numbers (thank you President Trump), are angry,” he wrote. “They want an alternative now. So do I!”

During this same period, Trump often promoted OANN, providing the nascent network — which is viewed with disdain by many reputable journalists — with cover against the White House Correspondents’ Association. Trump even plugged OANN by name in a tweet last month as the alternative he has been asking for.

But this isn’t the first time Trump has appeared to be switching media mistresses. When Fox soothes him, he reciprocates. When they rankle him, he pumps OANN.

OANN, which has roughly one-third of Fox’s reach, with ratings reportedly lower than the Tennis Channel, appears to have no problem serving as the president’s megaphone.

For instance, OANN hired former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo — the newly-hired spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services who recently disgraced himself with a barrage of racist, pandemic-related tweets — who hosted a special program dedicated to “the Ukraine Hoax.” Late last year a network crew accompanied Rudy Giuliani and personal assistant Christianné Allen on a trip to Ukraine, which resulted in a three-part series that mainlined viewers with apparent Russian disinformation.

Spokespeople for Trump Jr. and Hicks denied involvement in the deal to Vanity Fair.

President Trump, who is in no financial position to acquire Fox News, views OANN as a fallback business opportunity should former Vice President Joe Biden defeat him in November, according to Vanity Fair, which reported the president might look to OANN as a “post-presidential television platform.”

The cash from the buyout will reportedly help OANN increase its production values and campaign to expand its viewership, two elements Trump would demand of any home for a post-White House TV home.

Trump Jr. and Hicks have been wrapped in scandal before. The president’s eldest son and his younger brother Eric were — along with Hicks and Dallas-based investment manager Gentry Beach — co-registrants for a nonprofit called Opening Day, which insinuated itself in Trump’s inauguration. Trump’s sons had to abandon the organization weeks after its inauguration event was announced, amid allegations that they were selling access to their father.

An associate of Gentry Beach declined to comment when Salon inquired about his possible involvement in the OANN deal.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/new-trump-official-tried-to-cover-up-a-trove-of-conspiracy-laden-and-bigoted-tweets

no lnx

New Trump official tried to cover up a trove of conspiracy-laden and bigoted tweets

Written by Walter Einenkel / Daily Kos April 23, 2020

Michael Caputo is a former adviser to Donald Trump’s 2015-2016 presidential campaign. He is now the brand new spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A New York Republican operative, you may remember Caputo from his very worried and somber post-Mueller investigation interview in May of 2019. Since the Republican Party is unwilling to do anything to remedy the issue of our treasonously impeached and corrupt president, people like Caputo continue to rise.

CNN reports that Mr. Caputo has all kinds of conspiracy-laden, illogical, and bigoted ideas that we have come to expect from the Trump administration, the Tea Party, and their conservative base. In a series of tweets, which Caputo deleted—but exist forever because it’s the internet, stupid—Caputo has all kinds of truly terrifying ideas about the COVID-19 pandemic. According to CNN’s KFile, Caputo did away with his entire Twitter history of over 1,300 tweets and retweets. And none of these ideas are good or smart or remotely helpful to the public health in general.

Using an internet archive, some of Caputo’s statements have been saved here. So what sort of things does one of Trump’s “best people” think? On Feb. 28, 2020, Caputo had this to say about the novel coronavirus:

“Bottom line, a lot of Americans have to get sick and die for coronavirus to tank the Trump economy.

The Democrats’ only hope for 2020 victory is a sunk economy. They’re talking it down right now.

But their strategy only works if a lot of Americans get sick and die.”

On March 8, 2020, Caputo—clearly tweeting his resume to Trump directly—wrote this:

“Coronavirus is the Democrats’ new Russia, their new Ukraine. And nobody will believe them except their zombies.

But know this: The Dems’ strategy to defeat @realDonaldTrump requires 100s of thousands of American deaths.

Will on of their nutjobs make it happen, a la Hodgkinson?”

“Hodgkinson” here is James T. Hodgkinson, the man who opened fire at a congressional softball practice, injuring Rep. Steve Scalise. The right-wing conspiracy world has floated all kinds of theories about Hodgkinson since he is the only domestic terrorist of the last few decades to reportedly not be an entirely racist right-wing asshole. On March 12, 2020, as the novel coronavirus pandemic became considerably more real and the evidence began mounting that the Trump administration has completely dropped the ball on this, Caputo—clearly feeling a bit testy—attacked people who questioned the administration’s racist pivot to calling COVID-19 “Wuhan flu,” or “the Chinese virus.”

”Sure, millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters but some foreigner snuck in a bottle of the good stuff. That’s it. [frowny face emoji]”

Replying to a tweet by right-wing dirtbag and “Pizzagate” extraordinaire Jack Posobiec, who was attacking Democratic donor and billionaire anti-Semitic conspiracy theory flash point George Soros for not funding coronavirus aid (Soros has directed a reported $130 million in foundation funds to coronavirus aid), Caputo wrote:

“Are you kidding? Soros’s political agenda REQUIRES a pandemic.”

Caputo is the perfect spokesperson for this administration: He’s the opposite of what his job requires.

https://www.alternet.org/trump-confidant-roger-stone-admits-he-met-russian-offering-dirt-hillary-clinton-during-2016-campaign

Stone, Donald Trump’s longtime adviser and self-described “dirty trickster” met with a Russian national offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton in May 2016, theWashington Postreports.

At the meeting in Sunny Isles, FL, Stone said Henry Greenberg, a Russian restaurateur, asked Stone for $2 million in exchange for dirt on Clinton. Stone told the Post he shot down Greenberg’s request.

“You don’t understand Donald Trump,” Stone said he told Greenberg. “He doesn’t pay for anything.”

Greenberg denies asking Stone for money.

Stone also communicated about the meeting with Michael Caputo, a former Trump communications aide who once worked to rehab Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“How crazy is the Russian?” Caputo asked Stone, who described the meting as a “waste of time.”

Stone, who’s said he’s prepared for an indictment from special counsel Robert Mueller, and Caputo, who’s spoken publicly about his tough sit-down with federal investigators, told the Post they believe they were the target of FBI investigators trying to hurt Trump.

Greenberg, who claimed in 2015 he’d spent 17 years as an FBI informant, said he was not working with the bureau when he met with Stone.

“If you believe that [Greenberg] took time off from his long career as an FBI informant to reach out to us in his spare time, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I want to sell you,” Caputo told the Post.

nyt

Michael Caputo, who served as a communications adviser to the Trump campaign, has been asked by the House committee investigating Russian election meddling to submit to a voluntary interview and to provide any documents he may have that are related to the inquiry.

The House Intelligence Committee, which is examining possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, made its request in a letter on May 9. Mr. Caputo, who lives near Buffalo and spent six months on the Trump team, worked in Russia during the 1990s and came to know Kremlin officials. He also did work in the early 2000s for Gazprom Media, a Russian conglomerate that supported President Vladimir V. Putin.

Mr. Caputo has strongly denied that there was any collusion between him or anyone else on the campaign and Russian officials. He has also accused the committee of smearing him.

A Democratic member of the panel, Representative Jackie Speier of California, raised Mr. Caputo’s name during the March 20 hearing where James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, testified on Russia’s interference in the election. She noted Mr. Caputo’s work for Gazprom, and the fact that he met his second wife, who is Ukrainian, while working in 2007 on a parliamentary election in Kiev.

Continue reading the main story

The panel’s letter asked Mr. Caputo to “produce documents and other materials to the committee and participate in a voluntary transcribed interview at the committee’s offices,” according to a copy obtained by The New York Times.

Newsletter Sign UpContinue reading the main stor

It asked for “any documents, records, electronically stored information including email, communication, recordings, data and tangible things” that could “reasonably lead to the discovery of any facts within the investigation’s publicly announced parameters.”

The committee said it wanted to discuss with Mr. Caputo a number of topics, “including Russian cyberactivities directed against the 2016 U.S. election, potential links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns, the U.S. government’s response to these Russian active measures, and related leaks of classified information.”

Mr. Caputo has denounced the allegations for months on social media, and said he tried to contact Ms. Speier the day after she mentioned him and his wife in the hearing.

In a written response to the committee, Mr. Caputo, who said he plans to comply with its request, said, “At no time during this period did I have any contact with Russian government officials or employees.” He said he did not discuss Russia with anyone else on the campaign, including Mr. Trump, during his employment from November 2015 to June 2016.

“The only time the president and I talked about Russia was in 2013, when he simply asked me in passing what it was like to live there in the context of a dinner conversation,” he wrote.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/06/russia-trump-putin-scandal-key-players-dossiers/

Roger: The 64-year-old, who proudly sports a tattoo of Richard Nixon across his back, has made a career of political subterfuge. He cut his teeth at 19 as a Nixon dirty trickster, once hiring a GOP operative to infiltrate George McGovern’s campaign. He later co-founded the lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, Stone & Atwater in the early 1980s. He has advised Trump for decades, lobbying on behalf of Trump’s casino interests and serving as campaign manager of the real estate mogul’s short-lived presidential campaign in 2000. During the 2016 campaign, Stone seemed to possess uncanny knowledge of what WikiLeaks had in store for Hillary Clinton.

On October 1, he tweeted, “Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.” Less than a week later, WikiLeaks began publishing the emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. Stone claimed he was in touch with WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, and that he exchanged direct messages with Guccifer 2.0—the handle for the alleged Russian hacker(s) who posted the stolen DNC emails. Reportedly under investigation by the FBI, Stone has strenuously denied any collusion with Russians and has volunteered to testify before Congress. But anything he says should be taken with a grain of salt—his mantra, after all, is: “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.”

Michael Cohen

In the dossier produced by the ex-British spy Steele, Trump’s pugnacious personal lawyer surfaced as an alleged liaison to Russian officials—a charge he strongly denies. He has long-standing business and family ties to Ukraine. In January, he hand-delivered a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia to then-national security adviser Flynn, according to the New York Times. The effort also involved Trump’s business associate Sater and Andrii V. Artemenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker.

J.D. Gordon

The former Navy officer and Pentagon spokesman, who advised the Trump campaign on national security policy, has reportedly acknowledged advocating a controversial platform change at the Republican National Convention: removing language calling for the provision of “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine to protect the country from Russian aggression. Gordon was also one of several Trump campaign aides who met with Ambassador Kislyak during the Republican convention.

Rick Gates

As Manafort’s right-hand man, Gates helped him lobby on behalf of Putin-allied Ukrainian President Yanukovych and was involved in at least two multimillion-dollar deals with Russian oligarchs—one with Deripaska and another with Ukrainian natural-gas titan Dmitry Firtash. Like Manafort, Gates did not disclose his work as a foreign agent to the Justice Department last year, a possible violation of the law. Following the election he helped form a nonprofit promoting Trump’s agenda, but he departed after the Associated Press reported Manafort’s business dealings with Deripaska.

Michael Caputo

The veteran PR consultant ran communications for Trump’s 2016 primary campaign in New York. But before that, he spent years working in Russia, first for the US Agency for International Development and then for his own Moscow PR firm. In 2000, he was hired by Gazprom Media to burnish Putin’s image in the United States. At one point, fearing Russian organized-crime figures were hunting him, Caputo (and his parrot, August West) took refuge on a boat in Florida.

stone hell

https://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/

Whether because of his passion for the ironic, or the combination of tax liens and halting of revenue from ponzi scheming lawyers and future casino projects, Roger Stone then got involved in one of the more ridiculous and vile episodes of his life, the 2010 New York gubernatorial election. “I have to admit that this Stone saga even shocks me, as familiar as I am with his four-decade career,” wrote Wayne Barrett in “The (Roger) Stone Around Carl Paladino’s Neck” 132. Stone would run former madame Kristin Davis’s candidacy for the Libertarian party ticket; many of his associates, however, would be working on the Republican party ticket of Carl Paladino. Dianne Thorne, who worked as the treasurer for the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary, the Florida committee fronted by Mary McCarty and formed to pressure the Florida Supreme Court to vote in favor of Bush, worked as Paladino’s scheduler. Thorne is an enigmatic and interesting character who was involved in a number of Stone ventures. She is a raven haired former model from Australia, often mentioned as Stone’s assistant, though in Dana Milbank’s book on the 2000 campaigns, Smash Mouth: Two Years In The Gutter With Al Gore And George W. Bush, she is also mentioned as Trump’s advance woman – the person in charge of wrangling and prepping journalists133.

In the Labash piece, Stone is chauffeured around by A-Mill, a “23-year-old driver/computer whiz/all-around Boy Friday.” As usual, with Stone, we get the color that keep bringing reporters back to him: A-Mill looks like he’d fight as a featherweight, but Stone says looks can be deceiving. One late night, when they were walking across a strip-club parking lot together, two large gentlemen tried to mug them. A-Mill reached into his boot, pulled out a blade, and slashed one of them across the face, causing both assailants to run. ‘Watch this guy,’ says Stone. ‘He’s a killer.’” A-Mill is most likely Andrew Miller, Dianne Thorne’s stepson, who would work as Kristin Davis’s campaign manager, for free, while he was also paid $17,000 by the Paladino campaign, for “advance work and logistics.” Also with Paladino was Dianne Thorne’s husband, Tim Suereth, who had also worked on a number of Stone projects. There was Michael Johns, a speechwriter for Paladino who also had worked at the Heritage Institute praising Jonas Savimbi and criticizing Nelson Mandela as a communist. The incident involving BMS&K client Savimbi, where chemical weapons were supposedly discovered in Angola, has already been mentioned. It was Johns who brought Andries Holst, the film-maker who’d supposedly filmed evidence of chemical weapons use, to Washington to meet various officials such as Jesse Helms134.

Paladino’s campaign manager wasn’t Stone, but Michael Caputo, Stone’s former driver and another all-round occasional Stone associate. It was Caputo who handled the press for Stone when the National Enquirer swinger story broke. Stone was second only to Caputo’s father on his speed dial. Caputo was a military veteran who’d been a speechwriter for Jack Kemp, and the Communications Director for the Council for Inter-American Security in Washington, which meant that he was involved in civic and military public affairs programs in Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica in support of Reagan foreign policy initiatives, which was either sinister or nebulous, depending on how you read it.

“Publicists of the Damned” which detailed BMS&K’s work for Savimbi, Mobutu, Ferdinand Marcos, and others, would also describe the difficulties of one lobbyist trying to refurbish the image of El Salvador’s Alfredo Cristiani (specific page 58). “All we heard over and over was that he was a puppet of the death squads, a creature of millionaire coffee growers,” the lobbyist complains.

The article mentions why Cristiani carried this around: “That unfortunate reputation is due in part to the fact that Cristiani was the candidate of the right-wing ARENA party, which was founded by death-squad mastermind Roberto D’Aubisson and supported by millionaire coffee growers.” Caputo would help to run the 1989 campaign for Cristiani to give him the semblance of an actual election. Three journalists were killed during this election, one of them when a military helicopter strafed a car clearly marked with a PRESS sign. After the election, there was an incident where six Jesuit priests, suspected of collusion with the country’s rebels, were killed. High level members of the military were blamed by Cristiani for the killings. Twenty years later, two human rights organizations, The Association for Human Rights in Spain (APDHE) and the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), would file suit, charging Cristiani with responsibility for the murders135.

Caputo would also work in Russia in 1996 for the election of Boris Yeltsin. He would show up in The Exile, the infamous Russian paper co-founded by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, under “Who Tolls The Bell?”, a list of journalists the paper especially despised. “Any way you look at it,” wrote “Field Marshal von Paulus” (I have no idea who’s behind the pseudonym) about the 1996 Russian election, “the campaign was totally illegal and anti-democratic, and Caputo played a huge role in it.” The heart of the animus is Caputo’s involvement in this political race: “This guy was the spin doctor behind Yeltsin’s reelection campaign in 96. As if subjecting Russia to the horror of that post-quadruple bypass pig shaking it with a Rostov pop band wasn’t bad enough, greaseball Caputo gets to brag at Beltway cocktail parties that Jeff Goldblum played him in Spinning Boris.” But Goldblum didn’t play him in Boris, Caputo isn’t even a character in the movie, Goldblum plays Caputo’s boss, a go for the jugular political consultant named George Gorton.

Like Roger Stone, Gorton was a veteran of CREEP, who would go on to work as a top consultant, helping Pete Wilson, governor of California, win re-election by pushing Proposition 187, the ballot initiative that prohibited illegal aliens from using education, health and social services in the state. Stone had paid for Sedan Chair II to infiltrate various Democratic campaigns, and Stone had recommended that CREEP hire Theodore Brill to spy on various student groups. Gorton oversaw Brill, and paid him from his own pocket, so that his compensation wouldn’t come from campaign expenses. When Watergate broke, the revelation of student spying came out as well. “GW Student Spied for GOP,” was the Woodward-Bernstein headline (I cannot find this piece on-line; however, the excerpt from All the President’s Men, “The Quaker Plot” focuses on Brill). “Spying is a funny way to describe” what Brill did, Gorton said at the time. What exactly was it Brill was paid for, then? “It was a part of my job to know what all of youth was thinking,” Gorton explained. Gorton’s fellow CREEP staffers would hand him pages that were folded in half that he would give his signature to. Because they were folded in half, he couldn’t see what he was signing off on, and thereby could admit to no knowledge in court or elsewhere of what he’d just authorized. After a short exile after Watergate, Gorton would become a very successful political consultant136. Time magazine would put Gorton and others on the cover for their work in Yeltsin’s election (“Yanks to the Rescue” is the cover,“Rescuing Boris” by Michael Kramer is the story inside), but perhaps the Time writer was being spun more than the Russians. Yeltsin’s Russian consultants ridiculed the way that American consultants, who they felt had played a marginal role, placed themselves at the center of everything 137. “Russia needs democracy…. I would be remiss in my duty to mankind if I didn’t use every political consulting trick I could think of to keep what I felt was a great evil from returning to mankind,” Gorton would say at the time to the Sacramento Bee. His hindsight view was more brutally realistic. “My guy was drunk, corrupt. It was bad vs. evil,” he’d say138. “von Paulus” also has Michael Caputo’s company reaping a fortune in the millions through a deal with GazProm media in 2001. This is either very wrong, or he blew through the money quickly. A piece run during the Paladino campaign has him grateful for Roger Stone giving him some work and a place to sleep after a nasty divorce and a financial meltdown in 2003139. So, in 2010, Michael Caputo was Carl Paladino’s campaign manager.

...

the candidacy of Kristin Davis was perceived as one more salvo in Roger Stone’s vendetta against former governor Eliot Spitzer. Stone had been working, in 2007, for New York Senate majority leader Joseph Bruno on a $20,000 a month contract. Bruno was in a long, poisonous fight with Spitzer, and the dirty trickster had been brought in to help. The dirty trick he came up with was cruel, stupid, obvious. To harass Spitzer’s father, an elderly man with Parkinson’s, with a threatening message left on his answering machine:

This is a message for Bernard Spitzer. You will be subpoenaed to testify before the Senate committee on investigation on your shady campaign loans. You will be compelled by the Senate sergeant at arms, if you resist, you will be arrested and brought to Albany – and there’s not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho piece of shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth. The fact that your son is a pathological liar will be known to all.

(A clip which compares the audio on the call to Bernard Spitzer, and the audio of Roger Stone onpart two of a “Shark Tank” interview.)

“I have been accused of a lot of things but being dumb is not one of them,” said Stone in response to the allegation that he made the phone call. “I don’t deny that the phone number is mine but fabricating my voice would be exceedingly easy. Give me a fucking break. This is the ultimate dirty trick and the kind of terror tactic Spitzer used in the Attorney General’s Office.” He would say that he was at the play Frost/Nixon the night the call was made, though there was no performance that evening. Again, this is Stone: “I have been accused of a lot of things but being dumb is not one of them.” Here is one of Stone’s clients, on the affair: “They caught Roger red-handed lying,” said Donald Trump. “What he did was ridiculous and stupid.” Stone would be fired by Bruno140.

When the scandal broke that Eliot Spitzer had paid money for escort services, Stone would allege that he played a key role in the scandal by sending a letter to the FBI after speaking to an escort in a Miami club who’d had Spitzer as a client. The FBI would explicitly state that they never received any such letter. Kristin Davis was a convicted madam who alleged she had provided escorts for Spitzer, dozens maybe hundreds of times, and that Spitzer was abusive to women – but the New York Attorney General had confiscated her records when she was charged, and they showed no evidence of Spitzer ever having been one of her clients. When Alex Gibney dispassionately presented all this in Client 9, his documentary based on the well-researched book of Peter Elkind, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Stone would refer to Gibney as “Leni Riefenstahl” on TV141. It didn’t matter that there was nothing connecting Spitzer to Kristin Davis; the evidence didn’t matter. By running Davis, Stone had a means to throw slimy allegations throughout the election season.

As said, Paladino was running for the Republican nomination, and Kristin Davis was running for the libertarian ticket. According to Stone, he had no connection to the Paladino campaign, though his close associate, Michael Caputo was running it, his assistant Dianne Thorne was on it, as was Michael Johns, the man who’d played a role in the Angolan chemical weapons incident involving BMS&K, as well as Tim Suereth, Thorne’s husband, who’d work alongside Stone before and after this campaign. Thorne’s stepson, Andrew Miller, would get paid for work on the Paladino campaign before shifting over to Kristin Davis. Stone would say that Paladino came to him for campaign advice on the outset, and that he’d help pick out his campaign staff. There were other intersections.

When Paladino’s campaign kicked off at the Elliott Square Building in Buffalo, New York, Stone was there on the scene. A month before the election, attorney Lora Como, a campaign aide of Paladino’s , would allege that she’d been assaulted by Stone while they were at his Chelsea apartment. “He threw me to the ground and bruised my ribs. He was hostile and menacing and I wanted him arrested for assault and I went to the police,” alleged Como. Stone would acknowledge a disagreement with Como and that they were together at his apartment, but had a different version of events. He’d asked her to leave, and she’d gotten upset, he said. “I completely reject her assertion that I ever hit her or abused her in any physical way,” he said. In the article reporting the incident,“Assault claim vs. Carl’s aide Stone” by Fred Dicker, Stone was now referred to as a key campaign adviser of Paladino142. “The Kristin Davis Post-Election Party: Pretty Much What You’d Expect” by Brianna Strange, reported that Stone was at Davis’s election night party, along with Miller, still her campaign manager143.

Davis was running for the Libertarian ticket against Warren Redlich, a town board member and traffic lawyer. In April, at the beginning of the campaign, Stone would exchange a series of emails with Redlich. Much of the emails consist of Stone trying to pressure Redlich to step aside, so that Davis could be on the ticket for governor. If Redlich didn’t step aside, Davis wouldn’t attend the party convention, and they might set up their own party, filing suit over Redlich’s use of the Libertarian Party name. A few representative emails are below; paragraph spacing has been added for improved readability, but no other alterations have been made. The full emails are available at Capitol Confidential‘s “E-mails show Stone strategizing for Paladino” (archived) by Jimmy Vielkind:

Me [Warren Redlich], 10:31 am:

Can we just talk at the LPNY convention? We can talk Friday evening or Saturday morning, before anything of substance happens at the convention.

My schedule this week is pretty crazy. Had a trial yesterday, going to court near Binghamton tomorrow, etc.

Stone, 10:43 am: Warren

No- that is too late- unless we can reach some accomodation [sic] Kristin wont be attending the convention. A convention where a candidate isnt given a list of eleigible [sic] voters and where a poll tax of $25 is paid to vote isnt very legitimate.

In that case we’d prefer to petition on our own party onto the ballot [sic]- litigate over the word LIBERTARIAN- plenty of case-law.

Sure u can win the nomination on Saturday. How will you get 50,000 votes without money or publicity. I suggest a broader effort.

I too am busy. Let me know if you are available to talk by phone.

Me [Warren Redlich], 4:05 pm:

I’m a trial lawyer. When people threaten to sue me I find it amusing.

My impression is that you want Kristin to have the LP nomination for Governor and you may want me on the slate, perhaps LG or AG.

I don’t think the LPNY is willing to have Kristin in the Governor slot but I don’t speak for them – you’re wasting your time talking to me. If you can get the LPNY to go along with Kristin as the Governor candidate, and you want me on the ticket, I’m willing to consider that.

I do think I’m the better candidate for Governor, and I’m not going to step aside. But if you persuade them, and you still want me on board, I’m open to it.

On the other hand, if Kristin wants to be on the slate with me as the Governor candidate and her as LG or Comptroller, I think they’re more likely to go along with that. But again, I don’t speak for the LPNY. You should talk to them.

My cell is [omitted] if you want to talk.

Warren

The next email, from Stone, is the most interesting. He is a campaign manager for Davis, yet he now offers a deal where if Redlich runs for the Attorney General spot (rather than the governor spot), he can get Redlich to be on Paladino’s petitions and run in the GOP primary. How is it that Stone, who supposedly has no connection with the Paladino campaign, except for giving them advice, is able to offer such a deal?

Stone, 4:48: Because of her tangential connection to spitzer no other race makes sense for her. She, unlike you, has a shelf life. The further from Spitzer downfall the less her ability to command coverage. No other race has any logic for her.

Were you to support her actively you could help win her the votes to be nominated. If you ran for AG I could get Paladino to let you ride on both his GOP ( you are a registered R) and Tea Party petitions- and thus get in the GOP primary for real and get a second line. I can have Paladino himself confirm this if you like.

Donovan [Daniel M. Donovan, the eventual Republican candidate for Attorney General] is not a certain candidate for AG. You could end up the nominee.

In a 3 way race for Governor a woman candidate running on marijuana legalization gets 50,000+ votes and takes votes from Cuomo- not a Paladino. Prostitution would be de-emphasized in a fall campaign.

From my point of view you would help KD more as a candidate for LG making a nice balance M-F,downstate-upstate, non-lawyer, lawyer etc.

From your point of view a race for AG would be better for you if you would consider it.

Redlich would then contact Paladino, asking about the offer that Stone had made, and how it was that Stone, a campaign manager for an entirely separate campaign, on an entirely separate party ticket, had the authority to speak for Paladino:

Me [Warren Redlich] (to Paladino), 6:01 pm: Carl,

When we met last week, I did not have the impression that Roger Stone was on your campaign team. As you can see by the exchange below, he is speaking to me as if he has some sway over you – “I could get Paladino to let you ride on…”

It was my impression that you were campaigning as someone different from the usual politicians. If you’re working with Roger Stone, in the way he describes, then you don’t seem that different to me.

I’m big on hunches. My hunch is that he does not speak for you. Some of the things he says here do not fit with things you said to me when we met.

Mainly, I thought you should know that Stone was throwing your name around like he has some control over you. You don’t strike me as someone who is so easily controlled.

My cell is [omitted] if you want to talk. I have a town board meeting tonight at 7:30 pm and it might go long, so tomorrow might be better.

I cc’d Jim, Rus, and Allen on this message because I’ve had some interaction with them over the course of the campaign and I thought they should know what’s going on.

Warren

Stone would hear of this email to Paladino, and his reply would be curt:

Stone, 9:05 pm: Warren- do you really think this is clever ?…you’re out your league- and gentlemen don’t share personal correspondence. You sir, are no gentleman-

Redlich would forward the correspondence between himself and Stone to Eric Dondero, a libertarian blogger (his blog was Libertrarian Republican and he gained some prominence due to his attempt to boycott liberals after the Obama re-election, which resulted in interviews such as, “Democrat-Boycotting Libertarian Eric Dondero on Whether He Would Let a Democrat Drown” by Dan Amira), who contacted Stone, who sent another curt email to Redlich:

Stone, 4/21, 5:03 pm: Dondero wont print your leaked correspondence

rookie move asshole

guess CP [Conservative Party] shoved it up your ass, too.

LOSER……..

Redlich would reply:

Me [Warren Redlich], 5:58 pm:

We both know I’m a rookie. What I don’t get is why you’re wasting your time with me.

You are celebrating a tiny victory over a nobody.

If we played basketball, I’d clobber you. But it wouldn’t mean anything because I’m taller, younger and more experienced.

For some reason you’re trying to rub it in. I have no expectation of beating you. You’re supposed to be better at this.

However, the supposed master tactician Roger Stone and his candidate, Kristin Davis, would lose to the rookie. Redlich would be on the Libertarian Party ticket, and Kristin Davis would run instead on her own newly created ticket, The Anti-Prohibition Party. During the general race, with Paladino on the Republican ticket, Cuomo on the Democratic, Davis with Anti-Prohibition, and Redlich on the Libertarian, Stone was involved in one of the more vile acts of his life. Redlich had written a blog post on a semi-nude picture of Miley Cyrus that had appeared in Vanity Fair (which was only four years ago, but now feels like an eternity), an intelligent analysis arguing that much of the furor around the picture lay with a contemporary American sensibility, that viewed teenagers as either entirely sexual, or entirely non-sexual. We assume this sensibility to be universal and eternal, when it isn’t – Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet is written about lovers that were the same age as Miley Cyrus. One could disagree with the argument Redlich made, but it was ultimately an argument, not a predatory fantasy, or justification for rape. On October 29th, Capitol Confidential’s Jimmy Vieklind published “I pushed for the Redlich mailer”, about the appearance of a mailer, featuring a photo of Redlich as well as his phone number and home address, which warned that he was a public danger and for people to call the police when they see him:

Roger Stone - Pretty Reckless is going straight to hell

“Everyone who has contacted me about the flyer has been disgusted by it,” wrote Vieklind, “and one reader noted it landed in his mail box the same day as a flyer supporting Kristen Davis, the Anti-Prohibition Party candidate.” Both mailers shared the same postal permit. “It’s an absolute disgrace,” Redlich would say. “Nothing I’ve ever written would qualify me as a sexual predator more than it would qualify William Shakespeare as a sexual predator…I think discussing what I wrote is attacking the victim. The fact that I think the Miley Cyrus story was overblown does not make me a predator, and it’s not even close.” The flier was put out by another mysterious group, People for a Safer New York, of which there was no record144.

Vieklind would contact Roger Stone about the mailer, and though Stone would not take credit for it, he did say he was in contact with People for a Safer New York, that the mailers were accurate, they were legal, he not only supported the mailers, he urged them to do it. “I’ve seen both mailers, I think that they’re both accurate. People for a Safer New York is called a first amendment group,” Stone told Velkind by phone. “I’m in touch with them. Who are they? They’re a first amendment organization I urged them to do this, this is a first amendment issue.”145

“I don’t want this story spread because I have children,” Redlich would say of the mailers. “Let’s be clear about my sick alternative lifestyle: I’ve been married for 15 years, I have two children, I live in suburbia on a cul de sac and my kids go to public school.” Stone to Velkind: “Let’s be very clear: everything here is 100 percent legal, everything here is 100 percent accurate,” he said. “As somebody who has two granddaughters, I really find Redlich’s advocacy and defense of sex with underrate girls disgusting and repugnant, and voters need to know about it prior to voting on Tuesday.”146

Heather Redlich, the candidate’s wife, would write a letter to Capitol Confidential expressing her anguish over the mailer. Capitol Confidential would publish the letter, “Redlich’s wife’s letter to Stone on ‘horrific smear’”. The text of the letter follows:

You have told terrible lies about my husband. You have hurt me and my family. I have suffered anxiety and heartache.

You have made me fear for the safety of my children in our own home. I am the type of person that avoids the limelight. I don’t like when people talk about me but I feel I can be silent no more. So, I will dry my tears and write my own message to New Yorkers:

I have known Warren Redlich for 19 years and have been married to him for 15 years. We have two school-age children. We met in law school, got married shortly after graduation and built a home together. Warren supported me when I decided to pursue a career as a librarian. When I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer during my first pregnancy, he took care of me and our newborn child.

In the years since, we have started a law practice together. We have joined a local Congregation. Warren has volunteered with our Congregation’s Brotherhood. He has given his time to talk to high school students about politics and the law. He has welcomed interns into our law practice and enjoyed being a mentor. He has counseled our clients with mental health problems and assisted those with physical disabilities. I am a member of the Junior League of Albany and have volunteered with our Congregation’s Sisterhood.

Our daily lives involve running a business, driving our kids to after-school activities, going on family outings and eating dinner together. We teach our children to be kind to others. We try to make the world a better place by volunteering and getting involved with our community.

Our friends and neighbors have received these lies in the mail. They know the truth. But for those who do not, I will tell you. Warren has never committed a crime. We do not have a deviant lifestyle. Warren is not perfect but he is a good person, a loyal friend, and a loving husband and father. You do not need to fear Warren.

You should fear those that tell such lies and sling mud. Be leery of those that are afraid of open political debate. Fear those that have trounced the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” As for Mr. Stone and the others behind this horrific smear who speak these evil words, I hope the people of New York will reject your lies and will vote for principled men and women in the election.

I think it is so very easy to fill space when something like this makes you angry, and you must resist this most of all for aesthetic reasons, that nothing is so ugly and dull as a screech, however righteous. My anger has none of the comfort or certainty of an ideological target; I think libertarianism has done great damage to the United States, I want Warren Redlich’s ideology to fail – and yet I am still disgusted that this was done to him. With regard to this vile act, I will only say that there are great artists who can work on an extraordinary variety of canvases, the most vast and the smallest miniatures. Roger Stone, I think, is something like a great artist. He could cause horrific suffering among millions by working with a firm that prolonged a cruel, merciless war in Africa, and he could visit horror on a single family, falsely accusing a father of being a pedophile out of spite that this political rookie had just soundly beaten him in an election. “Color me contrarian, but I will say something I don’t believe another Washington reporter has ever admitted publicly: I like Roger Stone,” writes Matt Labash. “Stone is like a U.S. Army of treachery: He screws more people before 9 A.M. than most people do in a whole day,” writes Matt Labash, admiringly. And when one of those people is Warren Redlich, and the way Roger Stone screws him is to make his life a miserable hell by putting out fliers that he’s a sexual predator, does that fill you with gleeful laughter, Mr. Labash, or does it make you want to throw up?

Paladino’s campaign would be an endless joke. A mass of repellent emails that he forwarded out of amusement, such as an “Obama Inauguration Ceremony” featuring a group of African tribesmen as well as a bestiality video, would show up early on in the race. “With those emails out there, he’s clearly unelectable,” said a veteran political consultant. After stories were published about Paladino’s out of wedlock daughter, the candidate got into a screaming match with veteran political reporter Fred Dicker. “You send another goon to my daughter’s house and I’ll take you out, buddy!” Paladino would deliver a speech where he condemned homosexuality. “I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option – it isn’t,” he said. “You’re not an illegal immigrant, are you?” he’d ask during an interview with Fox reporter Ti Hua Chang. Caputo had Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic candidate, followed around by two people in duck costumes, sounding duck calls, as a way of taunting Cuomo for not agreeing to a debate. Caputo alleged that Cuomo aides had warned the ducks, “if you girls don’t get out of here I’m going to shove those duck calls down your throats.” Caputo alleged the encounter was “likely a hate crime since the Cuomo staffer clearly referenced their sexuality in his threat.” Cuomo won an overwhelming win over Paladino, who got 34% of the vote. “Madam Kristin Goes to Albany” by Molly Young describes a press conference held by Davis when she was running on the Anti-Prohibition Party. Seven people showed up, four of them from her campaign. Another was a heckler. “You don’t really think you have a chance, do you?,” he asked147. Neither Redlich nor Davis garnered enough votes for their parties to be placed on future ballots, but once again, the rookie had outdone the veteran strategist. Redlich pulled in 44,761 votes. Davis pulled in 22,000 votes. In a piece on the election, Stone wrote, without irony, that “Davis ran a positive campaign.”148He took space in this post-election piece to defend the Redlich mailer:

In the closing days of the race a First Amendment group People for Safer New York exposed Redlich’s weird writing defending sex with under aged girls in a carefully lawyered piece of literature that exposed Redlich as Sexual predator in his attitude. Redich can huff and puff all he wants but the claims fall squarely within the bounds of the First Amendment. Liberal reporters found Redlich’s writing acceptable as they saw it a sophisticated, erudite and cosmopolitan. It wasn’t. It was vile. I’m a libertine but I limit myself to consenting adults.

For whatever reason, Stone would eventually take this page down from his site – this content is pulled from the wayback machine archives.