caputo, michael

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pow death squads? KID KILLER?

9 20

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.

NO MERRI

sci suppress // Mann AGW but covid KIA?!

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

russia gazprom

bak

ukraine russian intel

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dhs secret cops?

fauci gag? 720 FDA

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AN 5 26

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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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.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

People need to go to prison’: Political analyst blasts Trump administration for hiding CDC guidance about airborne coronavirus

David Badash / The New Civil Rights MovementSeptember 21, 2020

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday quietly changed its coronavirus official guidance to note that coronavirus droplets, or “aerosols,” can stay in the air far longer than previously thought…

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/revelation-that-racist-trump-stooge-tried-to-censor-cdc-reports-rocks-experts-and-critics/

no lnx twt

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.”

NO LNX

WAPO

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/trump-sidelines-public-health-advisers-in-growing-rift-over-coronavirus-response/2020/07/09/

Health

CDC feels pressure from Trump as rift grows over coronavirus response

Vice President Pence holds a coronavirus task force briefing on Wednesday, joined by, from left, Dr. Deborah Birx, Adm. Brett Giroir, and CDC Director Robert Redfield.

]

Lena H. Sun and

Josh Dawsey

July 9, 2020

The June 28 email to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was ominous: A senior adviser to a top Health and Human Services Department official accused the CDC of “undermining the President” by putting out a report about the potential risks of the coronavirus to pregnant women.

The adviser, Paul Alexander, criticized the agency’s methods and said its warning to pregnant women “reads in a way to frighten women .?.?. as if the President and his administration can’t fix this and it is getting worse.”

As the country enters a frightening phase of the pandemic with new daily cases surpassing 57,000 on Thursday, the CDC, the nation’s top public health agency, is coming under intense pressure from President Trump and his allies, who are downplaying the dangers in a bid to revive the economy ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election. In a White House guided by the president’s instincts, rather than by evidence-based policy, the CDC finds itself forced constantly to backtrack or sidelined from pivotal decisions.

The latest clash between the White House and its top public health advisers erupted Wednesday, when the president slammed the agency’s recommendation that schools planning to reopen should keep students’ desks six feet apart, among other steps to reduce infection risks. In a tweet, Trump — who has demanded schools at all levels hold in-person classes this fall — called the advice “very tough & expensive.”

“While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!” Trump tweeted Wednesday. The CDC was already planning to issue new guidelines in the coming days. But Vice President Pence on Wednesday explicitly tied the effort to Trump’s ire.

“The president said today we just don’t want the guidance to be too tough,” Pence told reporters. “And that’s the reason next week the CDC is going to be issuing a new set of tools.”

Analysts say the deepening divide is undermining the authority of one of the world’s premier public health agencies, which previously led fights against malaria, smallpox and HIV/AIDS. Amid the worst public health crisis in a century, the CDC has in recent months altered or rescinded recommendations on topics including wearing masks and safely reopening restaurants and houses of worship as a result of conflicts with top administration officials.

“At a time when our country needs an orchestrated, all-hands-on-deck response, there is simply no hand on the tiller,” said Beth Cameron, former senior director for global health security and biodefense on the White House National Security Council.

In the absence of strong federal leadership, state and local officials have been left to figure things out for themselves, leading to conflicting messaging and chaotic responses. Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the World Health Organization further undermined efforts to influence global strategies against the coronavirus, including how vaccines will be distributed.

The CDC, meanwhile, is increasingly isolated — a function both of its growing differences with the White House and of its own significant missteps earlier in the outbreak.

Those stumbles include the botched rollout of test kits likely contaminated at a CDC lab in late January, which led to critical delays in states’ ability to know where the virus was circulating. And the CDC’s initial decision to test only a narrow set of people gave the virus a head start spreading undetected across the country.

During a May lunch with Senate Republicans, Trump told the group the CDC “blew it” on the coronavirus test and that he’d installed a team of “geniuses” led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner to handle much of the response, according to two people familiar with the lunch who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Trump speaks at CDC headquarters in Atlanta in March, flanked by HHS Secretary Alex Azar, left, and CDC Director Robert Redfield.Trump speaks at CDC headquarters in Atlanta in March, flanked by HHS Secretary Alex Azar, left, and CDC Director Robert Redfield.]

“There is a view the CDC is staffed with ‘deep state’ Democrats that are trying to tweak the administration,” said one adviser who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private conversations.

White House officials, who see the president’s reelection prospects tied to economic recovery, also say they’ve been deeply frustrated by what they view as career staffers at the agency determined “to keep things closed,” according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal deliberations.

Trump believes the CDC is “ineffective” and a “waste of time” but doesn’t blame CDC Director Robert Redfield and generally likes him, said another official speaking on the condition of anonymity. “He just thinks he is a poor communicator,” the official added.

Joe Grogan, former head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said Redfield had fans inside the White House who work on “addiction issues, on life issues, on HIV issues,” among other topics.

But he said Redfield has few political appointees to help him run a complex agency. “How do you run a place like that with .?.?. [few] appointees?” Grogan asked.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar called the director “a key scientific guide for the President and his administration, a trusted source for the American people, and a closely engaged partner of state and local governments.”

But Redfield is not a voice in coronavirus task force meetings, and “is never really in the Oval [Office] with the president,” said another senior administration official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal dynamics.

Even Redfield’s supporters say he has failed to be an effective advocate for the agency.

“Bob Redfield’s commitment to public health is completely strong,” said William Schaffner, a veteran infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University. But he said Redfield lacks the standing, deftness and communication capacity to persuade skeptical audiences, including those in the White House, that protecting public health and fostering economic recovery are not opposing goals.

Redfield, for his part, downplayed Trump’s criticism of the CDC school reopening guidelines after a coronavirus task force briefing Wednesday, saying the agency and the president were “totally aligned.”

“We’re both trying to open the schools,” he said.

White House spokesman Judd Deere also disputed big differences, saying in a statement that the White House and the CDC “have been working together in partnership since the very beginning of this pandemic to carry out the President’s highest priority: the health and safety of the American public.

“The CDC is the nation’s trusted health protection agency and its infectious-disease and public health experts have helped deliver critical solutions to save lives. We encourage all Americans to continue to follow the CDC’s guidelines and use best-practices they have learned, such as social distancing, face coverings, and good hygiene, to maintain public health and continue our Transition to Greatness.”

But some health experts were indignant the agency had been ordered to rewrite guidance to reopen schools to “make it easier and cost less” — a demand that effectively “turns science on its head,” said Tom Inglesby, director of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security.

“CDC should be giving their best judgments on how to lower risks to make schools safer,” he said. “That’s their job. If they aren’t allowed to do that, the public will lose confidence in the guidance.”

'Why are they not out there shouting "fire''?'

The diminished role of the 74-year-old agency has bewildered infectious-disease experts, as well as members of the public seeking guidance.

After six states set one-day case records on July 3, Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean at Emory University’s School of Medicine, tweeted at Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, “Tom, where is @CDCgov ? Why are they not out there shouting ‘fire’?”

Frieden shot back: “They are still there, still doing great work, just not being allowed to talk about it, not being allowed to guide policy, not being allowed to develop, standardize, and post information that would give, by state and county, the status of the epidemic and of our control measures.”

Jeffrey Duchin, the health officer at Seattle and King County health department, added: “Agree. Muzzled, neutered and exiled.”

The agency has been largely invisible. After more than three months of silence, it resumed briefings for the public last month. There have been two.

By comparison, when the H1N1 swine flu pandemic hit the United States in the spring of 2009, the CDC held briefings almost every day for six consecutive weeks.

During this outbreak, the agency’s regular briefings ended abruptly after White House officials were angered when a top CDC leader warned that Americans could face “significant disruption” to their lives as a result of the virus’s spread to the United States.

CDC officials say they are still getting their message out, pointing to more than 2,000 documents providing pandemic-related information about reopening and staying safe for dozens of groups and venues, including funeral home directors, amusement parks and pet owners. Each Friday, the CDC also posts CovidView, a weekly report of selected data and trends on testing, hospitalizations and reported deaths.

But the information is posted without additional explanation or analysis.

“I want to hear a real person give me three minutes based on these findings,” said del Rio, also a global health and infectious-disease professor at Emory. “I want to see them in the news, being interviewed, giving us the data.”

Scientists at the CDC and former colleagues speak of deep frustration and low morale over its inability to fully share and explain scientific and medical information.

Researchers are fearful for their jobs and want to protect the integrity of the data they release. “If you want to say something, you’re thinking, ‘what’s the White House going to say and how are they going to use it,’ ” said one longtime scientist who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

The lack of briefings has fostered misunderstandings at times. In early April, for instance, when the agency reversed its position and recommended the use of cloth face coverings, CDC scientists gave no public briefings explaining why they made the change.

“It’s not rocket science,” said Nancy Cox, a virologist and former CDC official who led the influenza program for 22 years and was part of the agency’s response during the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic. “But the reasoning behind those changes should be explained as clearly as possible and then you can get everyone on board.”

In the CDC’s absence, academic medical centers, public health and professional disease groups have filled the void by holding coronavirus briefings and providing analysis of key issues, data and research studies. Frieden, the president of Resolve to Save Lives, a New York nonprofit, has also been posting long Twitter threads analyzing the weekly CDC data released on Fridays.

Speaking 'with an unfettered voice'

Alarmed at the agency’s diminished role, nearly 350 public health organizations sent a letter Tuesday to Azar urging him to advocate for the CDC. The agency must be allowed to speak based on the best available science “and with an unfettered voice,” said John Auerbach, president and chief executive of Trust for America’s Health, a public health nonprofit that led the effort.

House Democrats echoed those concerns in a separate letter to Azar last month. Reps. Diana DeGette of Colorado and Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said they were troubled by reports that administration officials are considering narrowing the CDC’s mission and embedding more political appointees at the Atlanta-based agency.

Traditionally the CDC has one political appointee, the director. Now it has Redfield and five other political appointees, including two advisers added in recent weeks.

“Now more than ever, the American people need a robust and effective CDC that is not repeatedly undermined by others in the administration, including the President and the Vice President,” the letter said.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows views the agency as a problem and has criticized the CDC repeatedly to other administration officials, said a senior administration official.

White House and HHS officials are discussing what the CDC’s “core mission needs to be,” said one adviser familiar with the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment on policy deliberations. The discussions were first reported by Politico.

Over the years, the agency that was founded to fight malaria now works on virtually every aspect of public health. “It has tried to be everything to everyone,” the adviser said, suggesting the agency might need to refocus more narrowly.

On the global front, administration officials are also weighing a $2.5 billion initiative called the President’s Response to Outbreaks that would move a significant portion of national and international pandemic responses to the State Department, according to a draft obtained by The Post. Details were first reported by Devex.

“There is no clear leadership role for CDC” in this plan, said Jennifer Kates, a senior vice president for global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “In global health, you need an engaged CDC.”

Taken together, the administration efforts seem “designed to position CDC to the margins,” said one federal health official who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

'Boogeyman where there aren't any'

The report that drew the email attack, accusing the agency of undermining the president, had provided detailed but incomplete information about pregnancy risks related to the coronavirus. It found pregnant women with covid-19 were more likely to be hospitalized, admitted to an intensive care unit, and to need ventilator support than infected women who are not pregnant.

The sender, Alexander, a specialist in health research methods, is a senior adviser to Michael Caputo, a longtime Trump ally who was recently appointed assistant HHS secretary for public affairs, which includes the CDC.

The email was directed to Redfield and Caputo.

Even amid the intense criticism of the agency, the email “crosses the line,” said the official, who was aware of the content.

Like all of the CDC’s reports, the analysis itself noted several limitations. One key one that researchers acknowledged was that they did not have data to indicate whether the pregnant women were hospitalized because of labor and delivery, or because they had covid-19.

Administration officials are “seeing political boogeymen where there aren’t any,” the federal health official said, adding that such narratives could further hamper the U.S. response.

“It could feed the fire to limit the flow of scientific data and communication to the general population,” the official said. “People are getting sick and dying. Can we just focus on the science?”

Alexander said in his email that the lack of data about why women were hospitalized was a “key issue.”

“The CDC is undermining the President by what they put out, this is my opinion and sense, and I am reading it and can see the subtle and direct hits,” he wrote.

Alexander, also a part-time assistant professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, did not respond to emails and telephone calls seeking comment.

Caputo said in an interview that he agreed with Alexander. The CDC represents itself as the gold standard for public health agencies, he said, “but in the case of pregnancy analysis, it wasn’t even bronze.”

He called CDC’s track record “spotty” and “questionable,” pointing to Zika diagnostic testing errors in 2016.

“In many cases over the years, regardless of administration, the CDC has undermined presidents and themselves,” Caputo said, referring to leaked drafts of CDC guidances. “Who says the CDC is the sole font of wisdom when it comes to detecting and fighting deadly pathogens?”

Experts say that even with some big unanswered questions, the pregnancy findings represent the best available evidence and are important. The lack of data reflects decades of long-neglected national surveillance on pregnancy.

“I don’t think this is frightening women,” said Denise Jamieson, who heads the obstetrics and gynecology department at Emory University and Emory Healthcare. True, the report “suffers from completeness of data,” she said. But now doctors can be more confident that pregnant women are more likely to have severe disease and use “this really important information” to counsel patients, she said.

Yasmeen Abutaleb, Alice Crites and John Hudson contributed to this report.

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. Follow

Josh Dawsey

Josh Dawsey is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the paper in 2017. He previously covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Wall Street Journal.Follow

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.

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 andformer 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 :(style="background-color:transparent;letter-spacing:0.006em"):}:

:{public PowerPoint deck:(style="box-sizing:border-box;cursor:pointer;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:color"):}: 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,:(style="box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block;margin-top:50px;text-transform:uppercase;letter-spacing:1.5px"):}: 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 NowThis

Published 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:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline-color:initial;outline-width:initial;transition-duration:0.3s;transition-property:color;cursor:pointer"):}: questioning whetherFood and Drug Administration head Stephen Hahnis 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 quoteswhile 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 ofCaputo’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

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

Reagan Administration and Bush campaign

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]

References

^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-MajorPostHHS_1-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-MajorPostHHS_1-2) McCarthy, Robert J. (April 16, 2020). "Michael Caputo, Trump loyalist, gains major post in Health and Human Services". *The Buffalo News. Retrieved April 19,2020.*
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-2) ^d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-3) ^e(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-4) ^f(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-5) ^g(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-6) ^h(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-7) ⁱ(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-8) ^j(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-9) ^k(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-10) ^l(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-11) ^m(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-12) ⁿ(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-13) ^o(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-hernandez_2-14) Hernandez, Javier C. (September 24, 2010), "The Provocateur Loading Paladino's Slingshot", *The New York Times, retrieved June 7, 2017*
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-:0_3-1) Diamond, Dan; Lippman, Daniel (April 15, 2020). "White House snubs Azar, installs Trump loyalist Michael Caputo as HHS spokesperson". *Politico. Retrieved April 19, 2020.*
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^ Jennifer Mendelsohn, "What Goes Around Comes Around?" *Medium, April 25, 2020 [1]*
^ Barrett, Wayne (September 30, 2010). "Carl Paladino: The Dirty Details in His Campaign Filings". *The Village Voice. Retrieved April 24, 2020.*
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^ Schreckinger, Ben (October 26, 2017). Inside Donald Trump's Shady Scheme to Keep Jon Bon Jovi from Buying the Buffalo Bills. *GQ. Retrieved November 29, 2017.*
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^ Ellefson, Lindsey (2016-06-20). "Michael Caputo Out at Trump Campaign After Sending Mean Tweet About Lewandowski". Mediaite. Archived from the original on 2016-06-23. Retrieved 2020-04-21.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo#cite_ref-cbs_17-1) "To Trump supporters, the real story is sabotage -- not Russian interference", *CBS News, Associated Press, May 19, 2017, retrieved June 7, 2017*
^ Johnson, Kevin; Jackson, David (May 17, 2017), "Analysis: 'You're fired' may backfire. Untethered James Comey now Trump's greatest threat", *USA Today, retrieved June 7, 2017*
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^ J. Edward Moreno, New spokesman at HHS directed crude comments to women in previous tweets: report, *The Hill (May 1, 2020).*
^ Moreno, J. Edward (April 23, 2020). "New spokesman at HHS made offensive comments about Chinese people in since-deleted tweets". *The Hill. Retrieved April 28, 2020.*
^ Brest, Mike (April 23, 2020). ":{':(style="padding-left:0.2em"):}:Don't you have a bat to eat?': New HHS spokesman deletes derogatory tweets about Chinese". *Washington Examiner. Retrieved April 28, 2020.*
^ Behrmann, Savannah (April 23, 2020). "New HHS spokesman Michael Caputo deleted racist tweets related to the coronavirus". *USA Today. Retrieved April 28,2020.*
^ Vazquez, Maegan; Westwood, Sarah; Sanchez, Boris (June 17, 2018). "Former Trump operative Roger Stone met with Russian who wanted $2M for Clinton dirt". *CNN.*
^ Graham, Tim (July 16, 2017), "Michael Caputo emerges from high-stakes testimony on Capitol Hill", *The Buffalo News, retrieved July 18, 2017*
^ Cohen, Marshall. "At least 16 Trump associates had contacts with Russians during campaign or transition". *CNN.*
^ Helderman, Rosalind S.; Hamburger, Tom; Leonnig, Carol D. (December 9, 2018). "Russians interacted with at least 14 Trump associates during the campaign and transition". *The Washington Post.*

External links

Michael R. Caputo on Twitter
PoliticsNY.net - Caputo's political news site
HHS biography

show

(2012 ←) 2016 United States presidential election (→ 2020)

Categories:

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 inEl 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 s:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{elling access:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"):}:}_ to their father.

An associate ofGentry Beachdeclined 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.

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Continue reading the main storyMr. Caputo is the latest in a string of Trump campaign officials who have been approached by the committee. He is a protégé of Roger J. Stone Jr., one of President Trump’s longest-serving advisers and one of the people who has been a focus of investigators’ interest. Mr. Stone has also denied having any contact with Russian officials.

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.

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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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote132). 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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote133).

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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote134).

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 theCouncil for Inter-American Securityin Washington, which meant that he was involved incivic 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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote135).

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,Gortonwas 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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote136). 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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote137). “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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote138). “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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote139). 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 o./maxresdefault.jpg).)

“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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote140).

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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote141). 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 Stonewhile 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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote142). “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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote143).

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.

W

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.

R

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.

R

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-

R

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.

W

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:

“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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote144).

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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote145)

“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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote146)

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(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote147). 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.”¹⁴⁸(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote148)He 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.

House Inquiry Turns Attention to Trump Campaign Worker With Russia ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/.../michael-caputo-house-committee-russia-trump.htm...

May 20, 2017 - *Michael Caputo, who was a communications adviser during the presidential ... wife, who is Ukrainian, while working in 2007 on a parliamentary election in Kiev. ... He is a protégé of Roger J.Stone Jr., one of President Trump's ...*

Former Trump adviser asked to testify to House committee on Russia ...

https://www.theguxxxrdian.com › US News › Donald Trump

*:{

}:*

:{May 20, 2017 - *Michael Caputo* has links to long-time *Trump* adviser Roger *Stone*, and ... A former*Trump* campaign adviser has been asked to testify before the ... that he met his second wife in the*Ukraine* while serving as a consultant in that ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Local Republican strategist Caputo briefly takes center stage at ...

buffalonews.com/2017/.../michael-r-caputo-briefly-takes-center-stage-comey-hearing/

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Mar 20, 2017 - “If I were to run for office,” *Michael* R. *Caputo* once told The News, “my ... of any relationship between *Caputo*, *Trump* and *Russian* interference. ... *Ukraine*, a neighboring country that has been in conflict with *Russia*. ... He's a protege of the Republican stalwart Roger *Stone*, a functionary for President *Trump*.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

A Guide to the Key Players in the Trump-Russia Scandal - Mother Jones

www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/.../russia-trump-putin-scandal-key-players-dossie...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Jun 1, 2017 - Keeping track of the relentless news on the widening *Trump*-*Russia* ... that called for arming *Ukraine* in its fight against *Russian* forces. .... Reportedly under investigation by the FBI, *Stone*has strenuously ... *Michael Caputo*.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Trump campaign's Russia ties: Who's involved - Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/trump-russia/

Mar 31, 2017 - Here's what we know so far about Team *Trump's ties to Russian interests ..... 10, 2016 | In a speech to a Florida Republican group, Stone said he'd been in ... 1994-2000 | Caputo moves toRussia shortly after the fall of the Soviet .... 27, 2017 | Sater, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and Ukrainianpolitician ...*

Trump personal attorney declines congressional Russia probe request ...

www.politico.com/.../michael-cohen-decline-congressional-russia-investigation-23894...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{May 30, 2017 - Michael Cohen is among a growing list of *Trump* associates to come under ... and 2016 campaign advisers *Michael Caputo*, Roger *Stone* and Carter Page. ... on *Russia* in exchange for peace between *Russia* and *Ukraine*.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Trump aides facing perilous stage of Russia probe - POLITICO

www.politico.com/story/2017/05/27/trump-russia-probe-risk-238878

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{May 27, 2017 - For example, Roger *Stone*, a longtime *Trump* associate, told ... Paul Manafort, the former*Trump* campaign chairman whose work in *Ukraine* is under review, ... *Michael Caputo*, a political consultant who worked in *Russia* and ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

99 "coincidences" connecting Trump and Putin - Daily Kos

https://www.dailykos.com/story/.../3/.../-99-coincidences-connecting-Trump-and-Puti...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Mar 27, 2017 - Guccifer 2.0 and Roger *Stone* were apparently in contact up to 16 times ... Rick Gates, Manaforts top aide also lobbied for Pro-*Putin Ukrainian* candidate. .... *Michael Caputo* works for *Trump*apologist Chris Collins now, and ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Rise and Resist Public Group | Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/groups/RiseandResistNYC/permalink/820677601414865/

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Also during campaign *Trump* met along with his son with *Russian* Federation Council ..... *Michael Caputo* - *Trump* Adviser and Head of the Communications for .... *Stone* had office space in both Kiev,*Ukraine*, and Saint Petersburg, *Russia* (a ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Michael Caputo: another Trump aide with ties to Russian government ...

us.blastingnews.com › News › 2017 › 05

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{May 24, 2017 - *Michael Caputo*: another *Trump* aide with ties to *Russian* ... Last year from May until August, former advisor to the pro-*Putin Ukrainian* president Yanukovich, ... Former campaign aide Roger*Stone* has also been suspected and ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

https://www.local10.com/news/politics/who-is-president-trumps-informal-adviser-roger-stone

no link

Who is President Trump's informal adviser, Roger Stone?

By Bob Norman - Investigative Reporter

Posted: 4:48 PM, March 20, 2017

Updated: 6:03 PM, March 20, 2017

PEMBROKE PARK, Fla. - Long before accused political dirty trickster Roger Stone became a key player in the election hacking investigation involving Russia, the longtime aide and lobbyist for President Donald Trump was involved in another major political scandal: Watergate.

Stone, who has an image of President Richard Nixon tattooed on his back, was a member of the former president's notorious CREEP committee, where he was schooled in what he has called the "political dark arts." Using the pseudonym Jason Ranier, Stone oversaw a private investigator who was paid to spy on Democratic candidates during the 1972 election.

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"Dirty trickster" Roger Stone involved in Granteed smear

"I did a lot of things in 1972 that were not illegal, but were bare-knuckle politics," Stone told Local 10 News in 2012.

As a so-called GOP hit-man, Stone worked for other presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but was axed from Bob Dole's presidential campaign after the National Enquirer caught him in a swingers' sex scandal.

For years, Stone was a lobbying partner with former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort and served as a lobbyist and advisor to Trump for decades after the pair were introduced by notorious attorney Roy Cohn, who served as a right-hand man to red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy.

Stone lived part-time in Miami Beach for a long time, but first gained local notoriety due to his relationship with one of South Florida's most notorious criminals: convicted Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein.

Stone served as Rothstein's political director before the now-imprisoned ex-attorney's billion-dollar Ponzi scheme crumbled. Stone was sued for $400,000 in a clawback action in Rothstein's bankruptcy case, which he settled for a nominal amount, and was never accused of any involvement in Rothstein's crimes.

Stone moved from Miami Beach to Fort Lauderdale after striking up a friendship with Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, whom he helped elect, as well as Israel's campaign strategist, Ron Gunzburger, whom Israel hired after his election as BSO general counsel.

Prior to Israel's 2012 election, a Stone assistant named Andrew Miller gave a mysterious $120,000 contribution to an Israel political committee. After the election, Israel, a Democrat, hired three of Stone's associates – including assistantDianne Thorne, co-author Mike Colapietro, and Miller's girlfriend, Jennifer Hobbs – on the public payroll at the sheriff’s office after his 2012 election. Thorne left BSO after questions about her truthfulness regarding her educational background were reported and Hobbs has also left her BSO post.

"Whether or not someone is an associate of Roger Stone, I wouldn't necessarily know," Israel said in 2013.

While Stone carefully projects a sophisticated persona, Local 10 News captured another side of him when investigative reporter Bob Norman questioned him in 2014 about a $1.5 million federal tax lien filed that had been filed against him.

Stone lashed out at Norman and his photographer, pushing the camera and flashing his middle finger as he drove away.

In 2008, the infamous political "dirty trickster" Roger Stone made a big impact on the Broward County sheriff's race with a series of attack ads aimed at Democratic candidate Scott Israel.

That was back when Stone -- who gained political infamy as a "dirty trickster" for Richard Nixon -- was working as the political director for Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein, who backed Republican candidate Al Lamberti, who of course went on to win the race.

Well now Stone is back in a big -- and, yes, dirty -- way in this sheriff's race, and it appears this time he's working in the interest of Scott Israel.

The latest robocall attack on Israel's Democratic primary opponent, Louie Granteed, came last night in the form of an "endorsement" for Granteed from an entity that calls itself Tea Party Miami. Here's the exact words of the woman who voices the call:

"I'm calling for Tea Party Miami, one of the largest and most active tea party organizations in South Florida. We recommend conservative law and order Democrat Louie Granteed for Broward County sheriff. Louie Granteed is a tough no-nonsense cop who won't kowtow to minorities, civil liberties groups, or good-government types. Louie Granteed will crack down on illegal immigrants in Broward County. Please remember that Tea Party Miami recommends Louie Granteed for Broward County sheriff. Paid for by Tea Party Miami C-4 organization."

What's the real message of that ad aimed at Broward Democrats? That Granteed is a conservative, racist, anti-immigrant thug.

So is that Granteed's message? Of course not. Granteed told me he has never had any involvement with any Tea Party group and had no idea who the Tea Party Miami was. His stance on immigration is actually well-measured; in fact Granteed says the issue is a federal one and opposes local law enforcement agencies taking illegal immigrants into custody unless they have committed a crime with a complaining victim.

The Miami Tea Party, for the record, is ... Roger Stone. He and his associates created the group last year; serving as the original chairwoman of the group was Dianne Thorne, Stone's administrative assistant. Now it's someone called Eric Wolfgang Von Tausch, but Stone and his wife are "paid members" of the group.

The group has mirrored Stone's interests all along. For instance, after the Scott Rothstein bankruptcy sued Stone for $400,000 in a clawback action, Tea Party Miami began bashing Rothstein bankruptcy trustee Herbert Stettin, as "Florida's most corrupt judge."

Stone claims his involvement in the smear amounts to introducing political consultant Todd Wilder to Von Tausch. Sure, Roger.

Tea Party Miami on Saturday sent this email blast endorsing Granteed. Here's the text:

Hollywood Police Officer Louie Granteed is one tough cop. That's why Tea Party Miami, the largest and most active Tea Party organization in Miami-Dade County and our affiliate the South Florida Tea Party both recommend Louie Granteed, in the Broward County Democratic Primary for Sheriff August 14th.

Louie Granteed is a real law and order conservative. Granteed is a former Republican who will be tough on crime and crack down on illegal immigrants in Broward county. Granteed is clearly a better choice than Democrat Scott J. Israel, a strong supporter of President Obama and an opponent of racial profiling by the BSO.

Granteed could be depended on not to kow-tow to minorities, civil liberties groups and good government types. Granteed didn't pander by seeking the support of the left-wing Broward based Gwen Cherry Chapter of the Women's Political Caucus. The choice between Granteed and Republican Sheriff Al Lamberti will be a difficult one. We applaud Lamberti for inviting Rep. Allen West to address the BSO 9/11 Memorial.

We recommend Tea Party members who are registered Democrats vote for Granteed.

For Republicans in Broward, Tea Party Miami also recommends former Florida House Majority Leader Adam Hasner for Congress in the 22nd district and Karen Harrington for Congress in the 23rd district and Mike Lameyer for State Senate District 34.

Here we go again. Notice that the criticism of Israel is that he's a "strong supporter of President Obama," something the vast majority of Democratic voters in Tuesday's primary share in common. The other is that Israel is against racial-profiling, aka he's not a racist. You can almost hear Stone chuckling in the background when he sends out this stuff.

Interestingly, the email also mentions that it will be difficult for Tea Party Miami to choose between Granteed and Lamberti, a Republican, in the general election, mentioning that Lamberti invited right-wing Congressman Allen West to a 911 event. Judging by this and other tea leaves, it appears that Stone is ultimately gunning for Lamberti, the man he helped elect last time with Rothstein's money. So maybe the sheriff will get the next Miami Tea Party endorsement. We'll see.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-financial-ties-to-russia-and-his-unusual-flattery-of-vladimir-putin/:{2016:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:/06/17/

...The Trump Tower deal never moved past preliminary discussions. But Agalarov said the family is interested in a possible future venture.

Trump’s top aides, too, have had ties to Russia. Campaign chairman Paul Manafort has done multimillion-dollar business deals with pro-Russian oligarchs and was a longtime adviser to the Russia-aligned Ukrainian president whose 2014 ouster triggered Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, a major source of tension between Russia and the United States as well as its NATO allies.

Manafort did not respond to requests for comment.

[Inside Trump adviser Manafort’s world of politics and global financial dealmaking]

An adviser who helped run Trump’s efforts in the New York primary, Michael Caputo, lived in Russia in the 1990s. Caputo also had a contract for several months in 2000 with the Russian conglomerate Gazprom Media to improve Putin’s image in the United States.

Caputo declined to comment but told the Buffalo News, his hometown paper, that he was “not proud of the work today. But at the time, Putin wasn’t such a bad guy.”

Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief who is advising Trump and has been mentioned as a possible vice-presidential running mate, stunned the diplomatic community by sitting near Putin at a 2015 Moscow dinner honoring RT, the English-language network aligned with the Kremlin that broadcasts into the United States.

Flynn said he spoke in Russia about how he thought Washington and Moscow should work more closely together, particularly in reining in Iran.

Carter Page, also a Trump foreign policy adviser, once ran the Moscow office of Merrill Lynch, including advising the Russian energy giant Gazprom, according to his biography posted on his employer’s website.

Page did not respond to questions from The Post. In an interview this year with Bloomberg News, he hinted that Trump’s election could be a boost for some of his Russian associates who have been hurt by U.S. sanctions imposed after Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. “There’s a lot of excitement in terms of the possibilities for creating a better situation,” Page told the news service.

The Agalarovs, too, expressed enthusiasm for what Trump has told them.

“He keeps underlining that he thinks President Putin is a strong leader,” Emin Agalarov said. “This could be an amazing breakthrough. If [Trump] becomes president and actually becomes friends with Putin, we would avoid 10 wars every year at least.”...

Speier: Michael Caputo worked for Gazprom Media for Russia's Ukraine campaign. What reason is there for Trump to hire Putin's image manager?

http://buffalonews.com/2016/03/05/the-radical-adventures-of-conservative-radio-host-mike-caputo/

He’s a 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.”

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 toJ. Michael Waller, who oversaw Caputo’s work for the now-defunct Council for Inter-American Security.

...

skeletons

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

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.”

“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. 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

http://politicsnow.buffalonews.com/2016/03/05/the-strange-made-up-story-of-caputo-the-spy/

The lengthy profile in Sunday's paperabout conservative political operative and WBEN radio talk show host Michael Caputo was sparked by a single document -- a supposedly classified report claiming that Caputo was a longtime covert operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. The document claimed that not only was Caputo a former CIA agent, but that he had gone rogue and was now working with a man connected to al Qaeda.

The problem with easily dismissing such a document as a hoax is that document was carefully crafted with facts, details, names and signatures that could not be discounted by a quick online vetting. Caputo did meet repeatedly with a former Afghan ambassador for the Taliban and has been employed by American agencies with reputed CIA ties.

Determining the allegations were false took independent research, outreach to the United Nations, experts on Afghanistan politics, and other former CIA agents.

From mid-November to late December, a nameless source presenting himself as an American intelligence officer in Belgium, sent more than 100 private messages through Twitter, culminating in the "leak" of a detailed "top secret" document, to local sports blogger and Caputo adversary James Kriger. The document alleged that Caputo was a 20-year covert CIA agent who was forced into retirement after defying orders.

Kriger said someone contacted him through Twitter out of the blue starting in November after noticing that Kriger was criticizing Caputo through his sports blog BuffaloBruises.com. The two men are at odds over a legal dispute involving Bills Fan Thunder, a separate activist group for Buffalo Bills fans.Here's the "top secret" document: Tweeted "top secret" document

The anonymous source communicating with Kriger had surprisingly detailed knowledge of Caputo's movements in Russia and Europe and was familiar with some of his childhood friends and current partners. "Saw Caputo's tweets to you," the source wrote Kriger, who asked why this nameless source was dropping all this anti-Caputo information on him. "Figured it out -- you're going to blog about him and it's good for our designs if you do."

The source made use of photos and elements of Caputo’s real life story to back up his claims, starting with an old college photo of Caputo with Gen. Ramatullah Safi, a former Afghan resistance fighter who would later on become an ambassador for the Taliban in Europe. He was aware of follow-up social meetings Caputo had with Safi in London and Amsterdam and suggested there were many more.

He referred to Caputo’s 2007 political consulting work in the Ukraine as being an extension of spy work he did for Russia under the auspices of the Russian Federal Security Service. And he sent Kriger authentic articles about Caputo from Moscow and the Washington Post, offering Kriger the "real story" behind the articles – stories about Caputo being a double agent and later becoming involved in arms dealing and even murder.

The supposedly classified document from 2007, that was given to Kriger in December, appeared superficially authentic to the untrained eye, with references to real people and events, and the signature of the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service at the time.

"Caputo’s media enemies/pals would love the document," the writer told Kriger, suggesting that he tweet the document out to 19 specific Twitter accounts, including three from The Buffalo News. Though Kriger only posted a single public tweet on the memo, a second, anonymous Twitter account sprang up and retweeted Kriger's post to the recommended list.

How we know the "top secret" document is fake:

Caputo's relationship with Gen. Safi, an Afghan resistance fighter against the Soviet invasion, dated back to Caputo's college days.Caputo said he met Safi at a conference in Washington, D.C. in 1984, and subsequently assisted with his speaking tour at the University at Buffalo and other colleges when the U.S. was backing the Afghan resistance effort. The two continued to interact overseas through the mid-1990s, he said, but their relationship came to an end when Caputo moved to Moscow.

Caputo provided this photo of himself with Safi in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1985.

Safi later became an ambassador for the Taliban in Europe before eventually giving up the role. The United Nations removed Safi's name from its list of sanctioned Taliban officials in 2005. Other political experts on Afghanistan also debunked the notion that Safi has been linked to al Qaeda. The UK resident is believed to be dead, though The News could find no official confirmation of this.

Former CIA agents pointed out that the general appearance of the 2007 "top secret" document regarding Caputo is wrong -- has improper fonts, lacks code names, and inexplicably outlines an agent's entire career history in writing.

"That’s not what our stuff looks like," said Gary Berntsen, who worked undercover for the CIA for 24 years and is now a speaker and author. "The agency would never write a memo detailing the activities of a member of the clandestine service. The notion is ridiculous."

Other sources interviewed for the Caputo profile were equally dismissive.

Berntsen, who was ran against Sen. Chuck Schumer in 2010 and is acquainted with Caputo, said whoever is perpetrating this hoax is clearly a student of American intelligence work and spent considerable time building the damaging story.

He also emphatically stated Caputo was never a CIA agent. He'd be more vague with his answer if there was any chance Caputo was, he said.

"He’s had an interesting life, but not that interesting," Berntsen said.

After Kriger informed his nameless source that a reporter from The Buffalo News wanted to contact him, the source deleted all of his private Twitter messages to Kriger and has not been heard from again

For reference, here’s a partial list of senior Trump campaign aides and advisors who have been fired or reassigned by Donald Trump:

Roger Stone – Trump’s first political strategist, forced out last August. Sam Nunenberg – Trump’s first full-time political aide, also fired last August. Rick Wiley – Hired as Political Director in April; fired in May. Kevin Kellems – a veteran Republican operative hired in June and fired less than two weeks later. Corey Lewandowski – Fired in June. Michael Caputo – who helped run his campaign in New York, fired in June after gleefully celebrating Lewandowski’s firing. Barry Bennett – formerly of the Carson campaign, fired in July Ed Brookover – fired in July Michael Glassner – Trump’s first political director, a veteran of Bob Dole’s 1996, moved over to Mike Pence team in July. Paul Manafort – Fired in August

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en we first met in Miami, Stone brought along an old friend, Michael Caputo,who has assisted him in various projects over the years. Caputo grew up in upstate New York, where his family runs an insurance business that had a dispute with Eliot Spitzer when he was attorney general. As a form of revenge, Caputo had started two Web sites—spitzerfile.com and newyorkfacts.net—that collected negative press stories about the new governor. With help from a friend who had run computer projects for the Pentagon, Caputo and Stone located the e-mail addresses of many journalists and other prominent people in New York and sent them news of Spitzer’s woes. “The left has done a better job of dominating the new space,” Stone said. “We’re weak on the Web. The whole thing was a labor of love.”

It was, in short, Stone’s idea of entertainment. “I thought Spitzer was punk, and I wanted to fuck with him any way I could,” he said. (Rule: “Hate is a stronger motivator than love.”) By the middle of 2007, hisSpitzer bashing had become a business, because Stone was hired in June as a consultant to the New York State Senate Republicans.

On August 6th, someone whose voice sounded a great deal like Stone’s left a message on the office answering machine of Bernard Spitzer, the governor’s eighty-three-year-old father. The caller referred to a possible investigation of loans made by the elder Spitzer to his son’s campaigns. “If you resist this subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany,” said the caller, who went on, “And there is not a goddam thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it.”

Private detectives hired by Bernard Spitzer traced the call to Stone’s wife’s telephone, but Stone, however implausibly, denied leaving the message. At first, he claimed that on the night of the call he had been attending the Broadway show “Frost/Nixon,” but there was no performance that evening. Stone also suggested that his landlord, a Spitzer supporter, had set him up, or that a standup comedian and impressionist had imitated his voice. As a result of the controversy, Stone had to relinquish his position with the State Senate Republicans.

“They caught Roger red-handed lying,” Donald Trump said.“What he did was ridiculous and stupid. I lost respect for Eliot Spitzer when he didn’t sue Roger Stone for doing that to his father, who is a wonderful man.”

http://www.buffalonews.com/feed/the-radical-adventures-of-conservative-radio-host-mike-caputo-20160305

The radical adventures of conservative radio host Mike Caputo

The conservative radio host who has skeletons that would ‘come dancing out of the closet in a can-can’ has morphed into a low-key suburban family man