Month: February 2020

 

These last several weeks I’ve felt depressed, numb and angry. Only one thing inspired me during this time. Reading the Catch and Kill book and listening to the Catch and Kill podcast. It’s the story about the team that finally got Harvey Weinstein arrested for his multiple alleged rapes and sexual assaults.

There are a lot of lessons to learn from that book. What I needed to read and hear about were the historic failures and what the latest journalist to take on bullies, Ronan Farrow, learned from what happened in the previous attempts to expose Weinstein. One lesson is especially relevant now.

Bullies will continue to manipulated the system, media, public and victims to block a story and kill charges but the crimes at the core of the charges do not disappear.

There are also lessons to be learned from the take down of Roger Ailes. In both cases powerful men offered riches or fame to get what they wanted. If the victims fought back they used their money and power to silence them. When challenged they used threats to victims and the journalists who were trying to tell the story.

I know a bit about fighting powerful right-wing media, so the scenes with Gretchen Carlson in the movie Bombshell impressed me the most. It showed long-term strategic thinking based on analyzing what happened in previous cases of sexual harassment at Fox.

She knew exactly how her target would react–lawsuits, vengeful personal attacks and pressure on others to turn against her to show their loyalty to Ailes.

Carlson and her legal team prepared for what Ailes would do based on his pattern and used his predicted actions against him.

Right now Trump is bragging he won. He is going to be more vindictive than before. In the Catch and Kill podcast we learn that every time the victims of Weinstein’s rapes started talking to new reporters someone called them to remind them of their NDAs. How did Weinstein know this? Because both the victims and the journalists were under surveillance by private investigators.

Roger Ailes also had private investigators and media assassins ready to unleash “blind items” to damage the person’s reputation. Weinstein had a whisper campaign that let directors know that certain actresses were “difficult to work with” and they should be avoided. Trump has his rallies, Twitter, a troll army, Fox News and talk radio.

How do we help the people under attack from Trump?
One of the things I learned from the book and movie is how people outside the Weinstein/Ailes world helped those targeted by the vindictive bullies. Some helped them get jobs in different areas. Others got them money from settlements–although they still had legal clauses silencing them. They also got help from insiders in the Weinstein company and private investigators. A big part of the effort involved the help of insiders. Some that you wouldn’t expect.

In the Catch and Kill podcast we hear from Igor Ostrovskiy, the private investigator who followed Ronan Farrow around Manhattan. We also learn of a source who provided documents detailing the depth and scope of the actions of Black Cube, Weinstein’s surveillance firm. This inside information is useful because big money bullies use the same methods and often the same people to do their dirty work.

When she was 22 and barely spoke English, model @AmbraBattilana faced off against one of the most powerful men in Hollywood while wearing a police wire. What happened next upended her life. Subscribe to the #CatchAndKill Podcast to hear her story: https://t.co/649mmaiRam pic.twitter.com/es1sKXAaIE

— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) December 12, 2019

One of the sick little fun facts that I learned from Catch and Kill and Bombshell is that both Weinstein and Ailes employed Rudy Giuliani.  He worked on the NY DA to stop the case of Weinstein’s assault of Ambra Gutierrez going forward. His law firm was in charge of Ambra being paid off and silenced.

“At the time of the Gutierrez incident, Weinstein’s legal team was stacked with political influence. Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani was closely involved. “Rudy was always in the office after the Ambra thing,” one Weinstein Company employee recalled. “He still had his mind then.” Giuliani worked so many hours on the Gutierrez matter that a spat arose afterward over billing. These fights over invoices were a leitmotif in Weinstein’s business dealings. – Catch and Kill p. 64

In this clip we see Ailes saying the Obama White House had discussions about having him killed. We see the Giuliani character nodding in agreement. Now this is a fictionalized account of that meeting. But think about what we know about Rudy and Trump plus the evidence from the Lev Parnas tapes. What other kind of evidence exists? Who else can be subpoenaed within Rudy’s circle?

Anticipate and use Trump’s ego and incompetent staff against him

It was interesting to listen to Fabio Bertoni, the lawyer for The New Yorker, talk about the conference call with Weinstein. (Starting at 31.00) When Weinstein’s lawyers couldn’t get him to shut up they cut the call. Trump’s lawyers wish they could do the same.

In Bombshell we find out that all the terrible quotes that Ailes denied as lies were in fact based on audio tapes that Gretchen Carlson had been recording for a year.  In Catch and Kill we learn the story of Ambra Gutierrez, the woman who wore a wire when meeting with Weinstein, and the efforts to suppress the audio. It took a combination of a clever move by Ambra, an understanding of the law by Farrow and the support of a journalistic entity, The New Yorker, to make it public legally.

Who has leverage over whom and how do you remove it?
People often wonder who is holding what over the heads of GOP senators. At this level there are multiple sources of leverage that can be used against people. Financial, sexual, criminal and/or political leverage can be used to pressure people to act in a certain way.

In Catch and Kill Farrow explains how David Pecker, the head of AMI which owns the National Enquirer, bought stories to bury them. Recently when Jeff Bezos was blackmailed by AMI he came out and said what happened, removing that leverage.

Would exposing the leverage against Republican senators remove the pressure? Maybe not, but if the pressure is from crime shouldn’t the people who vote for them want to know about it?

Money helps
Big money bullies aren’t totally damaged by losing money. The people fighting them usually aren’t rich, so anything those people can do to survive financially is helpful to keep them going.

Gretchen Carlson knew that her actions were going to destroy her career so she made sure to get enough money to cover her time in wilderness.

If a journalist and a lawyer can figure out how to legally get out a story and protect the source, excellent!  If an insider can tip off the right people to get an essential documents that was buried, I’m thrilled. If a person who was harassed can get an huge settlement, wonderful! If someone has a tell all book that will expose the President’s crimes and make them money, great!

Win or lose big money bullies don’t stop after one hit
 Contrary to popular wisdom these type of bullies don’t crumble when someone stands up to them. When fighting vindictive bullies like Weinstein, Ailes and Trump you need multiple attempts on multiple fronts.

Bullies want you to think you are alone in your fight. But what I learned from the stories in Catch and Kill and Bombshell is that there are allies on the outside and inside who will help. They might be in places we never suspect. But people who have been bullied need help to keep fighting. Those who want to help should think about how best they can use their skills and positions to help.

In Bombshell they made a point of Gretchen Carlson looking at her son and daughter while fighting. She was clearly hoping that her actions would mean that things would be different for them in the future.

In the voice over after Ailes was ousted the Megan Kelly character she says, “Gretchen Carlson got the Murdochs to put the rights of women above profits, if only temporarily.”

When The New Yorker story about Weinstein was published things changed. Listen to the joy in voice of The Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters talk about the world after 10:47 am on October 10th 2017. (Link 35:40)

Following the defeat of Donald Trump and his enablers I look forward to investigations and convictions followed by changes in our systems. But mostly I’m looking forward to hearing the joy in peoples’ voices.

Cross posted at Spocko’s Brain

Good people, and very good dogs:

These can be hard to watch. But I feel better knowing that there are such decent people in the world who go the extra mile to help innocent animals. It restores my faith in humanity.

I don’t know what this guy did, but it’s quite a story:

Multiple officials in the State Department and the White House are cooperating in a security-related investigation into Andrew Peek, the former senior director for Russia and Europe at the National Security Council, The Daily Beast has learned. 

Peek was escorted off the grounds of the White House on Jan. 17 and placed on administrative leave pending investigation, the details of which have been closely held. Axios previously reported that Peek was expected to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos prior to his exit. He had barely been on the Russia job for two months. 

Since then, rumors have swirled within the ranks of the White House, State Department, and on social media about the reason for Peek’s sudden exit. The Trump administration has said nothing to explain Peek’s departure.

But two officials familiar with the probe tell The Daily Beast that the investigation has been ongoing for several months and that Peek’s State Department colleagues raised concerns about him before he left to join the White House’s staff. However, one official who spoke to The Daily Beast also said Peek had close, collegial working relationships with several individuals at the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs during his time at State. Peek has also retained counsel, those officials said.

You can see the rumors on Reddit or Democratic Underground if you’re interesting. Or you could watch the 1989 movie “Scandal” for a hint at what they are.

Meanwhile, the purge of his enemies picked up pace today. He fired Vindeman and Sondland today. Yovanovich “retired” last week. I’m not sure who’s left. But I’m going to guess that his need for revenge hasn’t been slaked. He’ll need some more heads on pikes.

This piece by Matthew Continetti defending the racist, misogynist pig Rush Limbaugh is going viral with people apparently shocked that the establishment would defend him.

There is nothing new about that. I’ve been writing about it for years:

The Smoking Wreckage Of Limbaugh Nation

by digby

Limbaugh is now calling people “butt boys.” This is on top of his adorable comments that Republicans are being asked to “bend over and grab their ankles” because Obama is black. I realize that the term “butt boy” is fairly common in junior high locker rooms as a synonym for sycophant, but when did it become ok to say this on radio? Does the FCC know that it literally means submissive, teenage anal sex (with a strong implication of coercion?)

I suppose this new frankness about gay sex could be seen as some sort of breakthrough for the right but I wonder what all the morality scolds have to say about it? In fact, someone should ask our new BFF Rick Warren what he thinks about the new Republican leadership. He was quite happily driving a wedge in the Democratic party recently, maybe he’d like to practice some bipartisanship and speak out against this crude piece of work on the conservative side. It would be quite revealing to know what he thinks.

I’ve written many posts about Rush over the years so all this new interest in him as a leader of the Republican Party is old news to me. I think this one, from 2006, may the most pertinent:

Notice how Limbaugh and the preachers pander to the depraved imagination? It’s not religious values these people are selling. They are selling a brutal, domineering, degenerate culture, making their listeners and viewers wallow in it, plumbing the depths of the subconscious, drawing forth Goyaesque images of bestiality and violence and death. That’s a feature of some religions, to be sure, but it’s not the nice upright Christian morality everybody’s pretending it is.

If the culture is careening into a crude, dog-eat-dog corrupt “Pottersville” it’s because the greedheads and the juvenile authoritarian thugs, whether in street gangs or talk radio or K Street, have taken it over. And it is hard for liberals to counter this because our bedrock values include tolerance, free expression and personal autonomy and that unwittingly enables this decadent turn in some ways. But let’s make no mistake, it is only on the right that purveyors of brutal, sadistic, depraved political discourse are welcomed into the houses, offices and beds of the nation’s political leadership…

LIMBAUGH: And these American prisoners of war — have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture…You know, if you look at — if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don’t know if it’s just me, but it looks just like anything you’d see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I’m — yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City — the movie. I mean, I don’t — it’s just me.

When Limbaugh came under fire for those vulgar comments, the leading lights of the Republican party quickly came to his defense.

Rush’s angry, frustrated critics discount how hard it is to make an outrageous charge against him stick. But, we listeners have spent years with him, we know him, and trust him. Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her. For millions of us, David Brock is firing blanks against a bulletproof target. — Kate O’Beirne is Washington Editor for National Review.

Figure out how to deal with that and we might be able to make some headway.

We didn’t figure it out. And now we have Donald Trump.

Election expert Rick Hasen has a new book out called “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy.” The Wall St Journal provides an essay based on his thesis. It’s pretty chilling:

As the Iowa fiasco suggests, the most likely reason that your 2020 vote may not be counted isn’t fraud, suppression or hacking—it’s incompetence

Over the past decade, a familiar frame has developed in the contentious debate over voting rules: Republicans express concern about voter fraud and enact laws supposedly intended to combat it; Democrats see these laws as an attempt to suppress Democratic votes, press for measures to expand voting access and rights, and worry about cyberattacks intended to help the GOP at the polls. It is an important debate, in which I have taken part, but it misses a deeper, more urgent reality: Most American voters in 2020 are much more likely to be disenfranchised by an incompetent election administrator than by fraud, suppression or Russian hacking.

While most election officials who set the rules and count the votes do a good job, often under serious budget constraints, we cannot ignore the weakest links in the chain: those bureaucrats who increase the chances of a protracted and divisive 2020 election meltdown. Fortunately, it is not too late to take steps to try to fix the problems.

He goes on to recount the stories of two of the most notorious examples of incompetence, malfeasance and suppression in both the Democratic and Republican parties, Brenda Snipes in Florida and Brian Kemp in Georgia. This is a bipartisan problem, although the Republican administrators tend to be consciously fraudulent while the Democrats are lazy and incompetent.

Here are some of his recommendations:

If we were thinking about long-term solutions, we might take several steps—most important, following other advanced democracies such as Australia, Canada and the U.K. in having elections administered nationally by a nonpartisan agency, with universal voter registration and a national voter-identification number. Many see the highly decentralized nature of our election system as a strength against attacks (which would be isolated in one place), but it is much more of a weakness. Having different voting machines, different rules and people with widely varying levels of training conducting the same election increases the chances of a problem somewhere.

Unfortunately, our deeply divided country has no appetite right now for redesigning our electoral system or debating the proper mix of federal, state and local control over elections. Regardless of what we might do in the future, the urgency of 2020 demands that we take some steps now to remove as many weak links as possible.

It is not too late for governors or secretaries of state in some places to suspend or replace election administrators with records of incompetence. It took years of Ms. Snipes’s foul-ups before the Florida governor used his powers to attempt to remove her. (Mr. Scott tried to remove Ms. Snipes when he was governor; she resisted but ultimately made a deal with Florida’s new governor, Ron DeSantis, to resign from office in January 2019 with her “dignity and name restored.”) Governors and secretaries of state aware of election-administration problems should not wait too long next time.

Those who approve new voting equipment need to ensure that it can be operated competently by poll workers and isn’t vulnerable to hacking. Systems using hand-marked paper ballots (such as ballots filled out with pencils and put through optical scanning machines) should be considered the gold standard. Newfangled ballot-marking devices that use a bar code for tabulating votes should be studied further to make sure they are secure and reliable. At the very least, states using such machines should pass laws requiring that the human-readable names printed on the ballot, and not a bar code readable only by machine, should be dispositive in the event of a recount. This is currently up for debate in Georgia, but it shouldn’t be; No one should have to trust a computer to tell them what a ballot actually says. There must be some way to audit results to ensure that the vote totals announced by election officials match voter intent.

State officials also need to push local administrators to better train poll workers. In 2016, the vote counting in Detroit was so bad because of poll-worker error that the city couldn’t even conduct a recount of the ballots when it was requested by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. The snafus led to cries of fraud by Republicans, even though a later investigation by the Republican Michigan secretary of state’s office found only incompetence, not intentional misconduct.

State and local election administrators must act now to assure the security of voter-registration and voting systems. Some state and localities resisted federal help in 2016, and we will see what kind of cooperation occurs in 2020. Still, given the much more substantial resources and intelligence assets of DHS and other federal agencies, now is not the time for states and localities to go it alone.

Finally, each state should have a contingency plan in place if election day is met with a cyberattack or natural disaster. One of the things that keeps me up at night is the possibility of an attack on the electrical grid in a Democratic city in a swing state—Detroit in Michigan, Milwaukee in Wisconsin—on election day. A recent article in The Journal described Russian hacks into systems that control American infrastructure, such as power grids and dams. These followed successful attacks begun in 2015 by the Russian government on Ukraine’s electrical grid, which led to a series of electrical outages.

Here in LA, we are facing a big problem in the upcoming elections. Anyone who lives here needs to pay close attention if they plan to vote in the primary.

I appear on Brad Friedman’s radio show/podcast frequently to talk about politics in general. (Tom Sullivan and I both came on this week to talk about all of it.) But Brad is an especially important voice on this issue, having sounded the alarm about election irregularities for many years. Here he is on KCBS this week talking about our potential local disaster:

More on that here.

There is always an impulse to run with conspiracies in situations like this. And it’s always possible that there is one. After all, look what we saw happen in 2016. But this is the biggest threat we have — along with the lack of trust in the system that inevitably follows.

I would have thought after 2000 that we’d deal with it. But there are people who believe they benefit from this problem who are not going to allow us to do the things we need to do to fix it.

We need to put this at the top of the reform checklist. It couldn’t be more important.

https://twitter.com/MeyerLabin/status/1225556451701272577?s=20

There is a lot to criticize Bill Clinton for. But he was, at least, a normal human being who cared about the well-being of the nation.

Donald Trump is not a normal being and he only cares about himself.

Donald Trump is a simple man but he does have one philosophy, and it’s very primitive: Get even. He has not kept it a secret. Most recently, he had his ghostwriter put it in “Think Big,” his 2009 self-help tome:

 I love getting even when I get screwed by someone. … Always get even. When you are in business you need to get even with people who screw you. You need to screw them back 15 times harder. You do it not only to get the person who messed with you but also to show the others who are watching what will happen to them if they mess with you. If someone attacks you, do not hesitate. Go for the jugular.

And he brought that philosophy to the White House. After Bill Barr erroneously pronounced him innocent of all charges in the Mueller report, Trump said:

There are a lot of people out there who have done very, very evil things, very bad things, I would say treasonous things against our country. And hopefully people that have done such harm to our country — we’ve gone through a period of really bad things happening — those people will certainly be looked at. I have been looking at them for a long time, and I’m saying, why haven’t they been looked at?

By now, Senate Republicans are aware of how he thinks, which is why their hissy fit over House Manager Adam Schiff referring to a news report that Trump had said he’d have their “heads on pikes” if they betrayed him was so obviously disingenuous.

I’ve noted this characteristic of Trump’s for quite a while, and it’s always seemed to me only a matter of time before he decided it was time to take off the gloves for real. We may be at that point right now.

Trump has had three public events this week in the wake of the impeachment trial. They have gotten progressively more unhinged. At the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, it was clear he was barely keeping himself under control. His speech was a toned-down version of his rallies, signaling that his campaign was primed to be a scorched-earth base strategy. But you could tell that he was very, very angry.

On Wednesday he let himself go. Appearing at the National Prayer Breakfast in the morning, he was beyond unrepentant. Trump arrived at the event showing everyone a newspaper with the headline “ACQUITTED” and made it clear he was not looking for any kind of reconciliation. He told Washington Post columnist Arthur Brooks, who had espoused the Christian ethic of “love your enemies” in his speech, “Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you.”

He clearly does not. He went on to attack both Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi on their professions of faith, and issued veiled threats to people he says are enemies but are pretending to be allies.

This is just deeply weird stuff to say to a prayer breakfast pic.twitter.com/GZlNXU57NU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 6, 2020

A couple of hours later he held a formal speech before invited Republican officials and staff in the White House. Without notes or a Teleprompter, he spent a solid hour angrily venting his spleen about the last three years:

We had the witch hunt that started from the day we came down the elevator — myself and our future first lady. And it never really stopped. We’ve been going through this now for over three years. It was evil. It was corrupt. It was dirty cops. It was leakers and liars.

In other words, this was a full-blown MAGA rally held inside the White House. Trump bragged and complained and cursed his enemies and the media. But instead of his star-struck, red-hatted followers clapping and chanting, his Washington henchmen were the audience — senators, Cabinet members, lawyers and staff — all of whom laughed and cheered and applauded with the same fervor as his ecstatic rally-goers. He called out many of their names to thank them for their fealty and they all basked in the glow of his acknowledgment.

That may be the most disturbing aspect of that extremely disturbing performance. The transfusion of Trumpism into the highest levels of the Republican Party is complete. That includes Trump’s philosophy of vengeance. The executive branch has been corrupted for quite some time, but now that Republican senators have disgraced themselves with their votes to acquit the president they have become active collaborators in his ongoing defilement of the office.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said in his floor speech that he expected to be vilified for his vote to convict the president. The White House itself is taking the lead:

The WH is now sending around anti-Romney talking points, including:
•Romney’s decision was unsurprising as this display of self-serving political expedience has come to define his career.
•Romney has a long history of flip-flopping, with no sign of principles to be found.

— Ashley Parker (@AshleyRParker) February 6, 2020

There was a time when senators would have circled the wagons around one of their own, but there was no sign of that. Even Romney’s fellow Utah senator, Mike Lee, who just weeks ago was aghast at the Trump administration’s lies to the Congress about the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, nearly fainted with delight when Trump noticed him at the White House event.

Attorney General Bill Barr was sitting next to Melania Trump, clapping and smiling, obviously undisturbed by Trump’s crude insults toward former FBI employees. Indeed, Barr delivered another gift to his patron this week by issuing an order that he must personally approve any investigation into campaign finance crime, which was obviously meant as a green light both for Trump and for any ambitious federal officer who has dirt on Trump’s rivals.

Trump got away with the Ukraine plot. Why not take it domestic, and go after Trump’s enemies list?

There are already new investigations of former FBI Director James Comey and former acting director Andrew McCabe. Special counsel John Durham is reportedly conducting “the investigation of the investigation” as a criminal case that may include former CIA Director John Brennan.

Now the Senate is lurching into high gear to persecute Hunter Biden with a fishing expedition into his finances. Oddly, the administration has fully cooperated without any subpoenas, instantly providing the Republican committees some of the most highly guarded materials in the Treasury Department. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has outed the purported Ukraine whistleblower on the Senate floor.

CIA Director Gina Haspel was noticed standing and applauding the president at the State of the Union address, a break in the normal protocol that calls for anyone in her position to be strictly nonpartisan. This would suggest that she too may be on the president’s re-election team.

They are all MAGA now.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

Alissa Rubin, a highly knowledgeable and experienced foreign correspondent for the NY Times, has compiled a compelling narrative of the events that nearly led the US and Iran into open war.

It wasn’t Iran-backed Iraqi forces that attacked the US embassy in Iraq with rockets, according to her sources. It was ISIS :

The white Kia pickup turned off the desert road and rumbled onto a dirt track, stopping near a marsh. Soon there was a flash and a ripping sound as the first of the rockets fired from the truck soared toward Iraq’s K-1 military base.

The rockets wounded six people and killed an American contractor, setting off a chain of events that brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war.

The United States blamed an Iraqi militia with close ties to Iran and bombed five of the group’s bases. Angry Iraqis then stormed the American Embassy. The United States then killed Iran’s top general. Iran then fired missiles at American forces and mistakenly shot down a passenger jet, killing 176 people.

But Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started the spiral of events, saying they believe it is unlikely that the militia the United States blamed for the attack, Khataib Hezbollah, carried it out.

Iraqi officials acknowledge that they have no direct evidence tying the Dec. 27 rocket attack to one group or another. And elements of Iraq’s security forces have close ties to Iran, which might make them reluctant to blame an Iranian-linked force.

American officials insist that they have solid evidence that Khataib Hezbollah carried out the attack, though they have not made it public.

Iraqi officials say their doubts are based on circumstantial evidence and long experience in the area where the attack took place.

The rockets were launched from a Sunni Muslim part of Kirkuk Province notorious for attacks by the Islamic State, a Sunni terrorist group, which would have made the area hostile territory for a Shiite militia like Khataib Hezbollah.

Khataib Hezbollah has not had a presence in Kirkuk Province since 2014.

The Islamic State, however, had carried out three attacks relatively close to the base in the 10 days before the attack on K-1. Iraqi intelligence officials sent reports to the Americans in November and December warning that ISIS intended to target K-1, an Iraqi air base in Kirkuk Province that is also used by American forces.

And the abandoned Kia pickup was found was less than 1,000 feet from the site of an ISIS execution in September of five Shiite buffalo herders.

Why does this smell like the truth? Because an ISIS-based attack in Iraq wouldn’t serve Trump’s narrative that ISIS was defeated. Because an Iran-based attack provided a too-perfect excuse to counter-attack Iran.

There is no way to know for sure. What is certainly the case is that Donald Trump’s government lies about everything. There is no reason, without evidence (which Trump will not provide), to accept that Iran was behind these rocket attacks.

And, if you read the article, which you really should, there is every reason to suspect that this was an attack by ISIS. But that wasn’t useful to Trump. Instead, he blamed Iran as part of a Wag the Dog strategy to distract from his impeachment. And we nearly went to war.

Our acting president will have his revenge. He’s sworn to it. Getting even is one of the few rules Donald Trump lives by (only self-serving ones, naturally). With Bill Barr riding shotgun at the Department of Justice, there will be no further investigations into Trump or his campaign without Barr’s approval. Customs and Border Patrol is already getting even with Trump’s former home state of New York for being uncooperative in rounding up unauthorized immigrants. Trump is making an enemies list and checking it twice:

“It’s payback time,” a prominent Republican told me last week. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day,” another source said. Names that came up in my conversations with Republicans included Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Mitt Romney, and John Bolton. “Trump’s playbook is simple: go after people who crossed him during impeachment.”

A source close to Trump tells Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair that John Bolton tops the list. The White House may attempt to quash release of Bolton’s new book. Sherman’s source says Trump wants Bolton criminally investigated. 

Digby wrote yesterday about McCay Coppins’s Atlantic offering on the billion-dollar propaganda and disinformation campaign Trump’s forces have planned for you. It’s chilling. Gird your loins. *

But having just watched Jojo Rabbit, the McCoppins piece reminded me of a progressive messaging campaign that thwarted a T-party putsch to close a local library. You can read about it here. But heading into Oscars weekend it might be more entertaining to just watch a short film:

The 2011 Troy, Michigan “Book-Burning Campaign” was a clever bit of guerrilla marketing carried out in social media and on street corners. But one wonders if inviting people to a MAGA book-burning party after Trump’s reelection would even make a dent in voters’ minds now. It might simply further erode confidence in any and all news amidst what McCoppins describes as “the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history.” But I can dream.

I have no idea how to combat “censorship through noise.” We are in terra incognita. Here be dragons.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

* Update: “Grid you loins” didn’t make sense to me either.

Speaking of propaganda:

Fox News’ own research team has warned colleagues not to trust some of the network’s top commentators’ claims about Ukraine.

An internal Fox News research briefing book obtained by The Daily Beast openly questions Fox News contributor John Solomon’s credibility, accusing him of playing an “indispensable role” in a Ukrainian “disinformation campaign.”

The document also accuses frequent Fox News guest Rudy Giuliani of amplifying disinformation, as part of an effort to oust former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, and blasts Fox News guests Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova—both ardent Trump boosters—for “spreading disinformation.”  […]

The research brief is especially critical of Solomon, a former opinion columnist at The Hill whose opinion pieces about Ukraine made unsubstantiated claims about its government interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Solomon’s pieces for The Hill fueled Giuliani’s efforts to dig up dirt in Ukraine, which eventually helped lead to Trump’s impeachment. Trump has also frequently cited Solomon’s questionable reporting on Twitter in his own defense.

While Solomon is portrayed on Hannity’s show as a crusading “investigative reporter”—despite The Hill overtly branding him an opinion columnist—the Brain Room document accuses the contributor of taking part in a Ukrainian smear campaign. “John Solomon played an indispensable role in the collection and domestic publication of elements of this disinformation campaign,” the Fox briefing book notes. 

Those smears, according to the briefing, were driven by people like disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko and the allies of Dmytro Firtash, an indicted Ukrainian oligarch and accused high-level Russian mafia associate (an accusation he denies). Both Lutsenko and Firtash have been seen as forces driving Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine to dig up dirt on Trump’s political enemies. 

Elsewhere in the internal brief, Murphy urges Fox News employees to focus on a wide range of alleged journalistic misdeeds from Solomon, including ”non-disclosure of conflicts, use of unreliable sources, publishing false and misleading stories, misrepresentation of sources, and opaque coordination with involved parties.” 

Despite Solomon’s reputation for questionable claims, he continued to be a fixture on Fox News even as impeachment inquiry witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman—who listened in on the infamous quid pro quo call between Trump and Ukraine’s president—testified that “all the elements” of the columnist’s supposed Ukraine reporting were “false.” The Hill announced it would conduct a full review of Solomon’s work. Though he has not appeared on Hannity’s show since Dec. 26, Solomon’s most recent Fox appearance came last Friday on Laura Ingraham’s primetime show.

[…]

The document also disputes the credibility of Trump personal attorney and frequent Fox News guest Rudy Giuliani. While the former New York mayor has regularly appeared on Fox to justify his efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter on Trump’s behalf, Murphy claims Giuliani is easily fooled by Ukrainian disinformation. 

Murphy writes that Giuliani has a “high susceptibility to disinformation” disseminated by Ukrainians like Lutsenko and Firtash. The document notes that two indicted Giuliani pals, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, had “strong reported financial links to Firtash.”

“Reading the timeline in its entirety—not a small task—makes clear the extensive role played by Rudy Giuliani and his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, in spreading disinformation,” Murphy writes. The brief also questions the credibility of diGenova and Toensing, a married pair of Washington lawyers and frequent Fox News guests who appeared across the network’s right-wing commentary shows. 

The pair were regularly deployed by Fox hosts like Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Tucker Carlson to criticize the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry and attack Fox News analysts who questioned the president’s actions. DiGenova briefly stopped appearing on Fox after spewing on-air the anti-Semitic trope that liberal billionaire George Soros “controls” the U.S. State Department. And then he and his wife have altogether ceased appearing on the network since December.

They knew they were full of shit. They were in on it. Check this out from TPM:

Fox News host Sean Hannity was set to play an early role in the response to President Trump’s impeachment inquiry.

TPM obtained text messages between Lev Parnas and a Fox News producer and booker as they attempted to arrange an interview between Hannity and Viktor Shokin, a disgraced Ukrainian prosecutor with an axe to grind against Joe Biden.

The exchange occurred in early October, days before Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman were intercepted by FBI agents at Washington-Dulles International Airport as they boarded a flight on a one-way ticket to Vienna. As CNN reported last year, the pair were headed to Vienna for the interview between Shokin and Hannity.

Texts obtained by TPM show that two Fox News employees — booker Alyssa Moni and executive producer Tiffany Fazio — reached out to Parnas on Oct. 6 asking about when to book a studio for Shokin in Vienna.

The convergence of Fox News and Trump is complete. It’s nice that they have some guy writing a briefing book that proves they are actually disseminating propaganda but the bosses don’t seem to care because they continue to do it.

When you combine the Trump campaign’s social media propaganda campaign, it’s going to be almost impossible to penetrate their bubble to persuade voters.