Month: February 2023

Just another Republican, doing what they do:

A Republican consultant was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison for his role in conspiring to illegally funnel contributions from a Russian national to former President Donald Trump‘s 2016 presidential campaign.

Jesse R. Benton, 45, of The Woodlands, Texas, was convicted in November on a series of charges including conspiracy, contribution by a foreign national, and causing false records to be filed with the Federal Election Commission.

It’s the second time Benton, who has advised numerous GOP lawmakers on campaign strategy, has been convicted of charges related to political contributions.

According to court documents, Benton schemed with Roy Douglas, another political adviser, to pass contributions to Trump’s campaign from a Russian national who wanted to meet and take a picture with the candidate.

At the time, Benton was a strategist for the Great America PAC, a super PAC that backed Trump in 2016.

The Russian national allegedly wired $100,000 as part of an arrangement with Benton to attend a Trump campaign fundraiser.

Benton concealed the Russian national’s identity from Trump and his campaign and created a fake invoice to disguise the scheme, court documents say. Acting as a straw donor, Benton allegedly contributed $25,000 of the Russian national’s money to the campaign, while pocketing the remaining $75,000.

The Justice Department said the campaign was unaware of the scheme.

Benton had worked on the campaigns of GOP Sens. Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Benton resigned as McConnell’s campaign manager in 2014 amid fallout from his work on Ron Paul’s presidential campaign two years earlier.

In 2016, Benton was convicted with Ron Paul campaign manager John Tate of concealing $73,000 in payments that went to Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson in exchange for Sorenson’s endorsement of Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign. Both Benton and Tate were sentenced to sentenced to six months of home confinement and probation. Trump pardoned them in December 2020.

They’re all crooks. All the way down.

Former UK foreign secretary’s deep thoughts

David Miliband’s jumping off point is Russia’s war in Ukraine, but his Age of Impunity is deeper and more insidious.

First, former UK foreign secretary Miliband in The New York Times:

The war’s impact goes far beyond the region. It has driven up food and energy prices worldwide, contributing to the record 349 million people experiencing food insecurity and to famine-like conditions in East Africa. The conduct of the war has flouted the most basic international laws and conventions, posing a fundamental threat to the global order. As such, it offers a textbook example of the Age of Impunity.

Impunity is the exercise of power without accountability, which becomes, in starkest form, the commission of crimes without punishment. In Ukraine this goes beyond the original invasion. It has included repeated violations of international humanitarian law, which is supposed to establish clear protections for civilians, aid workers and civilian infrastructure in conflict zones every day. The danger is that few people will ever face consequences for these crimes.

It’s a start. There exists today a culture of impunity, Miliband laments. The “Atlas of Impunity” just published by the Eurasia Group and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs scores all 197 countries on a set of abuses of power: abuse of human rights, unaccountable governance, conflict and violence, economic exploitation and environmental degradation. 

Okay, then what?

Getting closer:

It’s not just war zones. Impunity is a helpful lens through which to understand the global drift to polycrisis, from climate change to the weakening of democracy. When billionaires evade taxes, oil companies misrepresent the severity of the climate crisis, elected politicians subvert the judiciary and human rights are rolled back, you see impunity in action. Impunity is the mind-set that laws and norms are for suckers.

Donald J. Trump is the poster boy.

Dividing countries into democracies and autocracies does not get at the root of the decay of law problem, Miliband argues, citing degraded scores across the globe.

More investigations! More sunlight! More “changing the incentives of would-be abusers”!

Because impunity is the result of an imbalance of power, the forces of accountability must develop “countervailing power.” This notion was first coined by the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith as a way to offset the concentration of corporate economic power that threatened workers and consumers. It now needs wider application.

Wider application than little or none? Miliband assumes countervailing power was ever really brought to bear against the concentration of corporate power. The growing worldwide wealth gap suggests not.

Our very culture, our jobs and products and services we consume are based on impunity. The corporate model for organizing businesses depends on limiting personal responsibility for corporate misdeeds: its shareholders are not personally responsible for the company’s debts. Or crimes. The limited liability company spells that out in its name.

You are staring into a computer screen built by a corporation from parts supplied by several others. Sitting in a chair built by one. Wearing clothes made by several more. Surrounded by a dwelling constructed of materials furnished by them and assembled by a company shielded by the corporate veil. It’s not complete impunity, but it’s damned near close. It’s the water we swim in and cannot see.

“The systems and cultures of impunity are built over time,” Miliband concludes. What we need is “a counterculture of accountability.” 

Just so long as accountability does not meddle with the “primal forces of nature,” as Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) preached in Network (1976):

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion ofdollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines thetotality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today!

[…]

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

How’s that corporatist fable working out for you? For the Ukrainians? For those suffering food insecurity? For people seeing their island homes slowly sink into the ocean? For those seeing their freedoms whittled away by autocrats and their authoritarian followers?

Miliband, admirably, would like to see our world behave more humanly. Fat chance. Fat chance he would challenge the underlying system that nurtured and sustains him and us.

The world Miliband inhabits struck a devil’s bargain with that system centuries ago. We know what we are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.

Fox lies because viewers want lies

Fox is infotainment for the WWE crowd. But it’s nothing new. It’s The Drunkard  without throwing peanuts. David Blaine’s fans know the magic show isn’t real. It’s not clear how many WWE and Fox fans know those entertainments aren’t real. Or how many Fox anchors do, for that matter. But Dominion lawsuit filings gave us a hint this week.

I mean… who can possibly be shocked that Fox News lied? Is any sentient being with half an objective brain surprised by any of this?

— JodiJacobson 🇺🇦 🩸🦷 @jljacobson@mastodon.social (@jljacobson) February 17, 2023

The Drunkard  is a morality play. Like other morality plays, temptations of the flesh, of money, reveal character. We all have our failings and know it. We watch to boo and hiss at the cartoonish bad guys. But we cheer for their redemption, like Scrooge’s every Christmas, knowing it could be us.

Something darker is afoot with Fox and Trumpism. WWE and morality plays don’t lead to violent insurrection. But as the Dominion lawsuit reveals, the lure of money was a big motive behind Fox’s lies.

Michelle Goldberg recounts in The New York Times:

As the Dominion filing lays out, there was panic at Fox News over viewer backlash to the network correctly calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night. Despite its accuracy, the call was viewed, internally, as a catastrophe.

“Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Carlson texted his producer. He added, “An alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.” Sean Hannity, in an exchange with fellow hosts Carlson and Laura Ingraham, fretted about the “incalculable” damage the Arizona projection did to the Fox News brand and worried about a competitor emerging: “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”

Hyping false claims about election fraud was a way for Fox to win its audience back. While the Arizona call was “damaging,” Fox News C.E.O. Suzanne Scott wrote in a text to Fox executive Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son, “We will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”

By feeding Fox viewers lies in the style to which they’d become accustomed.

“Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical,” Hannity texted on Nov. 24. It’s a version of respect indistinguishable from contempt.

But like professional wrestlers, Fox celebrities know to keep up the front for the fans and not to break character in public. Again, it’s not clear how much of their ideological ranting is performance and how much is sincere. Some of each? I’d wager it’s not all kayfabe.

On that, some prelude to how American conservatism got here (from 2021):

Pretensions Republicans had to being a party fueled by patriotism and serious ideas began dissipating with the trickle-down nonsense and “starve the beast” strategy sold by President Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor and pitchman. Reagan budget director David Stockman later admitted it was all a con.

Richard Nixon’s impeachment over Watergate had been an embarrassment for the party. The greater scandal of the Nixon years — his 1968 back-channel effort to “monkey wrench” the Paris Peace talks for political advantage — would not be exposed for years. President Lyndon Johnson hid what he knew at the time but felt Nixon was guilty of treason and had “blood on his hands”. Reagan lied about tax cuts and sold weapons to a terrorist nation to fund a secret war in defiance of Congress. And got away with it.

It was a few short decades from there to Republicans committing war crimes and lying the country into war in Iraq; to nominating a know-nothing pinup for vice president; to electing a white-nationalist, narcissist man-child as Republican savior. The former pro-wrestling impresario would rub elbows with autocrats. The career con man would preen daily as half a million Americans died in a pandemic he denied while pimping a miracle cure. He would instigate an insurrection by cosplaying “patriots” bent on overturning an election and installing him as dictator.

It’s all fun and games until someone puts the flame of democracy out.

Conservatives want to take the country back to the 1950s. Just not to truth, justice, and the American way. That was always for whites then, just as “created equal” remains today more an aspiration than reality.

“The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers” has been on a “long march,” historian Rick Perlstein once wrote, toward “the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.”

Fox doesn’t know where the boundary is either. This time, it might cost them.

There are a lot of unhoused pet owners in LA and I always worry about the health of both the people and the animals. This is a nice story about someone doing a good deed that no doubt makes all concerned breathe just a little bit easier:

There aren’t many willing to voluntarily go out to spend the day on Skid Row, and even fewer with the goal of giving away free stuff, but Dr. Kwane Stewart, also known as “The Street Vet” is nearly famous because of it.

Kwane runs the 501(c)3 non-profit Project Street Vet, that takes donations and volunteers out onto the streets and to homeless encampments to provide free medical care for their pets, and last year they were able to help nearly 600 animals receive medical care.

It’s estimated that 10-25% of the homeless population of America own pets, for companionship, and occasionally for security. It goes without saying that many don’t have the means to take proper care of these animals, whom they often love more than anything else in the world.

In 1997 Stewart was buried in student loan debt when he graduated from the University of Colorado, before bouncing from one miserable rescue shelter to the next. Out of frustration for his career choice, he just started spending a few hours a day providing free medical care to pets of the homeless in LA.

This went on for 7 years until he had an encounter with show biz that spawned Dr. Kwane: The Street Vet, a one-season Canadian TV show that attracted pet product firms, volunteers, and philanthropists to his mission.

In 2020, he and his brother Ian started his non-profit that provides free exams, vaccines, flea medications, supplies, and information to people experiencing homelessness on how to raise their animals with the limited means they possess.

Charity organizations partner with animal clinics and Project Street Vet to open pop-up clinics where the homeless can bring in their pets for even more sophisticated medical care, as well as procedures like spaying and neutering. Project Street Vet also assists qualified pet parents with their pet’s veterinary care through financial assistance grants.

Their website produced a 2021 year-in-review which they describe as being very generous.

Their 2022 report for activities in Atlanta, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Webster, Florida, report that Project Street Vet saw and helped nearly 600 pets, as well as nearly 150 people receive financial assistance.

They rely entirely on charitable contributions, and anyone who wants to donate time or money can do so here.

I befriended an unhoused fellow in my neighborhood a while back largely because of his adorable friendly little dog named Rufus who was just irresistable. One day the man just disappeared and we wondered what had happened. As it turned out someone had stolen Rufus and he went into a mental health spiral landing in an inpatient ward for a couple of weeks. When my friend was better he went looking at animal shelters and as kismet would have it, Rufus was in one of them and they were reunited.

The last time I saw them, he had just gotten a Section 8 apartment in another part of town and was working part time. He and Rufus saved each other’s lives.

 

Here is DeSantis’ asshole move o’ the day. (It’s like he has a schedule…)

As news zipped across Florida that the governor had threatened to eliminate Advanced Placement classes, some parents discussed moving out of the state to protect their children’s chances at a good education. And high school students, some of them enrolled in AP classes, tried to fathom what was happening.

Prisha Sherdiwala, a 17-year-old junior in Palm Harbor, Fla., is taking three AP classes this year to boost her GPA and to make her more attractive to college admissions officers, a strategy drummed into her by her school counselor. But Sherdiwala has also grown to love the strenuous environment of her AP English Literature, Chemistry and Calculus courses, despite the hours of homework each week.

“In the APs, I am surrounded by other people who enjoy the rigor,” Sherdiwala said. “And I tend to have teachers that are really well-versed in what they are teaching.” What will happen, she wants to know, if all of that goes away her senior year?

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) warned Tuesday that he may withdraw state support for AP programs, intensifying his ongoing conflict with the College Board, which oversees all AP classes, including an African American studies course the DeSantis administration says leans left and lacks “educational value.” Earlier this month, the College Board said it was revising the course to eliminate lessons on Black Lives Matter and the reparations movement.

After the College Board said Florida’s criticism of its AP African American studies course amounted to “slander,” DeSantis suggested his state might drop AP classes from its schools. Instead, he said, schools could expand alternatives, such as the International Baccalaureate and Cambridge Assessment programs, which, like AP classes, permit students to earn college credit by passing an exam.

It remains unclear what the governor can do to nix AP classes, although he may be able to halt Florida’s practice of paying AP exam fees ($97 per test) for public school students. If DeSantis follows through, hundreds of thousands of students will be affected: Over 199,000 Florida students took AP classes in the 2020-2021 school year, The Washington Post has reported, and roughly 366,000 AP tests were administered statewide at the end of that year.

The stakes are high for Florida families, both financially and in terms of their children’s competitiveness during college applications. Scores of three and above on the five-point AP test scale help students qualify for college credit, lowering the price of a bachelor’s degree. Moreover, AP courses are seen by college admissions officers as a marker of ambition, intelligence and industriousness.

“Parents in this state need to be paying attention to this threat,” said Katie Hathaway, a Jacksonville parent whose son will enter high school next year. “I want him and every student in the state to have access to these valuable courses with college credit opportunities.”

The suggestion from DeSantis has prompted strong backlash from national education leaders. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement that DeSantis is placing his political aspirations ahead of students. DeSantis, a possible contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has won acclaim in conservative circles for executive actions and legislation limiting discussion of race and gender in schools.

“AP classes have become an avenue for American students to get a head start to college,” Weingarten said. “The alternatives floated by DeSantis, the International Baccalaureate and Cambridge Assessment, don’t provide the same breadth of course offerings and are not widely accepted by other colleges and universities.”

He’s chasing as many teachers out of the profession as he can, destroying elementary schools by banning books, demeaning smart and sensitive high school kids and taking over public colleges to replace them with Christian nationalist leadership. It’s weird that an Ivy League education lawyer would be so hostile to education but then he is a man without a soul so he cares about nothing but himself.

This is going to take a more systematic response from parents. There’s little evidence so far that that’s happening.

Yes, a coup attempt took place — and Fox News operated as Trump state media to help him.

Emptywheel on how these stunning Dominion lawsuit emails may help Jack Smith’s case:

As you read through Dominion’s motion for summary judgment against Fox News — and trust me, you should read it! — keep in mind not just how it proves Fox to be nothing but a propaganda platform aiming to help the Republican Party, but also the evidence it makes available to Jack Smith as he considers charges against those who used false claims about voting fraud to gin up a coup attempt.

Just as one example, Sean Hannity has played a role in every Trump legal scandal — serving as a back channel to Trump for Paul Manafort, participating in Rudy Giuliani’s attempts to gin up dirt on Hunter Biden as the first impeachment unfolded, and helping White House officials stave off the resignations of Trump’s White House Counsels in advance of January 6. But in each case, investigators only got his communications via other subjects of the investigation, as when DOJ found Manafort’s WhatsApp texts to Hannity saved in Manafort’s iCloud account or when the January 6 Committee got Signal texts Hannity exchanged with Mark Meadows from the former Chief of Staff’s production. Republicans chose not to call Hannity as a pro-Trump witness in the Ukraine impeachment.

With its filing, Dominion has given a snapshot of the ways and whys in which Fox News helped magnify false voter fraud claims, especially (though not exclusively) those of Sidney Powell.

It all takes place against the backdrop of a huge backlash against Fox after it called AZ for Joe Biden. When Fox presented the truth about the election, viewers started fleeing to Newsmax, with Trump’s encouragement. The filing describes the panic that ensued.

[O]n November 9, the impact of Fox’s Arizona call became more evident to Fox executives. Carlson told [Fox News CEO Suzanne] Scott directly: “I’ve never seen a reaction like this, to any media company. Kills me to watch it.” Ex.211. Scott immediately relayed the email to Lachlan Murdoch. Ex.212 . She told Briganti that Sammon “did not understand the impact to the brand and the arrogance in calling AZ,” which she found “astonishing” given that as a “top executive” it was Sammon’s job “to protect the brand.” Ex.213. And on that day–“day one,” as Scott termed it, Fox executives made an explicit decision to push narratives to entice their audience back. Ex.214 at FoxCorp00056542. Scott and Lachlan Murdoch exchanged texts about the plan going forward: “Viewers going through the 5 stages of grief. It’s a question of trust the AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them . at FoxCorp00056541 . Murdoch: “Yes. But needs constant rebuilding without any missteps. Id. Scott Yes today is day one and it’s a process.” [Dominion’s emphasis removed]

Hannity described how much reporting the truth (and Chris Wallace serving as a competent moderator for a Presidential debate) had undermined Fox’s brand.

Hannity told Carlson and Ingraham on November 12: “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”

The response to Jacqui Heinrich’s fact check of a Trump tweet is particularly stunning, as Hannity immediately called to have her fired for uttering the truth.

Meanwhile, later that night of November 12, Ingraham was still texting with Hannity and Carlson. In their group text thread, Carlson pointed Hannity to a tweet by Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich. Ex.230 at FNN035_03890511 . Heinrich was “fact checking” a tweet by Trump that mentioned Dominion–and specifically mentioned Hannity’s and Dobbs’ broadcasts that evening discussing Dominion. Ex.232; Ex.231. Heinrich correctly fact-checked the tweet, pointing out that top election infrastructure officials said that, “‘There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes ,changed votes ,or was in any way compromised’” Id Ex.232.

Carlson told Hannity: Please get her fired. Seriously …. What the fuck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Ex.230 at FNN035_03890511. Tucker added: “I just went crazy on Meade over it.” Id. at FNN035_03890512 . Hannity said he had “already sent to Suzanne with a really?” He then added: “I’m 3 strikes . Wallace shit debate [] Election night a disaster [.] Now this BS? Nope. Not gonna fly. Did I mention Cavuto?”

The filing describes how after Hannity “dropped a bomb” about Heinrich’s fact check with Scott, Heinrich deleted her tweet.

Hannity indeed had discussed with Scott. Hannity texted his team: “I just dropped a bomb.” Ex.292 at FNN055_04455643. Suzanne Scott received the message. She told Jay Wallace and Fox News SVP for Corporate Communications Irena Briganti: “Sean texted me–he’s standing down on responding but not happy about this and doesn’t understand how this is allowed to happen from anyone in news. She [Heinrich] has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted.” Ex.233 . By the next morning, Heinrich had deleted her fact-checking tweet. Ex.283.

For over two years, the right wing has squealed about a media outlet prohibiting the dissemination of dodgy claims from a Murdoch outlet. It turns out that Murdoch was, in that same time period, “censoring” true facts about Trump’s dodgy claims.

I wait with bated breath for James Comer to scheduled a hearing on the “censorship.”

Tucker Carlson, especially, recognized Trump’s role in this. He warned that Trump “could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.

“What [Trump]’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”

After January 6, Tucker called Trump,”a demonic force, a destroyer.”

Fox appears to have perceived that they had to play along with Trump’s false claims or risk permanent damage to their brand.

As noted, this lawsuit focuses closely, though not exclusively, on Sidney Powell’s false claims, from which even Trump publicly dissociated on and off. As such, much of this evidence may be more useful to DOJ in any ongoing investigation (if there still is one) of Powell’s monetization of claims she knew to be false. But even there, the evidence is key for Smith’s lawyer inquiry into Trump’s lies.

In an effort to rebut any Fox claim that it was simply reporting on lawsuits, Dominion lays out how the lawsuits filed served only as a vehicle to make false claims publicly.

Infact, none ofthe accused statements even meets the basic requirement that it report on a pending proceeding. As the Court recognized in its prior ruling, any statement made in a broadcast that occurred before November 25, 2020 could not possibly satisfy the “of … proceedings” requirement because the lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell–the only Fox guest who actually filed a lawsuit containing the defamatory allegations about Dominion–had not been filed by that date. See FNN MTD Order, p.46. And even after that date, the broadcasts in question hardly mentioned the existence of legal proceedings concerning Dominion, let alone purported to be a substantially accurate report ofthose proceedings. “[A]t no point did Dobbs or Powell attribute the statements … to an official investigation or a judicial proceeding. A reasonable observer would have no grounds to believe that her statements constituted a report of an official proceeding.” Khalil, 2022 WL 4467622 at 6.

Fox wasn’t covering lawsuits. It was magnifying false claims, and doing so because it knew that’s what its viewers, and Trump, demanded.

One accused false claim is of particular import, given the bases Powell and others used to pursue outrageous actions: A December 10 Lou Dobbs broadcast on which Sidney Powell claimed there had been a Cyber Pearl Harbor.

Nonetheless, on the next day, December 10, Dobbs had Powell on again, where she repeated the false (and repeatedly debunked) story about the Smartmatic and Dominion machines being designed to flip votes to rig elections for Hugo Chavez,and allowing people to login and manipulate votes . See ¶179(q );Appendix D. But rather than questioning Powell’s claims, Dobbs attacked Attorney General Barr for saying he’d seen no sign of any significant fraud that would overturn the election and told Powell “We will gladly put forward your evidence that supports your claim that this was a Cyber Pearl Harbor,” noting “we have tremendous evidence already,” id. which he now admits was not true. See Ex.111,Dobbs 46:25-47:10,86:20-24 . Dobbs had seen no evidence from Powell, nor has he since. Id.

Powell had sent her claims about a “Cyber Pearl Harbor” to Dobbs (who forwarded to his team) in advance of the show. Ex.450;Ex.451. Prior to the show, Dobbs published a tweet to the @loudobbs Twitter account with the claim that “The 2020 Election is a cyber Pearl Harbor,” and embedding the very document Powell had sent to him just hours before which stated that Dominion was one off our entities that had “executed an electoral 9-11 against the United States” and “a cyber Pearl Harbor,” that “there is an embedded controller in every Dominion machine,” and that they had “contracts ,program details, incriminating information ,and history” proving these claims.¶179(p); Appendix D.

Later the same day, after Powell appeared on the 5pm broadcast and before the 7pm unedited rebroadcast of the show, Dobbs again tweeted “Cyber Pearl Harbor @SidneyPowell reveals groundbreaking new evidence indicating our Presidential election came under massive cyber-attack orchestrated with the help of Dominion, Smartmatic, and foreign adversaries.” ¶179(r); Appendix D. Dobbs conceded at his deposition that this tweet was false Powell had not presented any such evidence on his program that day. Ex.111,Dobbs 269 :2-271:5.

People have long used Trump’s favored Fox programs to lobby Trump (for example, Roger Stone did so spectacularly well to get a pardon). And this story appeared on one of Trump’s favorite shows just over a week before Powell and Patrick Byrne would use the Solar Winds hack (which would be exposed in the interim week, starting on December 14) as their excuse to get Trump to use a claim of foreign election interference to seize the voting machines. In other words, this was the national security excuse Powell and Byrne were seeking to give Trump an excuse to assert Executive authority to seize the voting machines.

Worse still, as Dominion notes, Fox did all this not just knowing that it would harm Dominion. They did this knowing the intent was to harm the United States.

On November 10, Steve Bannon told Maria Bartiromo, straight out, that THE PLAN was to delegitimize Joe Biden.

“71 million voters will never accept Biden. This process is to destroy his presidency before it even starts; IF it even starts … We either close on Trumps victory or del[e]gitimize Biden … THE PLAN.” Steve Bannon to Maria Bartiromo, November 10, 2020 (Ex. 157)

Carlson, too, knew what he was doing.

On November 18, [Tucker producer Alex] Pfeiffer texted Carlson that powerful election fraud allegations like Powell’s “need to be backed up” and could lead to undermining an elected president if Biden’s confirmed,to which Carlson responded, “Yep. It’s bad.”

“It’s bad,” Tucker recognized from the start. But that didn’t stop him from participating in efforts to undermining the duly elected President.

We’ve long known that Fox was better understood as a wing of the Republican party than as a news organization (indeed, the filing describes Rupert Murdoch looking for ways to “help[] any way we can” in Georgia).

But this filing makes it clear that in a bid to cater to viewers who were fed false claims by Trump, Fox played right along with the false claims that would lead to insurrection. Jack Smith is already examining multiple parts of this effort. This filing makes evidence that would otherwise be unavailable accessible to prosecutors.

Fox News knew their platforming of Trump’s false claims was doing damage to the country. And they did it anyway.

Whether or not Smith can use any of this in a criminal case is unknown. But it certainly informs it.

Following up on Tom’s post below here’s Philip Bump on Fox’s mistakes that may lead to losing a billion dollar defamation suit:

“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” the spokesperson said, “but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.”

That will be determined in court. But these are the decisions that led to the suit in the first place.

Failing to challenge Trump’s false claims during his presidency. There would be no appetite for Trump’s false claims about election fraud had they not been given oxygen for months before the election. From the spring of 2020 forward, he and his team at the White House were elevating debunked and misleading claims about the purported risk of electoral fraud. Over and over, it was pointed out that these assertions were meritless and clearly motivated by Trump hoping to undermine a likely defeat. But Fox News rarely held Trump or his claims up to significant scrutiny.

“They, you know, by and large, didn’t get tough with us,” Trump’s former press secretary Stephanie Grisham said of the network in 2021. “They just took what we were saying and disseminated it.”

This was clearly because the network understood that Trump supporters were a central part of its audience. The Republicans most loyal to Trump were the ones who watched Fox News. On-air personalities like Shep Smith who challenged the prime-time-opinion hosts’ presentations of Trump found remaining at the network untenable.

“I thought it was important that I stay there,” he told CNN in 2021. “If you feel like the Fox viewers were getting mis- or disinformation, I was there to make sure that they got it straight.” This was a minority position.

There was a danger to the network in all of this. As Peter Baker and Susan Glasser wrote in their 2022 book “The Divider”: “What [Fox News founder Roger] Ailes saw in Trump that he did not see in any other Republican politician of recent years was someone who connected with the Fox audience even more than Fox did.”

That meant unusual deference to Trump so not to alienate viewers. So, coming into the 2020 election, Fox News’s audience had come to expect near-complete fealty to Trump’s rhetoric from the network.

The early election-night call of Arizona for Biden. It’s ironic that a key part of Fox News’s cascade toward creating space for the Dominion claims was a brash prediction that ended up being correct.

The network was the first to call Arizona for Biden on the night of the election, nearly completely closing the door on Trump’s path to reelection. Recognizing that, the call sparked widespread outcry within the White House. Multiple people connected to the administration reached out to Fox to complain.

They should have. The call was too early and predicated on bad data. That Biden managed to eke out a narrow win was not vindication of the call itself. It was, instead, a lucky escape.

Thanks in part to non-data-driven outcry from Trump, the early call was pilloried by Fox News’s audience. Right-wing competitors to Fox News amplified the criticism. Dominion’s filing documents some of the internal consternation.

Fox’s Chief White House Correspondent told Sammon and FNC President Jay Wallace, “we are taking major heat over the AZ call … Our viewers are also chanting ‘Fox News sucks’, something I have never heard before.” … internal Fox emails [state] “Holy cow, our audience is mad at the network,” and “They’re FURIOUS”

From election night on, Fox News suddenly found itself playing defense against its pro-Trump base.

The rise of an alternative. That created space for competitors, most notably Newsmax.

Newsmax had existed for a while before the 2020 election, but Fox News’s sudden unpopularity and its eventual call of the election for Biden boosted the opportunity for a network willing to explicitly and repeatedly hype Trump’s false fraud argument. In an interview with the New Yorker in late November 2020, Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy admitted that his network’s fraud content was bearing fruit.

“You know what? At the end of the day, it’s great for news,” Ruddy said. “The news cycle is red-hot, and Newsmax is getting 1 million people per minute, according to Nielsen, tuning into Newsmax TV. I think it’s good.”

Inside Fox, this threat was clearly recognized, according to the documents obtained by Dominion.

“[T]he lack of any meaningful editorial guidance may be a positive for them at least in the short term,” a senior vice president wrote to other Fox executives in November 2020. He noted Newsmax’s willingness to elevate conspiracy websites like Gateway Pundit. “ … This type of conspiratorial reporting might be exactly what the disgruntled [Fox News] viewer is looking for.”

“Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Tucker Carlson texted his producer in the same time frame. “We’re playing with fire, for real … an alternative like [N]ewsmax could be devastating to us.”

Writing to an outside individual in a message obtained by Dominion attorneys, Fox News’s Dana Perino noted the “RAGING issue about fox losing tons of viewers and many watching — get this — newsmax! Our viewers are so mad about the election calls (as if our calls would have been any different. It’s just votes!)”

“[T]his day of reckoning was going to come at some point,” Perino added — “where the embrace of Trump became an albatross we can’t shake right away if ever.”

Even Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch weighed in on the threat.

“These people should be watched, if skeptically,” he said of Newsmax. “ … Everything at stake here.”

A willingness to contest with Newsmax for the pro-Trump, pro-fraud audience. So the stage was set.

Fox’s staff on both Fox News and Fox Business fell into a few categories.

There were those hewing to reality, like host Neil Cavuto who cut away from a White House news conference including false claims about fraud. That prompted some internal consternation, with executive Raj Shah — a former member of Trump’s communications team, warning about the threat to the Fox brand, according to messages mentioned in the Dominion filing.

There were those who downplayed the claims about fraud, like Tucker Carlson. Carlson was one of the first people to publicly call out Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s lack of evidence for her wild claims about Dominion, though, according to messages obtained by the company, his private excoriations were much more critical than his on-air one. (Carlson’s on-air comments ended up aiding Dominion in an earlier court fight.)

There were those who rejected the claims in private — but created space for them publicly. Sean Hannity claimed in a deposition that he “did not believe [Powell’s claims] for one second,” for example, but he nonetheless hosted her and allowed her to share her claims, even after Carlson called her out.

Then there were those who appear as though they may have actually believed the nonsensical allegations — or, at least, offered few qualms. The Dominion filing isolates host Maria Bartiromo as particularly important in having elevated Powell’s claims. But Bartiromo’s engagement in the effort to bolster Trump’s claims went well beyond that. At the end of November 2020, she hosted Trump for a lengthy conversation in which he presented unfounded claims of fraud without any pushback.

Fox hosts and executives were sympathetic to keeping Trump in power. Remember Stephanie Grisham’s comment about the Trump administration “[taking] what we were saying and disseminat[ing] it?” One senior vice president warned another executive that Bartiromo had “[Republican] conspiracy theorists in her ear and they use her for their message sometimes.”

The overlap with politics here is inescapable. Sean Hannity was an overt supporter of Trump; at one point shortly after the election an executive worried about his interest in touting Trump’s allegations according to messages obtained by Dominion: “I think Sean will see the wisdom of this track eventually, but even this morning he was still looking for examples of fraud.”

And then there is Rupert Murdoch. In the quote above about how “everything is at stake” in the network’s fight with Newsmax, the Fox chairman also offered a path forward for his team.

“Trump will concede eventually,” he said in that same message, “and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can.”

Unquestionably meaning the Georgia runoff elections for the Senate — with the “help” presumably aimed at boosting the Republican candidates or getting their viewership to turn out to vote.

Being the pro-Republican network has been good for Fox’s business, given that it helps the network own a significant chunk of American cable-news viewers. Further downstream, it is also why the company faces this massive, dangerous threat from Dominion.

Trump couldn’t have done it without them.

But there’s this interesting little wrinkle that I haven’t head discussed much in all this:

When Donald Trump pledged in 2016 to “open up” libel laws, critics guffawed, noting that a U.S. president lacked the authority to tinker with Supreme Court doctrine.

Now Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential GOP presidential candidate, appears to have his own approach to tearing down barriers protecting news organizations from defamation suits. “Stay tuned,” DeSantis said at an event last week in which he guided a panel discussion on media regulation. During an hour of discussion, DeSantis, an ace practitioner of GOP media-bashing rhetoric, showed why some critics view him as a more dangerous embodiment of Trump’s two-bit authoritarianism. He’s smarter, more informed and more disciplined.

Though no less wrong.

For a politician who abhors the mainstream media, DeSantis sure seems to adore its trappings. His panel discussion took place before a studio audience on a sleek set with a graphic of a spinning globe in the background, overlaid by a banner: “TRUTH.” There was general agreement among the panelists — who included defamation attorney Libby Locke, former Covington (Ky.) Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann and Claremont Institute fellow Carson Holloway — that U.S. news media organizations need a more restrictive legal regime.

“When you’re knowingly putting out false information and, indeed, I’d say these companies are probably the leading purveyors of disinformation in our entire society right now,” said DeSantis, a Harvard Law graduate, “there needs to be an ability for people to defend themselves, not through government regulation or restriction but through being able to seek private right of action.”

Boldface added to highlight the irony of a Republican — whose party has long been committed to limiting the private right of action — extolling the private right of action, essentially a fancy term for people filing lawsuits to enforce their rights.

It’s really too much. But with all the information cascading out about how Fox’s business plan was to boost Trump, it’s hard to imagine that the DeSantis boosting Rupert Murdoch thinks that’s a great idea. As exciting as it may seem to threaten CNN or the NY Times, he knows very well that Fox is the media company that profits from rank partisan character assassination.

Donald Trump’s Big Lie has always had many moving parts, and as strange as it may seem, there are new ones every day.

There was the charge that Trump was winning the election on election night only to lose as the count went into the next day, which Trump and his cronies suggested happened because the Democrats shipped in phony ballots in the dead of night once they realized they were losing. This was the so-called red mirage that everyone knew in advance would be weaponized to persuade Trump voters that the election had been stolen despite the fact that all the votes are never counted on election night. (Trump has said many times that he believes all counting should stop at midnight on election night as if any votes counted later are automatically suspect.)

Then there was the idea that election workers were literally stealing votes which Trump and company illustrated most vividly with their character assassination of Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss who worked in Fulton County, Georgia. The two were accused of pulling fake ballots from suitcases hidden under tables at a ballot-counting center and passing a flash drive with phony election data from one to the other. None of this actually happened, of course. The ballots were legitimate ballots handled with the normal process and the alleged flash drive turned out to be a ginger mint. But it became an article of faith that workers like Freeman and Moss had stolen the election for Biden, leading to the necessity of having state legislatures overturn the electoral college votes to account for it.

There was also the accusation of massive vote fraud perpetrated by the voting machine companies who were allegedly working with everyone from the zombie corpse of Hugo Chavez to nefarious Italians using secret satellites to switch votes to the CIA director being injured while completing a secret CIA operation aiming to seize and destroy evidence of vote tampering on an election-related computer server. These charges led to states having to initiate recount after recount, some happening even a year after Trump was out of the White House, to prove the machines had been compromised.

But perhaps the most essential piece of the Big Lie was the insistence that mail-in voting was a corrupt Democratic scheme to steal elections by “harvesting” ballots, meaning that someone could stuff the ballot box with illegitimate votes.

---

Trump claimed the Democrats were sending mail-in ballots only to Democratic neighborhoods and to non-citizens and other ineligible voters. Trump demagogued that issue mercilessly and was joined in it by his Attorney General Bill Barr who flogged a nonsensical theory that foreign governments were somehow going to get their hands on blank ballots and vote in the election.

Some states have been doing vote by mail for years and the practice was being used in other places in 2020 because we were all being cautious due to the fact there was a deadly pandemic killing thousands of people every day. Trump never cared about that but cleverly set up vote-by-mail as a ready-made excuse in case he lost. In September of 2020, when asked at a press conference before the election if he would allow the peaceful transfer of power if he lost, Trump said, “we’re going to have to see what happens …get rid of the ballots and there will be a very peaceful … continuation of power. We all know what happened.

All of Trump’s silly, reckless claims were nonsense both before and after the election. He lost over 60 election lawsuits but he relentlessly pushed the Big Lie for two solid years, pounding it over and over again until it became an article of faith among most Republicans that the election had been stolen by the Democrats.

Here’s Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson “just asking questions” last night:

Tucker: There are so many unanswered questions. Some of them lingering. How, for example, did Biden get 15 million more votes than his former boss Obama? Was the 2020 election a miracle? Honestly we don't know and don't expect an answer tonight. pic.twitter.com/p4EHElfhLn

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 17, 2023

We have been told repeatedly that because of the GOP’s poor showing in the 2022 midterms, with election deniers losing their races more often than not and GOP voters eschewing mail-in voting at Trump’s behest, Republicans are going to have to re-evaluate their belief in the Big Lie. They say they’re tired of losing. I noted a while back that even Trump himself is suddenly downplaying the Big Lie or, at least, he isn’t obsessing over it the way he did for the first two years. It comes up but now that the campaign is cranking to life, he has other things to talk about so it’s not as prominent. He knows he’s made his point, in any case.

60% of GOP voters still believe the Democrats stole the 2020 election. His job done, Trump is now switching gears and this week endorsed mail-in voting. But don’t imagine that it’s because he now believes that mail-in voting is legitimate. In a fundraising pitch earlier this week he wrote:

“The radical Democrats have used ballot harvesting to cancel out YOUR vote and walk away with elections that they NEVER should have won. But I’m doing something HUGE to fight back. Our path forward is to MASTER the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots in every state we can. But that also means we need to start laying the foundation for victory RIGHT NOW.”

In other words, he’s telling his people to use vote by mail again. (Republicans were way ahead of Democrats in doing that before he came along and blew up their program.) This is a good thing, This is the 21st century and there’s no reason people shouldn’t have the option of conveniently voting before election day.

But read what he says carefully. He’s not saying he was wrong, of course. But neither is he urging officials to encourage mail-in voting, early voting and “harvesting” because it is good for democracy and empowers voters. He still maintains that the Democrats are stealing elections.

Trump premiered the movie “2000 Mules” at Mar-a-Lago and praised it to the heavens. It is a propaganda film by convicted felon and GOP operative Dinesh D’Souza that claims Democratic ballot “mules” were paid to illegally collect and drop off ballots in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, resulting in Biden’s win. When Trump says he plans to “master the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots” that’s what he’s talking about. And it’s almost certainly what many of his followers will hear.

Vote by mail and early voting has been free of any kind of systemic fraud until now. It looks like Trump is looking to change that. 

Fox knews the whole time

Revelations via Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple on the Dominion lawsuit against Fox Infotainment.

Huge day in the Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News defamation case, with both sides filing summary-judgment motions. Dominion's version is a nearly 200-page document bursting with text messages from network talent in the tense days following the 2020 presidential election. 1/

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) February 17, 2023

The argument from Dominion — bolstered by correspondence among the network's top people — is that Fox News knew all too well that the stolen-election claims were a lie, yet they plowed ahead with programming indicating the opposite. /3

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) February 17, 2023

“Syndey Powell is a bit nuts. Sorry but she is,” Laura Ingraham messaged to Tucker Carlson.

So you don’t have to click through:

‘Please get her fired’

Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity wanted Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich fired for fact-checking a Trump statement and tweeting there was “no evidence that any voting deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

“Please get her fired. Seriously…. What the fuck?” Carlson messaged Hannity.

A Fox spokesperson claims Dominion “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context.”

More: After a Fox News staffer correctly fact-checked stuff that was coming out of the network's opinion side, all hell broke loose among the prime-timers. Stunning: pic.twitter.com/gHjwVJoCOJ

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) February 17, 2023

Though Hannity said in private that he knew Trump needed accept the election results, look at what the host presented to his viewers each night: https://t.co/qOS5w1N7LV

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) February 17, 2023

I need to keep reminding myself never to refer to the second half of Fox [etc.]. The operation’s very name is propaganda and none of us need to be reinforcing it by spreading it. No matter how its anchors vainly see themselves.

More material in which Fox News people affirm they're in the news biz: pic.twitter.com/m5e80a1oTE

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) February 17, 2023

Wemple continues:

The minutiae disclosed in the Dominion filing are scandalous: They show just how incompatible is the hosts’ candid chatter with the product they put on the airwaves — and the reason for that gulf is ratings. Period.

By filing its suit and plowing through discovery, Dominion has produced perhaps the most piercing look at the internal goings-on at Fox News in its quarter-century history.

One caveat: News organizations that proceed through discovery in defamation suits rarely look good. Think of the New York Times in the Sarah Palin suit — discovery exposed a shoddy and hurried editorial process that the Times surely didn’t want to see in the light of day.

And when the WikiLeaks dumps of 2016 showed reporters’ emails with people in the political sphere, the results often were unflattering. Yet those instances were far more mild than what we see in these Fox News revelations. This is astounding.

Fox celebrities are ideologues, but they are not stupid. Tucker Carlson’s cackling, dumb-face shtick is just that. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t committed to Trumpism any less than the Murdochs. Fox is a propaganda operation. That’s as obvious as Republicans’ commitment to supressing the vote and eliminating Social Security and Medicare, notwithstanding their “how dare you” outrage at the suggestion.

Yes, he’s a Republican. You had to ask?

For ye have the poor always with you, Jesus said. Now, maybe COVID. And Trumpism? It won’t be going away anytime soon. Even if he does.

Jesus taught that we should love our neighbors. Trump taught disciples they could lie shamelessly and get away with it. The lesson took.

Freshman Rep. George Santos (R) of New York may have lied to voters about 95 percent of his resume. The hammer is yet to come down for that. Meantime, he holds a seat in Congress.

Freshman Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R) of Florida variously described herself as Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European when she served at Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg, Mo., per friends’ accounts to the Washington Post. She did not at that time identify as Hispanic, they say. Her last name then was Mayerhofer.

A Christian, Luna told Jewish Insider in November that she was “raised as a Messianic Jew by her father.” Also, “I am also a small fraction Ashkenazi.” Except three members of her extended family told the Post her father was Catholic. Her late grandfather, Heinrich Mayerhofer, relatives said, served in the Wehrmacht as a teenager.

The conservative congresswoman’s resume may not be so much fabricated as liberally padded.

Which brings us to freshman Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee. He’s now receiving scrutiny from a Nashville TV station:

If you believe Middle Tennessee’s newest congressman, he’s not only a businessman, he’s also an economist, a nationally recognized expert in tax policy and health care, a trained police officer, even an expert in international sex crimes.

But an exclusive NewsChannel 5 investigation discovered that Andy Ogles’ personal life story is filled with exaggerations, a story that’s often too good to be true.

Yes, he’s a Republican. You had to ask?

Ogles claims repeatedly that he is an economist. His congressional bio claims “he studied policy and economics” at Middle Tennessee State University. The school refuses to confirm that. A copy of his diploma shows he received a bachelor of science degree from Middle Tennessee State in 2007.

NewsChannel 5 Investigates checked and, back in 2002, Ogles’ website claimed he had “studied foreign policy and the constitution” at Western Kentucky University and Middle Tennessee State.

There was no mention of economics.

Western Kentucky says when he was there from fall of 1990 to fall of 1993, Ogles actually majored in English and Allied Language Arts.

A 2009 resume found online lists “a degree in international relations, with minors in psychology and English.” Those “executive certificates” from Vanderbilt and Dartmouth are online short courses.

His LinkedIn resume shows he once worked as “executive director” for the Laffer Center — not as an economist. That job appears to have been an administrative position. A search of the center’s website shows no economic reports authored by Ogles.

The congressman’s website also claims that “while working at the Laffer Center, Andy became a nationally recognized expert on tax policy and healthcare, having been featured in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Business Daily.”

But a search of those sites shows only three columns he wrote, in two cases with another person, when he was a lobbyist for the conservative Americans for Prosperity — nothing independently citing him as an expert.

All three were published before he worked for Laffer.

Ogles also claims, not unlike Herschel Walker, the former Georgia Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, a background “as a former member of law enforcement” with special experience in “international sex crimes, specifically child trafficking….”

NewsChannel 5 found that while he was sworn in as a reserve deputy with the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office in July 2009, “he lost that position two years later for not meeting minimum standards, making no progress in field training and failure to attend required meetings.”

“There is nothing in Mr. Ogles training or personnel file that indicates he had any involvement in ‘international sex trafficking’ in his capacity as a reserve deputy,” Williamson County sheriff’s spokesperson Sharon Puckett told NewsChannel 5.

There is more evidence that Ogles puffed up part time work for a nonprofit into being its Chief Operating Officer.

MTSU political science professor John Vile tells NewsChannel 5, “One of the downsides of political parties was the notion of people meeting in smoke-filled rooms and coming to decisions, but one of the advantages was some of these sort of old timers had a better idea of, you know, people’s reputation outside of the media.”

Ogles ignored requests for comment. So did Laffer.

Like students who attended Trump University, anyone who gave money to his phony charity, or who believed puffery that he is a successful businessman, Republican voters are lining up to be suckers.

Trump set the template other Republicans now follow. Trump taught his children well.