Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

[ti-amie]

It should be noted that the Clintons bought a compound next door to their property for the Secret Service detail.

Yes, but, and I'm guessing this is the case with the Bush family too, they bought that home for the Secret Service to have a place to live for their own comfort, as a nice thing for them. Not because they didn't want the damn help to ever use a toilet in their house. Just awful, objectionable people.

You're correct. It's what used to be called common decency.

[ponchi101]

It is not only rude and lack of common decency. It is stupid. These are the people that protect you. You treat them that way and you think they are going to take a bullet for you?

[ti-amie]

[JazzNU]

It is not only rude and lack of common decency. It is stupid. These are the people that protect you. You treat them that way and you think they are going to take a bullet for you?

Seriously. I was saying several months ago, can you just imagine how thrilled the Secret Service agents must have been that got selected for Biden and Harris' protection and pulled off detail for this awful family? And I'd imagine their families were almost as thrilled, don't have to worry as much about them being prime candidates on just a daily basis to catch covid along with the elevated risk associated with their job.

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

Don't they understand that he does this to them too?

Episode 3: Descent into madness ... Trump: "Sometimes you need a little crazy"
Axios
Jonathan Swan, Zachary Basu

Beginning on election night 2020 and continuing through his final days in office, Donald Trump unraveled and dragged America with him, to the point that his followers sacked the U.S. Capitol with two weeks left in his term. This Axios series takes you inside the collapse of a president.

Episode 3: The conspiracy goes too far. Trump's outside lawyers plot to seize voting machines and spin theories about communists, spies and computer software.

President Trump was sitting in the Oval Office one day in late November when a call came in from lawyer Sidney Powell. "Ugh, Sidney," he told the staff in the room before he picked up. "She's getting a little crazy, isn't she? She's really gotta tone it down. No one believes this stuff. It's just too much."

He put the call on speakerphone for the benefit of his audience. Powell was raving about a national security crisis involving the Iranians flipping votes in battleground states. Trump pressed mute and laughed mockingly.

"So what are we gonna do about it, Sidney?" Trump would say every few seconds, whipping Powell more and more into a frenzy. He was having fun with it. "She really is crazy, huh?" he said, again with his finger on the mute button.

It was clear that Trump recognized how unhinged his outside legal advisers were. But he was becoming increasingly desperate about losing to Joe Biden, and Powell and her crew were willing to keep feeding the grand lie that the election could be overturned.

They were selling Trump a seductive but delusional vision: a clear and achievable path to victory. The only catch: He'd have to stop listening to his government and campaign staffs, to cross the Rubicon and view them as liars, quitters and traitors.

Trump's new gang of advisers shared some common traits. They were sycophants who craved an audience with the president. They were hardcore conspiracy theorists. The other striking commonality within this crew was that all of them had, at one point in their lives, done impressive, professional, mainstream work.

Rudy Giuliani once was "America's Mayor," hailed for his handling of 9/11. Powell was a successful attorney who defended Enron. Michael Flynn was a decorated three-star general whom Obama fired and then Trump brought back as his national security adviser, before firing him and ultimately pardoning him. Lin Wood was a nationally known defamation lawyer. Patrick Byrne made a small fortune launching the internet retailer Overstock.com.

One exception was Jenna Ellis. She had a thin legal resume, and had in the 2016 campaign season used adjectives like "idiot," "boorish," "arrogant," "bully," and "disgusting" to characterize Trump and his behavior. But during Trump's presidency, she pushed her way into his inner circle, powered by levels of televised obsequiousness remarkable even for Trumpworld.

Powell and Wood distinguished themselves with their extremism. Even Giuliani began distancing himself, telling anyone who'd listen that Powell didn't represent the president. But Trump promoted Powell as part of his team, and even though he had privately admitted to aides that he thought she was "crazy," he still wanted to hear what she had to say.

"Sometimes you need a little crazy," Trump told one official.

While Trump's campaign team — experienced attorneys such as Justin Clark and Matt Morgan — were scrutinizing issues such as signature verification and access to room monitoring for vote counting, Powell was appealing to Trump's personal mantra to "Think Big!"

She presented the president with a sweeping, multinational conspiracy of foreign interference at a scale never seen before in American history. The fact that she had no evidence that could hold up in court was a minor detail.

Powell and Flynn told Trump he couldn't trust his team. That appealed to a paranoid mentality that always lurked beneath his surface: The FBI was corrupt. His CIA was working against him, and his intelligence community was, too. Why else weren't they showing him the evidence that China, Venezuela, Iran and various other communists had stolen his election win?

To help him bypass these obstacles, they'd need Trump to give them top-level security clearances so they could get to the bottom of the "stolen" election. Trump liked this idea. Why not make Powell a special counsel in charge of election fraud? Why not give her and Flynn the clearances?

Trump's professional staff had learned over time that they had to pick their moments to fight back. On the question of Powell, chief of staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone were of one mind: No way was she getting a top secret clearance.

Powell and Flynn sent Trump advisers documents they said contained the evidence of this far-reaching conspiracy. To the White House staff, it was gibberish — the rantings of a QAnon devotee. But these documents — perhaps the most deranged materials to reach a modern U.S. president — found their way to the West Wing.

According to documents obtained by Axios, Powell and her crew advised Trump that a foreign conspiracy to steal the election involved a coordinated cyberwarfare attack from China, Russia, Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

In arguments in front of Trump in the Oval Office, White House officials pushed back aggressively.

What Powell was claiming to have uncovered would have been the greatest foreign attack in American history. Yet the U.S. intelligence community had seen no evidence of it.

But Powell had an answer for that too: The reason Trump hadn't heard about this from his intelligence officials was because they were actively subverting him and hiding crucial information from him.

His dog whistle to QAnon conspiracy theorists — a curiosity prompted once he learned they "love Trump" — dated back to at least the summer.

On July 1, 2020, Trump met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Todd Young of Indiana and top political aides in the Oval Office for an update on Senate races. Trump was holding a printed slide deck showing the latest key data points, like polling and cash on hand, for the closely watched Colorado Senate race between Republican Cory Gardner and Democrat John Hickenlooper.

Trump looked at the deck and immediately said, "How about that primary last night?"

QAnon-enthusiast Lauren Boebert had won the Republican primary for Colorado's 3rd Congressional District. Consensus in the room was that Boebert's victory was a stunner. The president then addressed McConnell. "You know she’s a believer in that QAnon," he said. "Are you familiar with that, Mitch?" McConnell sat there stone-faced. He didn't move a muscle.

"You know, people say they're into all kinds of bad things and say all kinds of terrible things about them," Trump added. "But, you know, my understanding is they basically are just people who want good government."

The room fell silent. Nobody knew how to respond.

Then all of a sudden Meadows burst out laughing. "I have heard them described a lot of ways, but never quite like that," he said. The meeting participants broke down laughing. "In terror, quite candidly," said a source in the room.

Powell filled the Trumpian Venn diagram between conspiracy theorists and sycophants. She offered the comforting deceptions that Trump was craving in his desperate post-election days and that the people on his team who had actual experience in election law refused to serve him.

In the false and baseless theory she crafted, America's enemies had used two CIA programs — a foreign surveillance program called the "Hammer" and a cyberwarfare weapon called "Scorecard" — to steal U.S. elections.

Her evidence was based on claims from a California computer programmer with a long track record of hawking fantastic-sounding technology. Powell and Flynn claimed that the CIA had been using these programs nefariously since 2009.

Documents her team shared with Trump advisers falsely claimed that top Obama administration intelligence officials John Brennan and Jim Clapper — both enemies of Trump's — had illegally commandeered Hammer to advance Obama's supposed ambition of turning America into a communist client state. They further claimed that Brennan and Clapper had taken the program's source code with them when they left office. China had now mysteriously acquired Hammer, Powell argued.

They described this as an act of war in an Oval Office appearance on Dec. 18. No response should be considered too bold, they said. Trump needed to use the full force of the U.S. government to seize Dominion voting machines and catch the "traitors."

That an American president was even entertaining any of this, raised questions about the state of his mind and his capacity to fulfill his duties.

The evening before that meeting, Giuliani had phoned his old friend, Ken Cuccinelli, second in command at the Department of Homeland Security, asking him whether DHS could seize voting machines. "No," Cuccinelli told Giuliani, politely but firmly. His department did not have that legal authority.

By this point, Trump was mainlining conspiracies. Many of his longest-serving advisers had all but given up trying to reason with him.

His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, billed once by Newsweek as the most influential presidential relative since Bobby Kennedy, receded from the discussions when it came to countering the crazies. Once Giuliani took over, Kushner subsided from view, trying to cut last minute deals in the Middle East and burnish his foreign policy legacy. This frustrated some of his colleagues. Serious intervention was required on the domestic front.

Whether Trump himself was still in charge, or had ceded decision-making to the bottom feeders, was at least an open question.

Listen to Jonathan Swan on Axios' new investigative podcast series, called "How it happened: Trump's last stand."

About this series: Our reporting is based on interviews with current and former White House, campaign, government and congressional officials as well as eyewitnesses and people close to the president. Sources have been granted anonymity to share sensitive observations or details they would not be authorized to disclose. President Trump and other officials to whom quotes and actions have been attributed by others were provided the opportunity to confirm, deny or respond to reporting elements prior to publication.

"Off the rails" is reported by White House reporter Jonathan Swan, with reporting and research assistance by Zach Basu. It was edited by Margaret Talev and Mike Allen. Illustrations by Sarah Grillo, Aïda Amer and Eniola Odetunde.

https://www.axios.com/trump-off-the-rai ... ce=twitter

[JazzNU]

We appear to be gearing up for Pardon Day tomorrow. Where are we posting this nonsense? All in here? A new thread? At the moment, they are thinking it could be over 100 of them.

[ti-amie]

We appear to be gearing up for Pardon Day tomorrow. Where are we posting this nonsense? All in here? A new thread? At the moment, they are thinking it could be over 100 of them.

Someone said he's going to pardon L'il Wayne. I don't know if that's a joke or not.

[ti-amie]

Fox Settled a Lawsuit Over Its Lies. But It Insisted on One Unusual Condition.
Why did the network insist an agreement with the family of a murdered young man remain undisclosed until after the election?

By Ben Smith
Jan. 17, 2021


Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch at the Allen & Company media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2018.Credit...David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

On Oct. 12, 2020, Fox News agreed to pay millions of dollars to the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member, implicitly acknowledging what saner minds knew long ago: that the network had repeatedly hyped a false claim that the young staff member, Seth Rich, was involved in leaking D.N.C. emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Russian intelligence officers, in fact, had hacked and leaked the emails.)

Fox’s decision to settle with the Rich family came just before its marquee hosts, Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity, were set to be questioned under oath in the case, a potentially embarrassing moment. And Fox paid so much that the network didn’t have to apologize for the May 2017 story on FoxNews.com.

But there was one curious provision that Fox insisted on: The settlement had to be kept secret for a month — until after the Nov. 3 election. The exhausted plaintiffs agreed.

Why did Fox care about keeping the Rich settlement secret for the final month of the Trump re-election campaign? Why was it important to the company, which calls itself a news organization, that one of the biggest lies of the Trump era remain unresolved for that period? Was Fox afraid that admitting it was wrong would incite the president’s wrath? Did network executives fear backlash from their increasingly radicalized audience, which has been gravitating to other conservative outlets?

Fox News and its lawyer, Joe Terry, declined to answer that question when I asked last week. And two people close to the case, who shared details of the settlement with me, were puzzled by that provision, too.

The unusual arrangement underscores how deeply entwined Fox has become in the Trump camp’s disinformation efforts and the dangerous paranoia they set off, culminating in the fatal attack on the Capitol 11 days ago. The network parroted lies from Trump and his more sinister allies for years, ultimately amplifying the president’s enormous deceptions about the election’s outcome, further radicalizing many of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

The man arrested after rampaging through the Capitol with zip-tie handcuffs had proudly posted to Facebook a photograph with his shotgun and Fox Business on a giant screen in the background. The woman fatally shot as she pushed her way inside the House chamber had engaged Fox contributors dozens of times on Twitter, NPR reported.

High profile Fox voices, with occasional exceptions, not only fed the baseless belief that the election had been stolen, but they helped frame Jan. 6 as a decisive day of reckoning, when their audience’s dreams of overturning the election could be realized. And the network’s role in fueling pro-Trump extremism is nothing new: Fox has long been the favorite channel of pro-Trump militants. The man who mailed pipe bombs to CNN in 2018 watched Fox News “religiously,” according to his lawyers’ sentencing memorandum, and believed Mr. Hannity’s claim that Democrats were “encouraging mob violence” against people like him.

And yet, as we in the media reckon with our role in the present catastrophe, Fox often gets left out of the story. You can see why. Dog bites man is never news. Fox’s vitriol and distortions are simply viewed as part of the landscape now. The cable channel has been a Republican propaganda outlet for decades, and under President Trump’s thumb for years. So while the mainstream media loves to beat itself up — it’s a way, sometimes, of inflating our own importance — we have mostly sought less obvious angles in this winter’s self-examination. The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan concluded last week that the mainstream press is “flawed and stuck for too long in outdated conventions,” but “has managed to do its job.” MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan said the media had “failed” by normalizing Trump.

I took my turn last week, writing about how a man I worked with at BuzzFeed played a role in the insurrection. One thoughtful reader, a former engineer at Corning, wrote to me to say she’d been reckoning with a similar sense of complicity. The engineer was on the team that developed the thin, bright glass that made possible the ubiquitous flat screen televisions that rewired politics and our minds. She’s now asking herself whether “this glass made it happen.”

When I shared the engineer’s email with some others at the Times, one, Virginia Hughes, a Science editor and longtime colleague, responded: “Everyone wants to blame themselves except the people who actually deserve blame.”

And so let me take a break from beating up well-intentioned journalists and even the social media platforms that greedily threw open Pandora’s box for profit.

There’s only one multibillion-dollar media corporation that deliberately and aggressively propagated these untruths. That’s the Fox Corporation, and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch; his feckless son Lachlan, who is nominally C.E.O.; and the chief legal officer Viet Dinh, a kind of regent who mostly runs the company day-to-day.

These are the people ultimately responsible for helping to ensure that one particular and pernicious lie about a 27-year-old man’s death circulated for years. The elder Mr. Murdoch has long led Fox, to the extent anyone actually leads it, through a kind of malign negligence, and letting that lie persist seems just his final, lavish gift to Mr. Trump.

The company paid handsomely for it, according to Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, who first reported on the settlement and has covered the case extensively.

The Murdoch organization didn’t originate the lie, but it embraced it, and it served an obvious political purpose: deflecting suspicions of Russian involvement in helping the Trump campaign. That’s why the story was so appealing to Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, who kept hyping it for days after it collapsed under the faintest scrutiny. There has never been a shred of credible evidence that Seth Rich had contact with WikiLeaks, and a series of bipartisan investigations found that the D.N.C. had been breached by Russian hackers.

The story of Fox’s impact on the fracturing of American society and the notion of truth is too big to capture in a single column. But the story of its impact on one family is singular and devastating. Seth Rich’s brother, Aaron, reflected on it Friday from his home in Denver, where he’s a software engineer. Seth was his little brother, seven years younger and two inches shorter, but more at ease with people, more popular, better at soccer in high school.

Seth Rich was murdered in the early morning of Sunday, July 10, 2016, on a sidewalk in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Aaron was still wrestling with the shock, reeling from the worst week of his life, when a friend told him that something was happening on Reddit. A news story had mentioned that Seth was a staff member at the Democratic National Committee. While some of the top comments were simply condolences, the lower part of the page was full of unfounded speculation that the young D.N.C. employee — not the Russians — had been WikiLeaks’ source of the hacked emails. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks encouraged the speculation, but it remained low-level chatter about confusing theories for about 10 months. That’s when Fox claimed that an anonymous federal investigator had linked Seth Rich to the leak.

The story took off. It was like “throwing gasoline on a small fire,” Mr. Rich’s brother recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Denver. “Fox blew it out of everyone’s little echo chamber and put it into the mainstream.”

The story collapsed immediately, and in spectacular fashion. The former Washington, D.C., police detective whom Fox used as its on-the-record source, Rod Wheeler, repudiated his own quotes claiming ties between Mr. Rich and WikiLeaks and a cover-up, and said in a deposition this fall that the Fox News article had been “prewritten before I even got involved.”

“It fell apart within the general public within 24 hours,’’ Aaron Rich recalled, yet “Hannity pushed it for another week.” Finally, Aaron Rich said, he sent Mr. Hannity and his producer an email, and the barrage stopped, but he said he never received an apology from the Fox host.

“He never got back to me to say, sorry for ruining your family’s life and pushing something there’s no basis to,” he said. “Apparently, ‘sorry’ is a hard five-letter word for him.”

A Fox News spokeswoman, Irena Briganti, declined to comment on Mr. Rich’s request for an apology.

Fox also pulled the story down a week after it was published, with an opaque statement that “the article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.”

The damage had been done. The story is still in wide circulation on the right, to the point where Mr. Rich was reluctant to share a photograph of himself and his brother for this story with The New York Times. Every time he has done that, he said, the photo — of the brothers at Aaron’s wedding, for instance — has been reused and tainted by conspiracy theorists.

Aaron Rich, who with his brother grew up in Nebraska, said he hadn’t thought much about who beyond Fox’s talent was responsible for the lies about his brother. When I asked him about Rupert Murdoch, he wasn’t sure who he was — “I’m really bad at trivia things.” That’s the genius of the Murdochs’ management of the place: They collect the cash while evading responsibility and letting their hosts work primarily for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Rich isn’t party to the settlement with his parents, and he declined to discuss its details. His parents said in a court filing that the barrage of conspiracy theories had damaged their mental health and cost his mother, Mary, her ability to work and to socialize.

But he said he simply doesn’t understand why Fox couldn’t simply apologize for its damaging lie — not in May of 2017, not when it reached the settlement in October, and not when it finally made the settlement public after the election and wished his family “some measure of peace.”

It reminds me of a well-known political figure now leaving the stage, one who has been strikingly allergic to apologizing, expressing any empathy or engaging in any soul searching about his role in mobilizing the ugliest of American impulses.

“I was glad they stopped doing it,” Seth Rich’s brother said, a bit hopelessly. “But they never admitted they lit the fire.”

Ben Smith is the media columnist. He joined The Times in 2020 after eight years as founding editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. Before that, he covered politics for Politico, The New York Daily News, The New York Observer and The New York Sun.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/busi ... ticleShare

[JazzNU]

Someone said he's going to pardon L'il Wayne. I don't know if that's a joke or not.

Not a joke. Widely believed at the time to be part of the reason why he was out shuckin and jivin back before the election. 50 felt the heat of the blowback a bit more and dropped the dime on there essentially being payment for the endorsements. Though he was talking about money, he left the door open for it being for more. Dwayne is not in any way, shape, or form hurting for money.

[JazzNU]

Mooch has been dunking on him daily in public for well over a year at least, so they must be incredibly desperate to bolster numbers. Mooch said the invite says he can bring 5 guests.

[ponchi101]

Great.
But he is still Anthony Scaramucci, a man that was fired by Trump himself only five days into his tenure.
How come people forget that slight detail escapes me.

[ti-amie]

[ponchi101]

You really must have nerves..

[JazzNU]

Watch this segment from All in with Chris Hayes last night. It is likely very educational for many on here, possibly most educational for those members who live outside of the United States. But maybe not, because it's not like US History classes don't downplay the brutality of slavery. Link is also below the video if you'd prefer to watch it on the MSNBC site.






https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/whit ... 9656773795