Showing posts with label spin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spin. Show all posts

Friday, May 12, 2017

Trump Faces Backlash for Comey Firing

via GIPHY


Previous Related Post:
Trump Fires FBI Director Comey

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The folks in the FBI were absolutely not amused that President Trump fired Director James Comey. And Trump hasn't made things any better by changing the story of how and why he did it from hour to hour for three days.

"When I decided to [fire Comey], I said to myself, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story."





It's Over Now According to Spokesperson
Sarah Huckabee Sanders



But . . .







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Via New York Daily News
"Regardless of recommendation I was going to fire Comey," he said told NBC's Lester Holt. "He's a showboat, he's grandstander, the FBI has been in turmoil. You know that, I know that. Everybody knows that."



But . . .







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Just minutes after the NBC Interview, the FBI trolled Trump
with this ominous tweet - a warning perhaps?



Huckabee Sanders vs The FBI Reality











And Trump cancelled a trip to FBI Headquarters



Is this a turning point? asks Charles P. Pierce:




















And All the Karma Comes Flying Back




























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Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Crazy Karl Rove Says Hillary Has Brain Damage

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Karl Rove is struggling to put his troubles behind him, and by that I mean the night  Rove lost his marbles on Fox News when President Obama won Ohio on election night in 2012. He was so bizarre (and obviously wrong) that night he lost his job on Fox News, but after a few weeks Roger Ailes felt sorry for him and welcomed him back.



Now he is going after Hillary Clinton, who hasn't even announced a 2016 run for President yet, by saying she is "brain damaged" by a concussion and blood clot she suffered that same year.

I guess Karl is trying to earn political cred so some Republican might pay for his political expertise in skewing poll numbers again to feed to the trusting Republican voters. But like his warped and damaged party, his "brand" is broken and can't be put back together again. I'm not sure even the Koch Brothers want to pay him this time around.

Here's what Karl said, embroidered with lies. He hasn't changed much since 2012.

New York Post Story
(Rove) said if Clinton runs for president, voters must be told what happened when she suffered a fall in December 2012.
The official diagnosis was a blood clot. Rove told the conference near LA Thursday, “Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that.”
Rove repeated the claim a number of times to the audience. Clinton’s rep said, “Please assure Dr. Rove she’s 100 percent.”
Despite Rove’s claims, then-Secretary of State Clinton was discharged from New York Presbyterian Hospital after spending three days undergoing treatment for a potentially life-threatening blood clot.

The Hillary Camp also said:

There are no words for this level of lying.
~ A Clinton spokesperson via The Wire

And the White House:

Here's what I would say about cognitive capacity, which is that Dr. Rove might have been the last person in America on election night to recognize and acknowledge that the President had won reelection, including the state of Ohio. So we'll leave it at that,"
~ White House Press Secretary Jay Carney

Rove is already backpeddling:

I didn't say she had brain damage, she had a serious health episode.
. . . My point was that Hillary Clinton wants to run for President ... She would not be human if this didn't enter in as a consideration...
. . . I never used that phrase.
~ Karl Rove on Fox News

Now Ex-President Bill Clinton puts the Kibosh on old "Ham" Rove:

I got to give him credit, you know that embodies that old saying, ‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’First they say she faked her concussion, now they say she’s auditioning for a part on The Walking Dead. She works out every week, she is strong, she’s doing great. As far as I can tell she’s in better shape than I am now…I was sort of dumbfounded. You can’t get too upset about it — it’s just the beginning, they’ll get better and better at it. I’m still waiting for them to admit there was nothing in White Water.”
~ via Politicus USA





















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Friday, August 23, 2013

Was Miranda a "Mule" or a Journalist?

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Previous Related Posts:
Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger Spins Away
Smashing Hard Drives: the Miranda - Snowden - Guardian Saga Continues
Glenn Greenwald Threatens to spill UK Secrets
UK Detains Greenwald's Partner, Twitter Wars Erupt

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I was just taking materials back to Glenn.
~ David Miranda, spouse of journalist Glenn Greenwald, on CNN after being stopped and held for nine hours at Heathrow Airport while possibly carrying material from fugitive Edward Snowden





What is the Guardian's Position over David Miranda's Legal Action?
Alan Rusbridger, Editor, Guardian UK: The Guardian is supporting that action and we are supporting it in terms of financing it because David Miranda was acting on behalf of Glenn Greenwald at the time he was detained. So we support that action and I think it's a good thing to challenge that law and see why Terror and Journalism are being elided in this disturbing way.
David Miranda wasn't really "on assignment." He is Glenn Greenwald's partner. Glenn Greenwald's a very busy man and he assists Glenn in his journalistic work, and he was acting as a messenger or intermediary in a way that's difficult for Glenn at the moment because he's got a lot of work to be doing in Brazil, and I think he's also a bit nervous about traveling at the moment.
Was it wrong for the Guardian to pay a non-journalist to act as a courier this way, especially if he didn't know what he was carrying?
Rusbridger: Glenn Greenwald trusts David - he obviously does as his partner, and it was Glenn's decision and David's -- he's a grown-up adult. He wanted somebody he could trust and ... it was important that Glenn had somebody he could trust.
~ Complete Interview Transcript with Alan Rusbridger of Guardian Here

It sounds a lot like he’s being used by Greenwald and doesn’t fully understand the seriousness of what he’s wrapped up in. Now, like any other adult Miranda has agency and did not have the make the trip. And it’s possible he’s downplaying his role to sound innocent.
~ Joshua Foust

In short, the Brazilian was acting as a sort of ‘mule’, though Guardian reports have ignored or under-played this. The Tory MP David Davis, who has bravely campaigned against state surveillance, pointed out yesterday that whatever material was taken from Mr Miranda probably exists elsewhere.
But can you blame the British police for wishing to seize it?
By the way, Mr Miranda acted idiotically in coming via London on his way to Rio de Janeiro, as it is the one place in the world other than America where police were likely to take an interest in him.
~ Stephen Glover on The Daily Mail

Greenwald himself has previously told journalists that his partner assists him in his work. That present ‘work’ consists of engineering the leak of massive amounts of classified intelligence from a source – Edward Snowden – currently granted asylum in Moscow. Greenwald’s partner was travelling through London from a meeting using plane-tickets paid for by the Guardian and – it now transpires – appears to have been carrying files from Snowden. So all those ‘this could happen to any of us’ pieces are only really relevant if you happen to use your partner as a mule for industrial-scale sabotage against states you’re planning to travel to.
~ Douglas Murray on The Spectator

CNN Transcript: Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, Aired August 20, 2013 - 20:00 ET
JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: I sure do. Let's be clear about what Mr. Miranda's role was here. I don't want to be unkind but he was a mule. He was given something, he didn't know what it was, from one person to pass to another at the other end of an airport. Our prisons are full of drug mules.
Glenn's view is, as long as one of the two people on either end of that transaction was a journalist, he can take anything he wants. He could take the nuclear launch codes, he could take the names of our undercover agents --

COOPER: His flight was paid for by "The Guardian," though, so wasn't it in effect he acting in a journalistic capacity?

TOOBIN: No. I don't think that matters a bit who pays for your ticket. I mean, he's on a plane with stuff that is highly classified. You know -- anything he wants, it turns out it wasn't the names of our undercover agents, it was the extremely classified presumably NSA material. That is not the law.

COOPER: But does it -- I mean, he is being detained under a British -- UK Terrorism Act which is -- only supposed to be used to detect and find people who are connected to terrorist. There is no indication that David Miranda -- they knew who he was, they knew he's not connected to some terrorist group.

TOOBIN: Great Britain has its own laws that are similar to ours but then are somewhat different. Their terrorism law takes it one step farther. They say, it's not just the material -- this person is a terrorist, but can be used by terrorist. And frankly, if terrorist know how we surveil their cell phone calls, how we surveil their texts, that could be used for terrorism.
. . . Mr. Miranda was lucky that they used the terrorism law because he wasn't even delayed. He wasn't even stopped overnight. I mean, you know, I'm sure it was inconvenient to be stopped for nine hours at the airport, but, you know, when it -- but you know, when it happens to you on JetBlue they don't even offer you a lawyer.

So, I mean, I just don't think he was sent to the gulag. He was -- he was delayed for a while and they took what appears to be stolen classified information. I think Mr. Miranda actually did pretty well, considering what he was carrying.

. . . The word journalism is not magical immunity sauce that you can put on anything --
 COOPER: Immunity sauce --
 (LAUGHTER)
 TOOBIN: That you can put on anything and make -- eliminate any sort of liability. You know what? If he had the nuclear launch codes on there, he could -- you know, they can take that. If he had the names of undercover operatives, they can take that.

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Miranda states (if you believe him, and I don’t) that he had no idea what he was carrying. Greenwald states that he was transporting Snowden’s stolen, top secret CIA intelligence data on encrypted thumb drives. So basically, you have Greenwald using his spouse as a mule to actively assist Edward Snowden, and you have Miranda apparently lying at the airport when he answers that damned basic security question… “Has anyone given you anything to carry on board?”
Did you lie to airport security, then, David?
~ Louise Mensch on The Telegraph



Ask yourselves if Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras, are actively assisting Edward Snowden in his treacherous dissemination of classified, incredibly sensitive US and UK intelligence? From where I’m sitting, it looks like an attempt to fight charges in advance – by claiming that they are journalists and everything they do is covered by the First Amendment. Hence the New York Times putting Poitras on the cover of its magazine supplement this week and Greenwald’s repeated lies about the role of his husband and the events and aftermath of the detention to British journalists, unchallenged anywhere in the UK press, until I started tweeting about it & wrote my last blog on the topic.
They hope that claiming a journalistic role will protect them when they are stealing, storing and disseminating classified intel about not just NSA snooping but America’s intelligence programmes against China, Russia and so forth. They are, in doing so, risking countless lives. So are the Guardian newspaper.
Louise Mensch on Unfashionista




































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Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger Spins Away

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Previous Related Posts:
Smashing Hard Drives: the Miranda - Snowden - Guardian Saga Continues
Glenn Greenwald Threatens to spill UK Secrets
UK Detains Greenwald's Partner, Twitter Wars Erupt

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Note: In my previous post called Smashing Hard Drives  Editor Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian UK was quoted in his own paper saying that an unnamed "shadowy government group" came storming in and destroyed computers in the basement of the building. However, in an interview today with BBC Radio 4, he said Guardian "destroyed the material ourselves." In fact he said it to BBC, then says it twice in an interview posted on the Guardian website. Which version is true, yesterday's or today's? Are they victims of Government overreach or is this just Spin to get sympathy for Snowden?How much credibility can Guardian have going forward when they post hyperbole with incredible details one day, then roll it back the next day? And the reasons for holding onto this story for a month are rather lame - see Huff Post story below. Also Rusbridger also uses an incredibly tone-deaf phrase when he says that Snowden is "waving a red flag" at the world given the history of both China and Russia. #Derp
~ SnarkAmendment

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Guardian Editor Alan Rushbridger Interviewed by BBC Radio
Rusbridger told BBC Radio 4's The World at One on Tuesday that he agreed to the "slightly pointless" task of destroying the devices – which was overseen by two GCHQ officials at the Guardian's headquarters in London – because the newspaper is in possession of digital copies outside Britain.

. . . "It was a rather bizarre situation in which I explained to them that there were other copies and, as with WikiLeaks, we weren't working in London alone so destroying a copy in London seemed to me a slightly pointless task that didn't take account of the way that digital information works these days," said Rusbridger.

"Given that there were other copies and we could work out of America, which has better laws to protect journalists, I saw no reason not to destroy this material ourselves rather than hand it back to the government."

Rusbridger added that the alternative to destroying the computer hard drives would be "essentially surrendering control of that material" to the courts while fighting a lengthy legal case with only a small prospect of winning.

"It seemed to me fruitless to go through that exercise of fighting that case, which would have meant that we could not write about the Snowden material when there were other copies. So it's simply a matter of transferring our reporting to America," he told The World at One's Martha Kearney.

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From Huffington Post
Rusbridger told The Huffington Post that he could not originally discuss the property destruction, which took place July 20 before two security experts from British spy agency GCHQ, for “operational reasons."

“Having been through this and not written about it on the day for operational reasons, I was sort of waiting for a moment when the government’s attitude to journalism –- when there was an issue that made this relevant,” Rusbridger said.

That moment came after Sunday's nine-hour airport detainment of David Miranda, partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist at the center of the NSA surveillance story.

“The fact that David Miranda had been detained under this slightly obscure schedule of the terrorism act seemed a useful moment to write about the background to the government’s attitude to this in general,” Rusbridger said.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Guardian Video about Smashed Computers, Miranda, and Snowden






From the Video ~ (My Transcript)

Rusbridger: The disturbing thing about the way they treated David Miranda was the use of this "Terror Act." And there's a little noticed section, schedule 7, which effectively suspends all the normal checks and balances which you would have if you were arrested in Heathrow car park. So in mainland Britain if you're carrying journalistic material you have checks and balances, you can go before a judge, you can argue about the public interest and public importance of that work. By doing it in this kind of stateless bit of Britain, a port or an airport transit lounge and calling it terror, they suspend all the normal rules. And I think that is why people have got disturbed by what happened on Sunday.
We've just seen Edward Snowden holed up in Moscow transit lounge, and I think there's a confusion in law as to where you are when you're in a transit lounge or whether ... whose laws are applied to you.
The British Government about 12-13 years ago actually created this "lawless bit of Britain" where anybody can be questioned for up to nine hours without access to a solicitor, and where all your belongings can be confiscated. And there's nothing you can do about it.
(Note: Guardian reported yesterday that David Miranda was offered a solicitor but refused.)

What is the Guardian's Position over David Miranda's Legal Action?
Rusbridger: The Guardian is supporting that action and we are supporting it in terms of financing it because David Miranda was acting on behalf of Glenn Greenwald at the time he was detained. So we support that action and I think it's a good thing to challenge that law and see why Terror and Journalism are being elided in this disturbing way.
David Miranda wasn't really "on assignment." He is Glenn Greenwald's partner. Glenn Greenwald's a very busy man and he assists Glenn in his journalistic work, and he was acting as a messenger or intermediary in a way that's difficult for Glenn at the moment because he's got a lot of work to be doing in Brazil, and I think he's also a bit nervous about traveling at the moment.

Was it wrong for the Guardian to pay a non-journalist to act as a courier this way, especially if he didn't know what he was carrying?
Rusbridger: Glenn Greenwald trusts David - he obviously does as his partner, and it was Glenn's decision and David's -- he's a grown-up adult. He wanted somebody he could trust and ... it was important that Glenn had somebody he could trust.

Why did you take the decision to destroy the files you had in your possession?
Rusbridger: We were faced effectively with an ultimatum from the British Government that if we didn't hand back the material or destroy it they would move to law. That would mean prior restraint, a concept that is anathema in America and in other parts of the world, in which the state can effectively prevent a news publisher from publishing. And I didn't want to get into that position. And I also explained to the UK officials that we were dealing with that there were other copies already in America and Brazil so they wouldn't be achieving anything.
But once it was obvious that they would be going to law, I would rather destroy the copy than hand it back to them, or allow courts to freeze our reporting.



Would handing over the material be seen as a betrayal of Edward Snowden?
Rusbridger: Well, I didn't think we had Snowden's consent to hand the material back, and I didn't want to help the UK authorities know what he had given us.
So, to me, I wasn't going to hand it back to the government and I was happy to destroy it because it was not going to inhibit our reporting. We would simply do it from America and not from London.

In what way did the Government put pressure on you?
Rusbridger: I think the Government were geniuinly torn and to begin with they were not heavy handed. They were reasonable conversations. It was a reasonable dialogue. All I can is that at some point something changed and that switched into a threat of legal action. I don't know what changed or why they changed. I imagine there were different conversations going on within the security apparatus, within Whitehall, within Downing Street, and at some point a message came to me that 'we'd had our fun' and that the time had now come to return the documents.

How do you think this whole episode will affect the way Journalists go about their work?
Rusbridger: I think anybody, any journalist, reading the Snowden revelations ought to realize that with the mass collection of millions and millions of emails, details of phone calls, texts, the business of reporting securely and having confidential sources is becoming difficult. And I think our further revelations will underline that. I mean, obviously this is a much bigger subject than just journalism. And it affects every citizen. But journalists, I think, should be aware of the difficulties they're going to face in the future because everybody in 2013 leaves a really big digital trail which is very easily accessed.
I hope what this will do is lead people back to read the stories that so upset them about the British state. There's been a lot of reporting about what GCHQ and the NSA are up to. And I think what Snowden is trying to draw attention to is the degree in which we are on a road to total surveillance. We're not there yet, but in these documents there is the state ambition to scoop up everything and store it all and to master the internet.
This is a language that's being used internally and Snowden essentially risked his freedom to wave a big red flag and say look, this is the infrastructure they're building.
And I think in America and in Europe (England?), countries (sp) which have recent history of what that counter-surveillance means, this is being taken very very seriously, and has started a big debate. And I think that the danger in the UK is -- we're a kind of blessed country, we haven't had that kind of recent history. The danger is we'd be a little bit complacent about what's being revealed.
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