It's Not Journalism

... it's rat-fucking.

(pay wall)

Opinion - Verdict upends Project Veritas’s journalism defense in infiltration case

On Thursday evening, a jury in D.C.'s federal courthouse returned a verdict against Project Veritas in a case stemming from its 2016 efforts to infiltrate Democracy Partners, a progressive political consulting firm that assisted Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The verdict, which included a damages award of $120,000, followed roughly a week of testimony in the case and one day of jury deliberations.

The verdict upends claims by attorneys for Project Veritas, the video-sting operation founded by James O’Keefe, that its four-part video series on Democracy Partners amounted to old-fashioned journalism.

“We thank the Jury for its decision and are deeply appreciative of the time and effort the members of the Jury devoted to consider our case," Democracy Partners said in a statement. "Hopefully, the decision today will help to discourage Mr. O’Keefe and others from conducting these kind of political spy operations.”

In a statement Thursday night, O’Keefe announced that Project Veritas will appeal the verdict. “The jury effectively ruled investigative journalists owe a fiduciary duty to the subjects they are investigating,” O’Keefe said in a statement, noting also that “investigative journalists may not deceive the subjects they are investigating.” O’Keefe was a constant presence at the trial, as were several other Project Veritas staffers.

At issue in the proceedings were two civil charges leveled by Democracy Partners in its 2017 suit — that Project Veritas engaged in unlawful wiretapping and fraudulent misrepresentation when it used false identities, bios and pretenses to earn the trust of Democracy Partners co-founder Robert Creamer and others. Project Veritas planted an intern — Allison Maass, who presented herself under the pseudonym “Angela Brandt” — in the firm’s offices, where she taped the goings-on from a camera attached to a button on her shirt.

“Fake, fake, fake,” said Joseph Sandler, attorney for Democracy Partners, in his closing statement on Wednesday.

Arguments in the case involved dueling descriptors: Democracy Partners claimed that Project Veritas, under O’Keefe, was orchestrating a “political spying operation” to assist candidate Donald Trump; Project Veritas said it was following in the grand tradition of American journalists who gather their news by going undercover. In his closing statement, Paul Calli, an attorney for Project Veritas, referenced the glory days of late “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace, once a virtuoso of undercover journalism and ambush interviews.

“Mike Wallace with his hidden camera,” said Calli, who said he could still hear the “tick-tick-tick” of the iconic “60 Minutes” clock. He didn’t mention that Wallace moved away from undercover tactics as his career matured. “I have no doubt that what we started has become a plague ... we got caught up in the drama more than we caught up in going after the facts,” said Wallace in a 2006 CNN interview.

The reference to Wallace drives at the larger dynamic looming over Democracy Partners v. Project Veritas. If nothing else, the litigation exposed the unethical lengths to which O’Keefe’s organization will go to secure footage that explodes on the internet, as well as the growing gap between Project Veritas and traditional news organizations when it comes to clandestine reporting methods. Long before O’Keefe established Project Veritas in 2011, American journalists were falling out of love with undercover tactics — a breakup aided by Food Lion’s 1995 suit against ABC News for its clandestine exposé on the grocery behemoth’s unsavory meat-handling practices.

Mainstream outlets, accordingly, have spent the past couple of decades either swearing off undercover work or narrowing the circumstances when it’s warranted. “Undercover reporting can be a powerful tool,” wrote Greg Marx in CJR in 2010, “but it’s one to be used cautiously: against only the most important targets, and even then only when accompanied by solid traditional reporting.”

Meanwhile: Court documents and testimony show that Project Veritas, in putting together its four-part “Rigging the Election” video series on Democracy Partners, did the following:

• Concocted fake identities and narratives to deceive Democratic operatives
• Offered cash bonuses to staffers to get certain content from the targets of the investigation
• Gave a $20,000 donation to a progressive organization in order to “keep mouths watering” at Democracy Partners, in the testimony of a Project Veritas staffer
• Crafted a voter-fraud scheme and proposed it to Creamer, co-founder of Democracy Partners.

That last one is a doozy. A Project Veritas representative — Daniel Sandini, doing business as “Charles Roth” — hatched an initiative in which operatives would register out-of-state residents and even undocumented immigrants by using employer IDs and addresses of foreclosed properties, according to court records and testimony. These folks would be “surrogate voters” who would make up for the multitudes who had been disenfranchised by voter ID laws.

Of course, it screamed voter fraud. Creamer never bit on the scheme and testified that he considered “Roth” “well-intentioned” but ignorant of voting laws. And here’s the kicker: Even though it was Project Veritas that advanced the idea, its lawyer hammered Democracy Partners at trial for not doing enough to distance themselves from “Roth” after fielding the “surrogate voter” idea.

Got that?

Project Veritas must not have been spending enough time reading Poynter.org for ethics guidance. “Especially since the Food Lion misrepresentation and hidden-camera stuff, news organizations don’t do the ‘full Ginsburg’ ” of clandestine tactics, “where they put them all together at the same time,” says Lee Levine, a longtime First Amendment attorney. Contemporary examples of undercover stories are harder and harder to come by these days, says Levine — and even in the years when the practice was tapering off, he continues, news organizations that did embrace it were "very careful not to lie.”

Correct. Several years ago, Mother Jones decided that the best way to expose conditions in private prisons was to send in a writer to work as a guard. “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard,” by Shane Bauer, highlighted the scandalous crevices of the industry and hauled in all kinds of awards. Just how did Mother Jones get Bauer into the Corrections Corporation of America facility? Here’s how: “Shane Bauer applied for a job with the Corrections Corporation of America. He used his own name and Social Security number, and he noted his employment with the Foundation for National Progress, the publisher of Mother Jones. He did not lie.” (Disclosure: The Erik Wemple Blog’s wife is a staff writer at Mother Jones.)

Maass, the Project Veritas plant in the Democracy Partners infiltration, presented a résumé for her assignment. Asked at trial whether it contained anything that was true, Maass responded, “No.” Like other Project Veritas staffers on the stand, Maass didn’t shrink from confirming the deceptive measures that fueled the infiltration — what Sandler termed a “web of lies conjured by Project Veritas.” In his closing statement, Calli embraced the ethos of undercover reporting, asserting that Project Veritas propagates “deceit, deception and dishonesty” so that the organization can “speak truth to power.”

The trial, however, wasn’t simply a week-long seminar on journalism ethics. It turned, in large part, on prosaic legal technicalities and the tense testimony of a former union official. Following the publication of the Project Veritas videos, AFSCME withdrew from financial arrangements with Creamer and associated organizations.

Since Democracy Partners sued for fraudulent misrepresentation and unlawful wiretapping — and not defamation resulting from the content of the videos themselves — it had to prove that the damages stemmed from Project Veritas’s pre-publication actions: the operations and tactics themselves, that is. Former AFSCME executive Scott Frey testified that the infiltration was indeed a factor in the decision to cut ties, though he also said, in questioning from Calli, that the video itself was a “major factor."

That left an important judgment call in the hands of the jurors. Judging from the verdict, they viewed the infiltration as an actionable transgression itself. Too much fake-fake-fake.

On Getting Rat-Fucked

I don't know what it's like "out there". Like most Americans, I don't spend much time or energy looking at my country from the perspective of any other country.

I've tried to do that, and I know I should try to get back to doing that again, but also like most Americans now, it seems the problems here in USAmerica Inc are such that make it impossible to fight the fire from anywhere but inside the house. And we'll just have to trust that others can see our efforts, and provide the perspective we need to stay oriented and focused.

Of course, that assumes there are more good people who want to help - and who want to see us succeed - than there are who feel the need to tear us down.

Ever cautious though.

A little paranoia is, as always, in order. Because there's always some asshole who just wants to see it all crash and burn.

WaPo:

Suspicious robocall campaign warning people to ‘stay home’ spooks voters nationwide

An unidentified robocaller has placed an estimated 10 million calls in the past several weeks warning people to “stay safe and stay home,” spooking some Americans who said they saw it as an attempt to scare them away from the polls on Election Day.

The barrage of calls all feature the same short, recorded message: A computerized female voice says the message is a “test call” before twice encouraging people to remain inside. The robocalls, which have come from a slew of fake or unknown numbers, began over the summer and intensified in October, and now appear to have affected nearly every Zip code in the United States.

The reach and timing of the calls recently caught the attention of YouMail, a tech company that offers a robocall-blocking app for smartphones, as well as some of the country’s top telecom carriers, which determined from an investigation that the calls may be foreign in origin and sophisticated in their tactics. Data from YouMail shows that the calls have reached 280 of the country’s 317 area codes since the campaign began in the summer.

While the robocall does not explicitly mention the 2020 presidential election or issues that might affect voters’ well-being, including the coronavirus pandemic, it still threatens to create confusion, said Alex Quilici, YouMail’s chief executive. And it illustrates worrisome vulnerabilities in the country’s phone system, he said, that sophisticated actors could exploit.

“If you wanted to cause havoc in America for the elections, one way to do it is clearly robocalling,” Quilici said. “This whole thing is exposing [that] it can be very difficult to react quickly to a large calling volume campaign.”

When Zach McMullen received a call Monday telling him it was “time to stay home,” he assumed the warning was related to the coronavirus. His co-workers at an Atlanta bakery had received the same message, and they initially figured it was the city government enforcing its public health guidelines.

But the “robotic voice” gave McMullen pause, as did the second call — and then the third, and the fourth — delivering the same monotone message on the same day.

“I think they mean stay home and don't vote,” the 37-year-old concluded.

The torrent of calls illustrated the wide array of technologies that voters say are being used to convince and confuse them in the closing days of a dizzying presidential campaign. Four years after Russian agents exploited social media to spread divisive messages, Americans have come to expect similar efforts everywhere — including on their phones.

Robocalls long have represented a national scourge: Scammers contributed greatly to the 4 billion automated calls placed to Americans just last month, outwitting years of efforts by Washington regulators to crack down on the spam. But these tactics — dialing Americans en masse, sometimes illegally and without their consent — have taken on greater significance given the contentiousness of the 2020 presidential race. The same tools that have helped candidates and their allies reach their supporters properly also represent new avenues for falsehoods to spread widely — and without much visibility.

The “stay home” robocall appears to have bombarded Americans since the summer, sometimes yielding a roughly estimated half-million calls each day, according to data collected by YouMail.

USTelecom, a trade association for AT&T, Verizon and other telecom giants, has sought to trace and combat the campaign in recent days, according to Brian Weiss, the group’s spokesman. He said early evidence suggests that the calls are “possibly coming from Europe,” though they are sometimes routed through other foreign telecom providers.

The unidentified actor behind the robocall campaign also appears to have relied on other sophisticated tactics to ensure that the companies behind the country’s phone systems could not easily stop it, according to USTelecom and other robocall experts. That includes cycling through phone numbers, often using a number similar to the one owned by the person they are trying to dial, a practice known as spoofing.

Unlike most robocall scams, which seek to swindle Americans into returning the calls and surrendering sensitive information, the “stay home” campaign also has raised suspicions because the calls include no such effort.

“They’re usually threatening you to provide your Social Security number or something will happen to you,” said Giulia Porter, the vice president of marketing at TelTech, which owns the smartphone blocking app RoboKiller. “From this robocall, we can’t see anything that is indicating they’re actually trying to get something from you.”

The nature of the message gave many recipients across the country the impression that the cryptic alert sought to keep them from the polls. The concerns they expressed — that it might succeed in turning people off from voting — reflect long-standing fears that the pandemic could undermine participation in the 2020 election. Numerous states have expanded opportunities to vote by mail in response to safety concerns, and election administrators have taken pains to retrofit in-person voting for the coronavirus, supplying hand sanitizer and other safeguards.

“My reaction was this is likely an attempt to get people not to vote,” said Kevin Porman, a 40-year-old living outside Indianapolis.

For some recipients, there was no risk of that.

Laurie Chiambalero, a nurse in Philadelphia who has a Boston area code, said she answered the call out of a belief that it might be a friendly public health reminder.

“But when I got it a second time,” she said, “it really felt like it was telling me to stay indoors the next few days because of the election."

Chiambalero, however, said she’d already cast her ballot. “They’re not intimidating me,” she announced.

Not Fun

So this wasn't fun at all, but I wanted to see what we might expect to come from the dark side of the botweb, so I engaged this - whatever this is - on Twitter.

I'm convinced this "guy" is a bot, and it was set to troll me to a certain degree and when the algorithm crapped out, it moved on. It replied to me 8 times, never with anything but memes and the one "cartoon" clip tweeted by James Woods.

Be advised - these are pretty awful. And not surprising, they have that old familiar ring to it. 

ie: "I kinda actually hate women because they're a little threatening since I'm still a little hung up with my mommy issues, so I have to pretend that her sexuality is the only thing any woman really has going for her, etc."

You were warned - here we go.

Has anyone ever figured this Biden rant out? It’s truly strange. Like science fiction level strange... pic.twitter.com/yEaiHUN9hg

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) August 13, 2020

Stop Doom-Scrolling

...and do something useful.

Everything is terrible. And much of it can be directly tied back to Trump. Though he didn’t devise environmental degradation, create COVID-19, or invent racism, he has inarguably advanced all these disasters, and as you read the endless bits of bad news on your social feeds, it’s hard not to feel hopeless. Sometimes it feels like doomscrolling is all you can do — whether it’s a mortifying addiction to pain and disappointment, or a restless search for something hopeful.

But I have a great alternative: hateclicking.

Early this year, the Pew Research Center released a study suggesting that executives in the tech sector had a fairly dire diagnosis for the pattern of what the study called “digital disruption.” In fact, a full 49% of the respondents felt that the “use of technology will mostly weaken core aspects of democracy and democratic representation in the next decade.”

But in June, TikTok users and K-pop fans had a different idea about the virtues of digital disruption. Famously, they joined forces to throw off the official count for Trump’s rally in Tulsa. It was beautiful, it was brilliant, and it was all done from the confines of their respective quarantine.

It’s in this spirit that I offer hateclicking as a practical way to cost the Trump reelection campaign money, and to distort the data they’re capturing for further advertising investment.

What follows was written by a friend of mine who is running for public office in the 2020 election cycle. Not wanting to piss off his campaign manager, he can’t publish it under his own name. I told him I’m more than happy to.

What hateclicking is, and how to do it.

The Trump campaign is unprecedented in how aggressively it runs paid online advertisements. These ads nominally push out messaging and solicit the opinions of voters, but in actuality they are about generating fundraising dollars and merchandise sales, collecting data, and building a giant house file of email addresses and phone numbers to use for further fundraising and merch sales.

Advertisers pay social media companies and publishers like Google in a variety of ways, but generally each time an ad is clicked it costs the advertiser money, usually from a few pennies to a few dollars.

Here is where you come in. Every day (and up to a couple times a day) Google “Trump” or “Trump Store” or “MAGA Hat” or something similar and then click on the ad links. Look for the ones that say “Ad” next to them, those are the ones they are paying for.

What follows was written by a friend of mine who is running for public office in the 2020 election cycle. Not wanting to piss off his campaign manager, he can’t publish it under his own name. I told him I’m more than happy to.

If thousands of us do this a few times a day it will increase the campaign’s online ad spend while producing nothing of value for them. It is probably not helpful to refresh and click again more than a handful of times per day because online advertising platforms often filter out repetitive frequent clicks from the same computers and don’t bill for them.

Here are some things you can do for bonus points:

• Let the page load fully before closing it so that trackers have time to register the click
• If you happen to click through to a Trump merchandise page, add a few items to your cart before you close the window — this can tie up inventory and make some items appear unavailable to legitimate MAGA shoppers
• Right Click on links to open multiple links in new tabs
• Use your browser’s “incognito” mode to search and click multiple times
• Use a VPN to click on ads from virtual locations multiple times.
• If you can stomach it, follow some prominent GOP pages on Facebook so that you start getting Trump Facebook Ads and then click and comment on those to also use up their Facebook ad budget.

Happy hating, everybody.

What They're Up To

Judd Gregg on with Ari Melber

When Gregg says, "The country just isn't going to go with a socialist...", I think we can hear some of what the GOP is planning.

First, Ari shoulda pushed back on the "Bernie's a socialist" thing. There may well be a few "socialist" aspects to Bernie's philosophy, but I haven't heard him espousing anything that sounds like "the people must seize the means of production" - and that's kinda the big one.

Anyway -

The obvious part is that Cult45 want to run against Bernie. We've seen efforts from more than a couple of "conservatives" to push Republicans to vote for Bernie in the open primaries.

But I think it goes beyond the usual divide-n-conquer and scare-mongering they always use against "liberals" and anyone who shows signs of getting people together in order to resist the Daddy State. 

I think they have mountains of rat-fuckery shit they were planning to use against him if he'd pulled it off in 2016, and knowing the bellicose propensities of these clowns, I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude they're champin' at the bit, obsessing over the phrase that always haunts their subconscious: "An unused weapon is a useless weapon".

They've been running the same plays this time. They're tearing away at Biden - and the others too - but leaving Bernie more or less unscathed, except for a few potshots, and the usual needling of the anti-Bernie factions in the Dem coalition, which makes the Press Poodles salivate and put out the latest installment of "Democrats in disarray...".

If Biden gets the nomination, he goes into the general election wounded, and they can keep pimping the resentment and victimhood bullshit that the Bernie Bros stewed about the whole time in 2016, and are still muttering about.

If Bernie gets the nomination, they'll pull out every little piece of shit they've been stock-piling for the last 5 years, and you know it's gotta be pretty fuckin' awful.

(some of the shit I've seen, just with a little light browsing on 4chan and Gateway and Breitbart, is bad enough that I won't put it up here even with quotation marks and *s - it's bad - it's really fuckin' bad)

And actually, I think Gregg has probably had a bit of a firsthand look, and knows a little something about what they're planning, and what's likely to happen this time around no matter who the Dems nominate.

So I'll listen to the Never Trumpers, and the ex-Repub rat-fuckers, and the "conservative brain trust dweebs" but like Dick Nixon said: "Don't count on the fella who made the mess to clean it up."

Today's Tweet

If this doesn't make your skin crawl, then you're part of the problem.

ERNST: "IA caucuses are this next Monday evening. And I'm really interested to see how this discussion today informs and influences the Iowa caucus voters, those Demcaucus goers. Will they be supporting VP Biden at this point?"

H/T @JaxAlemany pic.twitter.com/tYYkSPuIDY

— Alan He (@alanhe) January 28, 2020

And there it is, kids. The latest version of the Benghazi Moment - when Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz (et al) admitted on camera that their "investigations" had nothing to do with finding the truth, or national security, or the well-being of Americans who sometimes risk it all serving the country.

They don't really care about any of that.

It was all about the typical GOP rat-fucking - intended only to drag Hillary down in the polls.

And here we are again.

The Statement

These women will save our asses if we just stay the fuck outa their way and let 'em do it.

Marie Yovanovitch's statement in testimony yesterday before committee in the House:

Opening Statement of Marie L. Yovanovitch to the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Committee on Oversight and Reform

October 11, 2019

Thank you for the opportunity to start with this statement today.

For the last 33 years, it has been my great honor to serve the American people as a Foreign Service Officer, over six Administrations—four Republican, and two Democratic. I have served in seven different countries, five of them hardship posts, and was appointed to serve as an ambassador three times—twice by a Republican President, and once by a Democrat. Throughout my career, I have stayed true to the oath that Foreign Service Officers take and observe every day: “that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;” and “that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Like all foreign service officers with whom I have been privileged to serve, I have understood that oath as a commitment to serve on a strictly nonpartisan basis, to advance the foreign policy determined by the incumbent President, and to work at all times to strengthen our national security and promote our national interests.

My Background

I come by these beliefs honestly and through personal experience. My parents fled Communist and Nazi regimes. Having seen, first hand, the war, poverty and displacement common to totalitarian regimes, they valued the freedom and democracy the U.S. represents. And they raised me to cherish these values as well. Their sacrifices allowed me to attend Princeton University, where I focused my studies on the Soviet Union. Given my upbringing, it has been the honor of a lifetime to help to foster those principles as a career Foreign Service Officer.

From August 2016 until May 2019, I served as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. Our policy, fully embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike, was to help Ukraine become a stable and independent democratic state, with a market economy integrated into Europe.

Recent Ukrainian History

Ukraine is a sovereign country, whose borders are inviolate and whose people have the right to determine their own destiny. These are the bedrock principles of our policy. Because of Ukraine’s geostrategic position bordering Russia on its east, the warm waters of the oil-rich Black Sea to its south, and four NATO allies to its west, it is critical to the security of the United States that Ukraine remain free and democratic and that it continue to resist Russian expansionism.

Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea, its invasion of Eastern Ukraine, and its de facto control over the Sea of Azov, make clear Russia’s malign intentions towards Ukraine. If we
allow Russia’s actions to stand, we will set a precedent that the United States will regret for decades to come.

Supporting Ukraine’ s integration into Europe and combatting Russia’s efforts to destabilize Ukraine have anchored US policy since the Ukrainian people protested on the Maidan in 2014 and demanded to be a part of Europe and live according to the rule of law. That was US policy when I was appointed Ambassador in August 2016, and it was reaffirmed as the policy of the current administration in early 2017.

The Fight Against Corruption

The Revolution of Dignity, and the Ukrainian people’s demand to end corruption, forced the new Ukrainian government to take measures to fight the rampant corruption that long permeated that country’s political and economic systems. We have long understood that strong anti-corruption efforts must form an essential part of our policy in Ukraine; now there was a window of opportunity to do just that.

Why is this important? Put simply: anti-corruption efforts serve Ukraine’s interests. They serve ours as well. Corrupt leaders are inherently less trustworthy, while an honest and accountable Ukrainian leadership makes a U.S.-Ukraine partnership more reliable and more valuable to the U.S. A level playing field in this strategically located country—one with a European landmass exceeded only by Russia and with one of the largest populations in Europe—creates an environment in which U.S. business can more easily trade, invest and profit. Corruption is a security issue as well, because corrupt officials are vulnerable to Moscow. In short, it is in our national security interest to help Ukraine transform into a country where the rule of law governs and corruption is held in check.

Two Wars

But change takes time, and the aspiration to instill rule-of- law values has still not been fulfilled. Since 2014, Ukraine has been at war, not just with Russia, but within itself, as political and economic forces compete to determine what kind of country Ukraine will become: the same old, oligarch-dominated Ukraine where corruption is not just prevalent, but is the system? Or the country that Ukrainians demanded in the Revolution of Dignity— a country where rule of law is the system, corruption is tamed, and people are treated equally and according to the law?

During the 2019 presidential elections, the Ukrainian people answered that question once again. Angered by insufficient progress in the fight against corruption, Ukrainian voters overwhelmingly elected a man who said that ending corruption would be his number one priority. The transition, however, created fear among the political elite, setting the stage for some of the issues I expect we will be discussing today.

Understanding Ukraine’ s recent history , including the significant tension between those who seek to transform the country and those who wish to continue profiting from the old ways, is of critical importance to understanding the events you asked me here today to describe. Many of those events—and the false narratives that emerged from them—resulted from an unfortunate alliance between Ukrainians who continue to operate within a corrupt system, and Americans who either did not understand that corrupt system, or who may have chosen, for their own purposes, to ignore it.

It seems obvious, but bears stating, that when dealing with officials from any country—or those claiming connections to officialdom—one must understand their background, their personal interests, and what they hope to get out of a particular interaction before deciding how to evaluate their description of events or acting on their information.

To be clear, Ukraine is filled with many citizens and officials who want the very things we have always said we want for the United States: a government that acts in the interests of its people; “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” The overwhelming support for President Zelenskiy in April’s election proved that. And it was one of our most important tasks at the embassy in Kyiv to understand and act upon the difference between those who sought to serve their people and those who sought to serve only themselves.

Addressing Specific Concerns

With that background in mind, I would like to briefly address some of the specific issues raised in the press that I anticipate you may ask me about today.

Events Before and After I served in Ukraine

I arrived in Ukraine on August 22, 2016 and left Ukraine permanently on May 20, 2019. Several of the events with which you may be concerned occurred before I was even in country. Here are just a few:

• the release of the so-called “Black Ledger” and Mr. Manafort’ s subsequent resignation from the Trump campaign;
• the Embassy’s April 2016 letter to the Prosecutor General’s Office about the investigation into the Anti-Corruption Action Center or AntAC 
• the departure from office of former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

Several other events occurred after I was recalled from Ukraine. These include:

• President Trump’s July 25 call with President Zelenskiy
• All of the discussions surrounding that phone call
• Any discussions surrounding the reported delay of security assistance to Ukraine in Summer 2019.

During my Tenure in Ukraine

As for events during my tenure in Ukraine, I want to categorically state that I have never myself or through others, directly or indirectly, ever directed, suggested, or in any other way asked for any government or government official in Ukraine (or elsewhere) to refrain from investigating or prosecuting actual corruption. As Mr. Lutsenko, the former Ukrainian Prosecutor General has recently acknowledged, the notion that I created or disseminated a “do not prosecute” list is completely false—a story that Mr. Lutsenko, himself, has since retracted.

Equally fictitious is the notion that I am disloyal to President Trump. I have heard the allegation in the media that I supposedly told the Embassy team to ignore the President’s orders “since he was going to be impeached.” That allegation is false. I have never said such a thing, to my Embassy colleagues or to anyone else.

Next, the Obama administration did not ask me to help the Clinton campaign or harm the Trump campaign, nor would I have taken any such steps if they had.

I have never met Hunter Biden, nor have I had any direct or indirect conversations with him. And although I have met former Vice President Biden several times over the course of our many years in government, neither he nor the previous Administration ever, directly or indirectly, raised the issue of either Burisma or Hunter Biden with me.

With respect to Mayor Giuliani, I have had only minimal contacts with him—a total of three that I recall. None related to the events at issue. I do not know Mr. Giuliani’s motives for attacking me. But individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.

Finally, after being asked by the Department in early March to extend my tour until 2020, I was then abruptly told in late April to come back to Washington from Ukraine “on the next plane.” You will understandably want to ask why my posting ended so suddenly. I wanted to learn that too, and I tried to find out. I met with the Deputy Secretary of State, who informed me of the curtailment of my term. He said that the President had lost confidence in me and no longer wished me to serve as his ambassador. He added that there had been a concerted campaign against me, and that the Department had been under pressure from the President to remove me since the Summer of 2018. He also said that I had done nothing wrong and that this was not like other situations where he had recalled ambassadors for cause. I departed Ukraine for good this past May.

Although I understand that I served at the pleasure of the President, I was nevertheless incredulous that the U.S. government chose to remove an Ambassador based, as best as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives. To make matters worse, all of this occurred during an especially challenging time in bilateral relations with a newly elected Ukrainian president. This was precisely the time when continuity in the Embassy in Ukraine was most needed.

Before I close, I must share the deep disappointment and dismay I have felt as these events have unfolded. I have served this nation honorably for more than 30 years. I have proudly promoted and served American interests as the representative of the American people and six different presidents over the last three decades. Throughout that time, I—like my colleagues at the State Department—have always believed that we enjoyed a sacred trust with our government.

We make a difference every day on issues that matter to the American people—whether it is war and peace, trade and investment, or simply helping with a lost passport. We repeatedly uproot our lives, and we frequently put ourselves in harm’s way to serve this nation. And we do that willingly, because we believe in America and its special role in the world. We also believe that, in return, our government will have our backs and protect us if we come under attack from foreign interests.

That basic understanding no longer holds true. Today, we see the State Department attacked and hollowed out from within. State Department leadership, with Congress, needs to take action now to defend this great institution, and its thousands of loyal and effective employees. We need to rebuild diplomacy as the firstresort to advance America’s interests and the front line of America’s defense. I fear that not doing so will harm our nation’s interest, perhaps irreparably.

That harm will come not just through the inevitable and continuing resignation and loss of many of this nation’s most loyal and talented public servants. It also will come when those diplomats who soldier on and do their best to represent our nation face partners abroad who question whether the ambassador truly speaks for the President and can be counted upon as a reliable partner. The harm will come when private interests circumvent professional diplomats for their own gain, not the public good. The harm will come when bad actors in countries beyond Ukraine see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system. In such circumstances, the only interests that will be served are those of our strategic adversaries, like Russia, that spread chaos and attack the institutions and norms that the U.S. helped create and which we have benefited from for the last 75 years.

I am proud of my work in Ukraine. The U.S. Embassy, under my leadership, represented and advanced the policies of the United States government as articulated, first by the Obama Administration and then by the Trump Administration. Our efforts were intended, and evidently succeeded, in thwarting corrupt interests in Ukraine, who fought back by selling baseless conspiracy theories to anyone who would listen. Sadly, someone was listening, and our nation is the worse off for that.

Thank you for your attention. I welcome your questions.

Dear Democrats

It's already started.

It doesn't matter what the truth is. The right radicals are going to make shit up and slag you with it.

Just like the Troopergate bullshit, and the Vince Foster bullshit, and the Swift Boat bullshit, and the Kenyan Usurper bullshit, and and and.

So, none of you boogers ever played any high school football?

Proving again that even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while, here's one of the very few life lessons my coach was actually right about.

You're looping around the end, out of the backfield, going over the middle for a short pass.

The ball's coming to you, and you know this much:

There's a linebacker in front of you, and a safety coming from your right, and whether you catch the ball or you drop the ball, they're gonna hit you so hard your dog dies.

So get something out of it for us, and catch the fuckin' football.

Color Me Unsurprised

When we know shows like SVU base their episodes on "true crime" and case files from real things that actually happened, it takes a special kind of rat-fucker to reverse it and spin it back in the opposite direction.

MMFA:

After author and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll reported that President Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., pushed a conspiracy theory that the claim was "ripped-off a plot" from a 2012 episode of NBC procedural Law & Order. Before being amplified by Trump Jr., the conspiracy theory was spread by a Twitter account associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory and another account whose content has regularly been shared by “seemingly-automated accounts.” It has also been pushed by the Daily Mail's political editor.

On June 21, Carroll wrote in New York magazine’s The Cut that 23 years ago, Trump assaulted her in a department store dressing room. According to Carroll, Trump “lunge[d] at me, pushe[d] me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and [put] his mouth against my lips.” She wrote that he then pulled down her tights and assaulted her. Carroll told two close friends at the time, both of whom “confirmed the allegations to New York and to [The New York] Times.”

Even though her friends confirmed that Carroll told them about the incident at the time, social media accounts and message boards have claimed that Carroll “ripped-off a plot” from an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit that dealt with a similar sexual assault against an actor. However, the episode aired in 2012, well over a decade after the incident allegedly occurred.

It's a source of constant interest to me that the Daddy Staters can always be counted on to take something obvious and turn it around. And that the rubes are so in need of reassurance that they'll put aside everything they know about anything to suckle at the teat of deliberate ignorance.

We Will Get Fooled Again

It's already happening again. And the not-so-weird thing is that some of the worst trolling behavior is now part of how we "communicate" online - sometimes with people we actually know.

Weekend Update (NSFW)

Colin Jost & Michael Che:

Per The Washington Examiner:

Stone went on to work for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole. But while serving on Dole’s campaign in 1996, he was hit with a controversy of his own. The National Enquirer revealed that Stone and his second wife Nydia, a former model, had placed ads for group sex partners in swingers magazines and online. Stone also frequented Capitol Couples, a former swingers club in D.C., according to the Enquirer and other publications.

“Hot former model seeks exceptional, in shape muscular … studs for threesomes with herself and body builder husband,” read one ad, which including topless photos of Stone and his wife. Another ad specified: “No smokers or fats please."

Stone initially denied the Enquirer story, claiming the ads were fabricated by political enemies, but he was forced to resign from the Dole campaign due to the controversy. He later acknowledged that the ads were indeed his.

Walkin' And Talkin'

If you talk like a crook and you walk like a crook, and in practically every other way you act like a crook - then you're prob'ly a fuckin' crook.

WaPo:

Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser to President Trump, was arrested by the FBI on Friday after being indicted in the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Stone was charged with seven counts, including one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements and one count of witness tampering, according to Mueller’s office.

With Stone’s indictment, Mueller has struck deep inside Trump’s inner circle, charging a long-standing friend of the president and one of the first people to promote Trump for the White House.

Stone, 66, who has been friends with Trump for three decades, served briefly as a formal adviser to his presidential campaign in 2015 and then remained in contact with him and top advisers through the election.

The GOP operative has been a key focus of the special counsel for months as Mueller has investigated whether anyone in Trump’s orbit conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Read the indictment
I suppose the dangling of pardons will likely come back into play now - preceded of course by more of the usual flip-floppy double-speak:

• Yes, Roger's a friend
• No, I never really knew him
• Yes, he was an integral part of the operation
• No, he did a few things for us around the edges
• blah blah fuckin' blah

And Stone will most likely stay in the mode he helped establish for GOP Rat-Fuckery:

The Tweets

Not those tweets - those other tweets. There's always a tweet.

Brian Krassenstein, The Hill Reporter:

Credico has deleted that Twitter account, and now says he was just mad and wanted to fuck with Trump and Stone.

OK, fellas, but y'know what? This is not a fucking game. Assholes.

Today's Tweet

It never ends - the fuckery just goes on and on and on.

This is a real radio ad currently running in Arkansas in support of Republican Congressman French Hill on radio stations targeted to the African American community. I don't even have words to describe it. pic.twitter.com/vpzt1nGPlc

— (((Ben Tribbett))) (@notlarrysabato) October 18, 2018

WaPo

After a racist ad discouraging black voters from backing the Democrats went viral, the Republican Party’s attempts to win one of the left’s most influential voting blocs likely got harder. But the truth for the GOP is that the ad isn’t the main reason blacks aren’t backing conservatives in the midterm.

Black Americans for the President’s Agenda, a super PAC, released a radio ad in support of U.S. Rep. French Hill’s (R-Ark.) reelection campaign warning black Arkansans that Democrats winning Congress could reverse the clock to the days of Jim Crow and state-sponsored segregation.

Think Progress

A shockingly racist radio ad from a super PAC calling itself Black Americans for the President’s Agenda went viral on Thursday evening. The spots, running on radio stations popular with black voters in Arkansas and Missouri, urge black women to back Republican Rep. French Hill in Arkansas’ 2nd congressional district, Republican Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley in his U.S. Senate campaign, and GOP candidates in general.

Their factually inaccurate argument: if Democrats accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual predation without evidence, black “men and boys” will be subject to “race verdicts, life sentences, and lynchings when a white girl screams ‘rape!'”

The donors bankrolling this committee, however, appear to be rich, conservative ideologues, not the actual “Black Americans” they claim to be.

How Stuff Works

The bots and various other rat-fuckers are hard at it, kids.

Bob Brigham, RawStory:

Conservatives in the United States helped spread a fake video against “manspreading” that resulted in a misogynistic backlash against women.

The video purportedly shows a feminist woman pouring a mix of water and bleach on the crotches of multiple men riding on a subway, who were “manspreading” by widening their legs into the area in front of adjacent seats.

The website EU vs Disinfo reported on Monday that the video features paid actors. The report originated with the Russian language online magazine Bumaga, which interviewed one of the men seen in the video.

Conservatives in the United States spread the video, including The Blaze (founded by conservative radio personality Glenn Beck), The Daily Wire (founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro) and the website Chicks on Right.

“In other words, the video stages extreme feminist activism and manages to provoke extreme anti-feminist reactions,” EU vs Disinfo noted.

One More Time

Ronan Farrow is turning out to be quite the investigator. And while the fact of Ramirez isn't new, the story of the Repubs holding it back explains how they managed to (eg) come up with a list of 65 women to "vouch" for Kavanaugh's character on such very short notice.

At that point, Heather Sawyer, the Democratic staffer who was copied on the e-mails in accordance with committee policy, wrote to Davis, “As you’re aware, Ms. Ramirez’s counsel have repeatedly requested to speak with the Committee, on a bipartisan basis, to determine how to proceed. You refused. I’ve never encountered an instance where the Committee has refused even to speak with an individual or counsel. I am perplexed as to why this is happening here, except that it seems designed to ensure that the Majority can falsely claim that Ms. Ramirez and her lawyers refused to cooperate. That simply is not true.”

They knew there were some major problems in this asshat's past and weirdly, the "woman problem" may be the one they actually want us to focus on, so we can be made to overlook the truly horrendous shit he's pulled as a long-time GOP operative, specializing in Rat-Fuckery.

I just like to remind myself of these things. 

E-mails show Republican Senate staff stymied a Kavanaugh accuser's effort to give testimony. "I’ve never encountered an instance where the Committee has refused even to speak with an individual or counsel. I am perplexed as to why this is happening here": https://t.co/Fy0om1zAuO

— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) September 28, 2018

And also too - thinking about Kavanaugh's little hissy fits on Thursday, imagine what this jagoff is going to be like in a debate with SCOTUS colleagues behind the doors.

And also too, pt 2: Imagine Donald Segretti, as a mean drunk, being elevated to SCOTUS.

Short Term Thinking

Republicans have allowed their rat-fuckers so much leeway to do their thing, the results are starting to eat away at their long-con strategy.

The story of Ed Whelan is a case-in-point.

Politico:

Ed Whelan may have just crossed a line he can’t jump back over.

Yesterday, Whelan, the president of the Ethics and & Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, and an assertive supporter of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, took to Twitter to lay out a Hardy Boys-inspired scenario, suggesting that Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Kavanaugh of attempted rape in high school, might have been mistaken about the identity of her alleged sexual assaulter. Using a mash-up of yearbook photos, Zillow information, Google Maps and Facebook, Whelan laid out a “case” that another man, a former classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Georgetown Prep—whom he named and provided a current photograph of—might have been the person Ford has in mind. After his wild theory received widespread criticism, Whelan deleted the tweets, and tried to walk back the accusation this morning.

But, if it’s false, it’s already too late to protect him against a possible defamation claim.

The common law of defamation isn’t that complicated. To be liable, the defendant must make an intentionally or negligently false statement about the plaintiff that tends to cause reputational harm, and harm must actually ensue.

Desperate to fill the federal bench with guys like Kavanaugh, the Daddy Staters are throwing caution to the wind, and forgetting what their operatives are telling us thru their idiotic short-term tactics.

Ed Whalen's attempt to deflect from the Blasey-Ford issue isn't just stoopid on is face.

By mounting this bullshit Scooby-and-the-gang "defense", they signal that at least some of them know (or have reason to strongly suspect) that something did in fact happen. 

They're admitting to the allegation that Dr Ford was assaulted. Which is why it got swept under the rug almost before it got out. Almost.

And of course, it fits with all the other shitty things Republicans have been doing:

• Nothing happened - you're lying
• OK, maybe something happened but it's not illegal, and it happened too long ago to worry about
• OK, something happened and it was illegal, but it's not a big deal - everybody does it
• OK, Something illegal happened and it's a big deal, but