he’s under investigation, and a series of revelations have bolstered suspicions — and credible doubts mean that he must be viewed as a security risk.
.. Kushner attended a meeting in June 2016 whose stated purpose was to advance a Kremlin initiative to interfere in the U.S. election; he failed to disclose the meeting on government forms (a felony if intentional); he was apparently complicit in a cover-up in which the Trump team denied at least 20 times that there had been any contacts with Russians to influence the election; and he also sought to set up a secret communications channel with the Kremlin during the presidential transition.
.. Kushner is set to be interviewed Monday in a closed session with the Senate Intelligence Committee, his first meeting with congressional investigators. I hope they grill him in particular about the attempt to set up a secret communications channel and whether it involved mobile Russian scrambling devices.
.. Similar issues arise with Ivanka Trump. The SF-86 form to get a national security clearance requires inclusion of a spouse’s foreign contacts
.. McClatchy has reported that investigators are looking into whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation, which Kushner oversaw, colluded with Russians on Moscow’s efforts to spread fake news about Hillary Clinton.
.. the national security world fears that there is something substantive to the suspicions about the president and Russia. Otherwise, nothing makes sense.
- Why has Trump persistently stood with Vladimir Putin rather than with allies like Germany or Britain?
- Why did Trump make a beeline for Putin at the G-20 dinner, without an aide, as opposed to chat with Angela Merkel or Theresa May?
- Why do so many Trump team members have ties to Russia?
- Why did Trump choose a campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who had been as much as $17 million in debt to pro-Russian interests and was vulnerable to Moscow pressure?
- Why did he take the political risk of firing Jim Comey?
- Why is he so furious at Jeff Sessions for recusing himself?
- Why does he apparently contemplate the extreme step of firing Bob Mueller during his investigation into the Russia ties?
If the Trump team is innocent and expects exoneration, why would it work so hard on a secret effort aimed at discrediting Mueller, as The Times reported?
Why would Trump be exploring pardons for aides, family members and himself, as The Washington Post reported?
.. One thing you learn as a journalist is that when an official makes increasingly vehement protestations of innocence, you’re probably getting warm.
.. I sympathize with our counterintelligence officials, who chase low-level leakers and spies even as they undoubtedly worry that their commander in chief may be subject to Kremlin leverage or blackmail.
Rachel Maddow’s urgent warning to the rest of the media
Whether or not the Trump campaign did it, one way to stab in the heart aggressive American reporting on that subject is to lay traps for American journalists who are reporting on it, trick news organizations into reporting what appears to be evidence of what happened, and then after the fact blow that reporting up.
You then hurt the credibility of that news organization. You also cast a shadow over any similar reporting in the future, whether or not it’s true, right? Even if it’s true, you plant a permanent question, a permanent asterisk, a permanent “who knows?” as to whether that too might be false, like that other story — whether that too might be based on fake evidence.
The phony document provided to Maddow is exactly the kind of thing that Columbia Journalism Review publisher Kyle Pope warned of, in May, when I asked him whether news outlets should be worried about making careless errors in their rush to advance the Trump-Russia story.
.. Later that month, conservative radio host Bill Mitchell proposed “flooding the NYTimes and WAPO tip lines with all kinds of crazy ‘leaks’ ” to induce false reporting.
.. It is a credit to Maddow’s sense of fairness that she — as vocal a Trump critic as there is — exercised enough restraint and skepticism to sniff out an elaborate hoax that she might have wished were true. Maddow likely was targeted on the premise that she personifies a press corps so bent on destroying Trump that it will publish any incriminating information it encounters without proper journalistic rigor.
That she didn’t publish is evidence that caricatures of what Sean Hannity calls the “alt-radical-left-propaganda-destroy-Trump media” (catchy, right?) are a bit inflated.But there is no glory in avoiding a mistake. There is only shame in making one, and it appears that bad-faith sources are working hard to increase the media’s error rate. Part of the Defense agains the Trump-Russia story is shopping fake evidence
Episode 256: Dancing with Atheists w/Justin Brierley
People who feel dis-empowered spread Fake News because they want to participate, to do their part
We’ve lost faith in the expert class. We’re turning to a different set of elites who make money off of us.
Discusses whether there are Absolute Moral Laws with Richard Dawkins: whether prohibition on rape is as arbitrary as 5-fingers
Snopes: Russia, U.S. Elections, and the Fake News Cycle
The Russians targeted “any disaffected U.S. audience” with “active measures,” a term that essentially means concentrated campaigns to exploit existing social tensions and divisions with the goal of weakening the country’s global standing, allowing Russia more latitude to assert its own interests. Watts described how these efforts were then turned onto the 2016 presidential race — and made it clear the issue is a bipartisan one, even though the targeting of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign to bolster Trump got the most public attention at the time
.. the Kremlin is more cynical than ideological in its approach to foreign influence. She told us that under Putin’s influence, pragmatism outweighs any coherent set of principles, and Moscow will exploit whichever side of the political spectrum suits their interests in any given context
.. The main advantage of conspiracy theories as political tools is that they can spread a general anti-establishment sentiment and they can destroy the credibility and trust in all the established leaders and institutions. It’s not only an American phenomenon that conspiracy theorists are popping up and operating around anti-establishment candidates.
.. But once those same anti-establishment candidates succeed in getting hold of the reins of power, the same dynamic that secured their victory can easily be turned against them. Krekó compared conspiracy theories as a political tactic to a boomerang, as “they can hit you back when you are in power.”
.. That belief in conspiracy theories was strong before the U.S. election in the Republican camp because they felt themselves to be the ones out of power. Usually conspiracy theories are the tools of people who are out of power; they aim to destroy the current institutional setting. After the election there are some indications that Democratic voters believe more conspiracy theories because they target those in power.
.. cherrypicking disparate and unrelated events and weaving them into a narrative without understanding what they don’t know