Several months ago, Stone predicted an October surprise that would disrupt Clinton’s campaign and his recent Twitter posts suggested Podesta would soon be facing scandal, including an August update stating, “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary”
Speaking to reporters earlier this week on Clinton’s airplane, Podesta confirmed he’d spoken to the FBI on Sunday as it probed the criminal hack into his email and he leveled a charge that Stone had “advance knowledge” of the document leaks.
.. former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell said during a conference call organized by the Clinton campaign that several of the GOP nominee’s former staffers “may be in this more deeply and may have relationships with Russia, perhaps financial relationships or other relationships and they’re working on behalf of the Russians to get this material out and spread this around.”
.. last Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and director of national intelligence James Clapper issued an unprecedented statement signaling with high confidence that the Russian government was trying to meddle in the U.S. presidential election via cyber espionage.
.. “The way that DOJ works, once they start looking at something they don’t look at very narrow discrete questions when there are other related questions swirling around. They try to get the rest of the picture,” said Matthew Miller, a former Obama administration Justice Department spokesman. “It stands to reason,” he added, “they’d already be investigating the Trump campaign.”
.. “There’s no way they’d do that before the election,”
.. Stone said what’s out so far is just “small potatoes compared to what I’m told is coming.”
The Man Behind the Tapes That Could Sink the Donald
Here’s why Mark Burnett won’t release the ‘Apprentice’ footage.
But one longtime Hollywood executive who knows Burnett well and considers him a friend says that, contrary to some media reports, Burnett is not supporting Trump politically and has, in fact, long been privately appalled by the mogul’s crudeness. “They made a lot of money together,” the executive says. “That’s all.”
.. Since last weekend, when Bill Pruitt, a former Apprentice producer, tweeted in the aftermath of Trump’s lewd and abusive comments about women in old Access Hollywood outtakes that “there are far worse” Trump comments in the Apprentice archives
Another former Burnett producer, Chris Nee, later claimed on Twitter—in a tweet since deleted—that she had heard from Apprentice producers and crew that Trump had been heard using the “N-word,” and that the contractual penalty for any Burnett employee who disclosed proprietary information about the show was $5 million. (Nee later said she had only heard rumors of Trump’s words.) And the Associated Press reported that former crew members, staffers and contestants on the show said Trump used demeaning and sexist language about female contestants, ranked them by breast size and talked about which ones he’d like to have sex with.
.. whatever Burnett’s political or personal beliefs, it would be highly damaging to his standing in the industry—where he has a reputation as the sharpest of deal-makers—if he released proprietary material. “There’s no upside to it,” the executive says. “You erode any trust that anyone ever had in you. Who would ever want to work with you again?”
.. the civil rights lawyer Gloria Allred and representatives of the California branch of the National Organization for Women and the California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus marched to MGM’s headquarters in Beverly Hills to present an open letter demanding release of the tapes as “a civic duty.”
.. “Ethically, I think it’s a very 21st century moment,”
.. Burnett has distilled his business approach in an epigram: “Having the same sales pitch is stupid. Always adjust what you’re saying based on the person you’re hoping will give you their money.”
.. it wouldn’t be surprising if more Trump outtakes surface as they did in the Washington Post on Friday—no matter the potential financial or legal penalty. As the veteran studio lawyer told me, “This is the time when things like this show up in envelopes in the mailboxes of people like you.
Trump caught on tape making crude, sexually aggressive comments about women
‘I don’t even wait,’ he said — and bragged about how he would ‘grab them by the p—y.’
In Ohio, the reporters covering Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, at a restaurant were immediately instructed to return to the press bus after the news broke and were not permitted to film him leaving the restaurant. Pence’s team insisted that was normal procedure.
.. In the tape, Trump, who was only recently married to Melania Trump at the time, says of an unknown woman, “I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it.” “I did try and fuck her,” Trump added. “She was married.”
.. According to “Access Hollywood,” the tape was discovered in its archives after the show’s staff read an Associated Press story about Trump’s treatment of women on his NBC reality show “The Apprentice.” But the Post obtained the recording on its own, and published it at around 4:00 p.m. on Friday, before the entertainment program was able to air its own version.
.. Within minutes of the tape’s release, in what appeared to be a strategic counterstrike, WikiLeaks dumped more than 2,000 emails it claimed were hacked from top Clinton adviser John Podesta’s personal email account ..
.. “The women who are still entertaining the possibility of Donald Trump, what they’re waiting for is the possibility that he tones it down,” Matthews said. “…It is not presidential. It is not toning it down.”
What Should We Do About Big Data Leaks?
What is transparency in the age of massive database drops? The data is available, but locked in MP3s and PDFs and other documents; it’s not searchable in the way a web page is searchable, not easy to comment on or share.
.. This, said the consortia of journalists that notably did not include The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc., is the big one.
.. Organs of journalism are among the only remaining cultural institutions that can fund investigations of this size and tease the data apart, identifying linkages and thus constructing informational webs that can, with great effort, be turned into narratives, yielding something like what we call “a story” or “the truth.”
.. If this is the age of the citizen journalist, or at least the citizen opinion columnist, it’s also the age of the data journalist, with the news media acting as product managers of data leaks, making the information usable, browsable, attractive.
.. There’s a glut of data, but most of it comes to us in ugly formats. What would happen if the things released in the interest of transparency were released in actual transparent formats? By which I mean, not as a pile of unstructured documents, not even as pure data, but, well, as software? Put cost aside and imagine for a minute that the FCIC report was not delivered as web pages, PDFs, finding aids, and the like, but as a database filled with searchable, formatted text, including documents attributed to the individuals within, audio files transcribed, and so forth.
.. I look at that FCIC data and see at least 300 hours of audio. That’s $18,000 worth of transcription. Those documents could be similarly turned into searchable text, as could any of the PDFs. We can do the same for emails. These tools exist and are open. If there are any faxes they can be OCRed.