Daily Check-In 03/04/2019

Daily Check-In

Monday, March 4, 2019.

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

House Judiciary Wants All The Things…

The House Judiciary Committee sent requests out for information to 81 people and entities tied to Trump, Russia, the GOP, and the rest of the giant spiderweb of fuckery.  This is a bit more than the 60 that was rumored on Friday (Daily Check-In 03/01/2019), and isn’t a comprehensive list.  I hope to have a full list tomorrow.

I don’t want to jump on a right wing talking point, but this is what an Impeachment procedure looks like in its infancy.

 

Fox News

When Shine assumed command at Fox, the 2016 campaign was nearing its end, and Trump and Clinton were all but tied. That fall, a FoxNews.com reporter had a story that put the network’s journalistic integrity to the test. Diana Falzone, who often covered the entertainment industry, hadobtained proof that Trump had engaged in a sexual relationship in 2006 with a pornographic film actress calling herself Stormy Daniels. Falzone had worked on the story since March, and by October she had confirmed it with Daniels through her manager at the time, Gina Rodriguez, and with Daniels’s former husband, Mike Moz, who described multiple calls from Trump. Falzone had also amassed e-mails between Daniels’s attorney and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, detailing a proposed cash settlement, accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement. Falzone had even seen the contract.

But Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.

Despite the discouragement, Falzone kept investigating, and discovered that the National Enquirer, in partnership with Trump, had made a “catch and kill” deal with Daniels—buying the exclusive rights to her story in order to bury it. Falzone pitched this story to Fox, too, but it went nowhere. News of Trump’s payoffs to silence Daniels, and Cohen’s criminal attempts to conceal them as legal fees, remained unknown to the public until the Wall Street Journal broke the story, a year after Trump became President.

In January, 2017, Fox demoted Falzone without explanation. That May, she sued the network. Her attorney, Nancy Erika Smith, declined to comment but acknowledged that a settlement has been reached; it includes a nondisclosure agreement that bars Falzone from talking about her work at Fox.

After the Journal story broke, Oliver Darcy, a senior media reporter for CNN, published a piece revealing that Fox had killed a Stormy Daniels story. LaCorte, who by then had left Fox but was still being paid by the company, told Mediaite that he’d made the call without talking to superiors. The story simply hadn’t “passed muster,” he claimed, adding, “I didn’t do it to protect Donald Trump.” Nik Richie, a blogger who had broken the first story about Daniels, tweeted, “This is complete bullshit. Ken you are such a LIAR. This story got killed by @FoxNews at the highest level. I know, because I was one of your sources.”

Richie told me, “Fox News was culpable. I voted for Trump, and I like Fox, but they did their own ‘catch and kill’ on the story to protect him.” He said that he’d worked closely with Falzone on the article, and that “she did her homework—she had it.” He says he warned her that Fox would never run it, but “when they killed it she was devastated.” Richie believes that the story “would have swayed the election.”

Fox News played a major role in getting Trump elected, but the fact that they spiked the Stormy Daniels story just days before the election now implicates the individuals and the company in Campaign Finance violations.  Spiking the Stormy Daniels story just before the election could be considered an in-kind campaign donation.  Wonder how that’s a crime?  Ask Michael Cohen.

That’s not even the most screwed up thing from this report.  We’ve got Rupert Murdoch and his cronies pulling the strings on our democracy by controlling the media that a third of the country watches.

Plus, because Tangering Tojo didn’t like something that CNN said, he tried to get the Department of Justice to break up a proposed merger between Time Warner and AT&T.  Granted, there’s a hundred reasons why they shouldn’t merge, but that is the stupidest one.

Kusher

 

Manafort

Manafort asking for a reduced sentence is like a kid asking for less time in time out because they were already in time out yesterday.  Fucker, you get more until you learn your lesson.

Roger Stone

Roger Stone might not even last two whole weeks out in the world with his gag order before going to prison.  How hard is it to not post something on Instagram?  Seriously, the only people that should have that problem are teen girls and food writers.

 

Corsi

So, let’s rewind a moment…

Jerome Corsi and Alex Jones helped spread the ‘Seth Rich was killed by the DNC’ story pushed by Roger Stone.  Roger got this from Russia and Wikileaks.  This story then made its way over to Fox News where several of their anchors, including Sean Hannity, repeated it ad nausuem.

Now, after Roger Stone was indicted and evidence that the plot originated with Russia, we get Jerome Corsi trying to walk this back.  It’s almost like he knows that he committed a crime.

What’s the crime that a person commits when they push propaganda from a hostile state?  It rhymes with Breason.

 

 

COHEN, NEW YORK, AND THE OTHER LAWSUITS

WSJ reports that a lawyer for Michael Cohen reached out to President Trump’s attorneys to inquire about the possibility of a pardon after his home and office were raided by the FBI. But in testimony before Congress last week, Cohen said he had never asked for a pardon from Trump.

An attorney for Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, raised the possibility of a pardon with attorneys for the president after federal agents raided Mr. Cohen’s properties in April, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Conversations among those parties are now being probed by congressional investigators, according to document requests issued Monday by the House Judiciary Committee to dozens of Trump associates, including one of the president’s current lawyers and Mr. Cohen.

This story came in pretty late Monday night.  Right when I was thinking “Damn, there’s a ton of shit here, I don’t think that anything else could possibly drop between now and midnight.”  Then the Wall Street Journal throws this story up behind their paywall.  I’m waiting for more information on details and sourcing.  Until we get more, take this story with a grain of salt.  It sounds and smells like a possible hit piece

Cohen’s attorney at the time, Stephen Ryan, discussed the possibility of a pardon with lawyers for Trump in the weeks after the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided Cohen’s home, office and hotel room, the people said. The pardon discussions occurred while Ryan was working alongside lawyers for Trump to review files seized from Cohen’s premises by the FBI to determine whether they were protected by attorney-client privilege.

The president’s lawyers, including Jay Sekulow, Rudy Giuliani and Joanna Hendon, dismissed the idea of a pardon at the time, these people said. But at least one of them, Giuliani, left open the possibility that the president could grant Cohen one in the future, they said. Ryan left the impression that if Cohen couldn’t rely on a pardon, he might cooperate with prosecutors from the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office investigating Cohen, the people said.

I’m still waiting for more information, but it sounds like a couple things are going on here.  Either this was a hit piece meant to destroy Cohen’s character, paint him as a liar, or show that pardon discussions did take place.  The likely twist from RWM will be that Cohen must have directed the lawyers to talk about pardons to Sekulow, Hendon, and Giuliani, so therefore Cohen is a liar.  My guess is that the conversations did take place, but were more low-key, like asking someone to pass the salt.  The fact that Rudy leaves the door open for talks about it in the future sounds fishy.

Like I said, until I hear otherwise, this sounds like it might be a hit piece.  Rupert Murdoch now owns the Wall Street Journal

 

TRUMP THE RUSSIAN ASSET A.K.A. INDIVIDUAL-1

 

TRAITOR TOTS

Whitaker Quits

Maybe he can go back to screwing over inventors in Iowa.

 

Gaetz

 

FIGHTING BACK

 

CONGRESS

 

EMERGENCIES, SHUTDOWN & IMMIGRATION

 

RACISM, RIGHT WING TERRORISM, & WHITE NATIONALISM

 

SCOTUS & COURTS

 

#METOO & WOMEN’S RIGHTS

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

FIXING THE INTERNET

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

 

WHITE HOUSE CHAOS

 

TRADE WAR, HEALTH CARE, AND ECONOMY

 

GOP: THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

PRIESTS & RELIGION

 

ENVIRONMENT & SCIENCE

 

ELECTIONS

 

THINKING AHEAD

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

 

IN OTHER NEWS…

 

RUMOR MILL

 

That’s it for Monday.  Fuck.

I should have a list of the 81 letter targets on Tuesday.  Also, it looks like some of the targets are already responding.  Also, there’s a possible criminal referral for Kushner’s 8,541 SF-86 edits.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

Published by noneofthisisnormal

Published

One thought on “Daily Check-In 03/04/2019”

  1. Pingback: Daily Check-In 03/05/2019 – None of this is Normal

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