Saturday, February 25, 2023
Thursday, February 23, 2023
In Sharing Video With Fox Host, McCarthy Hits Rewind on Jan. 6
In Sharing Video With Fox Host, McCarthy Hits Rewind on Jan. 6
“In granting exclusive access to Jan. 6 Capitol surveillance footage to a cable news host bent on rewriting the history of the attack, the speaker effectively outsourced a politically toxic re-litigation of the riot.
WASHINGTON — Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to grant the Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to thousands of hours of security footage from inside the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack was his latest move to appease the right wing of his party, this time by effectively outsourcing a bid to reinvestigate the riot to its favorite cable news commentator, who has circulated conspiracy theories about the assault.
The most conservative Republican members of Congress — many of whom have worked to downplay or deny the reality of the Jan. 6 attack — have been pushing Mr. McCarthy for weeks to release the video after he promised to do so during his campaign for speaker.
Mr. McCarthy has shown little appetite for the kind of aggressive public re-litigation of what happened that day that some of his colleagues have called for, but he is sensitive to the dangers of angering his hard-core base by seeming to drop or disregard the matter.
That is where Mr. Carlson comes in.
“I promised,” Mr. McCarthy said on Wednesday in a brief phone interview in which he defended his decision to grant Mr. Carlson exclusive access to the more than 40,000 hours of security footage. “I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment.”
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Still, the sunshine Mr. McCarthy referred to will, for now, be filtered through a very specific prism — that of Mr. Carlson, a hero of the hard right who has insinuated without evidence that the Jan. 6 attack was a “false flag” operation carried out by the government.
After Mr. Carlson has had his way with the video, Mr. McCarthy said he planned to make the footage more widely available. His team has had internal conversations about providing the footage to other media outlets after Mr. Carlson has had his “exclusive” first airing, according to a source familiar with the deliberations who insisted on anonymity to speak about them.
For now, however, Mr. McCarthy has given a large head start to a purveyor of conspiracy theories about the attack.
Mr. Carlson declined on Wednesday to comment on his review of the tapes, except to say that he and a large team of staff members looking at the footage were “taking it very seriously.”
Democrats have revolted at Mr. McCarthy’s decision, arguing that it is a politically driven move that risks the security of the Capitol.
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In a letter to fellow Democrats on Wednesday, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said the speaker was “needlessly exposing the Capitol complex to one of the worst security risks since 9/11.”
“By handpicking Tucker Carlson, Speaker McCarthy laid bare that this sham is simply about pandering to MAGA election deniers, not the truth,” Mr. Schumer wrote. “Tucker Carlson has no fidelity to the truth or facts and has used his platform to promote the Big Lie, distort reality and espouse bogus conspiracy theories about Jan. 6.”
Some Republicans, too, said Mr. McCarthy was taking a political risk with his decision. Should Mr. Carlson use the video — through selective editing — to further false narratives, it could supercharge the appetite in the right-wing base for the continued re-litigation of Jan. 6. That could force the issue onto the agenda of more House Republicans, a move that is likely to turn off swing voters.
“It helps McCarthy solidify his speakership among the right, especially those who held their vote out,” said Ron Bonjean, a veteran Republican strategist. “It shows to conservatives that he’s providing complete transparency, and that’s what Republicans have wanted for a long time. That said, if the footage is misused in some way, this could end up generating another black hole for Republicans on Jan. 6. It could cause Republicans to be wrapped around that issue, and to look backward, not forward, toward getting things done.”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, has portrayed the treatment of Jan. 6 prisoners as a civil rights atrocity and demanded the release of security footage that could exonerate them. But Mr. McCarthy has not shown the same passion as his right flank for re-examining Jan. 6 — an issue that some of his advisers view as a political loser — and, thus far, he has had little interest in dedicating limited staff resources to doing so.
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He set up no select committee to investigate the events surrounding the Capitol breach, though he warned the House Jan. 6 panel last year to preserve its files. He has signaled interest in exploring one avenue, saying that the House select committee that investigated the attack during the last Congress ignored the security failures that allowed the Capitol to be breached. He appointed Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, a Republican he views as being unfairly maligned by the Jan. 6 panel, as the chairman of a House Administration subcommittee tasked with investigating the matter.
Mr. McCarthy has risen to power during a tumultuous time on Capitol Hill. Republicans have a slim governing majority, and he had to repeatedly bend to a demanding hard-right flank in his quest for power.
Some of those same resisters celebrated Mr. McCarthy’s decision to give the footage to Mr. Carlson. “Thank you @SpeakerMcCarthy for following through on this!” Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado and one of Mr. McCarthy’s loudest detractors during the speakership battle, wrote on Twitter.
And Mr. McCarthy himself was eager to take political advantage of the move, blasting out a fund-raising email that told potential donors: “I promised I would give you the truth regarding Jan. 6, and now I am delivering.”
Even more mainstream Republicans backed him up.
Former Representative Rodney Davis of Illinois, who as the top Republican on the Administration Committee during the last Congress watched hours of the footage, said he had pushed for it to be released to refute what he called Democrats’ “lies” that Republicans had given tours of the Capitol to rioters in advance.
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He dismissed concerns that releasing the footage would endanger Capitol security, citing the Jan. 6 committee’s depiction of the evacuation of Vice President Mike Pence and others during the assault.
Mr. Davis also said there was nothing particularly surprising in the footage he reviewed, which showed the attack on the Capitol largely as it is widely understood to have transpired.
“The Capitol came under attack,” Mr. Davis said. “The brave men and women of the Capitol Police fought back. Hopefully, those who broke the law that day are held accountable.”
Still, Democrats said the move was deeply irresponsible, warning that Mr. McCarthy was granting access to sensitive video of escape routes, security camera angles and logistics at the Capitol.
“We have tremendous security concerns about what’s happening and we want to know what rules are in place for the viewing of this material, which goes right to the heart of how we protect the Capitol and our staffs,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, who was a member of the now-defunct Jan. 6 committee. “We want to make sure we are not giving a blueprint for attacking the Capitol.”
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
In Vermont, a School and Artist Fight Over Murals of Slavery - The New York Times
In Vermont, a School and Artist Fight Over Murals of Slavery
"Created to depict the brutality of enslavement, the works are seen by some as offensive. The school wants them permanently covered. The artist says they are historically important.
SOUTH ROYALTON, Vt. — For years, when students at Vermont Law and Graduate School came to Shirley Jefferson with objections to the murals in the student center, and their depictions of Black people that struck some as racist caricatures, the longtime Black administrator urged those protesting to move on.
Ms. Jefferson, 69, is no stranger to racism, nor to protest. Born in segregated Selma, Ala., in 1953, she helped integrate her high school, marched for civil rights and graduated from Vermont Law in 1986, later returning to work in admissions and alumni affairs. Still, hoping to avoid division, she advised the students to focus on their studies.
“I told them, ‘You all did not come here to fight over a mural, you came to get educated,’” Ms. Jefferson recalled one recent afternoon, her Southern accent still evident after more than two decades in northern New England.
Then came the summer of 2020, and for Ms. Jefferson and many others, a renewed commitment to confront embedded racism and insensitivity, even where it might be unintended. “When George Floyd was killed, all of a sudden I said to myself, ‘That mural has got to go,’” she said. “I called the dean, and he said OK.’’
That might have been that, if not for one complication: The artist who painted the murals 30 years ago as a condemnation of slavery, Sam Kerson — who is white — fought back against the plan to erase his work.
When his attempt to reclaim the murals failed — the paintings could not be removed from the walls without destroying them — Mr. Kerson sued to stop the school from permanently covering them, pointing to an obscure federal law that protects artists from certain types of “modification” of their art. After a two-year journey through the courts, the case landed last month before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, where the two sides presented arguments on Jan 27.
“It’s a major work, it’s my life, and it’s important that it be there,” Mr. Kerson, 76, said in an interview. “It’s historically important in what it says about Black people rising up to resist, and it’s important as a record of what we said in 1993.”
Preserving the artworks is also important, he said, “because there continues to be slavery in the world.”
The two murals, each 24 feet long, depict the brutality of slavery, with scenes including a slave market, a slave owner wielding a whip and an attacking dog. They also show white Vermonters protesting slavery and helping people escape to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Bold and colorful, in a style more expressive than realistic, the works were inspired by Mexican muralists like José Clemente Orozco, whose murals at nearby Dartmouth College also once sparked calls for their removal.
For now, the law school has covered the paintings with white panels, suspended just above their surface so as not to damage them, pending the outcome of the court appeal.
The case echoes other recent debates around the country, as artworks in common spaces are reassessed in light of changing attitudes — and as courts struggle to reconcile the rights of artists with those of art owners, and of people exposed to such works.
To Justin Barnard, an attorney representing the law school, the matter is simple: “If you own a painting, of course you have the right to decide whether or not to display it.”
The case turns on language in the federal law that says artists can seek to prevent modification of their work if the change would harm their “honor or reputation.” The law school says that covering the murals, even permanently, is not a modification if it leaves no mark.
Mr. Kerson maintains that damage will be done to his reputation. “He must suffer the indignity and humiliation of having a cover put over his art,” his lead attorney, Steven Hyman, told the appeals court last month.
Similar sagas elsewhere have come to varied ends.
School leaders at the University of Kentucky decided last year to relocate a 1934 mural that caused years of campus debate, a retrospective of Kentucky history that includes depictions of enslaved people working in a field. (In a twist, a Black artist who was invited to create an adjacent work in response to the mural said her art should also be removed if the school chose to “censor” the older work.)
In San Francisco, school leaders opted to keep a controversial 1930s mural on view at a public high school after art historians protested plans to remove it and alumni sued to save it. The mural, which chronicles the life of George Washington and includes scenes of enslaved people, was painted by the artist Victor Arnautoff, described by the school’s alumni association as “an avowed leftist” and social realist who sought to show Washington’s ties to “the sins of early America.”
Mr. Kerson, a native of western Massachusetts who lived in Vermont for decades before moving to Quebec 20 years ago, has also been influenced by the social realist movement, which seeks to draw attention to oppression. The founder and artistic director of Vermont-based Dragon Dance Theatre, known for its puppetry, he has created murals and other art projects in Mexico, Nicaragua and Europe, often in collaboration with local artists.
After envisioning a pair of murals that would describe the horrors of slavery and celebrate Vermont’s abolitionist history, Mr. Kerson said he searched the state for a place with the right set of walls and a mission that would complement his theme. The tiny, progressive law school on the banks of the White River seemed a perfect setting, he said, and its leaders in the early 1990s welcomed the project to the second floor of its student center, an airy, quiet space used for study and meetings.
It did not take long for some students to feel uneasy with the paintings. Soon after she started working at the law school, in 1999, Ms. Jefferson began hearing occasionally from students who were troubled by the murals’ style and content, particularly Black figures that some found cartoonish or reminiscent of earlier racist iconography. Removal of the paintings was discussed in 2013, and again in 2014, when plaques were added to explain the subject matter.
It was not until 2020 that Ms. Jefferson, now an associate professor and vice president, concluded that “the mural was part of the problem and inconsistent with the Law School’s mission no matter if the intentions that led to its creation were good,” she wrote in a statement to the federal district court in 2021.
To the artist, the discomfort was an affirmation.
“Of course the images are disturbing,” Mr. Kerson wrote after the district court’s ruling in 2021 affirmed the law school’s plan to cover his work. “These images represent human suffering, and if you do not find them disturbing, you are not looking at them.” He added: “We appreciate that the students who are complaining are also seeing the murals.”
Known for its programs in environmental law and restorative justice, Vermont Law has prioritized diversity in its small enrollment — a challenge in a rural state that remains among the whitest in the country. Its efforts have slowly yielded results: In 1993, when the murals were painted, students of color made up 10 percent of the graduating class; last year, they were 25 percent, according to the school.
Concern about the murals is not universal among the 500 students on campus, especially now that the art has been covered. In interviews, some members of the National Black Law Students Association at the school expressed frustration with those who see the murals as a “Black issue.” Some faulted the administrators who allowed them to be painted in the first place. Others criticized the artist for pushing back in court.
“If someone is saying to you, ‘How you’re depicting me is racist,’ for you to live in your own ignorance, and further aggravate the situation — now you’re showing us who you are,” said Yanni DeCastro, a second-year student from Queens.
“We need to stop protecting white fragility,” said another student, Anisa Rodriguez, from Orange, N.J.
Ms. Rodriguez and other Black students noted, however, that they have larger concerns about the school than what is painted on the walls, such as the diversity of faculty and curriculum. “The mural is covered, but what’s really changed?” she said. “What is the plan to ensure that students of color feel safe and welcome?”
While the legal battle offers a teachable moment, it also intrigues some art law experts, including Megan Noh, a partner at New York law firm Pryor Cashman. She said the case is unusual in raising a question about the law school’s right to free expression, and whether that right would be violated by an order to display the mural.
Mr. Hyman, a self-described “old liberal,” said he was astonished — and deeply troubled — when the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization dedicated to preserving personal liberties, filed a court brief in support of the law school’s right to cover the mural. The brief argued that “an entity’s display of an artwork amounts to that entity’s own speech,” which should not be compelled by the courts.
“We are in a sensitive time with regard to racial justice, but we still need to have a fundamental belief in the concept of free speech and thought,” Mr. Hyman said, “and in the idea that we will be better by having discourse than by covering it up.”
After the appeals court rules, the last recourse for either side to continue the case would be a petition for review by the Supreme Court.
Whatever the outcome, some Black students said, it will not bridge the gap between the artist’s experience and their own.
“What is real to me is a painting to you,” said Maia Young, a second-year student from Houston. “The artist was depicting history, but it’s not his history to depict.”
What Putin’s Suspension of New START Treaty Means for Arms Control - The New York Times
Putin’s Move on Nuclear Treaty May Signal End to Formal Arms Control
"Mutual inspections have been suspended for years because of the pandemic. But New START, the last nuclear agreement between Russia and the United States, is dying.
WARSAW — When President Vladimir V. Putin announced at the end of a 100-minute speech on Tuesday that he would suspend Russia’s participation in the New START treaty — the last surviving arms control agreement between the two largest nuclear-armed powers — it was one more indication that the era of formal arms control may be dying.
Mr. Putin made clear that he was not pulling out of the treaty, which expires in February 2026. Nor did he threaten to deploy more strategic nuclear weapons — the kind that can soar across continents — beyond the limits of the treaty, which keeps both sides to 1,550 nuclear weapons. And the treaty was already in deep trouble; the State Department announced last month that the Russians were out of compliance.
But on Tuesday Mr. Putin made clear that the United States would not be inspecting Russian nuclear sites, a central element of verifying compliance with the treaty. And more broadly, he sounded like a leader who was done with arms control at a time of escalating confrontation with the United States and NATO.
If that attitude holds, whoever is sitting in the Oval Office when the treaty expires in a bit more than 1,000 days may face a new world that will look, at first glance, similar to the one of a half-century ago, when arms races were in full swing and nations could field as many nuclear weapons as they wanted.
Mr. Putin argued that he was forced into his decision. “They want to inflict ‘strategic defeat’ on us,” he said, picking up a phrase that American officials have used to describe their desired outcome for Russia in the war against Ukraine, “and climb on our nuclear facilities.” He said that the Ukrainians had already used drones to attack strategic air bases in Russia, where the Russian Air Force keeps the bombers that can deliver nuclear weapons.
He said he wasn’t about to allow inspectors to survey those facilities, because they could pass their findings on to the Ukrainians to launch further attacks. “This is a theater of the absurd,” he said. “We know that the West is directly involved in the attempts of the Kyiv regime to strike at the bases.”
None of this changes the status quo very much. Nuclear inspections were suspended during the Covid pandemic, when inspectors on either side couldn’t get into Russia or the United States. But over the past year, as travel restrictions lifted, Russians came up with reasons to deny inspections — and charged, as Mr. Putin did again on Tuesday, that the United States was not living up to its inspection requirements either.
The United States retains some visibility over the Russian arsenal, mostly with satellites that keep track of Russian nuclear movements. But there is a deeper worry. The five-year extension of New START that President Biden and Mr. Putin agreed upon in the first month of the Biden presidency is the only one permitted under the agreement, which was negotiated during the Obama presidency. That means an entirely new treaty would have to be pieced together. And while American officials insist that they want to negotiate a new treaty, it is increasingly hard to imagine that happening in the next three years.
The reasons are numerous. First, there is virtually no communication between the two countries. The “strategic stability talks” that Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin agreed upon in June 2021, at their only face-to-face meeting as presidents, were suspended after the invasion of Ukraine.
Second, trust between the two countries is virtually nonexistent. Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden have not spoken directly in more than a year. In the ensuing time, Mr. Biden has described the Russian leader as a war criminal, and Mr. Putin has called the American president the aggressor in Ukraine. In private, American officials sometimes concede that even if they negotiated a treaty, it would be almost impossible to imagine the Senate ratifying it under these conditions.
Third, the treaty as it stands does not cover the nuclear weapons the world worries about most in conflicts such as in Ukraine — the “battlefield nukes,” or tactical nuclear weapons, that Mr. Putin has episodically threatened to employ against Ukrainian forces. Russia has 2,000 or so; the United States has a few hundred.
Finally, another treaty simply between Moscow and Washington no longer makes sense to most nuclear experts. The Pentagon now estimates that China, which is rapidly expanding its arsenal, could deploy 1,500 weapons in the next dozen years, matching the American and Russian arsenals. So an arms control treaty that left out one of the three major powers would be all but useless. And so far, China has showed no interest in joining negotiations — if there were any.
Still, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Tuesday, after Mr. Putin spoke, that he would be willing to negotiate a new treaty that was “clearly in the security interests of our country” and, he added, “in the security interests of Russia.”
Mr. Putin’s announcement, he added, was “deeply unfortunate and irresponsible.” But he suggested that the United States would not change its compliance with the treaty, no matter what Russia did.
“I think it matters that we continue to act responsibly in this area,” he said. “It’s also something the rest of the world expects of us.”
Monday, February 20, 2023
Nurses Are Burned Out. Can Hospitals Change in Time to Keep Them? - The New York Times
Nurses Are Burned Out. Can Hospitals Change in Time to Keep Them?
"The pandemic has pushed already stressed nurses away from a demanding field. Does the job need to be rethought?
Sunday, February 19, 2023
Blinken Has Tense Meeting With Chinese Official Amid Spy Balloon Furor - The New York Times
"The meeting resumed diplomatic contact between Washington and Beijing that had been frozen since the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken held what American officials described as a confrontational meeting with his Chinese counterpart on Saturday night in Munich, warning him that the flight of a Chinese surveillance balloon across the United States “must never happen again.”
He also cautioned Beijing against providing “material support” to Russia’s war in Ukraine, a prospect he later suggested China was now “strongly” considering.
The U.S. description of the meeting, which resumed diplomatic contact between Washington and Beijing after it broke down over the balloon episode, said nothing about how the Chinese official, Wang Yi, responded. But a brief summary on official Chinese state media described an equally sharp exchange.
Mr. Wang, according to that account, said it was up to the United States to “solve the damage caused by the indiscriminate use of force” when it shot down the large balloon off South Carolina.
The two descriptions suggested that both Washington and Beijing were digging in, two weeks after the episode. American officials had clearly hoped to find a path toward a resolution that would allow Mr. Blinken to reschedule a visit to China, the first in years by a U.S. secretary of state, that he had abruptly canceled as the balloon drifted from Montana to the East Coast.
Notably, neither country said anything about seeking a new date for Mr. Blinken’s trip. Mr. Blinken also told NBC that he had spoken “very clearly and very directly” to Mr. Wang about the balloon incident, and that there had been “no apology” from Mr. Wang during the meeting. It was another reminder that Chinese-U.S. relations have fallen to perhaps their lowest point since Richard Nixon opened a channel of communication to China’s leadership a half-century ago.
While President Biden often talks of aspiring to a relationship in which the two nations are in vigorous competition but not conflict, many at the Munich Security Conference — an annual meeting of diplomatic, intelligence officials and lawmakers — expressed concerns that the handling of the balloon episode merely highlighted how the two countries had failed to de-escalate, even when no lives were lost.
Hours before the two men met, Mr. Wang appeared before the conference and, to the astonishment of many Western officials, doubled down on China’s claim that the balloon had been a “civilian” research craft blown off course by high winds, calling the American decision to shoot it down “absurd and hysterical.”
A State Department description of Mr. Blinken’s message to Mr. Wang, using the abbreviation for the People’s Republic of China, said the United States “will not stand for any violation of our sovereignty, and that the P.R.C.’s high-altitude surveillance programs — which has intruded into the air space of over 40 countries across 5 continents, has been exposed to the world.”
The U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard have since recovered much of the balloon’s equipment — contained in a payload about the size of a small regional airliner — and American officials have said they intend to make public details about the sensors they found. Officials have already said the craft’s surveillance equipment was visible, contradicting China’s claims that it was a weather balloon.
Mr. Blinken also renewed warnings that China should not assist Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, amid growing concerns that Beijing is inching closer to doing just that, including by providing satellite imagery to Russia’s private Wagner militia and electronics that might aid Russia in building military hardware.
In his interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” which was taped on Saturday night for broadcast on Sunday, Mr. Blinken said the United States would soon be offering new information to demonstrate Beijing was “strongly considering providing lethal assistance to Russia.”
While the State Department sought to portray Mr. Blinken’s tone as tough, its official statement on the meeting said that he had stressed to Mr. Wang “the importance of maintaining diplomatic dialogue and open lines of communication at all times,” and that “we do not want conflict with the P.R.C. and are not looking for a new Cold War.”
That phrase was particularly notable given that Mr. Wang had said, during earlier remarks on Saturday at the conference, that “the Cold War mentality is back” in global affairs.
The meeting on Saturday night came two weeks after Mr. Blinken abruptly canceled a long-planned trip to Beijing intended as a step toward soothing relations between the United States and China that have been inflamed in recent years, with some analysts worried about the growing potential for future military conflict.
The canceled trip and subsequent war of words set relations back further. After Mr. Biden ordered the craft shot down, China rejected a request from Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to speak with his Chinese counterpart — a development that U.S. officials called troubling.
China initially struck a contrite tone about the balloon, saying that it was a weather craft that had drifted off course. But in the following days — especially after the U.S. military identified and shot down three other objects that it now concedes were probably innocuous craft — Beijing’s tone hardened.
Mr. Wang called the United States’ reaction an effort “to divert attention from its domestic problems,” and he said that shooting down the balloon had been “100 percent an abuse of the use of force,” adding that the United States had violated an international convention governing airspace.
Despite the pointed rhetoric, said Danny Russel, a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, an independent research organization, “the fact that the meeting occurred and that both sides can claim to have delivered their points on the spy balloon may help the two sides put the incident behind them and move on to rescheduling Blinken’s trip to Beijing — which is where the real work needs to get done.”
Mr. Wang has been using the conference in Munich as a platform to tell European leaders and diplomats that China is ready to bolster ties with them and to try to play a role in ending the war in Ukraine. In his public remarks on Saturday, he said that China would soon offer a peace proposal to stop the fighting. But Mr. Blinken warned in a separate event against the allure of cease-fires that Russia might exploit to regroup for new offensives.
Mr. Wang’s entreaties came after China’s leader, Xi Jinping, ended his “zero Covid” policy this winter, paving the way for the country to step back into the spotlight on the world stage. The Chinese government is grappling with a slowing economy and is seeking to bolster trade ties with Europe, amid animosity fueled in part by China’s diplomatic support of Russia.
Mr. Wang also met with Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany on the sidelines of the Munich conference on Saturday, and afterward, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said on Twitter that China was “ready to fully resume exchanges with Germany and other European countries in various fields.”
Edward Wong contributed reporting from Madrid."
Saturday, February 18, 2023
Revealed: the US adviser who tried to swing Nigeria’s 2015 election | Cambridge Analytica | The Guardian
Revealed: the US adviser who tried to swing Nigeria’s 2015 election
Sam Patten, an American consultant later mired in controversy, exploited emails obtained by Tal Hanan’s team
In late December 2014, a team from Cambridge Analytica flew to Madrid for meetings with a handful of old and new contacts. A member of the former Libyan royal family referred to as “His Royal Highness” was there. So, too, was the son of a US billionaire, a Nigerian businessman and a private Israeli intelligence operative.
For Alexander Nix, the Etonian chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, and his new employee Brittany Kaiser, who networked like most other people breathed, there may have been nothing unusual about such a gathering.
But, by any other measure, it was an unlikely ensemble, not least because last week the identity of the intelligence operative was revealed to be Tal Hanan: an Israeli “black ops” mercenary who, it is now known, claims to have manipulated elections around the world.
Hanan, who operates using the alias “Jorge”, has boasted of meddling in more than 30 elections. His connection to the now defunct Cambridge Analytica offers a revealing insight into what appears to have been a decades-long global election subversion industry.
Hanan’s group, “Team Jorge”, was unmasked by an international consortium of media, including the Guardian and Observer, which revealed the hacking and disinformation tactics it uses to try to sway elections."
Opinion | Fox News hosts doubted election fraud claims, Dominion filing shows - The Washington Post
Opinion Fox News is worse than you thought
News organizations rarely look good when their internal emails and text messages surface in the public square. A filing Thursday from Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News is not only no exception, it’s a watershed of journalistic misdeeds.
The network’s prime-time stars — Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, along with other top names — care about ratings first, second and third, a consideration that eclipses the truth and other principles of journalism. “Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson wrote on Nov. 16, 2020, to a producer about President Donald Trump’s lawyer, who played a leading role in pushing far-out theories about election theft. The Dominion filing makes clear that the stars and Fox executives knew there was no evidence behind the election-denial lies repeated on the network’s broadcasts — a bombshell that is likely to take Fox years to live down.
Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for $1.6 billion on March 26, 2021, for repeated false claims about election fraud made by the network’s hosts and guests. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement, “but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.”
Even the generous protections of U.S. libel might not save Fox News in this case. “Fox, one of the most powerful media companies in the United States, gave life to a manufactured storyline about election fraud that cast a then-little-known voting machine company called Dominion as the villain,” reads Dominion’s March 2021 complaint. The company argues that Fox News defamed its work across jurisdictions in 28 states in the 2020 elections and is seeking summary judgment from a Delaware court. The programming in question spanned the November 2020 presidential election and the tumult of January 2021, a time when Fox News found itself in an audience dogfight with other conservative cable networks — Newsmax and One America News (OAN) — for pro-Trump viewers eager to hear that their candidate had been cheated out of a second term.
Panic over audience desertion got going early at Fox News, correspondence cited in Thursday’s filing shows. On election night, Fox News was the first news outlet to call Arizona for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, a decision that infuriated the Trump campaign. Disenchantment trickled down to the Trump faithful. “We worked really hard to build what we have,” Carlson wrote to a producer, according to the Dominion filing. “Those f---ers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”
A familiar network fault line emerged, as the prime-time opinion stars sought to keep MAGA viewers happy while news-siders provided more fact-based analysis. Bret Baier, anchor of the weeknight program “Special Report,” expressed incredulity that Powell had gone on Lou Dobbs’s evening program three days after the election to discuss a far-out theory on voter fraud. “What is this? Oh man,” Baier asked Jay Wallace, president and executive editor of Fox News Media.
On Nov. 7, Fox News called the race for Biden. That night, top communications official Irena Briganti wrote, “Our viewers left this week after AZ.” And Carlson wrote, “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real....an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”
Apparently Fox News’s ruling class isn’t exempt from Carlson’s endless attacks on America’s ruling class.
Fearing an all-out ratings crisis, Fox News executives “made an explicit decision to push narratives to entice their audience back,” the Dominion filing says. Journalism wasn’t one of those narratives. On Nov. 9, Neil Cavuto, an afternoon host known for his affability and independence, cut away from unsupported remarks by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this,” Cavuto said on air. That moment triggered a notification from an executive at parent company Fox Corp. about the “Brand Threat” from Cavuto’s actions. An email from Fox News Media chief executive Suzanne Scott to other executives following the incident is redacted from the filing.
(Not redacted but notable from the filing? Fox Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch noting the election-fraud lies are “terrible stuff damaging everybody” and that it is “very hard to credibly claim foul everywhere.”)
Collegiality followed journalistic principles out the window on Nov. 12, when reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted out a fact check of Trump, who had cited reporting by Hannity and Dobbs (whose eponymous Fox program was canceled in 2021) and mentioned Dominion. Election officials, Heinrich pointed out, claim there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Having spotted Heinrich’s tweet, Carlson told Hannity via text, “Please get her fired. Seriously….What the f---? I’m actually shocked … It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Hannity took his concerns to Scott, who apprised other colleagues: “Sean texted me—he’s standing down on responding but not happy about this and doesn’t understand how this is allowed to happen from anyone in news. She [Heinrich] has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted.”
Think about that statement — the top official at Fox News choosing falsehood over fact, for the sake of ratings. Fox News viewers, the correspondence confirms, get “disgusted” when their favorite network stops feeding them conspiracy theories.
Yes, we know: The internal correspondence and testimony Dominion cites are part of a filing in a defamation case relating to “actual malice,” damages and so on. There will be time to evaluate those matters, which are scheduled to go before a jury in mid-April. For the moment, let’s pause on how effectively a well-crafted lawsuit has pierced one of the country’s most powerful, and opaque, media organizations.
Scott, Hannity and Carlson, after all, don’t publish their own messages."