"The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous..."

"... an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms. The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new 'Disinformation Governance Board': a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down...."

From "TRUTH COPS/Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation" by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang (The Intercept).

ADDED:

One day after a major story from @lhfang and @kenklippenstein proving the US Govt and Security State are directing Big Tech on what to censor, the #2 Senate Dem tries to radically restrict what "free speech" means in a way that contradicts all 1A caselaw:https://t.co/gzFnNaKAlQ

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 2, 2022

"The investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has resigned abruptly from the Intercept, the news website he co-founded, and accused the organization of seeking to censor him over a planned article critical of the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden."

"Greenwald, who was a vital part of the Guardian US team that broke the Edward Snowden whistleblower story in 2013, released a statement online that blasted the editors of the Intercept as being in hock to Biden and the Democratic party. 'The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression,' he wrote in a lengthy resignation post.... In a sharply worded statement, the Intercept’s editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, said that the charge that the Intercept was censoring its staff was 'preposterous' and that Greenwald’s main problem had been a desire to have his work published unedited. 'The narrative he presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies – all of them designed to make him look like a victim, not a grown person throwing a tantrum,' she added."

The Guardian reports.

From Greenwald's statement:

"At least one highly dedicated Wikipedia user has been scrubbing controversial aspects of [Kamala] Harris’s 'tough-on-crime' record from her Wikipedia page, her decision not to prosecute..."

"... Steve Mnuchin for mortgage fraud-related crimes, her strong support of prosecutors in Orange County who engaged in rampant misconduct, and other tidbits — such as her previous assertion that 'it is not progressive to be soft on crime' — that could prove unflattering to Harris as the public first gets to know her on the national stage. The edits, according to the page history, have elicited strong pushback from Wikipedia’s volunteer editor brigade, and have drawn the page into controversy, though it’s a fight the pro-Harris editor is currently winning.... Last month, a Reddit user remembered this Atlantic piece and wrote a Jupyter script to see which 2020 vice presidential contender had the most edits in a span of three weeks: Harris had 408, Stacey Abrams had 66, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had 22, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar had four. Another Redditor pointed out that a majority of Harris’s edits were coming from a single person.... who goes by the username 'Bnguyen1114'...."

From "THERE’S A WAR GOING ON OVER KAMALA HARRIS’S WIKIPEDIA PAGE, WITH UNFLATTERING ELEMENTS VANISHING" (The Intercept).

IN THE COMMENTS: wild chicken says:

Too bad. It sounds like some of those "damning" items would recommend her to me!

A black law-and-order candidate would be awesome.

Wouldn't it be funny if she were rather conservative deep down but had to play that Democrat game because California.

"Weinstein, in an interview on CBS in April 2016, expressed a preference for Clinton over her then-rival in the Democratic primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders."

"'I'd rather go with Hillary's, who's a strong, proven leader,' he said at the time. According to an email leaked and published last fall, the Clinton campaign helped prepare Weinstein for the interview."

From "Harvey Weinstein Harassment Claims Put Obamas, Clintons in Tough Spot" (Hollywood Reporter).

That links to an Intercept piece from October 7, 2016, "HARVEY WEINSTEIN URGED CLINTON CAMPAIGN TO SILENCE SANDERS’S BLACK LIVES MATTER MESSAGE":

HACKED EMAILS SHOW that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, a longtime ally of Hillary Clinton and a major fundraiser for her 2016 campaign, urged her campaign team to silence rival Bernie Sanders’s message against police shootings of African-Americans. He suggested countering it with “the Sandy Hook issue” — a reference to Sanders’s opposition to lawsuits against gun manufacturers.

"WikiLeaks Declares War on The Intercept," according to The Daily Beast.

"The FBI says a reporter led it to an NSA leaker. Julian Assange says that person, whom he suspects is an Intercept reporter, is a ‘menace’ to sources, journalists, and democracy."

It's hard to get past that name — Reality Winner....

But this is, I presume, serious.

On Monday evening, the Intercept published what appears to be a May 5 intelligence report from the National Security Agency that describes two cyberattacks carried out by Russian government hackers against employees of a company that provides technical support to state voting agencies, which occurred shortly before the 2016 election. (The Intercept’s Sam Biddle noted, “There’s nothing in the NSA report indicating the actual voting machines or vote tabulations were compromised” — though this certainly opens up a whole new dimension in the ongoing investigation into Russia’s election meddling and potential contact with the Trump campaign.)

About an hour after the report was published, the Justice Department announced that 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, a government contractor, has been charged with taking classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.....

Chris Wallace learns a new term, "deep state"... and he's loving it.

On today's "Fox News Sunday," first Chris Wallace was talking to Rush Limbaugh:

WALLACE:  You also use a phrase which I have to say that I only heard for the first time in the last couple of weeks, "the deep state".  And that’s the notion that there’s an Obama shadow government embedded in the bureaucracy that is working against this new president.  I think that some folks are going to think that’s right on and some folks will think it’s awfully conspiratorial. 

LIMBAUGH:  Well, I would love to claim credit for that, but actually, I think a reporter by the name of Glenn Greenwald at "The Intercept" who has got a relationship with -- what’s his name?  Assange.  I think [Greenwald] actually coined the term.*  And I think it works.  I don’t think -- who is driving this business that the Russians hacked the election?  It’s the Democrat Party.  It’s Hillary.  It’s Obama.  It’s all those people who just can’t accept...

And then later Wallace had WaPo's Charles Lane on a panel discussion:

WALLACE: [The Obama administration in 2009] didn’t get the resistance from the news media. Some would say that -- that it was very compliant and -- and you certainly didn’t get resistance from the -- the deep state, I’m now loving the expression --

I want to include all of Lane's answer just because I thought he said a lot of good things (not because they're on the topic of "deep state"):

LANE: You sure got a lot... of resistance from the problems. But let me make my second point. Of course you’re getting resistance from all these sort of establishment agencies, if you like, because Donald Trump himself came in promising to attack them, promising to disrupt them, promising to take them down. What does he expect them to do, just stand back and let him, you know, destroy their influence and their power? Of course there’s going to be resistance. But, you know, he -- it’s not as if he avoids provocation of these people, particularly the media, as you have been pointing out. He relishes this combat. A lot of what he’s complaining about as resistance and so forth is resistance that he himself is provoking for the very political reasons.... For his base, a battle with the media is wonderful. It’s almost as good as actual policy change because it makes -- it confirms their world view. It confirms their view of what’s wrong with the country and its terrific politics.

_________________________

* Jonah Goldberg quickly tweeted "Note to Rush and Chris Wallace, 'the Deep State' is not a new term and Glenn Greenwald didn't coin it," and Greenwald retweeted that saying "FACT CHECK: True," with a link goes to "Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry 1st Edition," a 2013 book by by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady. Goldberg's tweet linked to a Wikipedia article, "State within a state":

State within a state is a political situation in a country when an internal organ ("deep state"), such as the armed forces and civilian authorities (intelligence agencies, police, administrative agencies and branches of governmental bureaucracy), does not respond to the civilian political leadership. Although the state within the state can be conspiratorial in nature, the Deep State can also take the form of entrenched unelected career civil servants acting in a non-conspiratorial manner, to further their own interests (e.g., job security, enhanced power and authority, pursuit of ideological goals and objectives, and the general growth of their agency) and in opposition to the policies of elected officials, by obstructing, resisting, and subverting the policies and directives of elected officials. The term, like many in politics, derives from the Greek language (κράτος εν κράτει, kratos en kratei, later adopted into Latin as imperium in imperio or status in statu).

That article has a long list of historical examples, including one for the United States, which goes here. Excerpt:

According to Philip Giraldi, the nexus of power is centered on the military–industrial complex, intelligence community, and Wall Street, while Bill Moyers points to plutocrats and oligarchs. Professor Peter Dale Scott also mentions "big oil" and the media as key players, while David Talbot focuses on national security officials, especially Allen Dulles. Mike Lofgren, an ex-Washington staffer who has written a book on the issue, includes Silicon Valley, along with "key elements of government" and Wall Street....

IN THE COMMENTS: The Godfather said:

I'm concerned that this business of complaining about some "deep state" in the federal government is counterproductive.

I understand the "Yes, Minister" phenomenon, the beaurocracy's protection of its own position and power. I practiced law in Washington DC for almost 50 years, and I saw this all the time. One aspect of it is the glorification of "public service". The lawyer who got a job with a government agency was somehow a "better" person than his private sector counterpart. This is often quite sincere. When I was in law school in New York City, 1965-68, there was a dramatic shift in students' aspirations, no longer to Wall Street, but to Washington. They really wanted to go to the New Frontier and build the Great Society. They -- or more accurately their successors -- didn't sign on to "Make America Great Again". That's going to be a problem for Trump as it was for Reagan and GWBush, Presidents who came into office intending to reduce the size and power of the federal government.

But the problem I have with the term "deep state" (or "dark state" as one commenter referred to it) is the implication that there is a conscious and coherent conspiracy to undermine democratic and constitutional governance. References to the CIA and the Military, etc. seem to lead in that direction. Now I have no doubt that there are "spooks" out there who are willing to play their own games if they can get away with it. Somehow Nixon, who should have known better, allowed them to try to get away with it, and other "spooks" nailed him for doing so. But if there is a conscious and coherent conspiracy of government employees that is trying, in their official positions, to undermine the democratically-elected President, then that ought to be revealed to the public. So far, I haven't seen any evidence that this has happened. But if you think it has, let's have the evidence -- not inference, evidence. There are a lot of lawyers commenting on this blog, and you know what evidence is.

If Omarosa didn't say "dossier," let's lob a new epithet: "Nixonian."

[POST TO COME. SORRY I ACCIDENTALLY PUBLISHED AFTER WRITING THE HEADLINE. CONCERNED THAT YOU MIGHT BE DISTRACTED BY IT ALREADY, I WON'T TAKE IT DOWN. THE BODY OF THE POST WILL ARRIVE SOON.]

I hate when that happens! There's some keystroke that publishes a post. I'm still not sure what it is, but I manage to hit it from time to time. Now, you're wondering what the hell this post title means. And the previous post title is enigmatic, so perhaps you think I've lost my mind.

Here are the 2 Washington Post articles I am reading:

1. From February 13th: "Journalist says Omarosa Manigault bullied her and mentioned a ‘dossier’ on her."

2. From February 14th (referring to the same juournalist, April Ryan): "‘This is . . . Nixonian’: Reporter was taped by White House in heated exchange."

Both articles are by Paul Farhi. The first article describes a dispute between Manigault and Ryan, and you can see that the headline highlights Ryan's version of the story. This is from the middle of Farhi's article:

In October, Manigault sent Ryan an email raising questions about whether Ryan was being paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign — a claim Ryan vigorously denies. Manigault included a link to an article from the Intercept ["EXCLUSIVE: New Email Leak Reveals Clinton Campaign’s Cozy Press Relationship"]...

Ryan's name was in the Intercept article, and Manigault pushed Ryan to protect her "legacy" and "integrity."

Ryan said she was devastated by any intimation that she was unethical. “It’s just ugly,” she said. “She’s trying to harm my integrity and my career. I’ve been [covering the White House] for 20 years. I plan to be here for the next 20 years. You don’t mess with someone’s livelihood.”

I don't understand why Ryan is attacking Manigault for something that was in The Intercept. Was The Intercept right or wrong? Attacking Manigault makes it look like The Intercept got it right. Farhi doesn't explore that puzzlement. Here's his next paragraph:

During their altercation...

How did the "altercation" start? Suddenly, there's a face-to-face encounter? We're just plunged into the middle of things!

... Ryan said Manigault told her that she was among several African American journalists who were the subject of White House “dossiers.” Manigault has previously said that Trump is keeping “a list” of opponents, though at the time she was referring to Republicans who voted against Trump.

Ryan said she dismissed the idea of any such dossiers. “I said, ‘Good for you, good for you, good for you.’ ”...

What makes it into the headline is the idea of "dossiers." (An interesting word, given the fake-news Trump dossier of 4 weeks ago.) It sounds very creepy and scurrilous, the keeping of dossiers on journalists. Why it sounds... Nixonian.

One day later, the news is that the conversation was recorded and the word "dossier" isn't there. Ryan's story is shot to hell. And what's in the headline? Ryan's using the word "Nixonian" to describe the practice of recording conversations.

Ryan said she was not aware that her run-in with Manigault last week was recorded. “I didn’t know she was taping it,” she said. “This is about her trying to smear my name. This is freaking Nixonian.”

Manigault said the White House’s press staff recorded the encounter and that its contents make clear she never threatened Ryan or mentioned “dossiers.”

“She came in [to the White House press-staff area] hot,” hurling insults at her, Manigault said. “She came in with an attitude. For her to characterize me as the bully — I’m so glad we have this tape … because it’s ‘liar, liar, pants on fire’ ” in Ryan’s case, Manigault said.

It may be Nixonian to record conversations, but this incident shows it was smart, since it gives Manigault a way to defend herself.

Farhi tells us that Washington D.C. has a "one-party consent" law, which would mean that Manigault recording Ryan without her knowledge is not illegal, but:

Several veteran White House reporters said interviews are sometimes recorded by officials but that it was unheard of to do so without a reporter’s prior knowledge.

I'd like to hear more about the etiquette of recording. If it's done surreptitiously, that might explain why reporters do not hear of it. Maybe what's special in this case is how quickly Manigault offered the assertion of the existence of a recording to defend herself. One reason to do that would be if there actually is no recording and Manigault is simply trying to force Ryan into changing her story. But that's extremely unlikely given that Farhi writes that "a handful of reporters" have heard the recording. One of them, Fox News White House reporter John Roberts, said that he heard "some terse words and accusations... but it didn’t amount to a confrontation," and that he did not hear the word "dossier."

Ryan stood by her account and charged that Manigault “selected pieces” of their exchange. “She wants to spin it like it’s a catfight, but she edited that tape,” she said. “You don’t hear her screaming. This is about her smearing me.”

And that's where we stand. Ryan got some big press and now she's on the defensive. Why did The Washington Post help her go on the offensive on February 13th and then again boost her on the 14th, calling Manigault "Nixonian"? When does Manigault get fair balance in The Washington Post? 

"Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group."

The Intercept gives The Washington Post a well-deserved thrashing. Excerpt:

As is so often the case, those who mostly loudly warn of “fake news” from others are themselves the most aggressive disseminators of it. Indeed, what happened here is the essence of fake news. The Post story served the agendas of many factions: those who want to believe Putin stole the election from Hillary Clinton; those who want to believe that the internet and social media are a grave menace that needs to be controlled, in contrast to the objective truth that reliable old media outlets once issued; those who want a resurrection of the Cold War. So those who saw tweets and Facebook posts promoting this Post story instantly clicked and shared and promoted the story without an iota of critical thought or examination of whether the claims were true, because they wanted the claims to be true. That behavior included countless journalists....

The Intercept catches up with Justice Kennedy and extract an utterly standard routine statement of refusal to comment on cases.

It's what the Justices always do, but The Intercept runs it with the headline: "Justice Kennedy, Author of Citizens United, Shrugs Off Question About His Deeply Flawed Premise."

The author, Lee Fang, makes himself the hero of the story:

I caught up with Kennedy during a reception at the Justice Anthony M. Kennedy Library and Learning Center in the Robert Matsui Courthouse hosted by the Federal Bar Association Sacramento Chapter last Friday. Kennedy, after listening to my question about the false crux of his decision, waved his hand and shrugged off the issue, calling it something for others, “the bar and the lower bench to figure out”...

The full quote from Kennedy — after he listens to Fang's presentation — was "Well, I don’t comment. That’s for the bar and the lower bench to figure out." 

"Consultant Raised Cash for Hillary Clinton, Used Access to Seek Meeting for Coal Giant, Emails Reveal."

Reports The Intercept.

The "Coal Giant" is Peabody Energy.  The political consultant is Joyce Aboussie, who wrote to Huma Abedin:

“Huma, I need your help now to intervene please. We need this meeting with Secretary Clinton, who has been there now for nearly six months,” Aboussie wrote. “It should go without saying that the Peabody folks came to Dick and I because of our relationship with the Clinton’s,” she added.

Dick is Dick Gephardt, who was House Majority Leader from June 6, 1989 to January 3, 1995 and House Minority Leader from January 3, 1995 to January 3, 2003. That is, he led the Democrats in the House of Representatives during the entire Bill Clinton administration. Gephardt started a lobbying firm in January 2006, the month he left office.

Gephardt ran for President in 1988 and 2004, and he was considered a strong candidate for VP in 2004. There was even a New York Post cover saying that John Kerry had picked him:



(Kerry picked the now-disgraced John Edwards, who had better hair.)

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH said:

“It should go without saying that the Peabody folks came to Dick and I because of our relationship with the Clinton’s,” she added.

Huma must have rolled her exotic eyes and thought "what kind of amateurish influence peddler so consciously violates the rules of pay to play omertà?"

I imagined her rolling her eyes over something else — the illiteracy of "to Dick and I" and "the Clinton's." In my hypothetical scenario, she's saying:

How stupid is Peabody to pay big money to a guy who can't avoid making rank grammatical errors and sending them to me? To me! It's one thing to be married to a man who impulsively sends dick pics to skanky women, but to craft to-Dick-and-I email and send it to me! Ugh!

"The Intercept media executives and staff weren’t fans of their own reporting on the case featured in the wildly popular podcast Serial, delaying stories because they were 'siding with The Man'..."

"... former Intercept senior investigative reporter Ken Silverstein wrote in POLITICO Magazine."

“I came to realize that the system working correctly—and the right people going to jail—isn’t a good narrative to tell at The Intercept,” Silverstein wrote.

From Silverstein's piece:

Publishing the Serial stories was a huge headache: There were constant delays and frustrations getting them out, even after it became clear they were drawing huge traffic. Our internal critics believed that Natasha and I had taken the side of the prosecutors—and hence the state. That support was unacceptable at a publication that claimed it was entirely independent and would be relentlessly adversarial towards The Man. That held true even in this case, when The Man successfully prosecuted a killer and sent him to jail.

Some colleagues, like Jeremy Scahill, were upset after the first installment of Natasha’s interviews with Jay, the state’s flawed-but-convincing key witness, and our co-bylined two-part interview with the lead prosecutor, Kevin Urick, both of whom had refused to speak to Sarah Koenig for her Serial podcast. Jeremy even threatened to quit over the second installment, according to two of my colleagues who witnessed what they described as his “temper tantrum” in the New York office. He told them he couldn’t believe that we’d so uncritically accepted the state’s view of the murder—even though our stories were backed up by our own research, our unique reporting and our reading of court documents. One day at the office, frustrated, Natasha wrote “Team Adnan” on a sign on Jeremy’s office door.

"Investigative reporter Ken Silverstein has resigned from First Look Media’s The Intercept after 14 months..."

"... saying he and others were hired 'under what were essentially false pretenses [by being] told we would be given all the financial and other support we needed to do independent,inter important journalism, but instead found ourselves blocked at every step of the way by management’s incompetence and bad faith.'"

"People have to realize, we try cases in the real world. We take our witnesses as we find them."

"We did not pick Jay to be Adnan’s accomplice. Adnan picked Jay. Remember, Jay committed a crime here. He was an accomplice after the fact in a murder. A very serious crime. And there is almost always during a trial when you’re dealing with people out of a criminal milieu, that they have a lot of things they don’t want to talk about.... Like I said, people who are engaged in criminal activity, it’s like peeling an onion. The initial thing they say is, ‘I don’t know a thing about this.’ And then ‘Well, I sort of saw this.’ You get different stories as you go along. This is the real world. We don’t pick our witnesses, we have to put them on as they are. There were a lot of inconsistencies throughout Jay’s prior statements. Almost all of them involve what we would call collateral facts. A material fact is something directly related to the question of guilt or innocence. A material fact would have been, ‘I was with Adnan,’ and then you’ve got the cellphone corroborating that material fact. A collateral fact would be, We were at Joe’s Sub Shop,’ but then you find out actually they were at the auto repair store. That’s a collateral fact. It’s not necessarily material to the question of guilt or innocence. So, many of the material facts were corroborated through the cellphone records including being in Leakin Park...."

From the excellent Intercept interview with the prosecutor in the case that was the subject of the popular podcast "Serial."