Tag Archives: President Trump

The press versus the president, part four (with links to the previous 3 parts), by Jeff Gerth

Most guest articles posted on SLL  with either the mainstream press or one its organs in the title don’t do very well. This one will probably fare about the same, but this Columbia Journalism Review article about Trump and the press by Jeff Gerth has received a lot of attention in the alternative media and none in the mainstream media, which means it’s got something to recommend it. From Gerth at cjr.org:

The press versus the president, part four

Chapter 4: Helsinki and the $3,000 Russian disinformation campaign

Trump, in July 2018, finally had a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin, the man he mistakenly claimed in 2015 to have met years earlier and his supposed puppet master, according to Steele’s dossier.

In advance of the summit, Trump met with his national security adviser, John Bolton, to discuss how to deal with Russian meddling. The president “remained unwilling or unable to admit any Russian meddling because he believed doing so would undercut the legitimacy of his election and the narrative of the witch hunt against him,” Bolton wrote in his 2020 memoir The Room Where It Happened.

At a press briefing, the final question was whether US intelligence or Putin should be believed with regard to meddling in the 2016 election. After going on a tangent about the server at the DNC, Trump said, “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia that did it. Then, a bit later in his answer, he expressed “great confidence in my intelligence people.”

The first remark received all the attention. Some outlets, like the Times, didn’t include his comments about “great confidence” in US intelligence in their stories, while others, such as the Post, did.

Trump flew home to Washington, and when aides talked to him the next day about the reaction, he said he meant the opposite.

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‘Deep State’ Was Working Against Trump On COVID-19 Response: Dr. Paul Alexander, by Harry Lee and Roman Balmakov

Certainly Trump’s response to Covid didn’t help him in the election. Perhaps the “experts” advising him didn’t have his best interests at heart, nor those of the American people. From Harry Lee and Roman Balmakov at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

According to Paul Alexander, when former President Donald Trump was trying to tackle COVID-19 in 2020, the “swamp” or the “deep state” was working against him, using flawed data to tarnish him, locking down society, and keeping schools closed.

“Can you imagine the president of the United States fighting against the [teachers’] union, fighting against the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)], fighting against his own task force?” Alexander told EpochTV’s “Facts Matter” program in an interview that will air on May 3.

“They’re working against him. So you need to be there to understand when he said ‘the swamp’ – and he talked about deep state – it is real. I dealt with them. It is the bureaucracy. The entrenched bureaucracy is real.”

From late March till early September 2020, Alexander served as scientific adviser to Michael Caputo, then-assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Dr. Paul Alexander in an interview with EpochTV’s “Facts Matter” program. The interview is scheduled to premier on May 3rd, 2022. (Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

During that time, Alexander was attacked by the media and some health agency officials for trying to “tweak” the COVID-19 death numbers in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

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‘Bigger Than Watergate’: Trump Furious After Durham Spy Scandal Bombshell, Demands Prosecutions, Reparations, by Tyler Durden

If Republicans did this to Democrats the Republicans would already be in jail. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Former President Donald Trump issued a blistering response on Saturday after Special Counsel John Durham revealed in a court filing that the Hillary Clinton campaign plotted to infiltrate the Trump campaign along with White House computer servers in order to fabricate allegations of Russian collusion.

“The latest pleading from Special Counsel Robert Durham provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia,” reads Trump’s statement.

This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution.”

“In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death. In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this.”

Like Jake Sullivan – who’s currently leading the US down the war path with Russia over Ukraine?

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Trump’s Vaccine Support May Cost Him Victory in 2024, by David Haggith

If it becomes widely recognized that Operation Warp Speed was really Operation Warped and the vaccines are causing a Doom Loop, Trump will be political toast in 2024. From David Haggith at thegreatrecession.info:

Former supporters of Donald Trump who are virulently anti-vax are furious at the ex-president’s stance, and are vowing to support rival Republicans in the race to be the party’s candidate in two years’ time.

Trump’s most ardent supporters are turning against him, publicly ripping into him since he voiced his wholehearted approval of Covid vaccines.

During an appearance at a Bill O’Reilly ‘History Tour’ event in Dallas, the former president  claimed success in expediting the creation of Covid vaccines through Operation Warp Speed, a program he created that provided billions of dollars in government funding and cut the drug’s approval time down from the usual six or seven years to one.

“We did something that was historic,” Trump boasted before the crowd. “We got a vaccine done.” When he later admitted he had not only been vaccinated twice, but had got a booster, he was booed by some of his erstwhile supporters.

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Video Transcript: The Semi-Inside Story of Why Trump Refused to Pardon Snowden and Assange, by Glenn Greenwald

Trump blew it on Assange and Snowden and he blew it on the vaccines. He’ll have to give better answers than the ones he’s given so far if he expects to run in 2024. From Glenn Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

For months, Trump indicated that he was strongly considering pardoning NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and considering a pardon for Assange as well. Yet he never did. Why?

In an interview at Mar-a-Logo, Candace Owens presses Donald Trump on why he did not pardon either Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, Dec. 29, 2021

When Donald Trump vacated the White House on January 20, 2021, it became clear that he had refused to issue two pardons which many of his most ardent supporters were advocating and even expecting: one for the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has spent eight years in exile in Russia for revealing to American citizens that the Obama-era NSA was secretly and unconstitutionally spying en masse on their communications and other online activities, and Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder whose reporting in 2010 on grave crimes by the U.S. and its allies and in 2016 on the Clinton campaign were among the most consequential journalism stories of the last two decades.

Trump’s failure to pardon either of them fostered disappointment and anger in many circles — “Trump left the White House about as weak, cucked, and submissive as it’s possible for a grown adult to scamper away,” I tweeted on that day, with an obviously considerable mix of each sentiment. That reaction was due to the fact that Trump himself had raised the possibility that he might pardon Snowden — infuriating everyone from Susan Rice to Liz Cheney — and was also actively considering a pardon for Assange. Given that it is virtually impossible to imagine any other U.S. president even remotely considering such a move, Trump seemed to be not just the best but the last chance for either of these two courageous dissidents to finally earn their freedom and be able to go home. That many of Trump’s most trusted Congressional allies [such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL)] were strongly advocating for a pardon of one or both, and because Trump himself harbored so many valid personal reasons for wanting to confront these security state agencies — he had, as much as anyone, seen first-hand how pernicious and sinister these agencies can be, and what grave menaces they pose for American democracy — it was difficult for many people to understand why he did not pardon one or both of them.

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Why the Russiagate Scandal Outranks the Rest, by J. Peder Zane

It can be argued that the Kennedy assassination was worse than the attempt to depose Trump, but apparently J. Peder Zane doesn’t consider the former a scandal, certainly an arguable conclusion. From Zane at realclearpolitics.com:

Why the Russiagate Scandal Outranks the Rest

(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Russiagate is the biggest scandal in American history.

Nothing comes close in size, scope or harm to the republic than the years-long effort to cripple Donald Trump’s presidency by claiming he conspired with an enemy state to steal the 2016 election and then do its bidding as commander-in-chief.

Why the Russiagate Scandal Outranks the Rest

(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Russiagate is the biggest scandal in American history.

Nothing comes close in size, scope or harm to the republic than the years-long effort to cripple Donald Trump’s presidency by claiming he conspired with an enemy state to steal the 2016 election and then do its bidding as commander-in-chief.

Its notorious predecessors – L’Affaire Lewinsky, Iran-Contra, Watergate, Teapot Dome, Crédit Mobilier, the XYZ Affair – involved relatively small numbers of malefactors engaged in specific acts of illegality and corruption (we still don’t know who, if anyone, planned the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol)

Russiagate, by contrast, is a vast conspiracy involving innumerable powerful forces, including the Democratic Party, NeverTrump Republicans, the Obama administration, the FBI, Department of Justice and the nation’s most prestigious news outlets.

Where previous scandals often ended with public accountability for the perpetrators – Watergate saw the imprisonment of top White House aides and President Nixon’s resignation – and public reforms, Russiagate has produced no such reckoning.

Russiagate began with a kernel of truth: Someone – probably Russians, though we still don’t know for sure – hacked the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s private server. Fearful of what might be released, the Clinton campaign tried to discredit any damaging material by raising dark questions about its source. (Joe Biden executed this same strategy to great effect when he falsely described the evidence of corruption found on his son Hunter’s laptop as “Russian disinformation.”)

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A President Betrayed by Bureaucrats: Scott Atlas’s Masterpiece on the Covid Disaster, by Jeffrey A. Tucker

President Trump learned who runs the country, and it ain’t the president. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at brownstone.org:

I’m a voracious reader of Covid books but nothing could have prepared me for Scott Atlas’s A Plague Upon Our House, a full and mind-blowing account of the famed scientist’s personal experience with the Covid era and a luridly detailed account of his time at the White House. The book is hot fire, from page one to the last, and will permanently affect your view of not only this pandemic and the policy response but also the workings of public health in general.

Atlas’s book has exposed a scandal for the ages. It is enormously valuable because it fully blows up what seems to be an emerging fake story involving a supposedly Covid-denying president who did nothing vs. heroic scientists in the White House who urged compulsory mitigating measures consistent with prevailing scientific opinion. Not one word of that is true. Atlas’s book, I hope, makes it impossible to tell such tall tales without embarrassment.

Anyone who tells you this fictional story (including Deborah Birx) deserves to have this highly credible treatise tossed in his direction. The book is about the war between real science (and genuine public health), with Atlas as the voice for reason both before and during his time in the White House, vs. the enactment of brutal policies that never stood any chance of controlling the virus while causing tremendous damage to the people, to human liberty, to children in particular, but also to billions of people around the world.

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The Indictment of Hillary’s Clint’s Lawyer Is an Indictment of the Russiagate Win of U.S. Media, by Glenn Greenwald

The Russiagate concoction did irreparable harm to Trump’s presidency and to the nation as a whole. From Glenn Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

The DOJ’s new charging document, approved by Biden’s Attorney General, sheds bright light onto the Russiagate fraud and how journalistic corruption was key.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes gives credence to the fraudulent Trump/Afla-Bank story on Oct. 9, 2018, along with the two reporters who must aggressively pushed the hoax: The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer (then at Slate) and Natasha Bertrand (now at CNN).

A lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign was indicted on Wednesday with one felony count of lying to the FBI about a fraudulent Russiagate story he helped propagate. Michael Sussman was charged with the crime by Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Trump Attorney General William Barr to investigate possible crimes committed as part of the Russiagate investigation and whose work is now overseen and approved by Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Sussman’s indictment, approved by Garland, is the second allegation of criminal impropriety regarding Russiagate’s origins. In January, Durham secured a guilty plea from an FBI agent, Kevin Clinesmith, for lying to the FISA court and submitting an altered email in order to spy on former Trump campaign official Carter Page.

The law firm where Sussman is a partner, Perkins Coie, is a major player in Democratic Party politics. One of its partners at the time of the alleged crime, Marc Elias, has become a liberal social media star after having served as General Counsel to the Clinton 2016 campaign. Elias abruptly announced that he was leaving the firm three weeks ago, and thus far no charges have been filed against him.

The lie that Sussman allegedly told the FBI occurred in the context of his mid-2016 attempt to spread a completely fictitious story: that there was a “secret server” discovered by unnamed internet experts that allowed the Trump organization to communicate with Russia-based Alfa Bank. In the context of the 2016 election, in which the Clinton campaign had elevated Trump’s alleged ties to the Kremlin to center stage, this secret communication channel was peddled by Sussman — both to the FBI and to Clinton-friendly journalists — as smoking-gun proof of nefarious activities between Trump and the Russians. Less than two months prior to the 2016 election, Sussman secured a meeting at the FBI’s headquarters with the Bureau’s top lawyer, James Baker, and provided him data which he claimed proved this communication channel.

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Bush Completes His Scummy Betrayal, by Kurt Schlichter

George W. Bush struggled to attain mediocrity, and failed. From Kurt Schlichter at theburningplatform.com:

Bush Completes His Scummy Betrayal

George W. Bush reaffirmed his status as garbage last week, for those few cons still in doubt.

Bush got up on the 9/11 anniversary and proceeded to demonstrate, again, the essentiality of class in American society. Not “class” in the sense that he is classy; Bush, though it was very important to him to front that he has such class, in fact, has none. No, the “class” that is important to W is social class. He once again chose his country club pals over you and compounded it by issuing a disgusting blood libel against you. That’s his “thank you” for the thankless job of defending his worthless rear-end we did for all those years back when he was too gentlemanly to do it himself.

His disgusting speech even drew the ire of the even-tempered and thoughtful Byron York, who called it “dreadful.” What I would call it would not pass FCC muster.

This backstabbing creep dared say:

“And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

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CNN and WaPo Write Devastating Articles Outlining General Mark Milley as Leader of Military Coup Against President Trump, by Sundance

In the good old days this sort of stunt would have got a general shit-canned. In the even good older days it would have got him lined up in front of a firing squad. From Sundance at theconservativetreehouse.com:

The headline stories today are large, and so is the background as these issues surface. Context becomes increasingly important as each aspect is reviewed.  As you look at the stories, remember this context (emphasized as a reminder):

♦ TEAM One – The Department of State is aligned with the CIA.  Their media PR firms are CNN, CNNi and the Washington Post. Their ideology is favorable to the United Nations.  Their internal corruption is generally driven by relationship with foreign actors.  References: Hillary Clinton, Clinton Global Initiative, John McCain, Qatar, Muslim Brotherhood, Samantha Powers, Susan Rice, Cass Sunstein, Brookings Institute, Lawfare, China-centric, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Council on Foreign Relations.

TEAM Two – The White House is aligned with the Pentagon (DoD) and National Security Council (NSC).  Their media PR firms are domestic in nature. New York Times, Politico, etc.  Their internal corruption is generally driven by domestic influence.  References: Barack Obama, George Bush, Wall St, Big Banks, Multinational Corporations, Defense Contractors, FBI (state police), Judicial Branch, and community activists writ large.  [Presidential elections only affect Team Two (nationalism -v- globalism).  In the modern era Team One is independent.]

Today CNN, via Bob Woodward [Article Here] and The Washingon Post, via Robert Costa [Article Here] collaborate on a designed hit against one of the key corrupt actors on Team Two, Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley.  CTH previously said this was coming: “Look for Joint Chief’s Chairman Mark Milley to be the guy who gets canned to protect Joe Biden. Mark Milley knows this is likely.”

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