Tag Archives: Steve Bannon

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FBI Nominee Kash Patel and His Friends: A Cabal of Co-Conspirators

Kash Patel

There’s a common saying that reflects how a person’s friends reveal a lot about them: “Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are.”

“Kash is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People,” Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform in announcing that Kashyap “Kash” Patel would serve as the next Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

As Paul Harvey used to say in his widely popular radio broadcasts, “And now, the rest of the story”. 

After working for the first Trump administration,Patel launched Kash’s Corner, a podcast in which he offered his MAGA-tinged take on the news alongside a co-host, none other than The Epoch Times senior editor, Jan Jekielek.

The Epoch Times is a far-right conspiracy-peddling newspaper and website affiliated with Falun Gong, a fringe Chinese religious movement. If you are not already familiar with the Epoch Times, Falun Gong also founded the controversial entertainment organization, Shen Yung, the the ubiquitous dance troupe that appears regularly in Portland.

The Epoch Times and its affiliates “have grown, in part, by relying on sketchy social media tactics, pushing dangerous conspiracy theories and downplaying their connection to Falun Gong” according to a New York Times investigation.

NBC News has reported in depth about the “conspiracy-fueled” Epoch Times, citing it as “an early and aggressive promoter of election information” in the United States. The Election Integrity Partnership coalition has cited the Epoch Times as a “repeat spreader” of false and misleading voter fraud stories as well as a major promoter of debunked conspiracy theories around Dominion voting machines and the “Stop the Steal” movement, aimed at overturning the election results.” 

After the 2020 election, The Epoch Times refused to acknowledge the results, “falsely suggesting instead that legal and procedural challenges that will flip the results in favor of Trump are still ongoing,” Forbes reported. 

NBC News has also reviewed 79 episodes of Patel’s podcast, featuring Patel and Jekielek. “Together, they spun detailed but unfounded claims of conspiracies involving government officials, law enforcement agencies, the media and tech companies, among others, all aiming to rig elections, silence conservative voices and undermine Trump’s presidency and re-election,” NBC reported. 

NBC noted that in a 2022 episode of Kash’s Corner, Patel claimed the FBI used confidential sources during the Jan. 6 riots at the Capital for political purposes, asking whether rioters had been goaded by agents to commit crimes and questioning the related convictions. Did “those confidential human sources engage people who are not going to conduct criminal activity and convince them to do so? That is the definition of entrapment, which is illegal, and you can’t charge someone who’s been entrapped,” he said. 

At his January 30, 2025 Senate confirmation hearing, Patel said with a straight face, “I have no interest, no desire, and will not, If confirmed, go backwards. There will be no politicization at the FBI. There will be no retributive actions taken by any FBI.”

But In an interview with Trump ally Steve Bannon, Patel insisted he would go after judges, lawyers and journalists who, in Patel’s view, had improperly investigated Trump and stolen the 2020 election.  “We’re going to come after the people in the MEDIA who helped Biden rig presidential elections,” he vowed.

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media — yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’re going to figure that out — but yeah, we’re putting you all on notice,” he added. “We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”

Bill Bramhall, The Virginian-Pilot

Should this guy be running the FBI, the premier law enforcement agency in the United States? I don’t think so.

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Coming to a screen near you: The Georgia Star News, a new conservative digital newspaper

The Georgia Star News

Georgians are about to get a new online news site aggressively pushing a conservative agenda.

With all eyes on the January 5, 2021 elections in Georgia that could decide which party controls the U.S. Senate, Star News Digital Media, a right-leaning collection of five digital newspapers, obviously sees an opportunity to grab some eyeballs, revenue and influence with a new product, The Georgia Star News.

“…we are working hard to get The Georgia Star ready for launch later this week!,” Christina Botteri, Executive Editor of the online news sites, told me in an email today (Nov. 16, 2020).

Star News, based in Nashville, TN, launched its first title, The Tennessee Star, in February 2017. Its current digital news outlets include: The Virginia Star, The Ohio Star |The Michigan Star, The Tennessee Star and The Minnesota Sun.

A look at the Nov. 16, 2020 Virginia Star conveys the tone of all the Star News titles, with headlines such as:

·       The Empire Struck Back, but MAGA Will Strike Harder

·       Voting Software Was ‘Designed to Rig Elections,’ Trump Attorney Sidney Powell Tells Maria Bartiromo

·       Antifa/BLM Terrorists Viciously Attack Women, Children, and Elderly Following Saturday’s #MillionMAGAMarch

Further reflecting Star News’ leanings is a comment made in a Nov. 18, 2020 Virginia Star commentary by Conrad Black, a former media mogul who was jailed after being found guilty of conspiring with fellow executives to siphon off funds from the sale of media businesses. President Trump pardoned Black in May 2019 after he wrote a book praising the president.

“The Trump campaign to overthrow the political establishment may have stalled, but even if it is narrowly evicted from the White House, and even if the election result is not evidently based on fraudulent dumps of invalid ballots, Trump is not going away,” Black wrote in his commentary. “His following is unlikely to defect to anyone else, and so non-galvanizing a leader as Biden at the head of so fissiparous a coalition will not easily deflect the 73 million Trump voters or their formidable convener-in-chief from continuing the battle after no more of a hiatus than Trump’s enemies gave him four years ago.”

The CEO & Editor-in-Chief of Star News is Michael Patrick Leahy, an early tea party activist, Breitbart contributor and talk radio broadcaster.

In a 2018 Politico story, one of the company’s founders, Steve Gill, a conservative commentator and radio host, agreed that “Breitbart of Tennessee” would be a fair description of The Tennessee Star site.  Breitbart is a far-right syndicated news, opinion and commentary website. Gill left Star News in August 2019.

Steve Bannon – an outspoken rabble-rouser and one of the driving forces behind Breitbart – became Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President following Donald Trump’s election. He left the White House in August 2017, succumbing to power struggles with senior advisors to Trump.

Star News’ news sites are just one segment of a slew of rapidly expanding partisan outlets endeavoring to infiltrate our lives.

The Portland Courant, for example, looks like a legitimate news site serving Oregon. If you slide down to the bottom of the home page and click on “About,” you’ll discover it is put out by Metric Media LLC. 

A New York Times investigation published on Oct. 18, 2020 found that Metric Media is “a fast-growing network of nearly 1,300 websites that aim to fill a void left by vanishing local newspapers across the country…The network, now in all 50 states, is built not on traditional journalism but on propaganda ordered up by dozens of conservative think tanks, political operatives, corporate executives and public-relations professionals.”

While Metric Media’s network is conservative, liberals are financing other “news” outlets such as Courier. This is a network of eight sites started by Acronym, a liberal political group that began covering local news in several states in 2019. Those sites, and others focused on North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, are part of the Courier Newsroom network. 

So get ready Georgians. You’re next. Star News has you squarely in its sights.

Addendum, Nov. 19, 2020

The Georgia Star News debuted on Nov. 19, 2020. The digital newspaper has no connection with The Georgia Star, which bills itself as “Northeast Florida’s, Oldest, Largest, Most Read African American Owned Newspaper” or with The Star-News, which serves McCall, Idaho and the mountain communities of West Central Idaho. 

Media Matters, a left-leaning media watchdog, has already criticized the site: “The organization’s explicit aim is to deliver pro-Trump propaganda to residents of battleground states, coating local news in the same grievance- and conspiracy-filled vernacular as is used by outlets like The Daily Caller and Breitbart.

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Harvey Weinstein’s not the only one spying on reporters

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech. – Benjamin Franklin

 

spy

Harvey Weinstein had no qualms about spying on journalists to protect himself, or even using journalists to acquire information he could use against his accusers.

He used Dylan Howard, the chief content officer of American Media Inc., publisher of the National Enquirer, who passed on information about Weinstein’s accusers gleaned by his reporters.

Then there was the freelance writer hired by Black Cube, a private intelligence agency, who passed on information about women with allegations against Weinstein.

Sounds creepy. But Weinstein’s not the only one spying on reporters and he’s not the only one trying to undermine and disparage journalists.

ropetreejournalist

Walmart just removed a t-shirt like the one above from its website, following a complaint from a journalist advocacy group.
The shirt was listed on Walmart’s website through a third-party seller, Teespring, which allows people to post their own designs for sale.

The Columbia Journalism Review just reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said criminal investigations into the sources of journalists are up 800 percent and he’s vowed to “revisit” the Justice Department’s media guidelines that restrict how the US government can conduct surveillance on reporters.

Then there’s Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon who sent two reporters to Alabama to dig up dirt on reporting done by the Washington Post about Alabama Republican Roy Moore. Breitbart’s goa, according to Axios, is to undermine the work of Post reporters Stephanie McCrummen, Beth Reinhard, and Alice Crites.

How about when the Koch brothers allegedly hired private investigators to dig into Jane Mayer’s past while she was working on her book, “Dark Money,” which accuses the Kochs and other wealthy plutocrats of hijacking American democracy.

At one point, Mayer heard that she was going to be accused of plagiarizing other writers. According to the New York Times, a dossier of her supposed plagiarism had been provided to The New York Post and The Daily Caller. The writers insisted there had been no plagiarism, causing the smear to collapse.

Three years later Mayer said she traced the plagiarism accusation to a firm involving several people who have worked closely with Koch business concerns. The firm was Vigilant Resources International, whose founder and chairman, Howard Safir, had been New York City’s police commissioner under former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

“Smearing Mayer is reflective of Safir’s contempt for reporters and the media in general when he was police commissioner,” said a Newsday reporter.

In June of this year the New York Post reported that the Trump administration was spying on journalists who have been handed leaked information.

The Post said the Justice Department has obtained a legal warrant from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to conduct electronic surveillance on reporters who were known to have published articles based on leaked information.

The surveillance was reported to be part of the Trump administration’s attempts to clamp down on leaks from within the White House and government departments.

In some respects, there’s nothing new about all this.

In 2013, the Justice Department advised the Associated Press (AP) that Federal investigators had secretly seized two months of phone records for reporters and editors of the AP. The government had obtained the records for more than 20 telephone lines of its offices and journalists, including their home phones and cellphones.

Gary Pruitt, the president and chief executive of AP, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. calling the seizure, a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its news gathering activities.

There’s so much concern within the journalism community about government spying that the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and Freedom of the Press Foundation are teaming up to find out what’s going on.

On Nov. 29, they filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department and several intelligence agencies, demanding records revealing how the government collects information on journalists and targets them with surveillance.