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15 October 20
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The Viral Biden-Burisma Story Is Riddled With Holes and Red Flags
THE TABLOID NY POST IS OWNED BY MURDOCH
ALSO SEE: Facebook and Twitter Limit Sharing New York Post Story About Joe Biden
Sonam Sheth, Business Insider
Sheth writes: "Trumpworld flew into a frenzy Wednesday morning after the New York Post published what it described as a 'smoking-gun email' showing Hunter Biden communicating with a Ukrainian official about meeting with his father, Joe Biden, when he was vice president."
The Post said that in one email in May 2014, the month after Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings, Vadym Pozharskyi, the third-ranking executive at Burisma, emailed him asking for "advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message" or "signal."
In another email on April 17, 2015, the Post said, Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden for "inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together," adding, "It's realty an honor and pleasure."
President Donald Trump's allies seized on the report as evidence that the Bidens were in bed with the Ukrainian government and that Hunter Biden took advantage of his position on Burisma's board to link up his father with influential Ukrainian officials.
"NEWS: Biden lied when he denied speaking to his 'son [Hunter] about his overseas business dealings,'" tweeted Kellyanne Conway, the former White House counselor.
She said in another tweet that Hunter Biden joined the board "shortly after Obama put Joe Biden in charge of US relations with Ukraine." She added that the Post's report showed "Burisma's No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for 'advice on how you could use your INFLUENCE' on the company's behalf."
"Joe Biden is a stone cold corrupt liar," a tweet from the Trump War Room account said. In another tweet, it said that "Joe Biden thinks the American people are suckers."
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley latched onto the story as well, tweeting: "Joe Biden using his office to benefit a Ukrainian oligarch after he said he didn't. He is going to need to answer questions about this."
But a closer examination of the Post's story raises several red flags.
Are the emails authentic? How were they uncovered? And how did the Post obtain them?
The most glaring questions center on whether the emails are authentic, how they were uncovered, and how the Post obtained them.
The report said that in April 2019, an unidentified person dropped off a water-damaged MacBook Pro with the emails and other compromising material about Hunter Biden at an unidentified repair shop in Delaware, the Biden family's home state. The report said the repair shop's owner provided that information, but it did not give details on his identity.
A reverse image search of one of the photos in the story indicated that the shop's owner is a man named John Paul Mac Isaac, whose social-media activity suggests he is an avid Trump supporter. His shop, called The Mac Shop, is at 21a Trolley Square in Wilmington. The Post also did not strip the metadata from photos included in the article, and a software engineer named Russel Neiss noted that the GPS information embedded in some of the images showed that the repair shop was in the same area.
The owner of the repair shop said that he wasn't sure the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden but that the machine had a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, the report said.
The story went on to say the person who dropped off the water-damaged laptop "never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client."
The shop's owner then contacted federal authorities about the laptop and the hard drive, the report said. The article also included a photo described as a federal court subpoena showing that the FBI seized the computer and the hard drive in December. It's unclear why the bureau subpoenaed the hardware after the repair shop's owner volunteered information about its existence to authorities.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies who recently published a book called "Active Measures" that focuses on the history of disinformation, said that the way the purported emails surfaced in the first place was dubious.
"This here is highly suspicious behavior," Rid tweeted after the Post's story was published. "Especially when viewed in the context of a political campaign. Creative, anonymous, credibility-generating, somewhat plausible. Exactly how a professional would surface disinformation and potentially forgeries."
Rid added that the emails featured in the Post's story were published as images rather than in a file format, which "makes it harder to analyze and verify the files."
"Note that photos, which appear to look genuine, could be there simply to add credibility to forged emails surfaced along with the photos. This would be a standard tactic in disinformation operations," he wrote.
"Bottom line: *every individual little fact*—every email, every detail mentioned in an email—must be verified when data is surfaced in such a suspicious way, not just one piece of information, say a photo," he added. "It appears that The New York Post did not do that here."
Isaac did not respond to multiple phone calls and text messages seeking comment. But he later confirmed to several reporters who tracked him down at his shop that he was the source of the story. Isaac also said Trump's impeachment was a "sham" and at one point cited the debunked right-wing conspiracy theory about the slain Democratic staffer Seth Rich.
He also couldn't get his facts straight about the timeline of events outlined in the Post's story for which he was the source. The Daily Beast reported that "throughout the interview, Mac Isaac switched back and forth from saying he reached out to law enforcement after viewing the files in the laptop to saying that it was actually the Federal Bureau of Investigation that contacted him."
"At one point, Mac Isaac claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop," The Daily Beast said. "At another point he claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device's existence. At another point, he said the FBI reached out to him for 'help accessing his drive.'"
Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon resurface
Notably, the Post's report said, the repair shop's owner made a copy of the hard drive and turned it over to Robert Costello, a defense attorney who represents former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, before giving the computer and the hard drive to the feds.
Giuliani, Trump's personal defense lawyer, is the focus of a criminal investigation by the Manhattan US attorney's office into whether he violated foreign lobbying laws in Ukraine.
The same month that the repair shop's owner was said to have given Giuliani's lawyer a copy of the hard drive, Giuliani met with a Ukrainian national named Andrii Derkach to discuss efforts to obtain damaging information on Joe Biden before the 2020 election. At the time, the House of Representatives was also conducting an impeachment inquiry into Trump centered on his efforts to strongarm the Ukrainian government into launching politically motivated investigations targeting the Bidens.
The US Treasury last month sanctioned Derkach, saying he acted as a Russian agent and spread disinformation related to the election. Politico reported that Derkach had been circulating misleading and deceptively edited material targeting Joe Biden for nearly a year.
Late last month, the Post's story said, Steve Bannon told the outlet about the existence of the hard drive. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist who previously served as the Trump campaign's CEO and the head of the far-right website Breitbart News, was arrested and charged over the summer with fraud in connection with an online fundraising campaign.
The Post said Giuliani gave it a copy of the drive on Sunday, nearly a year after his lawyer was said to have been given a copy of it.
But The Wall Street Journal's Kevin Poulsen noted on Twitter that instead of publishing emails from the copy of the hard drive the Post said it's had since Sunday, it published PDFs of the emails that were compiled "by a third-party, Giuliani or someone else, over a year ago." The metadata that Poulsen tweeted indicated that the PDF of the May 2014 email was created on October 10, 2019, and that the PDF of the April 2015 email was produced on September 28, 2019.
Moreover, the Los Angeles Times reporter Chris Megerian tweeted that when he asked Giuliani on Wednesday morning how long he'd had a copy of the hard drive, Giuliani responded: "Your interested in the wrong thing. This time the truth will not be defeated by process. I've got a lot more to go. We just started. Print a headline saying Lyin' Joe and we can talk."
The content of the emails
Then there are the emails themselves.
In the alleged April 2015 email, Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden for inviting him to Washington, DC, to meet with Joe Biden. But there's no evidence Pozharskyi actually met the former vice president.
The Post then laid out an apparently explosive timeline: Less than eight months after Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden for the introduction, Joe Biden pressed the Ukrainian government to oust the prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin by "threatening to withhold a $1 billion US loan guarantee during a December 2015 trip" to Kyiv.
"I looked at them and said: I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money," Joe Biden said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018. "Well, son of a bitch. He got fired."
The Post highlighted that when he was fired, Shokin had said that he had "specific plans" to investigate Burisma that "included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden."
The implication — which Trump, Giuliani, and their allies in the right-wing media have repeatedly floated — is that Joe Biden had Shokin fired to stymie a criminal investigation into Burisma Holdings, whose board Hunter Biden was on at the time.
However, as Business Insider reported last year, there's a significant issue with that theory.
Government officials and Ukrainian anticorruption advocates said Shokin had hampered the investigation into Burisma long before Joe Biden even stepped into the picture, The Wall Street Journal reported.
In other words, Biden was doing the opposite of what Trump and Giuliani have implied: He was trying to oust a prosecutor who was slow-walking the investigation into Burisma, rather than actively targeting the company.
Western diplomats have also said Shokin effectively shut down one such investigation into Burisma's founder in the UK by refusing to cooperate with authorities. And Bloomberg reported that the Burisma investigation was largely dormant when Biden called for Shokin to be fired.
Most important, Biden represented the US's official position on the matter, one that was shared by many other Western governments and anticorruption activists in Ukraine, The Associated Press reported.
The emails laid out in the Post's story also weren't included in a controversial report released last month by two Republican Senate chairmen about the details of Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine.
Regardless, the conservative media and political sphere touted the Post's story on Wednesday as incontrovertible evidence that the president was right when he accused Biden of catering to corrupt Ukrainian interests to protect his son.
The Biden campaign said in a statement that it "reviewed Joe Biden's official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place."
The campaign's statement continued: "The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani — whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported — claimed to have such materials."
The story gained little traction among more reputable sources, and Facebook said shortly after the article was published that it would slow its spread on the platform until third-party fact-checkers could verify its authenticity.
"While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners," tweeted Andy Stone, a Facebook representative. "In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform."
Twitter followed suit and said it would limit the spread of the story on its platform by blocking users from linking to the Post's report, citing company rules against posting hacked material.
Breonna Taylor with boyfriend Kenneth Walker. (photo: Ju'Niyah Palmer)
Breonna Taylor's Boyfriend Tells Different Side of the Story
CBS News
Excerpt: "In an exclusive broadcast interview with 'CBS This Morning' co-host Gayle King, Breonna Taylor's boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, shares the details of the night she was fatally shot by police in her own home."
From the knock on the door to the barrage of bullets to the 911 call and his arrest, Walker describes what he says happened that night.
On March 13, Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by police while they were executing a search warrant for a drug case connected to Taylor's ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover. Walker was with her the night of the shooting and he remains adamant that police never identified themselves before the fatal shooting.
Walker told King both he and Taylor asked "several times" who was on the other side of the apartment door when police began knocking. "And there was no response. So the next thing I know the door is flying open," he told King.
Taylor, a 26-year old emergency medical worker, was shot at least five times.
In September, a grand jury agreed with the attorney general's recommendation not to charge anyone directly in Taylor's death. Now-fired Louisville police officer Brett Hankison was indicted on wanton endangerment charges for firing shots into a neighbor's apartment during the raid. Walker was initially charged with attempted murder for allegedly hitting an officer in the thigh when he fired his gun, but those charges have since been dismissed.
Police claimed they identified themselves before entering the apartment. In an interview recorded the day of the shooting and later played for a grand jury, Louisville police Lieutenant Shawn Hoover said they "knocked on the door, said 'police,' waited, I don't know, 10 or 15 seconds, knocked again, said 'police,' waited even longer."
"So it was the third time that we were approaching, it had been like 45 seconds if not a minute," Hoover said. "And then I said, `Let's go, let's breach it.'"
But Walker tells a very different story.
"It was dead silent in the house," he explained to King. "And it was 12:00, 1:00 at night, or whatever time. So it was — it's always quiet. We live in a quiet place. So if somebody was on the other side of the door saying anything, we would hear them."
When pressed if he was certain, Walker said "I'm a million percent sure that nobody identified themselves." Walker, a licensed gun-owner, said this is what caused him to open fire.
"That's why I grabbed the gun. Didn't have a clue," Walker said. "I mean, if it was the police at the door, and they just said, 'We're the police,' me or Breonna didn't have a reason at all not to open the door to see what they wanted."
No drugs were found in Taylor's apartment and Glover has said Taylor had never been involved in any drug trading.
"That's why I never thought it was the police. Because why would the police be coming here?" Walker said.
King's exclusive interview with Walker airs Wednesday on "CBS This Morning" at 7 a.m.
Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett listens during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (photo: Erin Schaff/AP)
'Stunned': Amy Coney Barrett Refuses to Say She Would Keep Birth Control and Same-Sex Marriage Legal
John T. Bennett, The Independent
Bennett writes: "Conservative Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett refused to tell senators if she would vote to overturn decisions that provide legal protections to birth control and same-sex marriage, prompting one Democratic lawmaker to say her silence on those issues left him 'stunned.'"
Her rebuttal: 'Well, senator, to suggest that’s the America i want to create isn ‘t based on any facts in my record’
Senate Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and the federal appellate judge clashed in one of the most pointed exchanges of the second day of her questioning by the panel. He pressed her on past decisions by US federal courts, including the Supreme Court, on both hot-button issues.
As she has on issues ranging from the 2011 Affordable Care Act to whether a president can both pardon himself and unilaterally delay an election, Ms Barrett declined to state clearly how she would rule if challenges to those previous decisions reached a high court on which she was a jurist.
“I am surprised and I think a lot of Americans will ne scared by the idea that people who simply want to marry or have a relationship with the person they love could find it criminalized, could find marriage equality cut back,” Mr Blumenthal said. “I think it would be an America where I wouldn’t want to live.”
Though she remained cool and calm, as she has the entire three days of her confirmation hearing, the nominee did appear less-than-pleased with the line of questioning.
“Well, senator, to suggest that’s the America i want to create isn ‘t based on any facts in my record,” she said, despite writings she has published in law journals taking conservative stances on those and other matters.
She contended a passage from one of those articles he read aloud merely reflected her saying that judges questioning the legality of such issues is “par for the course” in a legal decision-making venue.
Ms Barrett told the senator she did not want to give people the impression that contraception soon will be illegal.
But she would not say whether she would have ruled with the majority in one case that upheld legal birth control.
“I am stunned you won’t say you would have been in the majority,” he said before moving to a new topic.
Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 when he was 18 years old. Today, the group is represented on over 1500 American campuses. (photo: Gage Skidmore)
Videos Show Closed-Door Sessions of Leading Conservative Activists: 'Be Not Afraid of the Accusations That You're a Voter Suppressor'
Robert O'Harrow Jr., The Washington Post
O'Harrow writes: "As the presidential campaign entered its final stages, a fresh-faced Republican activist named Charlie Kirk stepped into the spotlight at a closed-door gathering of leading conservatives and shared his delight about an impact of the coronavirus pandemic: the disruption of America's universities. So many campuses had closed, he said, that up to a half-million left-leaning students probably would not vote."
“So, please keep the campuses closed,” Kirk, 26, said in August as the audience cheered, according to video of the event obtained by The Washington Post. “Like, it’s a great thing.”
The gathering in Northern Virginia was organized by the Council for National Policy, a little-known group that has served for decades as a hub for a nationwide network of conservative activists and the donors who support them. Members include Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Leonard Leo, an outside adviser to President Trump who has helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars from undisclosed donors to support conservative causes and the nominations of conservative federal judges.
Videos provided to The Post — covering dozens of hours of CNP meetings over three days in February and three in August — offer an inside view of participants’ obsessions and fears at a pivotal moment in the conservative movement. The videos, recorded by CNP to share with its members, show influential activists discussing election tactics, amplifying conspiracy theories and describing much of America in dark and apocalyptic terms.
“This is a spiritual battle we are in. This is good versus evil,” CNP’s executive committee president, Bill Walton, said on Aug. 21, addressing attendees at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City. “We have to do everything we can to win.”
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told attendees that same day that the left is “war-gaming” a plan to delay the election tally until Jan. 20, 2021, and enable House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to become acting president. “This is kind of like crazy talk” among political people, Fitton said. But he added: “This is not an insignificant concern.”
Expressing concern about voter fraud and disenfranchisement, Fitton called on the audience to find a way to prevent mail-in ballots from being sent to voters. “We need to stop those ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” said Fitton, whose organization is a tax-exempt charity. “But this is a crisis that we’re not prepared for. I mean, our side is not prepared for.”
In an interview with The Post, Fitton elaborated on his remarks. “The left has war-gamed this out,” Fitton said. “And it could cause civil war.”
Brent Bozell, a CNP executive committee member and founder of the Media Research Center, another tax-exempt charity, told attendees at one of the August sessions that he believes the left plans to “steal this election.”
“And if they get away with that, what happens?” he said. “Democracy is finished because they usher in totalitarianism.”
Bozell did not respond to messages seeking comment.
At the February meetings, attendees discussed plans for seeking an advantage in the upcoming vote. Two said the right will begin “ballot harvesting,” a controversial technique that involves the collection and delivery of sealed absentee ballots from churches and other institutions.
At the time of the meeting, Trump, his campaign officials and other Republicans were blasting the practice as an abuse by Democrats. “GET RID OF BALLOT HARVESTING, IT IS RAMPANT WITH FRAUD,” Trump tweeted this spring.
But Ralph Reed, chairman of the nonprofit Faith & Freedom Coalition, told the CNP audience that conservatives are embracing the technique this year.
“And so our organization is going to be harvesting ballots in churches,” he said. “We’re going to be specifically going in not only to White evangelical churches, but into Hispanic and Asian churches, and collecting those ballots.”
Reed did not respond to requests for comment.
J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department official and the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a charity, described mail-in voting as “the number one left-wing agenda.”
Adams urged the activists not to worry about the criticism that might come their way. “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth,” Adams said.
In response to questions, Adams wrote in an email: “I stand by what I said because it is accurate.”
The partisan commentary and election-related discussions captured on the videos involved members of an array of nonprofit organizations, including tax-exempt charities. In exchange for the right to accept tax-exempt donations, charities are prohibited from actively supporting political candidates or working in coordination on candidates’ behalf.
Such laws are rarely enforced, in part because of murkiness about what constitutes a violation, and because of the complex interactions between some charities and nonprofits known as “social welfare” groups, tax specialists said. Social welfare groups are permitted to engage in lobbying and advocacy but must devote less than half of their resources to political activity. An individual may serve as a leader of both a charity and an affiliated social welfare group.
Some of the sessions at the CNP conferences are designated as being run by CNP Action, a social welfare affiliate that shares leaders with CNP.
Two tax law specialists who viewed hours of video at The Post’s request said some of the remarks and planning on the videos could be improper for the groups that are registered with the IRS as charities.
“What was jarring was that it was pretty clear to any reasonable observer that the entire purpose of the panel was to help the Republican Party win in November, up and down the ticket,” said Roger Colinvaux, director of law and public policy at Catholic University’s law school, referring to a panel about health care.
Marcus Owens, a lawyer who led the Exempt Organizations Division at the IRS from 1990 to 2000, told The Post that participants’ comments on the videos raise potential issues of compliance with election laws and charity rules. “I’ve never seen anything like it on videotape and live,” Owens said, referring to the overt partisan coordination among the nonprofit leaders. “It’s almost like a movie.”
A spokesman for Kirk said he was there representing himself, not in his capacity as the leader of Turning Point USA, a prominent conservative youth organization based in Phoenix.
In an interview, Bob McEwen, CNP’s executive director, said the Washington-based organization complies with IRS regulations and does not itself “do anything.”
“CNP doesn’t do ad campaigns. It doesn’t do brochures. It is a meeting of leaders,” said McEwen, who is also president of CNP Action, the related social welfare group. “Anything that’s done is done by the membership, not by the Council for National Policy.”
The sessions are closed to the public, and participants are told not to talk to the media about the group or its proceedings. “It absolutely could be open to the media, except that the media is known to be left, and then creates a distorted vision of their conversations,” McEwen said.
The Council for National Policy was launched during the Reagan administration by figures in the religious right to bring more focus and force to conservative advocacy.
It has attracted conservative luminaries and front-line activists from across the country, according to internal directories obtained by The Post. In the years leading up to Trump’s election, members included Stephen K. Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. The videos make clear that CNP maintains strong links to the White House.
Some participants spoke of a CNP-associated delegation that meets weekly with White House officials. They said the group, the Conservative Action Project, has helped to choose loyalists to run federal agencies and coordinate outside messages with nonprofit organizations to support administration policies and leaders.
“It’s kind of this little secretive huddle that meets every Wednesday morning,” Paul Teller, a Trump deputy and director of strategic initiatives for Vice President Pence, told the audience in August.
In February, during three days of meetings in Southern California, a CNP member named Rachel Bovard described the Conservative Action Project’s influence in helping the Trump administration select political appointees for the executive branch. She said the Conservative Action Project coordinated closely on these and other efforts with CNP members and the Conservative Partnership Institute, a tax-exempt charity run by former senator and tea party leader Jim DeMint of South Carolina.
“We work very closely — CAP does and then we at CPI also — with the Office of Presidential Personnel at the White House to try and get good conservatives in the positions because we see what happens when we don’t vet these people,” she said.
Bovard cited as examples two figures who testified against Trump last year in the House impeachment hearings: Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, former director for European affairs at the National Security Council, and Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
“All these people that led the impeachment against President Trump shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” Bovard told the CNP audience. “We want to prevent that from happening.”
In addition, Bovard described Ginni Thomas as a crucial link to the White House. “She is one of the most powerful and fierce women in Washington,” Bovard said. “She is really the tip of the spear in these efforts.”
Bovard and Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.
A White House spokesman said Teller declined to comment.
In another February session, Kelly Shackelford was introduced as CNP vice president, chairman of CNP Action and leader of the First Liberty Institute, another organization registered as a tax-exempt charity.
He bragged about extensive behind-the-scenes coordination by his group and other nonprofit organizations to influence the White House selection of federal judges.
“Some of us literally opened a whole operation on judicial nominations and vetting,” he said. “We poured millions of dollars into this to make sure the president has good information, he picks the best judges.”
Shackelford said he is among the nonprofit leaders now coordinating with the White House to support the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to fill the seat previously held by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In an interview, Shackelford said he is focused on educating Americans and providing information that will help the White House choose judges who interpret the Constitution in a literal way.
Speakers at the August conference touched on many of the cultural issues absorbing conservatives today — sometimes with more edge and heat than they do in their typical public remarks.
In one of the sessions, author and former professor Carol Swain, speaking on a panel about race relations, said that “White people have lost their voice in America.”
She likened the Black Lives Matter movement to the Ku Klux Klan. “The Democratic Party is using Black Lives Matter and antifa the same way they used the KKK,” said Swain, who is Black. “They created the KKK. It was their terrorist wing to terrorize everyone.”
In response to questions, Swain stood by her remarks.
Some participants bridled at pandemic restrictions — and the video showed that many did not wear masks.
“You will need to wear masks in the public part of the hotel but not here,” Walton, the CNP president, announced to applause.
“Yeah,” Walton said. “That’s great!”
A state mandate in Virginia generally requires masks at indoor public settings.
On Aug. 21, in a rare CNP open session, Trump addressed the audience, which included acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf. Later that day, Teller, the White House deputy, gave a high-spirited shout-out from the front of a conference room to Wolf’s team.
“I don’t know if you got to know Secretary Wolf’s team, sitting in the corner, they’re just a bunch of wingers. That’s like the most conservative table in the entire room, is Secretary Wolf’s team,” Teller gushed. “Great, great, great secretary.”
In contrast to his ebullience, some speakers at the meeting raised doubts about Trump’s prospects in November.
Nancy Schulze, a CNP member and co-chair of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Wives Council, said the lack of a clear health-care plan from Trump poses a “huge vulnerability” for the president.
“If we don’t get this right in the next 75 days, there is a question as to whether we’re going to prevail at all within the presidential campaign, or the House or the Senate,” she said.
Others described an elaborate social media and advertising campaign by a collection of nonprofits — some of them tax-exempt charities — to convince voters this fall that a Republican free-market approach to health care would offer more choices.
Organizers showed ads that feature doctors in white lab coats with stethoscopes. They told the CNP audience that market research found that featuring doctors engenders trust among voters.
“And so I remind people that what we’re trying to do is put on theater here,” said Alfredo Ortiz, president of Job Creators Network and chief executive of its foundation. “It’s the stage. It’s the script and the actors.”
Ortiz did not respond to requests for comment.
Among those involved are former House speaker Newt Gingrich and former health and human services secretary Tom Price. Organizers are asking allies in Congress to introduce a resolution that echoes the policy themes, such as the notion of personalized health care, Price told the crowd.
“It’s urgent, but it’s not too late,” Price said.
A sketch of a picture that is alleged to depict The Base was shown in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Md., on Jan. 16 during a hearing after three people suspected of being members of the white supremacist group were arrested on federal charges. (photo: Bill Hennessy)
Secret Tapes Show Neo-Nazi Group "The Base" Recruiting Former Members of the Military
Samantha Springer, NBC News
Springer writes: "Secret recordings of a militant neo-Nazi organization called The Base reveal that the group is recruiting people with military expertise in the U.S. and Canada to train in military operations and prepare to take advantage of what they believe is impending societal collapse."
The audio recordings are from calls between the leader of The Base and more than 100 prospective recruits using the encrypted app Wire. The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, which monitors hate groups, says that it obtained more than 80 hours of audio recorded starting in November 2018 and that the recordings are featured in a new three-part podcast titled "Baseless" that is being released as part of the SPLC's "Sounds Like Hate" podcast series.
According to the SPLC, a confidential source provided the recordings to the organization unsolicited, and it confirmed their authenticity with subject matter experts. The SPLC says the audio does not appear to have been edited.
Twenty percent of the prospective recruits who were recorded said they were active-duty military or had served in the military in some capacity, said documentary filmmaker Jamila Paksima, a co-host of the podcast. NBC News has listened to a significant part of the audio but could not independently verify their identities or their claims.
The leader of The Base, Rinaldo Nazzaro, who was born in the U.S., runs his operation out of his apartment in St. Petersburg, Russia, which he discusses in the recordings.
Mollie Saltskog, senior intelligence analyst at The Soufan Group, an international security consultancy, said: "Extremely lethal and dangerous operations that believe in an impending race war like The Base or Atomwaffen make a concerted effort to recruit people with military experience. Having these types of people in these types of organizations increases their operational capabilities to commit acts of terrorism."
Saltskog said reports that Nazzaro is based in Russia "raise flags about the potential for foreign influence on these white supremacist organizations operating on American soil."
Nazzaro formerly was known only by his online aliases, Norman Spear and Roman Wolf, until The Guardian revealed his identity in January.
The Guardian and the BBC used photos and property records to show the links between Nazzaro and the Spear alias. The Guardian, for example, found tax affidavits signed by Nazzaro for a property in Washington state linked to Spear and owned by a company called Base Global. It also matched images of Spear with photos of Nazzaro posted on social media by his wife. The BBC, meanwhile, traced Nazzaro and his Russian-born wife to a St. Petersburg apartment that was purchased in her name. NBC News has not reviewed those records.
"We are survivalism, a self-defense network," Nazzaro said in one of the recordings. "Our mission's very, very simple. It is training and networking, preparing for collapse. We want to be in a position where we're ready, we're prepared enough, ready enough that we can take advantage of whatever chaos, power vacuum, that might emerge. We want to try and fill that power vacuum and take advantage of the chaos."
The Justice Department calls The Base a "violent extremist group." Members of The Base in the U.S. have been arrested on charges of possession of weapons, vandalism and conspiracy to commit murder.
"They hate Jews and African Americans. Their goal is to use terrorism to start a race war and collapse the United States. Triggering societal collapse may be a sick fantasy, but the reality is that domestic terror has claimed more lives than international terror since 9/11," Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., said in a House hearing on incidents of white supremacy in the military this year.
Many of the conversations document recruitment interviews Nazzaro conducted with potential members of the group. The SPLC says it used machine learning to find patterns in what was discussed. There are recurring themes of violence and munitions, but there are also pervasive undertones of avoiding attention from the media and law enforcement.
According to the SPLC, 80 percent of the recordings have to do with guns and the collapse of America. The word "targeted" occurs in 45 percent of the conversations, and the phrase "not doing anything illegal" shows up in 30 percent of the conversations.
While Nazzaro spoke mostly in positive terms about the camaraderie the group could provide the potential recruits, some of the most hateful language came from the potential recruits themselves, according to the SPLC.
"A lot of our guys, we have just a pure hatred for modern civilization and industrialization," said "the Ecologist," the alias for a 20-year-old potential recruit. "We wish to liberate ourselves, our fellow whites and animals from that system." When Nazzaro asked how, he answered, "Through economic sabotage such as bombings, arson."
"Growing up in California, I was surrounded by mostly, like, Filipinos, Asians, Mexicans, Blacks and just watching how they behave ... and watching, like, I don't know, occasionally, like, white women intermingle with them," he said. "It just disgusted me."
Others bragged about the weapons they own.
"In terms of firearms, I recently purchased one of my own," another potential recruit said. "I have an AR-15. I practiced with it for a few weekends."
According to the SPLC, Nazzaro organized The Base "not as a hierarchical membership organization, but as a network of small, underground cells, each with a high degree of autonomy."
Nazzaro said on one of the recordings: "What people decide to do outside The Base with that training and contacts they make is their business. We don't really need to know about it. I mean, sure, it's kind of better that we don't for everyone's sake and for everyone's success."
Pro-democracy protesters flash the three-finger salute. (photo: Adam Dean/The New York Times)
Thai Protests: Pro-Democracy Demonstrators Gather Again in Bangkok, Defying Ban on Gatherings
Jonathan Head, BBC News
Excerpt: "Protesters have taken to the streets again in the Thai capital Bangkok, defying a ban on gatherings and sweep of arrests of key protest leaders."
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A lawsuit in Maui alleges that Big Oil hid the risks of their products on the climate and should be held responsible for the costs of sea level rise. (photo: iStock)
Maui Has Begun the Process of Managed Retreat. It Wants Big Oil to Pay the Cost of Sea Level Rise.
David Hasemyer, Inside Climate News
Hasemyer writes: "With nearly 300 miles of coastline, the Hawaiian islands that make up Maui County face the threat of sea level rise from all sides. It's that assault that has formed the foundation of a lawsuit Maui filed this week against 20 fossil fuel companies seeking compensation for the rising costs of climate change."
The lawsuit alleges that the companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and ConocoPhillips, knew their products produced warming greenhouse gases that threatened the planet but hid those dangers from Maui's people and businesses to maximize corporate profits.
"Defendants have known for more than 50 years that greenhouse gas pollution from their fossil fuel products would have significant adverse impacts on the Earth's climate and sea levels," the lawsuit said. "Instead of warning of those known consequences ... defendants concealed the dangers, promoted false and misleading information, sought to undermine public support for greenhouse gas regulation, and engaged in massive campaigns to promote the ever-increasing use of their products at ever-greater volumes."
Roadways, parks, infrastructure and buildings that hug the coastline are vulnerable to billions of dollars in damages from sea level rise caused by climate change, the lawsuit said.
Some of Maui's most scenic and iconic highways are at risk, including a stretch of Honoapiilani Highway from Papalaua State Wayside Park to the Pali side of the town of Lahaina.
Maui County, which consists of the islands of Maui, Lanai, most of Molokai and two uninhabited islands, already has begun working on a plan for managed retreat and new infrastructure to protect communities from the impacts of rising sea levels. Fossil fuel companies could have taken steps to reduce damage or warn people about the danger from continued use of oil and gas products that harm the environment, the lawsuit said.
But now the county wants the industry to take responsibility.
"It might be a David vs. Goliath case, but someone has to take a stand and oil companies need to pay for the damage they knowingly caused," Maui Mayor Michael Victorino said in a prepared statement. "Our 'rock' is science, which clearly shows the impacts of burning fossil fuels have led to sea level rise and other environmental impacts that will get worse, perhaps much worse, in the years ahead."
Exxon did not respond to a request for comment.
Shell spokesperson Anna Arata said the company supports the transition to a lower-carbon future by lowering both the company's emission and that of its customers.
However, she said in a statement issued in response to previous lawsuits, "We do not believe the courtroom is the right venue to address climate change, but that smart policy from government, supported by inclusive action from all business sectors, including ours, and from civil society, is the appropriate way to reach solutions and drive progress."
Chevron spokesperson Sean Comey also restated the company's response to previous climate lawsuits, saying the company is "working to find real solutions to climate change." The climate lawsuits, he said, seek "to punish companies that deliver affordable, reliable energy."
Maui joins a growing list of cities, counties and states that have filed lawsuits seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for damages and mitigation costs attributable to climate change that could severely strain taxpayer-funded budgets.
The lawsuits cite a series of stories published by InsideClimate News in 2015 based on internal Exxon documents that revealed the extent of the company's knowledge about the central role of fossil fuels in causing climate change going back to the 1970s.
Sea level rise threatens Maui's five commercial harbors and five airports, which will become increasingly exposed to chronic flooding that will disrupt inter-island and transoceanic shipping and travel, impacting the county's economic activities along with its residents and visitors, the lawsuit said.
"Since the County is almost entirely dependent upon imported food, fuel, and material, the vulnerability of ports and airports to extreme events, sea level rise, and increasing wave heights is of serious concern," the lawsuit said.
On the island of Maui alone, more than $3.2 billion in assets, including more than 3,100 acres of land, 760 structures critical to Maui's tourism-based economy, and 11.2 miles of major roads, are at risk of inundation and destruction because of sea level rise estimated to occur by the year 2100, the lawsuit said.
Native Hawaiian cultural and historical resources, such as burial grounds and home sites, and the habitat of native and endangered species face destruction by rising seas, wildfires and rising temperatures, the lawsuit said.
The county's fire season runs year-round, rather than only a few months of the year. In 2019, called the "year of fire" on Maui, nearly 26,000 acres burned in the County—more than six times the total area burned in 2018, according to the lawsuit.
Heat continues to pound the islands with 2019 being the warmest year on record across the county. Kahului, on the island of Maui, broke or tied 61 daily record temperatures, leading to threats to human health and the water supply, the lawsuit said.
Maui's case comes at a time when nearly two dozen other climate cases are wending through the legal system and facing stiff opposition from the fossil fuel industry. The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to consider whether the cases should be heard in state or federal courts.
The first round of cases was filed three years ago when five cities and three counties in California sought damages from the industry. Those cases were followed in quick succession by lawsuits in Colorado, New York City, Baltimore, Kings County in Washington state, the state of Rhode Island and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. Most recently, Connecticut and Delaware have filed climate lawsuits, as have Hoboken, New Jersey, and Charleston, South Carolina.
Generally, these cases embrace a range of state law violations that include public nuisance, trespass, product liability and consumer protection.
Like the Maui case, most of the lawsuits have been filed in state courts. But fossil fuel companies are fighting to have them heard in federal court, where they have largely been successful in fending off earlier climate lawsuits. Consequently, legal battle lines so far have been drawn over jurisdictional questions rather than on substantive issues addressing the fossil fuel industry's role in climate change.
The municipalities want the cases heard in state courts where they can focus on arguments grounded in state laws they believe more precisely relate to the cause and consequences of climate change. Having cases tried in local courts gives them an advantage because the courts are not constrained by prevailing federal laws that sharply constrain climate-related claims.
The industry is fighting to have the cases tried in federal court, where the law gives them the upper hand to argue climate change remedies are policy issues best left to Congress, not the courts, a position that the federal courts have embraced in similar cases.
