mmr 10 Jan 2018

Interesting.
I still don't know how this will turn out, but it seems Trump is getting the upper hand?
Unless there are hidden schemes underneath.

Steve Bannon Is Stepping Down From Breitbart News

Steve Bannon is out at Breitbart News.

The publication announced in a post on Tuesday that Bannon, had stepped down from his position as chairman, just five months after he returned to the job after leaving the White House.

“Steve is a valued part of our legacy, and we will always be grateful for his contributions, and what he has helped us to accomplish,” said Breitbart CEO Larry Solov.

Before resuming his tenure at Breitbart, Bannon served as chief executive for Donald Trump’s campaign and then chief strategist in the White House.

But he came under fire last week after the publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, which detailed the inner workings of the Trump Administration during its first months. In the book, Bannon is quoted as saying the meeting between Donald Trump Jr., and a Russian attorney, which was also attended by Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, was “treasonous.”

The comments caused Trump to publicly break with Bannon, a move quickly followed by his biggest financial backer, Rebekah Mercer — who owns a stake in Breitbart News. Bannon issued a statement Sunday expressing regret for his delay in responding to the reporting about the comments, and calling the president’s son “a patriot and a good man.”

Representatives for both Bannon and Mercer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

time.com/5096035/steve-bannon-breitbart-news-out/?xid=homepage

However Small, North Korea's Olympics Talks Are a Victory

In North Korea, the Supreme Leader’s New Year’s speech is his most important annual political statement, one that is endlessly parsed for hints at the secretive Stalinist state’s policy priorities for the next 12 months. As 2018 dawned, a bespectacled Kim Jong Un, wearing a light gray suit, stood at a wooden podium to tell his 25 million countrymen “the entire continent of America is within reach of a nuclear attack” following his regime’s latest missile and nuclear tests. Washington, he warned, should “never forget the nuclear button is placed on my desk at all times.”

But Kim also adopted a conciliatory tone, declaring his wish “for peaceful resolution with our southern border,” and offering talks over sending a delegation to the Winter Olympics in South Korea in February. On Tuesday, those talks will take place at the DMZ that has divided the peninsula since the 1950-3 Korean War. They will be the first direct inter-Korea discussions since the spring of 2016, when then South Korean President Park Geun-hye severed communications in response to Pyongyang’s fourth nuclear test.

time.com/5092347/north-korea-kim-jong-un-moon-jae-in-winter-olympics-pyeongchang/?xid=homepage

But Weinstein's behavior was reportedly an open secret in the industry, which might make all the photos of Winfrey schmoozing around with him a political problem.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/01/09/oprah-might-run-for-president-we-did-the-opposition-research-for-you/?utm_term=.c48d2de9eab4


Oprah’s relationship with Weinstein highlighted amid presidential rumours

OPRAH Winfrey’s potential presidential bid could be hampered by her cozy relationship with one Hollywood’s worst sexual offenders.

But her potential candidacy and her status as a #MeToo champion could be hampered by the cosy relationship she has had with the man whose heinous behaviour sparked the whole movement: Harvey Weinstein.

Winfrey and Weinstein have had a professional relationship that stretches back two decades.

Rose McGowan, who led the push to expose Weinstein’s alleged crimes, was seemingly unimpressed with Winfrey’s speech, tweeting “Alright Oprah” and accusing those wearing black to highlight the issue at the Globes of “Hollywood fakery”.

www.news.com.au/entertainment/awards/golden-globes/oprahs-relationship-with-weinstein-highlighted-amid-presidential-rumours/news-story/3e03b57ff6bcb7caf2415655deaa34b6

Now it's fancy Hollywoodians like Oprah's time.
In other 20 years, the scandal of #metoo-kids will come out and everybody will talk 9again) of Hollywoods secret everybody knew about and ask "how could that happen?".

Because even for these things, people who "fight" them are more into the attention and fame than the actual justice.


"I was very, very awake and very ashamed of what was going on, how I put it, I was just ... coming into Hollywood, man, just a horny little kid, like on drugs, getting fed drugs, man, by vampires," he said of being abused at 14. "I still blame myself to an extent, but my conscience is much, much more clear. I have come to terms with this a long time ago but obviously not [totally]. Stuff happens when you are a kid, it scars you inside for life."

He said pedophilia was and still is Hollywood's biggest problem and darkest secret.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/corey-feldman-sexual-abuse_n_4136524

I see.
Mercers?

Ok.

Hugely rich GOP donors. They have their puppet, rubber stamp president, and they’ll throw Bannon under the bus any day to keep him in office.

Sorry, to clarify: while there's people like Larry Solov, the CEO, who is a co-founder (with the late Andrew Breitbart) and part owner, the Mercers seem to be the ones who bankrolled Breitbart originally.  The Mercers are Robert and his daughter Rebekah.  What I'm hearing is that Robert has actually retired, not just officially, and that Bannon's conciliation and departure are because he and Rebekah had a falling out over the book.  So people tend to speak of the Mercers as the father-daughter pair but this appears to be just the one Mercer that matters.

How many times do you think she was kicked in the teeth and how much easier does she think it would've been had the A-listers been on board at tossing out the troth that fed them because of what's right?

Put another way, I suspect Oprah was at least perceived to be an enabler.

Perhaps, but beating perceived enablers up doesn't help move the needle any. She should be content that she was finally proven right. Otherwise she comes off like TLC.

Lurch is set to challenge Bill Nelson for senator. Anything perceived to be a detriment to the race won't be allowed by Republicals.
(Lurch can't run for gov again, thank God.)

A Watergate moment? The Fusion GPS testimony could change history
Dianne Feinstein’s decision to release Glenn Simpson’s testimony has a long history, and could have a huge impact

One of the most misunderstood quotes from the Watergate scandal is also one of the most famous: "What did the president know and when did he know it?" That was uttered by Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, and it's often assumed it was a tough question hurled at a recalcitrant witness, seeking to implicate Richard Nixon. In fact, it was the opposite. Baker asked that question repeatedly, early in the Watergate hearings, in an attempt to wall off the president from the suspected criminality of his staff. Of course Nixon actually ran the coverup, as the committee holding those hearings was about to find out.

Baker has always been seen as something of a hero in the Watergate story, and it's really overblown. In the beginning, he met secretly with Nixon to keep him informed about the course of the Watergate committee's investigation. Baker told the president that the plan was to start with public testimony by the smaller fry and move up to high-ranking White House staff. Nixon wanted to make a deal with the committee to have the witnesses testify in private. Since the Democratic majority controlled the committee that was a non-starter anyway. But much as Baker wanted to help out his president, and may have even believed in the beginning that Nixon was not implicated in criminal misdeeds, Baker was also smart enough not to help Nixon obstruct justice.

Those hearings held by what was officially called the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, where Baker was the ranking Republican under Sen. Sam Ervin, D-N.C., the chair, were vastly important in unraveling the scandal. First came former White House counsel John Dean's dramatic testimony that implicated the president and then the revelation by former presidential aide Alexander Butterfield that Nixon had extensive tape recordings of everything that happened in the Oval Office. Presidential aides H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson all testified, lied to the committee under oath and were subsequently convicted and went to prison. The congressional investigations worked on parallel tracks with two special prosecutors and the press, all of which were vital to the public understanding of the scandal and the scope of the president's crimes.

If Nixon were around today he'd be able to see how it might have gone if the Republicans had held a congressional majority and supporters like Baker had labored to keep the investigations under wraps. The only dramatic public hearings we've had in the Russia investigation so far involved the testimony of former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and former FBI Director James Comey, and that was more than six months ago. All the important players, including Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, have testified in secret, with members of the committees more or less under a gag order and only able to comment on what's already in the press. Nixon understood that keeping testimony secret, rather than giving the public the ability to judge the witnesses for themselves, is a real advantage in a cover-up. Having a partisan majority running interference in the Congress is priceless.

The investigation by the House Intelligence Committee under Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., has been a farce from the beginning. Nunes has conspired with the White House from the beginning, was caught red-handed, and promised to remove himself from any involvement with the Russia probe. (He should have recused himself from the beginning since he served on the Trump transition team, which is a subject of the investigation.) He's still interfering in the investigation and has lately taken to creating elaborate diversions with baseless new fishing expeditions into alleged FBI corruption during the presidential campaign. Nixon would have loved to have such a devoted toady on his team.

The Senate Intelligence Committee seems to be working a bit more professionally, but one gets the feeling under getting some pressure. The Democratic ranking member, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, took to the Senate floor just before Christmas to warn the president against firing special counsel Robert Mueller. But so far the committee has hung together and whatever differences its members may have are not spilling into the public domain. They too are interviewing witnesses in private.

This week the real action happened on the Senate Judiciary Committee when Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., decided to release the secret testimony of Glenn Simpson, owner of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that employed former British spy Christopher Steele, compiler of the famous "dossier." Feinstein said she felt compelled to do it because “the innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation into potential collusion and obstruction of justice." She believed this was the only way to set the record straight.

The innuendo Feinstein refers to include the disproved assertions that the dossier was the impetus for the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's strange association with dozens of Russians, along with the request by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that the Justice department consider prosecuting Steele for lying to the FBI. Lying about what? The senators declined to say. This hostile action, done without consulting other senators on the committee, was clearly meant to smear Steele's reputation and by association the whole investigation. (In fairness, Graham seems to be the main actor here -- Grassley, the committee chair, is extremely confused.)

Simpson had asked that his testimony be released, so there was no question of violating anyone's confidentiality. Since Grassley and Graham had apparently decided to act unilaterally as partisan hit men, Feinstein realized that she would have to reciprocate in kind. After all, Democrats had been asking that the testimony be released since August.

The released transcript of Simpson's testimony contains a good deal of interesting information, all of which will be gone over with a fine-toothed comb in the press. But the upshot is that Simpson says Steele (who was effectively his subcontractor) went to the FBI because he learned in the course of his investigation that Russian agents were attempting to conspire with the campaign of the Republican candidate for president. Republicans in Congress have been trying to cover that up for obvious reasons: It's not only damning information on its own, it's also an indictment of every Trump associate who remained silent or played along.

www.salon.com/2018/01/10/a-watergate-moment-the-fusion-gps-testimony-could-change-history/?page=2

Oh I wonder wonder
Who
Oh oh oh
Who
---
Huuh!
---
Who wrote the Bill of Love?

Here you go, Rich:


‘A Lot of Butthurt to Go Around’ as Breitbart Battle Splits Billionaires
Former Keep the Promise benefactors are holding a grudge.

It was the billion-dollar breakup.

The 2016 Republican presidential primary left scores of relationships frayed and hobbled. The most consequential—at least, from a financial perspective—is likely the breakdown between Manhattan billionaire hedge fund heiress Rebekah Mercer and the new-money self-made fracking billionaire brother duo Dan and Farris Wilks.

Back in early 2015—it feels like a lifetime ago!—an ally of Sen. Ted Cruz’s team announced that a super PAC franchise had locked up more than $30 million to back the Texan, primarily from three wealthy conservative families.

But with extraordinary amounts of money came white-hot tension. At the heart of the tension was Breitbart News, the site’s top funder, its chief executive, and the intensifying feud between then-Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump and his chief primary rival. Multiple sources now tell The Daily Beast that the resulting fallout could have an impact on the company’s future.

Jon Francis, the Wilks brothers’ son-in-law who was involved in the super PAC expenditures, disputed some of this: He said in an email that any tension between the families was solely a result of disputes over Breitbart’s coverage of the race and that the Wilkses have nothing but respect for the Mercers despite those disagreements.

Rebekah Mercer and her attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

This all started on April 8, 2015, when a Cruz ally told Bloomberg that a franchise of super PACs backing his presidential bid had amassed a whopping $31 million. It soon emerged that those super PACs, called Keep the Promise 1, Keep the Promise 2, and Keep the Promise 3, were funded by Robert and Rebekah Mercer; Farris and Dan Wilks; and Toby Neugebauer, the son of former Texas Rep. Randy Neugebauer.

The innovative three-part structure meant each donor family had maximum control over how their millions got spent.

At the time, Rebekah Mercer had an ownership stake in Breitbart, which she holds today. She has leveraged that stake in the company to force out former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has led Breitbart since 2012, with a brief sabbatical to serve on the Trump campaign and in a senior position in the Trump White House.

Mercer and Bannon had a very public falling-out last week over the latter’s published comments in a salacious new book about the Trump White House. But two years ago, Mercer was far more forgiving of her political consiglière—despite complaints from allies in the pro-Cruz effort who complained Bannon was throwing a wrench in the works.

In the final months of the Republican primary, Breitbart began running stories giving credence to Trump’s most eye-popping criticisms of Cruz. The site repeatedly fueled speculation that Cruz was ineligible to serve in the White House because he was born in Canada and gave oxygen to Trump’s speculation that Cruz’s father was complicit in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The stories put Rebekah Mercer in an awkward situation: The news website she funded was vociferously—and conspiratorially—bashing the candidate she also funded.

Jon Francis, the Wilks brothers’ son-in-law, was advising them at the time on their political spending. He wasn’t impressed with Mercer’s business acumen, according to a Republican operative familiar with his thinking, and he wasn’t coy about it.

Over the tense weeks when the Republican primary came down to Cruz versus Trump, Francis criticized Mercer in a way she found insulting, per that same operative, suggesting she lacked business acumen and couldn’t keep her people in line. He also said he would never let a company he owned get away with doing what Breitbart was doing to Cruz.

“There was a lot of butthurt to go around,” said one Texas Republican operative familiar with the situation.

Francis told The Daily Beast in an emailed statement that there “simply isn’t any truth” to claims that the bad blood between the families persists to this day.

“My family has nothing negative to say about the Mercers,” he said.

He didn’t dispute they had disagreements that grew tense.

“It became apparent to me that Breitbart News was running interference for the Trump campaign,” Francis said. “I didn’t want Breitbart to run interference for us or to turn against Donald Trump. I just wanted them to function like a news site and not like an arm of the Trump campaign, which is how I saw them.”

Francis said in the email that he confronted Mercer about Breitbart’s covert support for Trump and that she dismissed his concerns.

“She felt that Breitbart was just calling it as they saw it,” he said. “I told her I thought she was missing something that was becoming obvious to everyone else, and that I believed Steve Bannon was actively currying favor with Trump. She stood her ground.”

“It wasn’t a fight. It wasn’t part of any broader conflict,” he said. “It was a disagreement between two passionate people in a stressful situation. After that, we got back to work.”

Both families kept working with the super PAC until Trump’s victory in the Indiana primary ended Cruz’s bid.

But well-placed sources say the “butthurt” between the two families didn’t dissipate. Instead, the Keep the Promise mess left a rift between the Wilks family and the Mercers—one that plugged-in sources suspect will be irreversible.

One contributing factor was cash. Initially, the Wilks brothers, the Mercers, and Neugebauer each committed to spend $10 million on their individual Keep the Promise franchises.

But that’s not what happened. By the time Cruz conceded the primary, the Mercers had dropped $13.5 million boosting the Texan, and another $2 million after the primaries ended. The Wilks brothers had donated $15 million, but more than $8 million was refunded to them after Cruz withdrew from the race. Neugebauer, meanwhile, chipped in $10 million and had nearly $9 million refunded the day after Cruz ended his campaign, according to FEC filings.

Neugebauer’s unspent money left the other families irate.

“That was the common bond: everybody venting about Toby disappearing,” said a Republican operative.

Despite that shared ire, the Republican operative familiar with the Wilks family’s thinking told The Daily Beast it’s all but certain the two families will never again both invest in the same project.

Breitbart for Sale?

In addition to their political and charitable giving, the Wilkses also own the Daily Wire, an online outlet led by conservative author and pundit Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor, has also clashed with Bannon. And multiple sources said he has floated potentially marshalling the Wilkses’ financial support to buy Rebekah Mercer’s stake in Breitbart. But that prospect appears dim, thanks in part to the messy history between the Wilks brothers and the Mercers.

The Republican operative familiar with the Wilks family’s thinking said that as long as the Mercers are invested in Breitbart, the Wilks brothers—and, by extension, Shapiro—will stay out: eyeing Breitbart from afar, biding their time.

www.thedailybeast.com/a-lot-of-butthurt-to-go-around-as-breitbart-battle-splits-billionaires?ref=home