#oh god who let me have access to the intern et

[lovelyirony]

Fic title meme : pulvis et umbra sumus (We Are Dust And Shadows)

On every single document, including the ones that show what actually happened to Howard and Maria Stark, Tony Stark is listed as dead among them. 

He is not. 

But in not calling in the accident on the abandoned road, Tony managed to find someone else to take his place and escaped. 

Tony Stark is dead. A whole family funeral and everything. Obadiah pretends to cry. Tony is at the funeral with shitty dye in his hair and sunglasses that he wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. Ha. 

The funeral is closed casket. All their faces are rumored to be impossible to fix with make-up. 

He makes new documents. Anthony Jarvis, from Boston. Airtight background. Likes puzzles. Scored damn high on the SAT, but not the perfect score. 

(Killed him to answer some of those questions wrong, seriously.) 

Anthony Jarvis goes to MIT and requests a single room. He gets one for one semester, and then the room next to his burns and destroys his as well. So he gets moved to Jim Rhodes’. 

Jim becomes Rhodey, and he is the first friend of Anthony Jarvis, and nicknames him Tony. 

He grins at that. 

There are plenty of times that Tony wants to tell him. The thing about secrets is that they need to be shared. No one really wants a secret, nor do they want to keep it. But he keeps his mouth shut and asks if he wants to go for Thai food. 

“This is the third time this week.” 

“Not my fault it’s good! I’ll pay...” 

“Sign me up.” 

Tony and Rhodey gets Thai food. It’s good. 

Rhodey lets him in on a secret that Tony had actually known about since his room assignment. 

(You remember that guy’s room that caught on fire? Yeah, he swore that his microwave hadn’t been on, and nothing had been plugged in. He was right. But Tony needed an accident.) 

In other circumstances, Rhodey would have ignored the offer that he had. He had had his heart set on Air Force. But there was something about the man who talked to him. 

“It’s a place called Strategic-Homeland-something I can’t remember,” Rhodey says. “Point is, they’re a big deal and kind of shady, but not in the government shady kind of way. The only thing I can find out about them is that they’re an international company who need engineers, pilots, and basically anyone like you and me. I don’t know how I feel about it.” 

Tony nods. 

“You want me in on this?” 

“I mean, you did tell me a couple of weeks ago that you weren’t sure what you wanted to do after graduation.” 

(It was two weeks, three days, and fourteen hours ago. Not like he was counting.) 

“...thanks. I’ll check it out with you.” 

Anthony Jarvis shows up in a nice suit, stupid sunglasses, and impresses the higher-ups by diagnosing a problem with the engine that others had previously marked as “impossible.” 

He’s hired on the spot, same as Rhodey. 

Tony Jarvis gets his own keycard, finds an apartment in New York that’s within at least biking distance, and gets started on inventing some cute little toys for the spies in Research and Development. 

He brings the laser-lipstick to life, poison-drop-earrings, spyglasses that actually work and have HD, and briefcases that use mirroring technology to change color. 

“How did you do this?” Rhodey asks, eyes wide. “I swear this is unreal.” 

“Aw,” Tony says. “You sap. I got some inspiration from some old comic book ads. I think I’m gonna try a ring decoder next, what do you think?” 

“Almost makes me want to go on missions instead of flying them.” 

Tony Jarvis is known for working odd yet long hours. He comes up with results. And he keeps his head down and minds his own business. 

This is all to find out exactly who killed his parents. As much as his and Howard’s relationship was...interesting, he still wanted to know. 

His desire to know the truth leads to somewhere he hadn’t thought was possible: Hydra. 

His hands freeze as he looks at the paper file with thick, black lines all over. The information there was sparse. Howard, Maria, and Anthony Stark all died. It was ruled: 

And there’s nothing there. 

It wasn’t an accident. Sure he knew that, but there was something far more sinister at play. Why wasn’t it an accident? 

- 

He gets Alexander Pierce in his apartment with a man in the corner. His arm gleams in what little light from the lamps outside give off. 

“Why are you searching for the Stark files?” He asks. 

“Why didn’t you just schedule a meeting? I’m available tomorrow at three,” Tony jokes. “Who’s your friend here?” 

“Someone you wouldn’t want to shake hands with,” Pierce answers. “You need to stop looking into this before you find yourself in a situation you don’t want to be in.” 

“And if I don’t?” 

“Accidents will happen,” Pierce says. He gets up from the table, to the counter. Gets out a glass. And makes himself water. He smiles as he looks to the man in the corner. “Do you want any water, Winter Soldier?” 

Winter Soldier remains impassive. 

Tony stills. 

“So, the legends are true. And Hydra is still around.” 

“And if you aren’t careful, you won’t be,” Pierce says. “Don’t bring any of this up. Or this won’t be the last time you see Winter Soldier. I know your moves, Jarvis. Don’t think you can surprise me.” 

They exit the apartment. Tony realizes that Pierce took his glass. 

And he laughs. 

Because this? Not according to plan, but god he’s gonna have fun with it.  

It starts with telling Rhodey who he actually is. 

It does not go as planned. 

“So let me get this straight. I’ve known you for years and you just. Never told me?” Rhodey asks. “Why not?” 

“To be completely fair, no one knows besides a man in Wisconsin, and he’s from Wisconsin,” Tony says. “Also I was drunk. Drunk me is a terrible person who would sell me for a buffalo nickel.” 

“I’m still mad, even if that’s funny,” Rhodey says, trying not to smile. “So. Why tell me now? I’m assuming you need something.” 

“I would like your help,” Tony says. “It is not required but I am toppling a secret organization living in SHIELD and I think if I get your help, I will most likely not get fired by the end of this. Fury likes you, he hates me.” 

“False, he mildly tolerates you. You’ll be fine. Probably. Who else should we get to help?” 

Tony had originally planned for no one. 

But then there was Pepper Potts. 

She had been deemed by the media as “crazy” for accusing Obadiah Stane, longtime-CEO of Stark Industries, as ordering a hit out on the Stark family. 

She had been booted from the company--anticipated--and then Hydra had ordered a hit on her. 

Slightly unexpected. 

Point is, Rhodey brings her into the apartment and tells Tony casually that the grocery store had run out of his usual hummus brand, was the generic okay? 

“That’s like asking if I’m okay with blue pens,” Tony curses. “Also, is that Pepper Potts? Why is she here? Did you run into her at the grocery store?” 

“No, as I was coming back. Did you know that she has a hit out on her? Fun times.” 

“Oh my god, will someone explain to me what’s going on here?!” Pepper seethes. “I was just trying to get my yogurt without anyone taking a picture of me and some random fucking guy had a knife thrown at me and then this guy took me to your house!” 

She then rants for ten minutes about the “questionable design choices going on in this establishment, who honestly thinks shot glasses are a decoration?!” 

“Are you done?” Tony asks. “Because if you want to help with a conspiracy plot, you need to be done.” 

She is. 

Pepper does not get a job with SHIELD. In fact, she mainly just decides to take care of the redecoration in Tony’s apartment. 

“You will be paying me for this.” 

“Why would I do that? You’re using my money to buy everything. You’re living here rent free for now.” 

“Because I’m helping you make better life choices. I also want new shoes.” 

What Pepper does is provide very valuable access to Stark Industries: she knows the ins and outs, what employees do and don’t do, and also is very helpful in telling Tony what he needs to do when he takes the company over. 

“Who said I was going to take it over?” 

“Me,” Pepper says. “Also because I reviewed every single old document and the company was specified to go to next-of-kin. You are. And you’re not dead.” 

“My death certificate is literally framed,” Tony says, pointing to his graduation photo that Rhodey took. He had swapped out his official diploma with it as a joke. No one had seen it. He thought it was hilarious. 

“Yeah, but they can do DNA testing,” Pepper says. “This is like the twenty-first century Anastasia except this time they don’t find you with metal detectors!” 

“I don’t like that you know that story as well as you do,” Rhodey says. “But I’ll leave you a credit card for furniture and groceries. If you get rid of my drinks in the fridge I’m literally never forgiving you.” 

“Noted, and I don’t need forgiveness,” Pepper says. “But they’ll stay there.” 

So begins the plot. 

Pierce doesn’t know three things, which is a lot of things not to know: 

1.) Tony Jarvis is not Tony Jarvis. 

2.) Rhodey actually likes Tony and most of the time him saying that he would “kill Tony in a variety of ways, starting with sporks and moving forward...” is mostly (mostly) a joke. 

3.) Pepper Potts resides in their apartment and is having fun telling Tony she bought new silverware. 

“Why did you buy new silverware! It was fine!” 

“I recognized all of these forks and knives from restaurants. Why did you steal them from restaurants?” 

“They can replace them!” 

“Don’t. Anyways now your spoons match and you don’t have the shitty ones from different places. Also I painted the bathroom.” 

“My landlord is gonna kill me.” 

“I made her cookies and discovered that she likes going to concerts. You’ll be fine.” 

(Pepper is a goddess. You can’t convince them otherwise.) 

Pierce doesn’t know any of this, but he still holds a key piece of blackmail: Tony Jarvis shouldn’t know about Hydra, and he’ll do anything to make sure that he doesn’t lose his job. 

Tony has been recording their conversations for weeks. 

(Pierce thinks he doesn’t design things to get around the available technology. Pathetic.) 

He also has bugged Pierce as well as his house, and figures out that Winter Soldier is going to be on assignment within the DC area in an effort to kill some higher-up on the foodchain that was SHIELD. 

Well. 

Tony has always wanted to go and see the cherry blossoms a little more up close. 

Pepper, of course, doesn’t like that they left his boots on. 

“This couch is new and red,” she says. “Take off his boots!” 

“He is unconscious and probably won’t be in the next fifteen minutes,” Rhodey says. “We are not touching him and possibly shortening that fifteen minutes.” 

Winter Soldier wakes up to three faces staring at him. 

“Mission failed?” he asks, voice robotic. 

“Nope, you just got a new one,” says the man on the right. He is wearing a t-shirt. Winter Soldier thinks that in this situation, a t-shirt is not the best option. 

(Of course, he’s not supposed to think. But they don’t have to know that.” 

“Can you take your shoes off?” says the woman in the middle. “Please. You’re getting germs on the couch.” 

He’s confused. 

“Who am I killing?” 

“No one, yet,” says the man on the left. “Do you know who you are?” 

“Winter Soldier.” 

“No, like a name? I’m assuming you’ve had a name at some point.” 

“Someone has called me Mr. Freeze before.” 

The man on the left snorts. Man on the right taps his arm lightly. 

“Well, um, okay then. How do you feel about the name...aw shit. I can’t think of a name for you when your mask is on. Can you take the mask off?” 

He takes it off. It’s nicer to breathe. 

The man in the t-shirt pauses. 

“Okay. So your name is Bucky Barnes. Do you know that name?” 

Something clicked. But he doesn’t know what. 

“Sounds...familiar.” 

“Cool! So that’s your name now, do me a favor and don’t google it. I’m Tony, this is Rhodey, and this is Pepper. If you don’t take your shoes off, you’re going to be scared of her.” 

Newly-named-Bucky highly doubts that he will be scared of Pepper because she is built like a twig and she is wearing high heels. 

(He is wrong about ten minutes later when she forcibly throws a fork at him.) 

“Why am I here?” he asks. “Should I be checking back in with Handler Pierce?” 

“No,” comes the consensus from everyone else in the room. 

“Technically, he thinks you went rogue and went back to Russia. He’s organizing a team to go get you. We hired an actor to play you. It’s been entertaining. He got some plums. Do you like plums?” 

“Why is that relevant?” 

“It’s vapid and not interesting at all, Tony loves questions like that,” Rhodey says. “Now come on. We need to get you actual shirts. Also some body wash.” 

Bucky Barnes learns how to be a person. He stares at himself in the mirror for an hour and smiles slightly when Pepper calls him “vain” and pushes him aside to grab her hairbrush. 

He then learns that Hydra is trying to overtake SHIELD and they have a slight window with Pierce out. 

This involves two things: 

1.) Tony Stark coming back from the dead. 

2.) SHIELD panicking that they didn’t know this secret and taking another look at the paperwork, in which case Hydra will be found out. 

These are both easier than anticipated. Tony can act like a showman better than anyone, and has been carefully growing a goatee that is eerily reminiscent of his late father’s. Of course he’s had to switch it up. 

The media is going crazy. SHIELD as well. They’re scrambling to find paperwork that proves that it happened, and they find that the “accident” was no accident. That Howard hadn’t been working for the “enemy” at the time. 

The enemy was in the building, and they had blended in seamlessly. 

This all happens on a Wednesday, by the way. Pepper has it marked on the calendar and everything. Rhodey made his coffee. 

Bucky is busy slamming people into drywall and listening for any word from Rhodey, who is also slamming people into drywall. 

“You know, you’d think we’d get something like a suit of armor for this,” Rhodey pants out, slamming another guy out of his way. 

Bucky nods. 

“Best I can offer is a grenade.” 

“Where in the fuck did you get a grenade?!” 

“Supply closet. Second floor. What, you didn’t check?” 

“No sorry must’ve missed it--of course I didn’t fucking check the second floor closet!” Rhodey yells. 

Bucky says he’s stressed. He should calm himself. 

Rhodey chucks a particularly nasty Hydra agent out a window. 

(Bucky thinks Rhodey is probably the coolest person he’ll ever meet.) 

Tony is fashionably late to the take-down of the century. He’s already foiled a lot of plans, and taken a key-card for Project Insight to work. 

He waltzes in and nearly gets hit by a mug. 

“So, how’s the party going?” he yells over to Pepper. Pepper is still in her heels. She looks like a goddess still, as usual. It is a Wednesday, after all. 

“As fine as it can be,” Pepper says. “We’ve met some resistance. With Pierce gone there’s little infrastructure. You got his plane delayed, correct?” 

“Even better. Got it sent to London. Motherfucker is gonna be there for a while,” Tony says. “Also may or may not have said that he was a threat. SHIELD branch there will investigate, find out some questionable things in his file that he will swear up and down were never there.” 

“Good,” Pepper says. She launches a stapler at someone’s head. “Do you think we’ll have time to pick up takeout for dinner?” 

“Depends on whether or not Deputy Director Hill is Hydra.” 

They see Maria Hill pass by in a blur, yelling as she jumps onto a man and sends him crashing down over a railing. 

“Lovely, she isn’t!” Pepper cheers. “By the way, I was thinking about redoing our kitchen.” 

“‘Our’ kitchen?” Tony says, ducking a bullet and drawing out his personal lipstick-laser, firing it with expert precision. “I told you the living situation was temporary.” 

“Oh please, you have an extra room.” 

“Which was an office!” Tony tells her. 

“Like you can’t have your office at Stark Industries,” Pepper says. “I expect to hear how the reveal went over dinner. Also, please hire me back. I don’t wanna be your interior decorator for forever.” 

“Neither do I, you like modern art. Disgusting.” 

And so the fighting resumes. 

It is done by five-thirty-two, with an official surrender from Pierce. 

“Thank god, I already ordered Chinese and they said it’d be here at six,” Rhodey says. 

They all sit on the red couch. 

Shoes on. 

Tony tips four hundred percent. 

-

“So what are we doing tomorrow?” Rhodey asks. 

“I am not moving for six hours,” Bucky answers. “Also maybe getting a library card.” 

“This is the first thing you want out of the icebox? A library card?” Tony asks, laughing. 

Pepper laughs. 

“I have errands to run. You can come with me and we’ll swing by.” 

“What are the errands?” 

“Getting a kitchen mixer and also making sure that my plates match my napkins.” 

“A travesty if it doesn’t happen,” Rhodey deadpans. “Pass the lo mein, Tony. You’re hogging it.” 

“I had to fight on a Wednesday and run,” Tony says. “Today isn’t cardio day.” 

“Literally hate it when you speak,” Rhodey says. “Absolutely abhor your language.” 

They go to bed, although it’s more of laying on the floor. 

Sure, Tony will have to deal with retaking a business that he knows a bit less about and Pepper will have to be trained (again) and also fight against being made CEO (but she won’t fight much). Rhodey will get a new job with SI because it’s not like Tony will let him work at SHIELD (Rhodey tries, Tony will get him fired at some point). Bucky just...he needs to get a bit more than a library card. 

But that’s for tomorrow. 

[slut-kiss-g1rl]

geostorm <3

FADE IN:

INT. COURTROOM

GERARD BUTLER is at a COURT HEARING... in the FUTURE!

GERARD BUTLER

It is the future. Natural disasters have become alarmingly commonplace. Hurricanes, mudslides, floods, you name it. The level of destruction is catastrophic.

RICHARD SCHIFF

To be clear, this is the FUTURE you’re talking about?

GERARD BUTLER

The nations of the world have finally decided to take action. So, pooling our resources, we’ve invested heavily in environmental research and clean energy, and cracked down heavily on industrial emissions standards-

(laughs and laughs and laughs)

Just kidding! We’ve built a giant orbital platform that shoots the bad weather with space missiles and space lasers, of course.

RICHARD SCHIFF

So you’re the genius who built the space station. But instead of just making you the chief engineer, which would make sense, we made you director of the whole multi-national program, despite the fact that you have no administrative skills or political experience and mostly get what you want by yelling at people and punching them in the face?

GERARD BUTLER

That’s correct, you useless government fucks. You can all lick my sweaty gonads.

(moons everybody)

RICHARD SCHIFF

You’re fired and we’re giving your job to your little brother Jim Sturgess. At least he can do a passable American accent.

GERARD BUTLER

Och, ye dinnae hae ta be a deck abote et!

INT. SPACE STATION

Engineer RICHARD REGAN PAUL is aboard the WEATHER STATION when he notices that somebody has stuck a SMARTPHONE on an important CIRCUITBOARD.

RICHARD REGAN PAUL

Oh crap, somebody’s sabotaging this hundred-trillion-dollar space program using consumer electronics! I better draw everybody’s attention to this and alert my superiors!

(falls down and hits head very hard)

Duhhhh I mean I should hide this evidence and tell nobody yessss.

He stashes the EVIDENCE, but shortly afterwards the CORRIDOR he’s walking through is SEALED and all the WALL PANELS START BLASTING OFF!

RICHARD REGAN PAUL

What the fuck? Why would we design them to be able to do that? What possible situation could arise in a space station when we’d need to get rid of the WALLS in a hurry? This makes no-

(spaced)

The SPACE STATION then proceeds to turn a bunch of VILLAGERS in AFGHANISTAN into SNOWMEN.

INT. WHITE HOUSE

JIM STURGESS is having a meeting with the movie’s entire supply of Oscar-nominated actors.

JIM STURGESS

So yeah, we kind of murdered a bunch of innocent people with a giant ice ray like Mr. Freeze, oops. We need to send up an international team of brilliant engineers to the space station to investigate what went wrong, despite the fact that there’s already an international team of brilliant engineers ON the space station.

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE ANDY GARCIA

No way, Jim. As the president, I can’t have foreigners touch this station which has been funded and staffed predominately by foreigners! We’ll send up Americans.

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE ED HARRIS

ONE American. I mean if we’re going to half-ass this thing, let’s half-ass it, y’know?

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE MARE WINNINGHAM

I am also in this scene for some reason.

JIM STURGESS

Ugh fine, let’s send up Gerard. It’ll take some doing though, he and I haven’t really gotten along in the vague amount of time since you gave me his job. Seriously, the timeline is super nebulous, it could have been anything between a week and five years.

ED HARRIS

I have faith you can convince him, Jim. As your father figure and mentor, you know I support you in everything, and if you ever need somebody you can implicitly trust-

JIM STURGESS

We get it, you’re the villain, whoop-de-doo.

(leaves)

EXT. LOSER SHACK

JIM goes out to see GERARD, who is hanging with his DAUGHTER.

JIM STURGESS

Hey bro, the space laser’s been acting up. Think you could pop up to space real quick and fix it? Thanks.

GERARD’S DAUGHTER

Dad, no! You can’t go back to space! It’s too dangerous! Don’t abandon me like this!

GERARD BUTLER

OH GOD NOT THIS FUCKING TROPE. Yeah, parents should never do work that takes them away from their families for any amount of time or puts themselves at risk, no matter how important it is. I’m a shitty father because I’m agreeing to go save hundreds of millions of lives, possibly including yours. Shut the fuck up, you little turd.

GERARD immediately storms off and goes to SPACE.

EXT. HONG KONG

Suddenly the movie remembers the CHINESE BOX OFFICE and cuts to HONG KONG, where DANIEL WU is heading home with some SHOPPING.

DANIEL WU

(looks around)

Aw fuck. A famous capital city in a disaster movie? This isn’t gonna end well.

Sure enough he drops some EGGS on the ground and they immediately begin to FRY!

DANIEL WU

Holy shit the ground is apparently as hot as a stovetop! You’d think this is something the people in the street would have noticed, but uh, I guess all our shoes are made entirely of thermally nonconductive silica fibreglass?

(jumps in car, speeds off)

And our tires too, don’t forget our tires!

DANIEL drives through the streets as the pavement CRACKS and FIRE erupts out of the SUPERHEATED PAVEMENT!

DANIEL WU

Damn, the space station must have done that! Not that we ever explain how geothermal energy could possibly be controlled by space lasers!

INT. SPACE STATION

GERARD arrives aboard the SPACE STATION to meet the team of ENGINEERS.

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Welcome, Gerard! I am an asshole. A smug, unlikeable asshole. The exact kind of jerk you’d think would turn out to be the saboteur. Which is kind of awkward, because I DO turn out to be the saboteur.

AMR WAKED

It’s okay, I’ll cover for you by red herringing as hard as humanly possible in every scene I’m in.

(lurks sinisterly)

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

Meanwhile I’m the station’s commander. I exist to be your sort-of love interest with whom you never get beyond meaningful eye contact, and to make you seem hypercompetent by standing around uselessly while you do everything important.

GERARD BUTLER

Okay then, now that everybody’s in position let’s get this 2012-but-with-weather/Gravity-except-stupid-and-with-more-explosions hybrid on the road! Bring on the barrage of gratuitous global annihilation!

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

Actually there’s nowhere near as much of that kind of thing as the trailers promised. But if you like scenes where someone stares at tiny gobbledegook on a computer screen and explains what plot points it discloses, we’ve got a buttload of that!

GERARD BUTLER

(puppy dog eyes)

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

Oh fine, here’s one to tide you over.

EXT. TOKYO

Giant hail in Tokyo!

INT. SPACE STATION

GERARD BUTLER

Ta! Now let’s look at that satellite that fried Hong Kong.

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Uh, oops, unfortunately that malfunctioning satellite got smashed beyond usefulness because the hydraulic arm which was holding it malfunctioned!

GERARD BUTLER

Fine then, let’s look at the surveillance footage from when Richard Regan Paul got spaced.

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Um well we can’t see the footage of that wall malfunction because the footage has also malfunctioned.

GERARD BUTLER

Wait though, there’s still a useable recording in a leftover bit of wall that got stuck in a solar array panel! Let’s go for a spacewalk and get it.

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Sure thing WHUH OH while you’re trying to retrieve that malfunctioning bit of wall, your space suit has malfunctioned!

GERARD BUTLER

(bouncing off every part of the space station)

HEY YOU KNOW WHAT, I’M STARTING TO THINK THAT MAAAAYBE THERE’S JUST A SMIDGE OF SABOTAGE GOING ON.

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Damnit! Turns out that by the time you’re committing sabotage to cover up your sabotage to cover up your sabotage to cover up your sabotage, it starts to get kinda obvious what you’re doing.

(pause)

Nnnnnot that I have anything to do with that. Right, Amr?

AMR WAKED

(hovers creepily at the edge of frame)

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Exactly.

GERARD retrieves the DATA from the WALL FRAGMENT, but finds that he can’t ACCESS IT.

GERARD BUTLER

Oh crap, only a high-level government official could have restricted the data like this! That means that SOMEBODY extremely high-ranking is behind all this, but we don’t know who!

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

It’s Ed Harris. Everybody has figured this out already.

GERARD BUTLER

I have to tell Jim about this. But they might have bugged our comms, and my message may be intercepted by whoever the traitor is.

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

It is quite obviously Ed Harris.

GERARD BUTLER

I better use a code.

(calls Jim)

Hey there, Jim! Just thought I’d stop in the middle of this deadly crisis to randomly reminisce. SOMEtimes I think about that old WHITE porch we used to have at our HOUSE, where our pathetic inbred ASSHOLE of a father used to get FUCKED up on tequila and whale on US with a wrench. Glad that’s all OVER.

JIM STURGESS

A high-ranking government traitor? Why that could only be-

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

ED HARRIS, IT’S ED HARRIS YOU IDIOTS, THERE'S NO OTHER REASON FOR HIS CHARACTER TO EXIST

JIM STURGESS

-the president! America is soon scheduled to hand control of the space station over to an international committee. The president must be causing these disasters in order to retain control!

GERARD BUTLER

Right. Because after a fuckup of this magnitude, obviously the last thing people will want to do is remove the administrators responsible for killing everybody.

JIM STURGESS

And he’s not gonna stop with these penny-ante special effect showcases, either! He’s trying to chain a bunch of them together and bring on a geostorm!

GERARD BUTLER

You mean the tiny, ugly-ass sports compact from Isuzu?

JIM STURGESS

Not a Geo Storm, a GEOSTORM! A made-up, probably impossible meteorological phenomenon where it storms everywhere on the planet at once! According to our computers, this precise sequence of weather disasters - including the ones which the space station hasn’t caused yet - will lead to a geostorm in EXACTLY the nice, round timeframe of ninety minutes!!

GERARD BUTLER

Fuck! Fine then, let’s do an emergency shutdown of the station so it can’t frag the planet. This potentially apocalyptic orbital weapons platform DOES have an emergency off switch, right?

JIM STURGESS

Well, yes... but, ha ha, it turns out it can only be activated using the president’s biometrics. So if the most dangerous thing ever made malfunctions, it can only be stopped if you can get the president into the right specific room quickly enough.

(shrugs awkwardly)

Fortunately, I have been provided with a convenient secret service girlfriend who can grab the president for us!

ABBIE CORNISH

Okay then, I’ll-

JIM STURGESS

Plot devices don’t speak, honey.

ABBIE CORNISH

Then why does this movie have any dialogue at all?

INT. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION

JIM and ABBIE go to find PRESIDENT ANDY at the DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION in ORLANDO. But first they run into ED HARRIS.

JIM STURGESS

Ed, thank god I ran into somebody I can trust! We need to grab the president so we can shut down this Bond villain-esque weather scheme.

ED HARRIS

Uh, okay. I have the president right here in this gun. Stand still so that I might fire him at you.

JIM STURGESS

Wha - YOU?! EVIL?!? DWAAAHHH?!?!?

ED HARRIS

Don’t patronize me. Anyway, part of my plan is to set off a giant lightning storm here and kill everybody in line of succession ahead of me, so I become president!

JIM STURGESS

Are you fucking kidding me? We’ve gone to the trouble of pointing out it’s an election year! Do you honestly expect an administration that ran an environmental program so badly that it KILLED THEM ALL to get reelected?

JIM and ABBIE grab ANDY and run for it! Then a fuckton of LIGHTNING starts DESTROYING THE DNC!

BYSTANDER

Man, those Russian hackers have really stepped up their game.

(incinerated)

ABBIE CORNISH

Quickly, we can get away using this SELF-DRIVING cab we just commandeered! Since I’m driving it there might seem to be no reason for us to point out that it’s a SELF-DRIVING cab, so I guess now the audience has already figured out we’re shortly going to be pulling some trick where it SELF-DRIVES. We’ll still act like we’re being clever, though.

ED HARRIS

Chase that cab, my suicidally dedicated minions! Meanwhile I will teleport to the road ahead of them, so I can set up a rocket launcher ambush! Nothing screams “accidental death” like getting blown up by a fucking rocket launcher. FIRE!

MINION

Uh, you sure you don’t want to wait until we can see who’s driving? Disregarding any possible self-driving tricks, cabs are pretty interchangeable and that could in fact be entirely the wrong car-

ED HARRIS

I SAID FIRE!

They BLOW UP THE CAB! But then ANDY appears and shoves a GUN in ED’S FACE.

ANDY GARCIA

That’s right, we sent the empty cab driving towards you at sixty miles an hour! And now here we are, having caught up to it on foot within the next twenty seconds. My legs are KILLING ME.

ED HARRIS

Come on Andy, you should still let the geostorm happen! My theory is that the massive catastrophe which is going to demolish the face of the planet will handily attack only our political enemies and we’ll be fine!

ANDY GARCIA

Goddamn, how is it that each new layer of your motivations is even dumber than the last?

EXT. EVERYWHERE

Meanwhile DIRECTOR DEAN DEVLIN looks under the COUCH and finally finds the movie’s MISSING DISASTER EFFECTS, and they all start happening at once! Ice storms in Rio! Fire storms in Moscow! Tsunamis in the desert!

GERARD BUTLER

Opposite weather, is it? In that case I’m guessing London is currently having a pleasant sunny day HEY-OOOHHH!

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

But we’re not doing so great here in space either. Somebody’s set off our self-destruct system, and the station’s gonna explode in [amount of time left in which the geostorm can still be averted + just enough time for a thrilling escape]!

GERARD BUTLER

Wait a minute, according some kind of plot mumbo jumbo, the only one who could have started the self-destruct protocol is... ROBERT! You little traitor, you’re working for Ed!

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Okay okay, you’ve got me, but SURPRISE I had a gun strapped to the underside of this desk and now you haven’t got me at all, HA!

GERARD BUTLER

What was your plan if I’d confronted you in literally any other room?

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Clearly I must have guns strapped underneath every surface in the entire space station.

(opens fire)

Aw yeah, no better strategy for staying alive than shooting bullets in a room which is separated from the vacuum of space by a single pane of-

ROBERT accidentally SPACES HIMSELF! The movie does not reveal whether, in his last moments of consciousness, RICHARD’S FROZEN, ORBITING CORPSE happens to collide FOOT-FIRST with ROBERT’S CROTCH, so one is forced to assume that it DOES.

INT. SPACE STATION STOPPING ROOM

Back on EARTH, ANDY arrives in the ROOM he has to be in so that he can turn off the SPACE STATION.

ANDY GARCIA

All right, we did it! I just used my biometrics to activate the thing, so now the world is saved! Right?

JIM STURGESS

Actually Gerard still has to get to another specific room on the station itself and press a big “YES” button for it to actually work.

ANDY GARCIA

OF COURSE. What was I thinking, we can’t let this emergency shutdown be activated merely by having the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED FUCKING STATES TURN IT ON WITH HIS OWN SPECIAL BODY SCAN. No, we need the extra, mega-secure step of having some engineer click “confirm”!

JIM STURGESS

Look, we wanted to do the president kidnapping scene but still give Gerard a big action climax, this was the only way.

In SPACE, GERARD and ALEXANDRA make it to the SPECIAL ROOM, shut down the SPACE STATION and SAVE THE WORLD!

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

Phew, and with one second left to go! That’s right, because we turned off the weather machine when we did all the bad weather instantly cleared up; but if it had gone on for even one more second it would have become a global superstorm which would have wiped out most of humanity. What a sensible premise!

GERARD BUTLER

Unfortunately while we were able to get everybody else off the station, there’s no time left for you and I to escape. But I knew this when I stayed behind. I may not have been a good father, but I hope my daughter can at least appreciate the sacrifice I made by dying in space in order to save-

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

Are you seriously copying Bruce Willis’s death from Armageddon?

GERARD BUTLER

Oh FUCK you’re right. Screw it, let’s just jump in a spare satellite and fly to safety then.

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

Hooray! I’m not even gonna ask why a weather satellite has room inside it for passengers!

They HOP ABOARD the SPACE EX MACHINA and fly away!

EXT. LOSER SHACK

Months later, GERARD, JIM and GERARD’S ANNOYING DAUGHTER are all hanging out and fishing.

GERARD BUTLER

Neat, our family’s come un-estranged! What a happy ending. Why if we keep the focus on stuff like this, and the fact that in Brazil the dog didn’t die, we can ignore the fact that millions of people just got horribly murdered!

JIM STURGESS

And the rebuilt space station is now in international hands as intended, and they’re gonna make sure none of this can ever-

GERARD BUTLER

Wait, what the fuck? They’re doing the space station again? After the last one turned out to be a city-destroying death ray which could be commandeered by a single nerd with a smartphone? That’s the least plausible ending this movie could have possibly had!

JIM STURGESS

Uh huh. Yeah, I’m sure in real life politicians the world over would instead start seriously committing themselves to environmental policy. Hmmm?

GERARD BUTLER

...Okay yeah this way’s more realistic.

---------------

>:(

[scrunchyharry]

on allowing translations of our fics: a non-native English speaker’s perspective

Here’s some 7am thoughts from my brain to your screens. This isn’t criticism, to be clear. I’m thinking out loud.

Under a cut because it’s pretty long and verging on Discourse.

I’ve been writing fics for 15 years, across four different fandoms and as many platforms. I’ve always allowed translations to be made of my fics because, I suppose que je comprends que certaines personnes ne disposent pas des capacités nécessaires pour lire des œuvres écrites en anglais.

I couldn’t comfortably read a novel in English until I was 17-18. It took me three weeks to get through Of Mice and Men in high school and when I was asked to read Dracula in my 9th grade ESL-A class, I found a French translation of it. I still can’t go to a Shakespeare play and hope to understand what’s going on. I’ve tried, numerous times. I’ve tried with Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet. I just do not understand them when they speak (to be fair, I have seen a handful of Molière plays and also struggled my way through the Ancien Régime French, so maybe I just have really bad hearing comprehension).

And I’m Canadian, so English is omnipresent in my life. I started learning when I was in the 4th grade, I only truly felt like I could call myself bilingual in my early twenties, after going to university in English. Je comprends donc que l’anglais n’est pas confortablement accessible à tous et à toutes.

the 1D fandom is the first where I see people being against translations, yet it is also the most "international" of the fandoms I’ve been in. I have to clarify: I never witnessed any discussions of translations in my previous fandoms, is what I mean by that. Whether for or against them, I never saw people talking about them. The 1D fandom is the first where I a) see it being talked about and b) see people against them.

It stands out as odd to me because I personally never had any objections to it, I never even gave it a second thought beyond making sure that I was properly credited and asking for a link to the final product so that I can verify that I was. I think, perhaps, it speaks to the fact that the English speaking world is so rarely confronted to works in a language inaccessible to them. The outcries around Parasite being in Korean with English subs come to mind, while the rest of the non-English world was like "this is a regular Monday for us? To have to contend with translated or subtitled works to be able to access the hegemonic culture?"

Being a non-English speaker in an Anglo-centric world means constantly readjusting what you thought you knew. I didn’t grow up watching The Lion King or reading Anne of Green Gables. I grew up watching Le Roi lion and reading Anne et la maison aux pignons verts. Translations are an integral part of my life. Hell, on days when I’m really tired, I’ll switch whatever I’m watching on Netflix to French (when it’s available, which is a topic for another discussion) so that my brain can catch a break.

When I say readjusting, I mean that you’re always reframing. “Oh, I didn’t know that Severus Rogue’s English name was Severus Snape. Let me keep that in mind throughout our entire discussion in my second language.” “Oh, right, Americans have middle school so I better remember what years that covers and speak accordingly so I don’t have to go down the longer road of explaining that, actually, my French-Canadian school system didn’t have middle school and oh, also, our high school ends in the 10th grade and...” you get my drift.

This post is getting away from me. I’ll try to reel it back in. When I was in undergrad, I took a lit class from the French department (remember my bit about giving my brain a break?) and it was about the early 20th century. After suffering through the inevitable Proust, we moved on to Milan Kundera, a Czech writer (I had to use autocorrect for that, see, for me Czech is Tchèque) who became a French citizen. I don’t have the exact quote, that notebook has been gone since 2012, but I remember that he considered translations to be entirely new works of fiction and that the translator’s touch made the book anew because of the interpretations they chose when translating. Here’s an excerpt from an abstract about this:

"Kundera showed displeasure at any translator who, however briefly, would impersonate the author and take some license in translating Kundera’s work. Further, Kundera decided that only his full authorial involvement in the process would ascertain “the same authenticity” of his translations as the original Czech works. Kundera thus becomes the omnipresent, omnipotent author, himself impersonating God controlling his own creation."

Margala, Miriam. (2011). The Unbearable Torment of Translation: Milan Kundera, Impersonation, and The Joke. TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies. 1. 10.21992/T9C62H.

I’m not just name dropping Milan Kundera to show that I’m Educated. I’m bringing this point up because this isn’t my personal perspective on translation, but I can understand how it can be other people’s. My stance on this is that I want my work to be as universally accessible as it can be. Once I’ve put a story out into the world, while I do retain the copyright of it, it isn’t mine anymore. Every person reading it will read a different story because of their own inner lives and what they bring to it. Similarly, translations may bring out other perspectives of it. My work is done, though, the moment I click "post" and send it out into the world. I am no longer in control of the way it will be understood. And I’m at peace with this. It is a true ego death to read comments and see people picking up on things you did not even notice yourself as the omnipotent little god of your own creation.

As I was revising this essay, memories of bygone discourse came back to my mind, from the time I was in the Les Misérables fandom. You can imagine that I got a kick out of being able to say I had read it in the original French, but beyond that, the most interesting conversations I had in those days were when comparing the various English translations of the novel to each other and to the original French. There were Opinions on who had done it best, and who got closer to the original, but then not quite as much, because “see, here this word that Hugo used can be interpreted in a different way and it changes the entire meaning of the next sentence.” 

More recently, a woman translated The Illiad or the Odyssey, I don���t quite remember, and her interpretation of certain scenes completely changed their meaning. I’m working off my memory, here, but I think I recall reading that where men had translated “prostitute”, she had translated “companion”, or something along those lines, and it showed how the translator brings their own worldview to a work, it’s inevitable.

I am not trying to compare One Direction fanfiction to The Illiad, let’s be clear. What I’m attempting to say in too many words is that fanfiction is derivative work, and so are translations. I, personally, will never be against people translating my work if I’m credited correctly. Without translations, I wouldn’t have known Disney growing up. I wouldn’t have known Anne of Green Gables, or Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, or Winnie the Pooh, or Alice in Wonderland, or any other work that have shaped my psyche as a child. Far from me to say that my native French culture is not rich in itself with works (I owe as much to the Comtesse de Ségur as I do to Lucy Maud Montgomery), but translations allow me to be able to take part of a global conversation, to be a part of the Internet’s collective unconscious.

At the same time, with the plague that are unauthorized reposts of our works, I understand why other people are wary of anything that involves a form of reposting. There is no easy answer to this, but I did want to share my thoughts on the matter as a non-native English speaker and, most importantly, writer. 

I’ll conclude by saying that, if anyone is wondering, I’m not writing in my native French because the mere thought of writing a sex scene in the same language I use to talk to my mother is enough to Catholic-guilt me off the face of the planet, without even breaching the topic of writing in the language that has the biggest potential reach.

so, huh, yeah. thank you for coming to my ted talk.

[bountyofbeads]

Brittany Kaiser’s work with Cambridge Analytica helped elect Donald Trump. She’s hoping the world will forgive her.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/02/brittany-kaisers-work-with-cambridge-analytica-helped-elect-donald-trump-shes-hoping-world-will-forgive-her/

Brittany Kaiser’s work with Cambridge Analytica helped elect Donald Trump. She’s hoping the world will forgive her.

By Craig Timberg and Rosalind HELDERMAN | Published August 02 at 1:13 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted August 2, 2019 7:40 PM ET |

Brittany Kaiser first emerged in last year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal as a seemingly nefarious figure, an insider steeped in the dark secrets of a new kind of voter manipulation powered by Facebook data. To make matters worse, news reports also raised questions about Kaiser’s mysterious dealings with WikiLeaks mastermind Julian Assange at a time when he remained holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London.

For Kaiser — at the time a 30-year-old Democrat from Texas who’d become business development director for Cambridge Analytica, a firm created to elect Republicans — the massive wave of critical news reports about the company threatened to deliver catastrophic damage to her reputation and even made her fear possible arrest.

So she did something drastic: Kaiser fled to Thailand, and she let a crew of filmmakers tag along.

What followed was a highly public — and still unfinished — quest for moral redemption that has played out across the globe and, now, in a Netflix documentary called “The Great Hack,” released July 24. It includes images of Kaiser up to her shoulders in a giant pool under an impossibly blue sky in Thailand, uncertain what to do. And it later depicts Kaiser, in a far more determined frame of mind, testifying before the British Parliament about the many unsavory deeds of her former employer and warning of the ongoing privacy threats posed by Facebook, whose dealings with Cambridge Analytica resulted in July in more than $5 billion in U.S. fines.

But two important elements are missing from the film. The first is Kaiser’s private meetings with British and U.S. prosecutors, including those from then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s office, which she recently detailed in interviews with The Washington Post. In these she also explained her visit with Assange in 2017 and how close she came during the hottest days of the Cambridge Analytica scandal to turning over the entirety of her hard drive to WikiLeaks for publication online.

The second missing element is a decisive moment of reckoning for Kaiser, during which she fully acknowledges her role in matters she now regards as wrong and possibly illegal. She repeatedly calls herself a “whistleblower” but viewers of the film may wonder: Why didn’t she blow the whistle a little sooner — ideally before Cambridge Analytica’s misdeeds had become front-page news worldwide?

It’s a question, Kaiser told The Post, that she still struggles with herself.

“I used to make so many excuses to myself,” she said. “I used to make excuses to my friends and family on why I was there and that it was okay to be working with these people and that what they were doing wasn't all that bad, and I was just doing my job. I look back at some of it, and it's shocking.”

Kaiser’s efforts to wrestle with this legacy in such a profoundly public way shoots a charge of emotional electricity through a film otherwise devoted to distinct heroes and villains. She occupies a middle ground of moral complexity while she seeks to emerge from what she now depicts as a fever that consumed more than three years of her life.

“She knew before the story blew up that the rights of Americans had been violated,” said David Carroll, an associate professor of media design at the New School in New York and a hero in the film for his dogged legal battle to gain access to the data Cambridge Analytica had collected on him. He is among those who would think better of Kaiser had she spoken up about her qualms with Cambridge Analytica before the scandal erupted.

“Once that’s out, it’s hard to be a whistleblower,” Carroll said. “You’ve missed your chance.”

But whistleblower or not, Kaiser’s story is a compelling one for the insights it offers into the dark heart of Cambridge Analytica, the unregulated market for our personal data and also — and perhaps most importantly — what happens when questionable decisions get thrust to the center of the world’s white-hot gaze.

A JOB OFFER IN THE U.K.

Kaiser was a graduate student in international human-rights law at Middlesex University in London when she met Alexander Nix, the now-disgraced chief executive of Cambridge Analytica. The company had been created by Republican strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who served as the company’s vice president, with money donated by conservative financier Robert Mercer. And while the parent company, called SCL Group, meddled in elections across the world, Cambridge Analytica had a more specific brief — to use the emerging science of Big Data to help Republicans win U.S. elections.

Like the company’s well-known whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, who helped British journalist Carole Cadwalladr of the Observer expose Cambridge Analytica’s misdeeds, Kaiser was no conservative. She had dabbled in Democratic politics and at one point had aspired to work for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.

Nix, who appears in the film and in much of the news coverage as a particularly skilled manipulator of his fellow humans, lures Kaiser to join his company with the unforgettable line: “Let me get you drunk and steal your secrets.”

Kaiser, whose parents suffered serious financial troubles that led to the loss of their home the same year she started working at Cambridge Analytica, appears to fall hard for the unmistakable scent of money and power that wafts through the conservative political world Kaiser soon inhabits. The film shows her in a series of exotic locations, dressed in pearls with a champagne glass in hand and on shooting weekends with her new associates. During this phase, she even joined the National Rifle Association, a group seemingly at odds with her traditional political views.

“The Great Hack” also details how Cambridge Analytica gathered up data on a massive scale, using an online app to collect information on tens of millions of Facebook users — everyone who used the app and all of their friends — and also from data brokers. The goal was targeting them with messages designed to work on voters’ underlying psychologies. Perhaps the most appalling moment in the film comes as SCL Group orchestrates a voter suppression campaign in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago that succeeds in helping a candidate of South Asian descent triumph when poorer, darker-skinned supporters mysteriously fail to cast ballots.

SCL Group reportedly also had a role in an operation in Nigeria in which an Israeli firm obtained private emails from that nation’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, when he was a candidate for office in 2015, according to Cadwalladr’s reporting that also tied Kaiser to the effort. (The article appeared in the Guardian, the sister paper of the Observer.) Those emails, like those of Democrats working to elect Clinton in 2016, mysteriously emerged online during the election season, hurting Buhari’s candidacy. Kaiser told The Post that she won the account for SCL but did not have a direct hand in the collecting or deploying of the emails.

But these events have kept Cadwalladr from regarding Kaiser’s efforts to redeem herself as entirely convincing, especially given that Kaiser decided to flee to Thailand shortly after the article about SCL’s meddling in Nigeria appeared, naming her. “I think it’s hard to know if she’s sincere or not because of the circumstances in which she chose to blow the whistle: the day after we revealed her role at center of particularly problematic election,” Cadwalladr said in an interview.

Kaiser has repeatedly portrayed her actions after leaving Cambridge Analytica as well-intentioned, driven by rising revulsion at the things she’d witnessed and a determination to speak out — classic whistleblower motives. Now that some official investigations are wrapping up, Kaiser says she’s eager to tell the full story. On Tuesday, Parliament released new documents that she had furnished on Cambridge Analytica’s role in the early days of the Brexit campaign, underscoring the importance of her cooperation.

That all of this coincides with the release of a largely sympathetic film and a Kaiser memoir, to be published by HarperCollins in October, only makes Cadwalladr warier — though she also praised Kaiser for providing evidence to authorities and said she wished others from Cambridge Analytica would follow Kaiser’s example.

“The problematic thing for me is her monetizing and exploiting this role, essentially,” Cadwalladr said. “There is this sort of hero-ization of her as a character, and that’s tricky given the many important still-unanswered questions.”

A MOMENT OF CLARITY

Kaiser said she began turning away from Cambridge Analytica and its sharply conservative, Fox News-driven world the night of Trump’s victory, which came as both a surprise and a shock to her political and moral sensibilities. For all of Cambridge Analytica’s claims about the power of its precise voter targeting, nobody knew how well it would work in the U.S. presidential election.

“I was then, like, ‘Wow, I was part of something that I shouldn't have been part of. I never thought that the campaign is actually going to win. Oh my God.’ He actually won through this, you know, racist, sexist rhetoric that has divided a country that was actually doing quite well,” Kaiser said.

Soon after, she found herself in a conflict with her bosses over her role in the company. A promotion she sought to Cambridge Analytica’s executive ranks didn’t come through. A hoped-for job in opening the company’s offices in Mexico City went to somebody else — a man — reactivating her feminist sensibilities.

“That's when the disillusionment really sunk in. And I realized these people could be doing a lot more than I know about, because they're cutting the corners that I see, and I'm not an executive of the company. So what else is going on?”

This dawning realization, however, was gradual enough that Kaiser still found herself hobnobbing around victory parties the night before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. She dropped by one hosted by Britain’s Brexiteers and even made what she said was a brief appearance at the Deploraball, an event including members of what was then called the alt-right, who reveled in the strident, racially charged rhetoric of Trump’s campaign.

Inside the event, Kaiser said, she recoiled at a painting of George Washington wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat.

“It was so offensive,” she recalled. “I went in there. I recognized some of the people around. Once I got inside and recognized some of the people that were there … I had to leave.”

She watched the inaugural the following day, at another party, atop the W Hotel overlooking the White House with a cocktail in her hand.

A MEETING WITH JULIAN ASSANGE

The event that would make Kaiser herself newsworthy happened a few weeks later, in February 2017.

She had a long-standing admiration for Assange and, in 2011, had donated about $200 worth of bitcoin to the group in honor of its work revealing a secret trove of U.S. military files related to the Iraq War. Kaiser had cited its work in her master’s thesis on war crimes.

But what ultimately brought Kaiser and Assange together was the death of well-known human rights lawyer John R.W.D. Jones, who was hit by a London train in an apparent suicide. Kaiser considered Jones, who had represented Assange, a mentor. When a mutual friend suggested that Kaiser and Assange meet to commiserate, she agreed in concept but was unable to arrange a meeting quickly. The Jones death happened in April 2016, as Cambridge Analytica’s campaign work was accelerating. In the aftermath of Trump taking office, with Kaiser increasingly questioning her life choices, the idea of meeting Assange gained traction.

But first she had to get through Assange’s gatekeeper, a gray-haired British man whom she knew only as “James.”

He and Kaiser met over tea at Harrods, the iconic London department store. The next day Kaiser visited with one of Assange’s lawyers for a second round of vetting. The third day, Kaiser, in the morning before heading to work at Cambridge Analytica’s London offices, walked up to the Ecuadoran Embassy, suddenly aware that she almost certainly was being watched, her name entered into the files of at least one government’s intelligence agency.

She also entered with full knowledge of the allegations that Assange had worked with Russians in manipulating the U.S. election but, at the time, dismissed the claims as hyperbole.

“All of this, to me it sounded, I hate to use the term, but it just sounded like ‘fake news.’ It sounded like a way to discredit what could have been credible information,” Kaiser recalled. “And so, unfortunately, the information bubble that I was in, actually being surrounded by Republicans and being surrounded by conservative messaging all of the time, looking back on it, I realized I was a lot more affected than I would have liked to believe at the time.”

By this point, Assange had been in the embassy, avoiding arrest, for more than four years and would be there for two more before authorities rousted him this past April. Kaiser, encountering him for the first time, was immediately struck by how pale he was — somehow paler even than the white, buttoned shirt he was wearing.

Yet despite his appearance — and a rambling conversation she recalled as mainly devoted to Assange monologues on several geopolitical subjects — Assange mustered enough charisma to calm Kaiser’s rising unease about the role Cambridge Analytica had played in electing Trump. Assange assured her Trump was a better choice than Clinton would have been, referencing some of the decisions she had made as secretary of state. “The one who didn’t have blood on his hands won the election,” Assange told her, according to her recollection.

The comment succeeded in soothing her, at least for a time. “I kind of viewed that as, well, Julian knows more than I do,” Kaiser said. “So maybe I should be calm about that.”

FLIGHT TO THAILAND

But Kaiser was decidedly not calm, more than a year later, when the Cambridge Analytica stories broke in the Observer and the New York Times, triggering a global scandal. A few days later came the story, under Cadwalladr’s byline, about the SCL operation in Nigeria and Kaiser’s role in landing the contract.

James, her WikiLeaks contact, messaged that same day, through an encrypted app, wanting to talk, she said.

She was visiting San Francisco at the time and getting worried that authorities in both the United States and England might be looking to talk to her. She knew a lot about the role Cambridge Analytica had played in Trump’s election and also in the first phases of the Brexit campaign. But she wasn’t sure the official inquiries would be friendly. With the possibility of arrests in the back of her mind, Kaiser headed to the airport and off to Thailand for an unplanned vacation.

Kaiser agreed to meet with James a few weeks later when she was back in London, feeling a bit less in immediate peril.

In this second meeting, James made an intriguing offer: Why not turn over her laptop computer for publication online so that journalists, investigators and anyone else searching for the truth could simply crawl their way through the data and reach their own conclusions? Kaiser was desperate to clear her name. James said this was the best way to do it.

“He said, ‘Well, we can help you with that, but we publish indiscriminately,'” she recalled James saying. “'Nothing will be held back. Nothing will be redacted. We’ll publish the entire thing. Your whole hard drive.'”

So tempted was Kaiser by this offer that she made arrangements to take that step remotely — from wherever in the world she happened to be when she made the decision.

“I left a copy of my computer in London in a safety deposit box,” Kaiser recalled. “I had trusted people that had the password. And I knew that if I did make the decision, that someone in London would be able to pass it” to James and WikiLeaks.

And this is where the filmmakers, having trailed her all the way to Thailand and back, played a crucial role.

TELLING HER STORY

The team behind “The Great Hack” are Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, a married couple who already were working on a film on the dangers of modern technology when the Cambridge Analytica story broke, giving them an ideal frame for telling the story. They found Kaiser quickly upon her emergence in the coverage, and it was Amer who put her in touch with a contact he knew at the FBI.

That connection, which eventually brought her into contact with Mueller’s investigation and other ones in the United States, ultimately provided the most convincing act of redemption in Kaiser’s story.

“Her story is one that’s about power, about how power seduces and how power shapes us,” Amer said.

What he finds redemptive is the decision, however belatedly, to speak up.

“She didn’t need to do any of the things she did” in cooperating with authorities and the film. “She could have just walked away into the wilderness and never been heard from again, like so many people did at Cambridge Analytica.”

Kaiser sat for many hours of interviews with Mueller’s staff, as well as joint visits with investigators for the FBI, Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission. Kaiser talked about Cambridge Analytica. She talked about Facebook. She talked about WikiLeaks and meeting with Assange and the donation. She even gave investigators the number she had for James, which she presumed no longer worked.

The FTC and the SEC together levied more than $5 billion worth of fines against Facebook, and the FTC also sanctioned Cambridge Analytica’s Nix and the app developer from whom Cambridge Analytica bought the Facebook data. The British Information Commissioner’s Office, meanwhile, is in the final phases of a year-long investigation, with the help of Kaiser and others. She also turned over her laptop computer to U.S. investigators — and not to WikiLeaks — along with hundreds of thousands of emails and other documents.

Cambridge Analytica, meanwhile, dissolved in infamy.

The extent of the danger to Kaiser was underscored not long after she first established contact with the U.S. authorities. Another article came out — again by Cadwalladr — about Kaiser’s meeting with Assange.

The story was not a flattering one, and Kaiser disputes the characterizations in it, if not the basic facts. The article reported that Kaiser and Assange met “to discuss what happened during the US election” and that Kaiser claimed to have “funneled money” to WikiLeaks.

In her interviews with The Post, Kaiser said the election barely came up in her one meeting with Assange and the only thing that may have qualified as “funneling” was the bitcoin donation in 2011, before Cambridge Analytica was founded.

Cadwalladr, in speaking to The Post, said of Kaiser’s criticisms, “We sent her a formal right to reply which set down specifically and in detail what we knew and were planning to say and gave her the chance to respond and she didn’t. We therefore based the story on what we knew. We updated it later to reflect her later statements.”

All of which brings back the question of Kaiser’s reputation, which she has worked so hard to rehabilitate. What of it now?

Kaiser wants to be remembered more for what happened after Cambridge Analytica imploded — for working with investigators and, in the interest of not disrupting investigations, holding her tongue on sensitive matters until they could conclude their work. Some questions about her actions, she said, would have been clearer sooner if she had felt free to speak out. That was part of the price of working with authorities, she said, and that price was worth it to her.

“I definitely made the right decision,” Kaiser said. “A lot of the investigations are still ongoing. So I’m really hoping that we’re going to have a result where if people did commit crimes, that they are held to account. As of right now, there are multiple people that I think should be held to account that haven’t yet, and so we’ll see where that goes.”

As for what happened before, she sometimes speaks as if it were another person — or another version of herself — that fell so deeply into a world she now openly despises. The fever, she knows, held her far longer than it should have.

“It started to break down gradually,” she said. “I’m sad that it took me so long to erode this outer shell that I had developed from working there.”

If that falls short of the abject apology that some viewers of “The Great Hack” may crave, she offered this in her interviews with The Post:

“I’m incredibly sorry about letting the wool be pulled over my eyes,” Kaiser said. “I think of myself as intelligent and strong and principled. And look what happened. If it happened to me, it could happen to anyone.”

[digitalwhatever]

The paranoid style is back, and better than ever

I know I’ve said this ad nauseam in these pages, but oh man are we in trouble as a nation. We find ourselves today in such an extremely ugly place, in the post-Obama era—an era riddled with hysteria, paranoia, division, hatred, extremism disguised as normal discourse. In fact, thanks to Fox news and the public institutions of hysteria (Rush Limbaugh, et al) much of what once might have been considered radical, violent, extreme or just plain socially unacceptable views or behavior is now normalized across the airwaves on a daily basis. It’s mainstream!

This trend has been exasperated by the anonymity and free expression (or rather “free of consequence” expression) allowed by the internet that leads us deeper off the cliff. Thus, here we are now, in the throws of the golden age of paranoia—a deeply shameful and disgusting time in America. Hallelujah!

So I figured this is the perfect time to go back and reread the original article “The Paranoid Style” by Richard Hofstadter (from Harper’s Magazine, 1964) which put into writing, clearly and thoughtfully for the thinking world to see a phenomenon that’s plagued the human race for centuries.

Hofstadter writes about popular movements in American history fed by conspiracy theories, and politicians who used those conspiracies to manipulate and stimulate voters’ passions. The anti-freemason movement of the late eighteenth century; the anti-catholic movement of the mid-nineteenth; the ani-shadow banker movement of the early 20th century; and of course, everyone’s favorite anti-communist frenzy of the McCarthy era. He ends on, what was then, the current rage in Paranoid Politics: the Barry Goldwater campaign, in which many of the pillars of modern conservative conspiracies were born and cemented.

But one thing I can’t help in reading about all these great moments in paranoid politics, is how quaint they are. How simple and relatively innocuous.

Hofstadter writes that one of the noteworthy developments to occur in the “modern” Goldwater era was the infusion of mass media to help fuel whatever strange and depraved messages were being brokered. Oh, but how gentle and dated the Goldwater days seem now, in comparison to today’s white hot mess. If Goldwater only had access to forces like Fox news and the internet, there’s no telling how far he could have gone. But he didn’t.

Rereading about the basic tenants of the paranoid mind and the exploitation thereof, it puts much clarity on what is happening to us now in this moment, and on how it is happening. The fears, the types of conspiracies, the invented enemies that politicians and media personalities use to manipulate voters, they come from well worn places in the human (or at least, the American white male) psyche. Capitalism is being undermined! Infiltrators from “outside” have worked their way to the highest levels of government. Backed by, and in cahoots with international radicals and powerful shadowy figureheads, they are plotting the destruction of the United States.

By the way, here’s an exercise for you: watch Fox news tonight and count how many times the say the word “socialist” in the course of a between-commercials segment. Also, how many times they pair the word “socialist” with “democrat” or “democrat party.” This is a way to get very drunk, very fast.

Even more disturbing and appalling then the actual practice is the skill with which the perpetrators of today’s paranoid politics inflict their craft. Whether it’s Trump, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, or some Russian troll farm, these people know what the fuck they’re doing.

Look at the Russian trolls of 2016, for instance. They knew the exact type of conspiracy theory to publish, the exact kinds of stories that would gain traction and be share (amplified) by their intended audience: Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. Proof she was corrupted by foreign governments—a corrupt insider who’s infiltrated the highest levels of US government! Classic stuff, right out of the pages of Hofstadter.

Our current president, despite his massive faults, nastiness and moral deprivations, is an extremely gifted Paranoid politician. He has taken the art to new heights. In fact, in most instances, it’s all he’s got.

His particular gift is language. He finds perfect little packets of words to neatly summarize, encapsulate and motivate the conspiratorial spirit:

“The system is rigged”

“Fake news”

“Witch hunt”

“Giant hoax”

He repeats these over, and over, and over.

Let us not forget as well, that this guy’s entré into the world of national politics was through the “birther” movement, which itself was something of a high paranoid achievement. The president (Obama) was actually born outside the United States and is therefore not legitimate. He’s a foreigner, hell-bent on destroying democracy, capitalism and the constitution! The fact that Obama was African American worked doubly well on the paranoid mind: the theory fit so perfectly into those warped pre-conceived paranoid notions that blackness is otherness, and that those with dark skin represent a threat to the natural order of America. It was a paranoid home run, giving rise to a whole new era of mind bogglingly delusional right-wing ranting.

Cutting his teeth on this vast and rich material, the current office holder of the presidency continues to use the dark sentiments of “birtherism” to his advantage. Another of his overused verbal bludgeons is to blame all negative things happening in our country on Obama. And weirdly, to justify any untoward practices he uses himself in office by claiming, mostly wrongly that “Obama did it!” There is no logic or reality to this, but to the paranoid mind, it all makes perfect sense.

Sadly, it’s this same deep paranoid fear of dark skin that gives fuel to one of the greatest national disgraces of our era: our current immigration policy and this ridiculous turmoil about “the Wall.” None of this nonsense would be possible if not for a broader fear of dark skin “infiltration” which has been building with the paranoid crowd over the last 10 years or so.

In fact, when you look at just about any of today’s most important political battles today, it seems that the obstacles to progress and sensible policy are built out of paranoid building blocks. Whether it’s immigration policies, stopping the epidemic of gun violence, curbing widespread sexual harassment, ensuring fair and equal voting practices, or just about any issue on the table, you encounter some very emotionally powerful appeals to the great, white, irrational mind.

For instance:

Immigration:

Dark skinned rapists are crossing the border, stealing our jobs!

Gun Violence:

Democrats and liberals want to take away our guns!

Institutionalized Sexual Harassment:

White men in this country are under attack. Liberals want to destroy our careers!

Voting Rights:

Black people, Mexicans and democrats are voting illegally! They’re stealing our elections!

Environmental Policy

Global warming is a Chinese hoax! Regulations are killing our jobs!

Healthcare:

They’re trying to import European-style socialism and destroy capitalism!

Religion:

Christians and christianity are under attack from atheists and democrats who want to dismantle your religious liberty.

Fair taxation:

Socialism!

The fact that these conspiratorial roadblocks have been in use for such a long time and have been set in high-repeat mode puts us in a very tricky situation.

These paranoid sentiments are no longer loony-bin, fringe and weirdo rantings. They have become a standard, acceptable form of mainstream political discourse. People are using them ad nauseam to distort and short-circuit any type of rational political debate.

The birth of a new Rational Movement in politics

Rereading Hofstadter's original article, and working through some of my thoughts have helped tremendously to give me a sense of clarity towards our current political predicament.  It’s also helped to clarify some thoughts about a possible way out of this mess.

Here’s what I hope to see: some politician, or several politicians really, thought leaders, public voices, personalities, spokespeople from all walks of life and political persuasions, rising up from the current crop to begin a massive, persistent de-bunking and re-framing campaign.

They will need formidable language skills, guts, conviction, and god-like perseverance. The end goal: re-frame the debate. Shed light on the bizarre and out-of-whack nature of our current politics. Make it crystal clear what’s happening.

They cannot be the wonky, policy-minded politicians of today’s left, or the quirky, quick-witted personalities of MSNBC or late night TV. They cannot be merely smart people with good ideas. They need to convey the weight of truth and urgency in their words. They need to clarify in a concise, colloquial way. They need to lay it all on the table.

We are fighting against deep paranoid fears and the people who exploit such fear.

This is not a debate between left and right or liberalism versus conservatism. It’s a debate between sanity and insanity. Between rational thought, and bizarre ranting. It's a debate between very real ideas and irrational fear.

The Fox news crowd needs to be called out again and again, not as the “right” or the “right wing, but as the “paranoid right.” The two words can never be uncoupled.

Most importantly, politicians cannot pretend to debate against opponents who eschew this garbage. Call off the debates. Don’t yell at each other across the podium or from different boxes of the TV screen. Do not argue with insanity—it only serves to elevate it and make it seem like it’s a real, valid point-of-view.

At this point in time, I believe there is still a soft middle in the American electorate—people who have not yet been radicalized, polarized, marginalized, cannibalized or disenfranchised. People  who are still open to political discourse and are still capable of making decisions based on thought and information. These are the people who need to be reached and influenced. These are the people that can save our collective hides.

Of course, a few other things need to happen. For instance, Fox news needs to be put off the air once and for all. And the internet needs to be unplugged. But those are discussions for another day.

[bountyofbeads]

Newly revealed emails show why Trump should fear a real Senate trial

By Paul Waldman | Published December 23 at 9:58 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted December 23, 2019 |

Though articles of impeachment against President Trump have been approved by the House, the investigation — both official and journalistic — is by no means over. And newly revealed emails demonstrate not just why Democrats are so eager for Trump’s trial in the Senate to include testimony from witnesses we have yet to hear from, but also why Republicans are so frightened of the prospect:

An official from the White House budget office directed the Defense Department to “hold off” on sending military aid to Ukraine less than two hours after President Trump’s controversial phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to internal emails.

Michael Duffey, a senior budget official, told Pentagon officials that Trump had become personally interested in the Ukraine aid and had ordered the hold, according to the heavily redacted emails, obtained by the Center for Public Integrity on Friday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. He also asked the Pentagon not to discuss the hold widely.

Now we know why House Democrats subpoenaed Duffey as part of the impeachment inquiry — and why he and other officials refused to comply as part of the White House’s stonewalling of the inquiry.

You might say that while these emails give us some more detail about how this policy was implemented, it doesn’t change the basic story. But let me emphasize this in particular:

“Given the sensitive nature of the request, I appreciate your keeping that information closely held to those who need to know to execute the direction,” Duffey wrote in a July 25 email to Pentagon Comptroller Elaine McCusker and others.

This directly undermines the justification Trump’s defenders have so often offered for holding up the aid: that it was not to coerce Ukraine into helping Trump’s reelection campaign but was merely a product of Trump’s passionate commitment to fighting corruption (please stop laughing).

If that were true, the White House would have wanted to make sure that every relevant official in the government was informed about the suspension of aid and why it was being undertaken. The White House might even have wanted to talk about it publicly. Instead, the White House treated the suspension of aid as a secret so dangerous that if if were discovered it would be a disaster.

So officials in the Pentagon couldn’t figure out what was going on, and many of them feared that since the aid had been appropriated by Congress, withholding it was against the law. Why were they kept in the dark? Because of the way those close to Trump treated what he was doing on Ukraine. They acted as though the president was up to something so problematic that it had to be kept secret even from other officials in the government, let alone Congress or the public.

That’s what Duffey surely meant when he talked about how “sensitive” the withholding of aid was. That’s how National Security Council lawyers reacted when they saw that Trump had strong-armed Zelensky on that infamous phone call; in a panic, they hid the transcript in a special server so it could be accessed by as few officials as possible to keep people from knowing what Trump had done. The common reaction when those around Trump learned of his moves on Ukraine seems to have been: Oh, my God. We have to keep this from getting out.

And they were right. When it finally did become public, the result was the impeachment of the president.

These new emails will make it even more difficult for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to justify staging the kind of Senate trial he and the White House would obviously prefer: one as brief as possible, with no witnesses. And while the president himself might like to create an absurdist spectacle by forcing Joe Biden or his son to testify, Trump doesn’t have a single witness he could call whose testimony would support the idea of his innocence.

That’s Trump’s problem, which is now McConnell’s problem, in a nutshell. If there are going to be any witnesses at all, they would have to include at a minimum Duffey, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton, all of whom have refused to testify before the House. And who would the witnesses for Trump’s defense be? They’ve got nothing.

So revelations such as these new emails — and they won’t be the last — will actually make McConnell even more determined to hold a perfunctory trial without witnesses. The more obvious it becomes that there is more to learn about Trump’s attempt to coerce Ukraine to help his reelection, the less willing he’ll be to open that can of worms. And the less likely it will be that the public gets to see the whole sordid story laid out in Trump’s trial.

⛄🎄🎅🎄🎅🎄🎅🎄⛄

New emails help peel back the layers of pressure surrounding Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky

By Philip Bump | Published December 23 at 11:37 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted December 23, 2019 |

Twenty-nine times in the past three months, President Trump has used Twitter to implore the country to read the rough transcript of his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

To hear Trump tell it, the rough transcript itself proves that there was no effort to pressure Zelensky to launch investigations that would benefit Trump politically. Instead, it was just two guys talking, with one, the president of the United States, suggesting that Ukraine should launch the investigations and the other readily agreeing. It was, in Trump’s abbreviated assessment, “perfect.”

Even when the rough transcript was first released, that assertion was dubious. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about the context in which the conversation took place, context that makes clear that Ukraine was well aware of what Trump sought and what it was expected to do. That context became more obvious over the weekend with the release of emails showing discussion of the hold on aid to Ukraine immediately after Trump and Zelensky hung up the phone.

WHAT THE ROUGH TRANSCRIPT SAYS

Even within the transcript, there are hints that Zelensky understands both what’s expected of him and that he’s agreeing to the terms.

The most obvious indication of that came toward the end of the call.

“I also wanted to thank you for your invitation to visit the United States, specifically Washington D.C.,” Zelensky said. “On the other hand, I also wanted (to) ensure you that we will be very serious about the case and will work on the investigation.”

On the one hand, Zelensky is thanking Trump for prior invitations to come to the White House. On the other, he assures Trump that the investigations he seeks will move forward. There’s a link between the two that’s implied in that phrasing, and, as we’ll see, it mirrors a link that had been presented to Zelensky as essential.

Trump, of course, makes his own connections between what Zelensky wants and what he himself hopes to obtain.

“I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense,” Zelensky said to Trump. “We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.”

Javelins are antitank weapons that were provided to Ukraine earlier in Trump’s administration to support the country in its struggle against Russia. They are the most direct example of how U.S. military aid has been deployed to Ukraine.

Instead of acquiescing to Zelensky’s request — or even acknowledging it — Trump segues.

“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump said. The favor? Launch an investigation into his bizarre conspiracy theory about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election.

Trump has recently tried to argue that the “us” in that phrasing is a reference to the United States broadly and, therefore, that he wasn’t asking for something of benefit to himself. The nature of the request and his tendency to refer to himself in the first-person plural, though, make that claim hard to accept.

In short, there are two apparent points of leverage buried in the transcript: the meeting in Washington and Ukraine’s desire for additional military aid.

WHAT WAS HAPPENING JULY 25: THE AID

Ukraine would have had every reason to believe that more aid was coming. On June 18, the Department of Defense announced publicly that it was sending $250 million appropriated by Congress to Ukraine.

When Trump saw news coverage of that announcement, though, he balked. The next day, he asked Mike Duffey, a political appointee in the Office of Management and Budget, to learn more about why the aid was being disbursed. On July 3, a notification to Congress from OMB that the aid was being released was put on hold. On July 12, the aid was frozen, a decision that was announced within the administration broadly July 18.

We’ve known for some time that the formal order to hold the aid came late in the day July 25, sometime around 6:45 p.m. Emails released to the Center for Public Integrity published over the weekend show additional conversations that same day centered on the hold in aid.

About 11 a.m. — some 90 minutes after Trump and Zelensky got off the phone — Duffey emailed staffers at the Department of Defense.

“Based on guidance I have received and in light of the Administration’s plan to review assistance to Ukraine,” Duffey wrote, “including the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, please hold off on any additional DoD obligations of these funds, pending direction from that process.” Later, he added, that “[g]iven the sensitive nature of the request, I appreciate your keeping that information closely held to those who need to know to execute the direction.”

On July 2, the day before the congressional notification was due to go out, Duffey had been informed that $7 million in aid had already been sent to Ukraine according to another email obtained by CPI. Here, he’s instructing Defense not to obligate any further money, given the hold.

Mark Sandy, an OMB official who testified as part of the impeachment inquiry, was carbon-copied on the email. Sandy testified that he had been informed of the halt to aid via email from the office of acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney on July 12 — but hadn’t received it until after he returned from vacation. On July 19, after he was back, Duffey informed him about the hold.

Sandy was concerned about legal obligations OMB had to get the money out the door by the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30, so he scheduled a meeting with counsel on July 22 — three days before the Trump-Zelensky call. To ensure that Defense could meet that obligation, it was determined that the department should be able to move forward with its work preparing the disbursement of the money, as Duffey noted later in the 11:04 a.m. email.

That allowance was memorialized in a footnote to the document released at 6 p.m. that same day. Emails obtained by CPI show that Sandy sent a draft of the footnote to the Defense Department at 1:13 p.m., about two hours after Duffey’s email.

It’s a tantalizing timeline but, ultimately, not necessarily one that relates directly to the call. Sandy testified that his conversations with counsel and Defense stretched from July 22 to July 25. That the footnote was finalized that day, though, is a reminder that the hold was already in the works as Zelensky was mentioning aid to Trump in their call.

Evidence emerged that same day that at least some members of the Ukrainian government were aware of the hold. In public testimony as part of the impeachment inquiry, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia Laura Cooper revealed that her staff had received two emails that same afternoon hinting that Ukraine was already aware of the hold.

At 2:31 p.m., Cooper testified, someone on her staff received an email saying that “the Ukrainian embassy and House Foreign Affairs Committee are asking about security assistance.” At 4:25, another message, indicating that “the Hill knows about the FMF situation to an extent and so does the Ukrainian embassy.”

“FMF” stands for “foreign military financing,” security aid disbursed through the State Department.

Ukraine wouldn’t want the aid halt to be known publicly, as Catherine Croft, a Ukraine specialist at the State Department, testified.

“I think that if this were public in Ukraine it would be seen as a reversal of our policy,” she said, “and would — just to say sort of candidly and colloquially, this would be a really big deal, it would be a really big deal in Ukraine, and an expression of declining U.S. support for Ukraine.”

No evidence has emerged to suggest that Zelensky was aware of the halt in aid during his call with Trump. The earliest indicator that Kyiv knew (as opposed to the Embassy in Washington) was several days later.

Trump knew, of course. And when Zelensky raised the prospect of aid, Trump replied with the request for a favor.

WHAT WAS HAPPENING JULY 25: THE MEETING

As we’ve documented previously, Zelensky was almost certainly aware both that his meeting with the White House was dependent on his launching the investigations Trump sought and what he had to do to get them.

In late June, Zelensky was told that a meeting depended on the investigations during a phone call with then-Ukraine special envoy Kurt Volker, according to impeachment testimony offered by David Holmes. On July 10, Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland twice told Ukrainian officials that the meeting and the probes were linked.

The morning of the call, Trump and Sondland spoke again. In that same hour, Sondland tried calling Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, and, not connecting with him, asked that he call as soon as possible. Shortly thereafter, Volker texted a senior Zelensky aide named Andriy Yermak, again making clear the connection between the probes and the meeting.

“Heard from White House — assuming President Z convinces trump he will investigate / ‘get to the bottom of what happened’ in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington,” Volker wrote.

Volker later texted Sondland.

“Hi Gordon, got your message,” he wrote, “had a great lunch with Yermak and then passed your message to him."

After the call, Yermak texted Volker.

“Phone call went well,” he wrote. “President Trump proposed to choose any convenient dates. President Zelenskiy chose 20, 21, 22 September for the White House Visit. Thank you again for your help!”

True to Volker’s texts, Trump didn’t extend that invitation for a visit in his call with Zelensky until the Ukrainian president had agreed to launch the investigations. It was only after both had been agreed to that Trump said,: “Whenever you would like to come to the White House feel free to call. Give us a date, and we’ll work that out. I look forward to seeing you.”

That also came only after Zelensky was explicit in linking the visit with his promise to conduct the probes.

⛄🎄🎅🎄🎅🎄🎅🎄⛄

What we know and don’t know about Trump’s intentions on Ukraine aid

By Amber Phillips | Published December 23 at 11:33 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted December 23, 2019 |

As House Democrats investigated and then impeached President Trump, one thing they were unable to pin down beyond a shadow of a doubt is that he directly ordered Ukraine’s military aid held up specifically to pressure Ukraine’s president to announce investigations into Democrats.

We know Trump ordered the aid paused this summer, and we know that in a July 25 phone call, he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Biden family and a conspiracy theory about Ukraine interfering in the 2016 election to help Democrats.

The latest and perhaps most damaging evidence that the aid hold and investigations might be linked: A new email that shows that a White House aide told the Defense Department that Trump wanted them to stop the process of giving the money to Ukraine less than two hours after Trump’s call with Zelensky. The Trump administration was forced to release the email this weekend by a documents’ request by the nonprofit news organization Center for Public Integrity.

Here’s what we know and don’t know about whether and how Ukraine’s aid was directly tied to Trump.

WE KNOW TRUMP HELD UP THE AID

He has said as much, confirming Washington Post reporting.

“I’d withhold again, and I’ll continue to hold until such time as other countries contribute,” Trump told reporters in September. The aid was released a few weeks earlier, after Trump was briefed on the whistleblower complaint about his work on Ukraine.

WE DON’T KNOW WHY

Trump’s explanation came after this whole thing became public: He said he wanted to force other countries to do more to help out Ukraine. Before that, officials said they were given no reason for the hold. We do know that his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, publicly said it was for investigations into Democrats.

Did “he also mention to me, in the past, that the corruption related to the DNC server?” Mulvaney said to reporters in October. “Absolutely, no question about that. But that’s it. And that’s why we held up the money.” Mulvaney later tried to walk back his comments by saying it wasn’t a quid pro quo.

WE KNOW THE AID FREEZE WAS MYSTERIOUS — AND SOME THOUGHT POTENTIALLY ILLEGAL

Congress approved nearly $400 million to help Ukraine fight Russian-backed separatists in a war in their own country. The Defense Department had certified that the money would be put to good use. But then Trump ordered it held up without explanation.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress were perplexed. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) even called Trump and asked why it was held and whether it was tied to political investigations.

White House budget official Mark Sandy testified that two of his colleagues resigned in part over concerns about the aid being held up. He was worried it would violate a law that requires congressionally appropriated funds to be spent in a timely manner.

WE DON’T KNOW EXACTLY WHEN IT GOT HELD UP

The timeline of when it got held up is fuzzy. The process for giving the money to Ukraine was going smoothly until June 19. That’s when Trump started inquiring about the aid, after a Washington Examiner article reported on it.

Top officials, including U.S. diplomats in Ukraine, were notified in a July 18 meeting that aid wasn’t immediately coming. The Post’s Philip Bump has put together a detailed timeline of when certain people knew the aid was held up, and the earliest someone had said something was amiss was early July.

But there are unanswered questions about the timing. If some officials said they knew the aid was held up then, why did a senior White House official order the Defense Department to stop it after the July 25 call?

And did Ukraine know about it? A Defense Department official testified that the Ukrainians inquired with her office about the aid on the day Trump talked to Zelensky.

A senior administration official told the New York Times that the timing of the email was coincidental to Trump’s call.

We know people had suspicions about the aid freeze, which they said the Trump-Zelensky call confirmed

When diplomats and national security aides said they heard or saw the contents of the call, either in real time or after reading the rough transcript the White House released, many of them said it clicked that Trump was holding up the military aid for his own personal political benefit.

“President Zelensky had received a letter — congratulatory letter from the president saying he’d be pleased to meet him following his inauguration in May and we hadn’t been able to get that meeting and then the security hold came up with no explanation,” diplomat David Holmes said.

Holmes also said he thought Ukrainians could put two and two together as well, calling them “sophisticated people.”

That’s why this new email is so important. It further ties the phone call, where Trump made his political intentions known, to the aid being held up. The budget official in the email, Michael Duffey, told the Pentagon that Trump himself was focused on the aid and had ordered the hold, and he told the Pentagon to keep it on the down low. “Given the sensitive nature of the request, I appreciate your keeping that information closely held to those who need to know to execute the direction,” he said.

We still don’t know for sure that the aid freeze was tied to Trump’s desire for political investigations

That is why Senate Democrats are calling on Duffey to testify in a Senate impeachment trial, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) is asking a government agency that helps Congress investigate things to weigh in on whether the aid being held up was illegal.

⛄🎄🎅🎄🎅🎄🎅🎄⛄

McConnell has less power to shape the impeachment trial than Democrats think

By David Super | Published December 23 at 6:00 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted December 23, 2019 |

A vigorous debate has broken out among senators, and House leaders, about how President Trump’s impeachment trial ought to be conducted. In an opening salvo, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) sent Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) a letter outlining the procedures he believes the Senate should employ — asserting that subpoenas should be issued to four senior administration officials whom Trump prohibited from testifying in the House’s impeachment inquiry (notably, former national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney).

McConnell replied on the Senate floor that Schumer “misunderstand[s] constitutional roles” and flatly rejected his proposals. Then, in an opinion article in the New York Times, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) accused McConnell of laying the groundwork for “a Senate coverup.” Now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says she may hold off on sending the articles of impeachment until she’s confident the Senate will hold a fair trial.

This debate is remarkable because McConnell is unlikely to be making the key decisions about the shape of a Senate trial. The contours of the trial will be set by rules dating to the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, in 1868. Those rules leave answers to such questions as whether witnesses will appear, and when the trial may be adjourned, to the chief justice of the United States, John G. Roberts Jr., who — as set forward in the Constitution — presides over the proceedings. By comparison, Schumer and McConnell are bit players.

To be sure, senators can pass a special resolution setting rules for Trump’s trial, as they did for President Bill Clinton’s; such a resolution is the subject of last week’s skirmishing. But doing so would require more comity than is evident, as it needs a supermajority of 60 votes and there are just 53 Republican senators. Absent a special resolution, on the questions now causing debate, senators must defer to Roberts — or overrule him, if they dare.

McConnell could propose, in advance, a partisan resolution setting rules Democrats dislike, but then Democrats could filibuster. McConnell could try to do away with the filibuster, but that would require the support of almost his entire caucus, including vulnerable senators he needs to protect, who represent states that are increasingly voting Democratic — such as Susan Collins (Maine), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Thom Tillis (N.C.) and Martha McSally (Ariz.). It also would probably doom the filibuster for ordinary legislation, which McConnell wants to keep.

Assuming there’s no special resolution, once the House presents articles of impeachment to the Senate, the Senate’s standing rules make the chief justice responsible for both trial preparations and the trial itself; all motions would be directed to him. The motions could come either from the representatives the House appoints to manage its impeachment case or from the president’s defense lawyers.

To make clear their disdain for the entire process, the president’s lawyers could move for dismissal of the articles before the managers for the House even begin presenting evidence. Early motions to dismiss are allowed in criminal trials where the indictment or information fails to allege an actual crime. But unless Roberts believes the conduct described in the articles of impeachment would not constitute lawful grounds for removal of a president even if proven, he probably would deny such a motion. Whether or not one thinks Trump actually abused his office or obstructed Congress, surely the chief justice would not be prepared to say that no president could ever be impeached and removed for such acts.

The House’s impeachment managers, in turn, could move for the issuance of subpoenas to the current and former administration officials who refused to testify in the House on the president’s orders. Again, it’s difficult to see what basis Roberts would have for refusing to issue such subpoenas. The power to compel unwilling witnesses’ testimony is fundamental to the prosecutorial function, which the House assumes in an impeachment proceeding. (If witnesses still defied the subpoenas, the issue would go to court, probably in an expedited process.)

On either a motion to dismiss from the president’s lawyers or a motion to subpoena witnesses from the House, the chief justice could, it is true, decline to rule and put the question to the full Senate. But declining to rule on such simple questions in favor of McConnell — who has declared his intent to shield the president — would widely be perceived as a hyperpartisan move and would call the integrity of all his decisions into question. Given Roberts’s repeated efforts to preserve the public’s esteem for the Supreme Court as a body above politics, he seems unlikely to take such a step.

Once Roberts ruled on a given matter, any senator could seek a vote of the Senate to overrule him. This would require only a simple majority. Republicans have such a majority — so long as they lose no more than two of their senators. However, voting to overrule Roberts — a staunch conservative appointed by a Republican president and confirmed by a Republican Senate — to short-circuit a full airing of the charges against the president might well make some senators uncomfortable. Between those senators who have announced their retirement — Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Mike Enzi (Wyo.) and Pat Roberts (Kan.) — and those facing difficult reelection battles (again, Collins, Gardner, Tillis and McSally), McConnell probably could not count on limiting defections to two.

Once the House rests its case, Trump’s lawyers would have to decide whether to mount a defense or to move for dismissal. Again, the decision about dismissal would not belong to McConnell. Granting a motion to dismiss at the conclusion of the House’s presentation of the evidence would be the equivalent of the Senate voting to decide the case in Trump’s favor, and the chief justice probably would allow it to go to the full Senate. Unless more than two Republican senators wanted to prolong the proceedings, the case presumably would end there.

In short, Democrats who complain that McConnell has not committed in advance to acceptable trial procedures fundamentally misconstrue his limited authority. And Pelosi’s withholding of the articles is nonsensical: It’s a bit like the electric company threatening not to send you a bill until you get rid of your television. As McConnell has pointed out, the House gains no leverage by “refraining from sending us something we do not want.” He would welcome the chance to avoid making vulnerable Republicans choose between alienating Trump’s supporters and offending moderates troubled by the president’s actions. The threat of not triggering such a trial — which makes the process look even more tactically political — is more likely to make him dance a jig than to offer any concessions.

McConnell has no reason to agree to special rules giving Democrats more than the Senate’s standing rules already provide. But those standing rules probably would provide for a reasonable airing of the charges against the president. They would force senators to vote in response to a full, public record. McConnell will no doubt be a determined and effective advocate for the president, but he simply lacks the power to turn the proceedings into the farce Democrats fear.

⛄🎄🎅🎄🎅🎄🎅🎄⛄

Biden-Graham friendship, forged in war zones, fractures under the pressures of impeachment and Trump(May Lindsay Graham BURN IN HELL)

By Greg Jaffe and Matt Viser | Published December 21 at 4:44 PM ET |

Washington Post | Posted Dec 23, 2019

Joe Biden and Lindsey O. Graham were hurtling over the Hindu Kush mountains, bound for Kabul and a war that both men knew was veering badly off track.

Biden was two weeks away from being sworn in as vice president and had chosen Graham, who he said had the “best instincts in the Senate,” to accompany him on the trip. Graham, eager to carve out a new role in a changing Washington, jumped at the invitation.

Both men wanted to send a message to then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai — and to their fellow Americans — that the 2008 election was behind them, and that Republicans and Democrats were now united in their resolve to arrest the long-neglected Afghanistan war’s decline.

“The campaign is over,” Graham said, “but the war is not.”

Nearly 11 years, two presidential elections and a historic presidential impeachment hearing have passed since Biden and the Republican senator from South Carolina flew off together to Kabul. Today their friendship, their war zone trip and its bitter aftermath offers a view into how two of the most prominent politicians of their era have tried to adapt to a changing Washington, a norm-breaking presidency and the country’s rancorous politics. The pressures have tested their ideals, their friendship and, at times, their faith in their country.

As impeachment shifts to the Senate, the two men seem to be on a collision course.

Graham’s attacks threaten not only their friendship but also the very rationale of Biden’s Democratic presidential campaign, one that promises to return the country to a less partisan time — an era when Biden could work with Republicans as partners and friends. It’s a vision that even some in his own party dismiss as naive. If Biden can’t break through with Graham, critics wondered, what chance does he have with other Republicans?

Last month, in an attempt to shift attention away from President Trump’s alleged misdeeds in Ukraine, Graham asked the State Department for materials related to Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian energy company. He also demanded the declassification of transcripts of calls between the elder Biden and Ukrainian officials.

Only a few weeks earlier, Graham said he had no intention of investigating the Bidens. “I’m not going to turn the Senate into a circus,” he vowed.

Then, under pressure from the White House, Graham insisted that his relationship with Biden shouldn’t preclude a proper Senate investigation.

The line of inquiry infuriated Biden. “Lindsey is about to go down in a way that I think he’s going to regret his whole life,” the former vice president said, shaking his head.

A few days later, Biden’s frustration spilled out in an exchange with an 83-year-old Iowa farmer who suggested that Biden and his son had acted improperly in Ukraine. “You’re a damn liar!” said Biden, striding toward the man, who held his ground. “That’s not true. No one has ever said that.”

It was, in fact, similar to what Graham had suggested.

In January 2009, such rancor between the two men seemed inconceivable. As Biden and Graham huddled on their plane, the senators pored over CIA reports that showed al-Qaeda was reestablishing training camps in Pakistan’s tribal areas, just outside the reach of U.S. forces. In Afghanistan, the U.S. military and CIA reports spoke to staggering levels of government corruption, mounting Afghan casualties and a resurgent Taliban that was rapidly advancing toward the capital.

Their military plane approached Kabul International Airport, ringed by snow-covered mountains. Down on the tarmac, a clutch of generals and Foreign Service officers waited in the cold. Soon their traveling party would board a Blackhawk helicopter that would whisk them to the presidential palace, where Karzai was waiting.

They agreed that they were going to push the Afghan leader to crack down on longtime political allies and family members who had been looting the country, according to contemporaneous interviews done for Bob Woodward’s 2010 book, “Obama’s Wars.” Neither had much faith that their pressure on Karzai would work.

“I dread this meeting,” Graham said.

“Me, too,” Biden replied.

POWER OF THE SENATE TO HEAL

Five days after their joint meeting with Karzai, Biden and Graham were back in Washington, where Biden took to the Senate floor to bid farewell to the place that shaped his view of the nation and its politics.

There were no female senators when Biden was elected. No computers. No fax machines. By the time he was leaving, there had been 1,900 senators in American history, and Biden had served with 320 of them. “The United States Senate has been my life, and that is not a hyperbole,” he said. “It literally has been my life.”

His speech that day focused on the power of the Senate — and friendships like the one he was building with Graham — to alter the course of American politics and heal the wounds of slavery and segregation.

Biden recalled his bonds in the Senate with three former segregationists: Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.). From his deathbed, Thurmond asked Biden to speak at his funeral. To many Democrats, Thurmond was an unrepentant racist. To Biden he was a man saved by his service in the Senate.

“Every good thing I have seen happen here, every bold step taken in the 36 years I have been here, came not from the application of pressure by interest groups, but through the maturation of personal relationships,” Biden said.

It was Thurmond’s retirement at age 100 that opened a pathway for Graham’s ascendance to the Senate. In the years that followed, Graham and Biden crisscrossed the globe together with their mutual friend Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

When the Iraq War looked lost in 2005, Biden and Graham traveled to Baghdad, returning home to warn President George W. Bush that the country was on the brink of civil war. Their 2009 trip to Afghanistan had been just as eventful. Over dinner, Biden and Graham hammered Karzai on his failings, the country’s growing heroin trade and his brother’s alleged corruption.

“We can’t come to Afghanistan without hearing about your brother,” Graham told Karzai. When the Afghan president accused the Americans of indifference to civilian deaths, Biden abruptly ended their meal. “This is beneath you, Mr. President,” Biden said. He and Graham stormed out together. Back in Washington, President-elect Barack Obama told reporters that he was drafting Graham as “one of our counselors in dealing with foreign policy.”

This was the kind of politics — collegial, bipartisan, conciliatory — that Biden wanted to celebrate. As he bid goodbye to the Senate, Biden recalled his relationship with one more reformed segregationist, former Democratic senator John Stennis of Mississippi.

In 1988, Stennis had given Biden a prized conference table from his office where he and his fellow Dixiecrats had gathered to plot the demise of the civil rights movement. Stennis had dubbed it “the flagship of the Confederacy.”

“It’s time this table passes from the man who was against civil rights into the hands of a man who was for civil rights,” Biden recalled Stennis telling him. By that point in his life, cancer had ravaged Stennis’s body and cost him a leg. From his wheelchair, Stennis told Biden of his late-in-life conversion and belief that the civil rights movement had done “more to free the white man than the black man.”

“It freed my soul,” Stennis said. “It freed my soul.”

To some, the table would have been a symbol of hatred, a reminder of the men who fought to perpetuate America’s original sin and the racism that still infected the nation’s politics. To Biden, it represented possibility and the transformative powers of the Senate.

SHAPED BY DIFFERENT ERAS

In a dark conference room at the National Guard Memorial Museum, Graham stood to Biden’s right, dressed in his crisp Air Force uniform. It was late June 2015. After 33 years as a lawyer in the reserves, he was retiring. Biden, just two weeks removed from his son Beau’s funeral, had come to help send him off.

A few days later, Graham was touring Iowa as part of his long-shot presidential run. In the back seat of a rental car, he grew emotional as he spoke about Biden. “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, then you’ve got a problem,” he told HuffPost. “You need to do some self-evaluation, because what’s not to like?

“He’s the nicest person I think I’ve ever met in politics,” he continued. “He is as good a man as God ever created.”

Graham’s comments in the back of the rental car came just days after Trump glided down the golden escalator at Trump Tower, launching his presidential campaign with an unprecedented attack on Mexicans and McCain’s heroism in Vietnam.

Graham responded by calling Trump a “jackass” who was “appealing to the dark side of American politics” and had no place in the Republican Party. “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” Graham added later in the year. “I’d rather lose without Donald Trump than try to win with him.”

Graham voted for Evan McMullin, a long-shot independent, in 2016. By 2017, though, he was already acceding to the demands of Trump’s Washington. Graham dined with Trump at the White House and gave the president his new cellphone number. Trump had broadcast his old one from a campaign stage in a fit of pique. He became a regular Trump golf partner and, in what was becoming the most direct path to power and influence in the Trump White House, a cable news defender of the president.

Though they were friends, Graham and Biden had been shaped by different eras. Biden entered a Senate dominated by World War II veterans and the apocalyptic demands of the Cold War. Graham came to Washington in 1995, when American power was at its apex and lawmakers could spend months focused on President Bill Clinton’s infidelities with a White House intern. He was the floor manager during the Clinton impeachment hearings, where he tried and failed to persuade the Senate to call Monica Lewinsky to provide live testimony.

Before his death in 2018, McCain had asked both men to eulogize him. Their speeches captured their contrasting views of America and its politics.

Biden recalled a moment during the Clinton years when party leaders chastised him and McCain for sitting next to each other in the Senate chambers. “This is the mid-’90s,” Biden said. “It began to go downhill from there.”

But at an even stormier moment in American politics, Biden’s eulogy was unapologetically optimistic. “Many of you travel and see how the rest of the world looks at us. They look at us a little naive, so fair, so decent,” Biden said. “We’re the naive Americans. That’s who we are. That’s who John was.”

Graham also praised McCain’s courage and capacity for forgiveness in the wake of his captivity in Vietnam and his presidential defeats. But in eulogizing his old friend, Graham focused on his own and his country’s limits. Unlike McCain, Graham wasn’t a war hero or political maverick who could buck the president or his party on hot-button issues such as health care, immigration and climate change.

“The void to be filled by John’s passing is more than I can do,” Graham said on the floor of the Senate as he fought back tears. “Don’t look to me to replace this man.”

INEVITABLE CONFRONTATION

So far Biden has built his presidential campaign around many of the same “soul of America” sentiments that surfaced in his McCain eulogy. Graham, meanwhile, has moved ever closer to a full embrace of Trump, the president who McCain pointedly banned from attending his funeral.

Until recently, Graham and Biden had been able to avoid a direct confrontation. But Biden’s presidential aspirations and the increasingly contentious impeachment battle have made a confrontation inevitable.

Trump has put Biden at the center of his impeachment defense, insisting that Biden used his influence over U.S. foreign policy to engineer the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden. There’s no evidence that Biden acted to protect his son or that Hunter was ever a target of the probe. Even as he has described Biden as “a fine man,” Graham has defended Trump’s efforts to dig up dirt on his rival and suggested that Biden and his son might be guilty of wrongdoing.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Graham, has no clear oversight role regarding Ukraine, but Graham has asked for transcripts of Biden’s calls with Ukraine’s former president and records of Hunter Biden’s interactions with State Department officials. “I hope there’s nothing there. Reveal the transcripts. Trump released the transcripts,” Graham said in an interview with Fox News Radio last month. “All I’m asking is that somebody look at this line of inquiry. It does look very suspicious to me.”

Biden responded by trying to shame Graham. Asked by CNN if he had any words for his friend, Biden paused for several seconds to think, and replied: “Lindsey, I . . . I . . . I’m just embarrassed by what you’re doing, for you. I mean, my Lord.”

The two men have spent part of the past two weeks pondering the state of their relationship and what it says about the nation’s increasingly bitter politics. “My friendship with Joe Biden, if it can’t withstand me doing my job, it’s not the friendship I thought we had,” Graham said. “Everything I said about him in 2015 is true. I admire him as a person. I think he’s always trying to do right by the country. . . . But we’re not going to allow a system in America where only one side gets looked at.”

As Biden’s campaign bus rolled through Iowa recently, reporters asked what was driving Graham to investigate him and his son. Biden offered a simple explanation: “Donald Trump. Donald Trump. Donald Trump.”

[bountyofbeads]

Fox News fiction: How the Seth Rich conspiracy murder theory made its way to Trump's favorite cable news network

https://news.yahoo.com/fox-news-fiction-how-the-seth-rich-conspiracy-murder-theory-made-its-way-to-the-cable-news-network-100000772.html

FOX NEWS FICTION: How The Seth Rich Conspiracy Murder Theory Made It's Way To Fox News

By Michael Isikoff | Published July 23, 2019 6:00 AM ET | Yahoo News | Posted July 23, 2019 |

This is the fourth part in the Yahoo News “Conspiracyland” series. Read and listen to the first three parts here.

WASHINGTON – In the spring of 2017, then-senior White House counselor Steve Bannon got a text message from a producer for CBS’s “60 Minutes” inquiring about a wild story getting traction on internet websites and chat rooms. It involved Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who had been shot and killed on the streets of Washington the previous July, and claims that his murder was retribution for a supposed role in leaking internal Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks.

“In the conversations I've had with Steve, he tended to go towards conspiracies,” recalls Ira Rosen, the “60 Minutes” producer who sent Bannon that text message. “He liked conspiracies, and he believed in them. He talks about the deep state. He talks about black ops.”

In the case of Rich, Bannon didn’t disappoint. When Rosen asked about rumors that a “disgruntled insider … kid’s name was Seth Rich” had sold Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, Bannon responded with no shortage of certainty.

Download or subscribe: “Conspiracyland” on Apple Podcasts

“Huge story. He was a Bernie [Sanders] guy,” Bannon wrote back in a series of text messages that falsely characterized Rich’s political sympathies. As for Rich’s death from an early-morning shooting in a neighborhood 30 blocks north of the Capitol, Bannon upped the ante. “It was a contract kill, obviously,” he texted Rosen.

Rosen doubted that Bannon — prone to flippant bomb-throwing asides in his chats with journalists — actually believed that Rich was gunned down by hired assassins. But he had little doubt what Bannon was up to.

The White House at that moment was increasingly besieged by the ongoing investigations into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, and the role it played in boosting Trump’s candidacy. But if it could be shown that it was Rich — and not Russian intelligence agents — who provided the stolen emails to WikiLeaks, then the White House could turn the Russia story on its head.

“He’s trying to whet my appetite to actually go chase the thing,” says Rosen about his email exchange with Bannon. “He was trying to spin a counternarrative, and Seth Rich fit perfectly within that counternarrative.”

Bannon declined to respond to multiple requests for comment about his text messages. And, in the end, Rosen never pursued the Rich story. He made a few phone calls to police and FBI sources in Washington, he says, and quickly determined there was nothing to what Bannon had told him.

But at that very moment, another news outlet far more sympathetic to the president — Fox News — was preparing to take up the story. The network’s pursuit of the story would soon lead to one of the most embarrassing episodes in the history of America’s biggest cable news outwork.

How Fox News came to report an inflammatory and unsubstantiated Rich conspiracy story — and then, after hawking it for a week on its top-rated shows, retract it and strike it from its website — is the subject of the next two episodes of Yahoo News’ “Conspiracyland.” The first of those episodes, “Fox News Fiction,” is being released Tuesday.

It is a story with many twists and turns that ultimately raises a provocative question: What role did the Trump White House play in promoting one of the nastiest conspiracy theories rising out of the 2016 election?

The central player in this drama is Ed Butowsky, a hard-charging Dallas financier and inveterate political schmoozer with connections at Fox News. (He was an occasional guest commentator on the Fox Business Network.) He was also on friendly terms with a number of Trump White House officials, including Bannon and then-press secretary Sean Spicer.

During the Obama years, Butowsky had served on a “citizens’ committee” to investigate Benghazi and would often talk about how he got important information about the deadly incident into the media without leaving any fingerprints. “Behind the scenes I do a lot of work (unpaid) helping to uncover certain stories,” he once boasted. “My biggest work was revealing most of what we know today about Benghazi.”

In late 2016, Butowsky claims, he got a hot tip that caused him to plunge headfirst into the Rich story. His supposed tipster was Ellen Ratner, a liberal radio talk show host who due to family ties — her late brother Michael Ratner had been the U.S. lawyer for WikiLeaks — had met with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London during the closing days of the 2016 campaign.

Butowsky then passed along his tip, or at least his version of the tip, to the Rich family in a phone call after the election. “He had told us that a friend had gone to visit Assange, and Assange had told them that Seth had done it,” recalled Mary Rich, Seth’s mother, referring to Butowsky’s claim that her son had provided Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks. “We said, ‘It’s not true. ... Seth didn’t do that.’ And then Ed told us to look for the money that Assange had paid. And we said, ‘Trust me, there is no money.’”

Butowsky would go on to repeat the same story about his alleged tip to other potential collaborators on the Rich story. But Ratner, interviewed for the first time about this for the “Conspiracyland” podcast, vigorously disputed the financier’s claims. She did indeed meet with Assange, along with other members of her family, at the Ecuadorian Embassy just a few days before the 2016 election, she said. But, she added, neither Rich, nor any role he might have played in leaking or selling DNC emails, was ever mentioned during her meeting with the WikiLeaks founder. “It didn’t even come up,” she said. “Not at all.”

Butowsky never revealed Ratner’s identity to the Riches. They had no idea that Butowsky’s alleged tipster was prepared to contradict what he had told them. But the Riches were interested in something else that Butowsky would soon offer to help with: hiring a private investigator to find their son’s killers.

The Washington Police Department was convinced from the start that Rich’s death was the result of a botched robbery. There had been seven armed robberies in the Bloomingdale neighborhood where Rich was killed, all within the six weeks prior to his death. The cops and prosecutors had linked those holdups to drug-dealing activity in nearby housing projects.

But the cops had made little progress in identifying any suspects in Rich’s murder — a cause of no end of frustration for his parents. “I needed to hire a private investigator that can go door to door,” said Mary Rich. “And I was trying to figure out how in the world we could ever afford it, because we couldn't.”

It was at that point that Butowksy offered not only to hire the private investigator but also to foot the bill. “And I sat there and I went, ‘Oh, God, don't say this, don't say this,’ and I did,” he recalled. “I said I'll pay for it. And I have no idea why I said that.

“So then this is where everything in my life changed.”

Butowsky’s determination to pursue the Rich story was further fueled by a strange phone call he had with legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. After being put in touch with Butowsky by a former U.S. intelligence official who was a longtime source for the journalist, Hersh, who is occasionally given to loose, boastful comments, proceeded to spin out a bizarre and unverified narrative about Rich and a supposed secret FBI document.

“What I know comes off an FBI report,” Hersh told Butowsky in a phone call that the financier secretly taped. Rich “makes contact with WikiLeaks. That’s in his computer, and he makes contact. All I know is that he offered a sample, an extensive sample, you know, I’m sure dozens of emails, and said, ‘I want money.’ Then later WikiLeaks did get the password, he had a Dropbox, a protected Dropbox. And they [WikiLeaks] got access to the Dropbox.”

And how did Hersh know this? “I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me,” he told Butowsky. “And I know this person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He’s a very high-level guy, and he’ll do me a favor.”

Hersh’s claims in this secretly taped phone fall were exactly what Butowsky wanted to hear. The moneyman immediately started pressing the journalist to get him a copy of the FBI report so he could share it with his friends in the White House.

“We solve a lot of problems” with that report — and not just “letting a mother and father know what happened to their son,” he said in the phone call. “There’s so many people throughout Trump’s four years or maybe eight years who are always going to fall back on the idea that he’s not legitimate and the Russians got him elected. This changes all of that.”

But no sooner did Butowsky start pressing him than Hersh backed off. He had no access to the FBI report, he emphasized to Butowsky, and he couldn’t actually vouch for what his “high level” source told him. “It doesn’t make it true,” Hersh told him.

Months later, when Butowsky ignored Hersh’s cautionary words and started publicizing his remarks in that phone call, the journalist walked back what he had said in its entirety.

“I was not read anything by an FBI friend,” he told Butowsky in a previously unreported email that contradicted what he had previously said in that taped phone call. “I have no firsthand information, and I really wish you would stop telling others information you think that I have and that I have no reason to believe is accurate.” (When contacted by Yahoo News, Hersh declined to be interviewed on tape for the “Conspiracyland” podcast. But he emphasized he never published anything about the supposed FBI report on Rich because he never had any corroboration that such a document actually existed.)

But Butowsky was not to be put off. He reached out to a Fox News contributor —Rod Wheeler, a former Washington police homicide detective — and hired him as the private investigator for the Rich family. Then he took Wheeler to the White House to meet with press secretary Sean Spicer so he could brief him on his efforts to investigate the Rich murder.

What happened at this White House meeting would later be a matter of dispute. Spicer and Butowsky would both insist that nothing happened at all. As soon as Wheeler brought up the Rich case, they insisted, Spicer shut down the conversation and emphasized that it was not a White House issue.

That’s not how Wheeler remembered it. Spicer gave him his business card and his personal cellphone number, Wheeler told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, and offered to do what he could to facilitate the private investigation by putting him in touch with an official at the Justice Department. “If you need some more help, give me a call,” Spicer told him, according to Wheeler’s account. (Spicer declined to comment.)

Perhaps even more important, Butowsky put Wheeler in touch with a Fox News reporter, Malia Zimmerman, who was working to prove what Hersh had originally said in that secretly taped phone call. On May 10, the day after FBI Director James Comey was fired, she claimed to Butowsky she had talked to a federal investigator who wished to remain anonymous but had supposedly seen an FBI forensic report documenting emails between Rich and WikiLeaks.

It was an enormous break — if true. But Zimmerman knew she needed more sources for the article to pass muster with her editors, and she began reaching out to Wheeler to get him to provide on-the-record quotes to support her story.

When Wheeler at first balked, Butowsky decided to turn up the heat, leaving a highly provocative voicemail for the detective.

“Hey, Rod, it’s Ed,” Butowsky said on a voicemail message he left on Wheeler’s home answering machine on May 24. “A couple of minutes ago, I got a note that we have the full attention of the White House on this. And tomorrow, let’s close this deal.“

Then he followed up with an even more eyebrow-raising text message to Wheeler. “Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article, he wants the article out immediately,” he wrote Wheeler.

Butowsky insists he has never spoken to Trump in his life and that he was only joking with Wheeler in these messages. He invoked the interest of the White House, he says, as a way to pressure him to return Zimmerman’s phone calls.

“I was teasing with him to tell him, let's get this thing done,” said Butowsky. “I was bulls***ting with Rod, of course.”

Whatever the truth about the White House involvement, Butowsky’s tactics worked. Wheeler got back to Zimmerman. She told him her mysterious source was “this FBI guy, a former FBI guy” whom she considered credible. Wheeler agreed to provide a few on-the-record quotes to corroborate Zimmerman’s story even though, as he would later admit, the only thing he knew about the sole source for the article was what Zimmerman had told him. “My investigation up to this point shows there was some degree of email exchange between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks,” he said.

Then, even as Zimmerman was finishing up the article she was about to send to her Fox News editors in New York, Wheeler jumped the gun, prematurely revealing what her article would say to a different reporter for the Fox News affiliate in Washington, D.C.

The affiliate then went public with a story that would set off a political and media explosion — even though everything in it was wrong.

Next week on “Conspiracyland”: “Fox News Fallout.”