The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 07, 2017 2:00 am

POLITICS 03/04/2017 05:00 pm ET | Updated 12 hours ago
This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World

“The Camp of the Saints” tells a grotesque tale about a migrant invasion to destroy Western civilization.
By Paul Blumenthal , JM Rieger

Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and the driving force behind the administration’s controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, has a favorite metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee crisis in human history.

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.

“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”

“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”

“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. ... I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”

Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a “platform for the alt-right,” the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.

But the top Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s breathtakingly racist.

“[This book is] racist in the literal sense of the term. It uses race as the main characterization of characters,” said Cécile Alduy, professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on the contemporary French far right. “It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague.”

The book, she said, “reframes everything as the fight to death between races.”

Upon the novel’s release in the United States in 1975, the influential book review magazine Kirkus Reviews pulled no punches: “The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”

Linda Chavez, a Republican commentator who has worked for GOP presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush but opposed Trump’s election, also reviewed the book back then. Forty years later, she hasn’t forgotten it.

“It is really shockingly racist,” Chavez told The Huffington Post, “and to have the counselor to the president see this as one of his touchstones, I think, says volumes about his attitude.”

Image

The cover of this English translation of The Camp of the Saints calls it “a chilling novel about the end of the white world.”
The plot of The Camp of the Saints follows a poor Indian demagogue, named “the turd-eater” because he literally eats shit, and the deformed, apparently psychic child who sits on his shoulders. Together, they lead an “armada” of 800,000 impoverished Indians sailing to France. Dithering European politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders, including a liberal pope from Latin America, debate whether to let the ships land and accept the Indians or to do the right thing — in the book’s vision — by recognizing the threat the migrants pose and killing them all.

The non-white people of Earth, meanwhile, wait silently for the Indians to reach shore. The landing will be the signal for them to rise up everywhere and overthrow white Western society.

The French government eventually gives the order to repel the armada by force, but by then the military has lost the will to fight. Troops battle among themselves as the Indians stream on shore, trampling to death the left-wing radicals who came to welcome them. Poor black and brown people literally overrun Western civilization. Chinese people pour into Russia; the queen of England is forced to marry her son to a Pakistani woman; the mayor of New York must house an African-American family at Gracie Mansion. Raspail’s rogue heroes, the defenders of white Christian supremacy, attempt to defend their civilization with guns blazing but are killed in the process.

Calgues, the obvious Raspail stand-in, is one of those taking up arms against the migrants and their culturally “cuckolded” white supporters. Just before killing a radical hippie, Calgues compares his own actions to past heroic, sometimes mythical defenses of European Christendom. He harkens back to famous battles that fit the clash-of-civilizations narrative — the defense of Rhodes against the Ottoman Empire, the fall of Constantinople to the same — and glorifies colonial wars of conquest and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.

Only white Europeans like Calgues are portrayed as truly human in The Camp of the Saints. The Indian armada brings “thousands of wretched creatures” whose very bodies arouse disgust: “Scraggy branches, brown and black … All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms.” Poor brown children are spoiled fruit “starting to rot, all wormy inside, or turned so you can’t see the mold.”

The ship’s inhabitants are also sexual deviants who turn the voyage into a grotesque orgy. “Everywhere, rivers of sperm,” Raspail writes. “Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers.”

The white Christian world is on the brink of destruction, the novel suggests, because these black and brown people are more fertile and more numerous, while the West has lost that necessary belief in its own cultural and racial superiority. As he talks to the hippie he will soon kill, Calgues explains how the youth went so wrong: “That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains.”

The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. “The Fall of Constantinople,” Raspail’s unnamed narrator says, “is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.”


STEPHANIE KEITH/GETTY IMAGES
Protesters rally against President Donald Trump’s travel ban at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Jan. 28, 2017, in New York City.
Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints in 1972 and 1973, after a stay at his aunt’s house near Cannes on the southern coast of France. Looking out across the Mediterranean, he had an epiphany: “And what if they came?” he thought to himself. “This ‘they’ was not clearly defined at first,” he told the conservative publication Le Point in 2015. “Then I imagined that the Third World would rush into this blessed country that is France.”

Raspail’s novel has been published in the U.S. several times, each time with the backing of the anti-immigration movement.

The U.S. publishing house Scribner was the first to translate the book into English in 1975, but it failed to reach a wide audience amid withering reviews by critics. A rare favorable take appeared in National Review. “Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health,” then-Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Hart wrote in 1975. “Raspail is to genocide what [D.H. Lawrence] was to sex.” Hart added that “a great fuss” was being made over “Raspail’s supposed racism,” but that the “liberal rote anathema on ‘racism’ is in effect a poisonous assault upon Western self-preference.”

The book received a second life in 1983 when Cordelia Scaife May, heiress to the Mellon fortune and sister to right-wing benefactor Richard Mellon Scaife, funded its republication and distribution. This time it gained a cult following among immigration opponents.

May’s money has also been instrumental in funding the efforts of John Tanton, the godfather of the anti-immigration movement in the U.S. Tanton, who began as an environmentalist and population control proponent, founded a host of groups focused on restricting immigration, including the Federation of American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA and U.S. English. May’s fortune has fueled these groups with tens of millions of dollars in contributions over the years.

Linda Chavez was recruited in 1987 to head U.S. English, which advocates for English to be designated the country’s official language. But then a series of disturbing stories painted Tanton’s motives in a racial light. Among other issues, Chavez said she learned that his funding came from the pro-eugenics Pioneer Fund and from May, who Chavez knew had helped publish The Camp of the Saints. Chavez recalled seeing Tanton’s staffers carrying the book around their offices. She quit the group.

Tanton, who insists his opposition to immigration is not connected to race at all, told The Washington Post in 2006 that his mind “became focused” on the issue after reading The Camp of the Saints. In 1995, his small publishing house, Social Contract Press, brought the book back into print for a third time in the U.S., again with funding from May. Historians Paul Kennedy and Matt Connelly tied the book to then-current concerns about global demographic trends in a cover story for The Atlantic.

“Over the years the American public has absorbed a great number of books, articles, poems and films which exalt the immigrant experience,” Tanton wrote in 1994. “It is easy for the feelings evoked by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to obscure the fact that we are currently receiving too many immigrants (and receiving them too fast) for the health of our environment and of our common culture. Raspail evokes different feelings and that may help to pave the way for policy changes.”

In 2001, the book was republished one more time, again by Tanton, and again gained a cult following among opponents of immigration like the border-patrolling Minutemen and eventually the online “alt-right.”


KIRK IRWIN/GETTY IMAGES FOR SIRIUSXM
On his Breitbart News radio show, Stephen Bannon repeatedly used The Camp of the Saints as a metaphor for migrants and refugees.
Bannon’s alt-right-loving Breitbart has run multiple articles over the past three years referencing the novel. When Pope Francis told a joint session of Congress that the U.S. should open its arms to refugees in September 2015, Breitbart’s Julia Hahn, now an aide to Bannon in the White House, compared his admonition to Raspail’s liberal Latin American pontiff. And the novel’s thesis that migration is invasion in disguise is often reflected in Bannon’s public comments.

The refugee crisis “didn’t just happen by happenstance,” Bannon said in an April 2016 radio interview with Sebastian Gorka, who now works for the National Security Council. “These are not war refugees. It’s something much more insidious going on.”

Bannon has also echoed the novel’s theory that secular liberals who favor immigration and diversity weaken the West.

“Do you believe the elites in this country have the backbone, have the belief in the underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West to actually win this war?” he asked Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), now the attorney general, in June 2016.

“I’m worried about that. … They’re eroding, regularly it seems to me, classical American values that are so critical to our success,” Sessions replied.

Like Raspail, Bannon has reveled in the past victories of Christendom over Islamic forces.

“If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing,” he said in a 2014 speech broadcast to a conference at the Vatican. “I think they kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna [the Battle of Vienna in 1683], or Tours [the Battle of Tours in 732], or other places. … They were able to stave this off, and they were able to defeat it, and they were able to bequeath to us a church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind.”

Now Bannon sits at the right hand of the U.S. president, working to beat back what Bannon calls “this Muslim invasion.” And Trump is all in on the project. During the campaign, he called for a ban on all Muslims entering the country. His Jan. 28 executive order, since blocked in the courts, turned this campaign idea into executive policy.

Trump has continued to defend the executive order as a life-or-death national security issue. “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America,” he said in his first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.

Five days earlier, Trump had called his immigration enforcement efforts a “military operation.”

Although Department of Homeland Security officials walked back that statement, the president’s conflation of immigration with warfare did not go unnoticed.

“They see this as a war,” Chavez said.

Chavez, who supports some of Trump’s economic policy proposals, called the direction the White House is taking on immigration and race “extremely dangerous.” She said Trump’s immigration moves are “a kind of purging of America of anything but our Northern European roots.” Bannon, she added, “wants to make America white again.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ste ... 4854b3dc03
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 08, 2017 12:15 pm

Sen. Joseph McCarthy's (R-Wis) at a March 9, 1950 session of a hearing on McCarthy's charges of Communist infiltration in the state department. McCarthy,... AP Photo/Herbert K. White
Steve Bannon believed Joe McCarthy’s crusade was right
03/07/17 10:05 AM—UPDATED 03/07/17 10:09 AM
By Steve Benen
When Donald Trump launched his wiretap conspiracy theory over the weekend, the president took his argument in a curious direction. In his opening salvo, Trump declared, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

It was an interesting choice of words for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that much of the right actually looks back at McCarthyism with fondness. As CNN noted yesterday, among the admirers is Trump’s chief strategist.
Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist Steve Bannon said in 2013 that Sen. Joseph McCarthy was right in his 1950s campaign claiming widespread Communist infiltration into the United States government.

The Wisconsin senator’s inquisitions of those he suspected of communist ties – which eventually led to his censure by the United States Senate – was a key moment in the Red Scare and led to the coining of the term “McCarthyism.”
While interviewing an author in 2013, Bannon mocked the idea that McCarthy was some kind of “villain.” On the contrary, Bannon argued that the Republican senator and his allies were right in their hunt for traitors.

“The place was infested with either traitors that were on the direct payroll of Soviet military intelligence or fellow-travelers who were kind of compliant in helping these guys get along,” Bannon said at the time. “I mean, there’s absolutely no question of it. How has pop culture so changed it that white is black and black is white?”

Bannon went on to equate his vision of communist infiltration in the 1950s with Middle Eastern influence in contemporary America.

That’s obviously quite nutty, but it doesn’t come as too big of a surprise – because as regular readers know, much of the far-right has made a conscious effort to rehabilitate McCarthyism has having real merit.

A reporter from the Dallas Morning News told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in 2013, for example, that he’d been compared at times to Joe McCarthy. Cruz said that criticism “may be a sign that perhaps we’re doing something right,” which seemed like a curious response given the context.

Asked specifically, “Is McCarthy someone you admire?” Cruz wouldn’t answer.

In 2016, a Cruz national security adviser said McCarthy was “spot on” about communists infiltrating the United States government in the 1950s.

There’s been a lot of this kind of thinking. In 2008, then-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) made a memorable appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” telling Chris Matthews that she wanted an investigation into members of Congress to “find out if they are pro-America or anti-America.” Two years later, one of Bachmann’s closest allies, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), voiced support for the revival of the House Internal Security Committee, the 1960’s-era successor to the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee. Missouri’s Todd Akin compared himself to McCarthy two years ago, and he meant it in a good way.

Last year, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) endorsed the idea of a new HUAC for a new era.

It’s not just the Beltway, either. In 2010 in Texas, conservative activists rewriting the state’s curriculum recommended telling students that McCarthy was a hero, “vindicated” by history.

Given all of this, it’s hardly shocking that Bannon is part of far-right’s pro-McCarthy chorus. Should we assume he gave Trump a lesson following the president’s complaint on Saturday?
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show ... -was-right



Trump accused Obama of 'McCarthyism.' But Trump's lifelong mentor had a crucial role in its rise.
Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn


Sen. Joseph McCarthy covers the microphones with his hands while having a whispered discussion with his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, during a committee hearing in Washington in this April 26, 1954 file photo. (AP)
Cleve R. Wootson Jr.
The Washington Post
A few minutes before the sun rose over Mar-a-Lago, President Trump was up, thumbing a series of tweets about Barack Obama and some of the darker days of 20th century American history.

In particular, he was making accusations that Obama had tapped the phones in Trump tower just before the 2016 election - tactics Trump said hearkened to the McCarthy hearings and Red Scare of the late 1940s and ′50s.

"Nothing found," Trump tweeted. "This is McCarthyism!"

McCarthyism is something of which Trump should have in-depth knowledge.

His lifelong attorney and mentor - Roy Cohn, one of the men who helped mold Trump into Trump - was, as one author called it, Joseph McCarthy's sidekick.

After World War II, McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, made claims that large numbers of communist spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the U.S. government and needed to be weeded out.

Trump cites no evidence in wiretapping claim; Obama spokesman calls it 'simply false'
The accusations happened during a period of escalating tensions with the Soviet Union and growing fears about the global spread of communism. McCarthy interrogated alleged sympathizers at Senate hearings that came to bear his name. Just an accusation could ruin reputations and careers.

Cohn was the brains behind McCarthy's rise to power and, to many Americans, one of the first real television personalities, according to his obituary in The Washington Post.

"Mr. Cohn, with his slick hair, dark complexion and heavy-lidded eyes," the obit said, "was frequently seen whispering in the senator's ear."

Eventually, though, Cohn's influence in Washington waned as McCarthy and his hearings lost public support.

Decades later, after Cohn returned to New York, he had Trump's ear.

They first met in New York in October 1973, when Trump was 27 and beginning to make his fortune in his family's real estate business. Cohn, then 46, was a high-profile defense lawyer with connections in city government and in the courts. He used his connections to reward friends and punish opponents, according to The Post's Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg.

There were, however, legions of Cohn detractors. "He was a source of great evil in this society," Victor A. Kovner, a Democratic activist in New York City and First Amendment lawyer, told O'Harrow and Boburg. "He was a vicious, Red-baiting source of sweeping wrongdoing."

Cohn represented Trump and his dad, Fred, when they faced Justice Department allegations that they discriminated against black rental applicants at the apartment complexes the family owned or managed, according to O'Harrow and Boburg.

On Dec. 12, 1973, Cohn called a news conference saying they were suing the government for $100 million over the allegations. In an affidavit, Cohn said the government was trying to force "subservience to the Welfare Department."

The Trump business associate who led a double life as an FBI informant
The Trumps ultimately settled the case with the government without admitting guilt - and declared victory.

In the late '70s and into the 1980s, Cohn fought efforts to have him disbarred. Through it all, Trump was a loyal friend, trophy client and protege.

"Roy had a whole crazy deal going, but Roy was a really smart guy who liked me and did a great job for me on different things," Trump told The Post, according the story published in June. "And he was a tough lawyer, and that's what I wanted. Roy was a very tough guy."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... story.html



Alleged efforts to wiretap President Trump's phone lines during his campaign could have been conducted as part of a "rogue intel operation," Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said Monday.

King's remarks come days after Trump claimed over the weekend, without offering any evidence, that former President Obama had ordered Trump's phones tapped during the 2016 campaign.

"That doesn't necessarily prove that there wasn't a rogue intel operation going on that wasn't encumbered by, or just decided not to be encumbered by, the legalities," King said in an interview with Iowa's Sioux City Journal.

The Iowa congressman cited a slew of news articles claiming that U.S. officials had obtained a warrant to review contacts between Trump Tower and a Russian bank, according to the Sioux City Journal. But no U.S. news outlets have independently verified the claim that a Trump Tower server was under surveillance.

In a series of early morning tweets on Saturday, Trump compared the unfounded wiretapping to McCarthyism and former President Richard Nixon's role in the Watergate scandal.

King said that the president was not necessarily talking about Obama as an individual, but was more likely referring to the Obama administration. He blamed Twitter's limit on characters for Trump's poor explanation of the allegations.

"Twitter gives you a limited space of 140 characters. But it gives you also a little bit of latitude to double entendres. ... There sometimes can be a secondary or tertiary meaning," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Trump's comments spurred immediate backlash, as Democrats and some Republicans denounced the allegations as unfounded and salacious. FBI Director James Comey privately urged the Justice Department to push back on the president's accusations, according to reports, though the agency has not done so.

King also defended Trump's use of Twitter, saying the social media site gives Americans insight into the president's thoughts and decisionmaking process.

"I am reluctant to say anything that would discourage him from tweeting," he told the newspaper. "There are people who say he shouldn't and there are those who say he shouldn't do so in the middle of the night. ... We always want the freshest thoughts we can get from the president of the United States."
http://thehill.com/policy/national-secu ... ogue-intel


The irony of Republicans complaining about McCarthyism
By Ishaan Tharoor February 28
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A couple of days before a host of celebrities spoke out against President Trump at the Oscars, Hollywood icon George Clooney was feted at an awards ceremony in Paris. There he warned of the shadow of McCarthyism looming over his homeland.

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must not walk in fear of one another. We must not be driven by fear into an age of unreason," said Clooney. He signed off with the famous tagline of late American journalist Edward R. Murrow: "Good night, and good luck."

Murrow, of course, made his name in opposition to the anti-communist witch hunts launched by Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) in the 1950s. Liberal cognoscenti see the specter of McCarthy again haunting the country as Trump deems the mainstream media the "enemy" and scapegoats whole communities as potential terror threats.

But some Republicans are invoking McCarthy, too. They see the menace of Beltway conspiracies and government overreach in Democratic calls for an investigation into Trump's reported links to Russia. In early January, Trump himself said that speculation into his Russian connections was part of "a political witch hunt."


House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican lawmaker from California, echoed what seems like the administration's line over the weekend. "This is almost like McCarthyism revisited," said Nunes to reporters in California when asked about the prospect of appointing a special prosecutor to oversee an investigation. “We’re going to go on a witch hunt against innocent Americans?"

On Monday, Nunes once more attempted to shift the focus away from the White House. "There’s been major crimes committed,” said Nunes, referring to leaks from the intelligence community that spurred the Russia allegations. "What I’m concerned about is no one is focusing on major leaks that have occurred here ... We can’t run a government like this. A government can’t function with massive leaks at the highest level."

This rhetorical move is drenched in irony.

First, the cries of McCarthyism from Nunes and other Republicans were first uttered by figures on the American far-left last year. They lambasted liberal supporters of Hillary Clinton for succumbing to Russophobia instead of properly reckoning with the failures of the Democratic candidate. Now two camps from the opposite sides of the Cold War find themselves in the same corner.

Second, the move to quash leaks carries echoes of an earlier era, when former president Richard M. Nixon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover — both comrades in arms with McCarthy — circled the wagons in the face of Nixon's own political scandal. Things ultimately didn't end well for that Republican president.

Third, as the Atlantic's Peter Beinart wrote in 2015, Trump and McCarthy actually have a fair amount in common. Both their political careers were launched by opportunistically channeling the fears of the moment. "Both men would have happily taken up some other cause had it offered them a path to fame and power," wrote Beinart. "It was their own party, and political elites more generally, who bred the hostility and fear that they exploited."


McCarthy gestures during a Senate subcommittee hearing on March 9, 1950. (Herbert K. White/AP)
According to reports, the Trump administration tried to compel CIA officials and Republican politicians to push back on the Russia story in conversations with reporters. But the White House's attempts to subdue the Russia question appear to be backfiring.

"Efforts by the White House to spin this story their way before the investigation has run its course — and efforts by congressional Republicans to prop up that spin — are already looking like ham-handed political interference," wrote Post columnist Greg Sargent.

While Nunes argued there was nothing much to investigate, his Democratic colleague on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, made clear to reporters that no meaningful investigation has yet taken place. He and other lawmakers are demanding hearings that would compel agencies like the FBI to clarify what they know and don't know about Russian meddling in the elections and contacts with the Trump camp.

As a masterful expose by the New Yorker explains, it's probably certain that Moscow wanted to influence the U.S. elections — 17 different federal intelligence agencies, after all, agreed that Russia was responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee's emails. The question of direct collusion with the Trump camp, though, is much more complex and uncertain.

"Russia or Putin did not get Trump elected. Americans elected Trump," said Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen in an interview with Slate. "Russians basically played their sort of classic disruptive role of trying to do something that will both delegitimize democratic mechanisms and throw wrenches into the process. They never expected to succeed."

In the near future, you can expect more wrangling and bluster as the tussle over Russia's role continues. If things appear to be going against Trump, you should also expect more denunciations of the press and cries of witch hunts.


If so, at least one Republican politician may call out Trump for his demagoguery: former president George W. Bush.

"I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy," Bush said in a televised interview over the weekend. "We need an independent media to hold people like me to account." He added: "Power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive and it's important for the media to call to account people who abuse power, whether it be here or elsewhere."

That was true in the days of McCarthy and Nixon — and, yes, Bush. It remains so now.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wor ... 8d12b5febe
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 10, 2017 8:48 am

Thomas Cromwell was executed in 1540, without trial, and his severed head was displayed on a spike on London Bridge.


That is too good for Bannon

The Bombs of Steve Bannon
Timothy Egan
Timothy Egan MARCH 10, 2017

Like much of the world, I’ve been trying to understand Stephen K. Bannon, the chief strategist and guiding force behind the chaos of Donald Trump’s bizarre presidency — chaos by design.

He has been called the most dangerous political operative in America, the second most powerful man in the world and the great manipulator. He reportedly compared himself to Vladimir Lenin, the murderous architect of the Soviet Union — not his politics, but his goal to blow up the state. In a rare interview last fall, Bannon mentioned some role models.

“Darkness is good,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “Dick Cheney, Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.” You certainly can’t accuse him of lacking ambition, but I think he cited that villainy all-star list to throw people off. In the same interview, he made another, more accurate comparison:

“I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.”

It’s well known that Trump doesn’t read; he watches Fox News, then sends out inaccurate tweets about something he was unable to process. But Bannon is a voracious reader — of philosophy, theory and the hinge moments in history. Cromwell, who altered the course of the Western world in ways still being felt today, was Steve Bannon in feathered Tudor finery.

To the Irish, the name Cromwell still sends shivers down the spine, a name associated with a rampage of terror and slaughter in Ireland. But that was Oliver Cromwell, a distant relative.

Readers of Hilary Mantel’s revisionist novels, and viewers of the BBC series based on her work, know Thomas Cromwell as a brooding, brilliant master of the court of King Henry VIII, from 1532 to 1540. The real Cromwell was a cunning conspirator who tore up the old order in service of a self-indulgent, wife-killing king who forced a breakaway religion on his subjects.

Or was he serving his own needs, an overarching plan? That’s the question we should ask about Bannon. Like Cromwell, the Trump-whisperer in the West Wing is brilliant and cunning, and full of contradictions. He appears to be a self-hating baby boomer, a self-hating member of the Harvard Business School/Goldman Sachs elite, a self-hating Hollywood director and a self-hating journalist. From his films on Sarah Palin to his time running Breitbart, he learned how to be a very good propagandist. It’s a role that has served him well in the White House.

King Henry was a Trumpian figure — imperious, vainglorious, explosive, a handsome charmer in his youth who became an embittered and slothful 400-pounder. Henry was married six times, though of course two of his wives were executed. Between them, Bannon and Trump have had six wives.

Cromwell was known for two things. First, he helped to orchestrate the annulment of the king’s marriage to his longtime wife, Catherine of Aragon, so that Henry could marry his mistress. When the Roman Catholic Church wouldn’t grant a divorce, Henry declared himself the Supreme Head of a renegade Church of England.

Cromwell’s second major initiative was to ensure that the church founded by a serial killer would wipe out the old order. He was responsible for the destruction of monasteries and relic-laden cathedral alcoves, transferring wealth to the crown. Monks and nuns who refused to take an oath to Henry were murdered. The haunting, beautiful ruins of the Benedictine monastery in Canterbury, founded in 598, is one indirect result of Cromwell’s deeds. And the British monarch’s current role as the head of the Church of England is another legacy — dating to Henry.

Bannon is close to conservative Catholics who do not like the progressive bent of Pope Francis. They favor a clash of civilizations with Islam, rather than the pope’s openhearted approach.

Changing Rome will be a tough slog. But elsewhere, Bannon has been busy trying to destroy the existing order. Trump’s attacks on a free press, an independent judiciary and civil society are disrupters out of Bannon’s playbook. Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower had the smell of Bannon’s gunpowder.

Bannon has praised Joseph McCarthy, who was censured by the Senate for his 1950s witch hunt. In 2010, Bannon said, “What we need to do is bitch-slap the Republican Party.” The stunt of having women from Bill Clinton’s past appear at a presidential debate last year was a pure Bannon play.

As chief strategist, he recently vowed a daily fight for “deconstruction of the administrative state.” This is a Cromwellian task aimed at overturning not just the traditional work of the federal government, but also the existing international order of treaties, trade pacts and alliances that has kept the world relatively safe since World War II. Trump’s cabinet is stocked with people whose goal is to neuter the agencies they head.

But before he gets gluttonous with power, Bannon should remember what happened to his historical doppelgänger. Henry turned on him. Thomas Cromwell was executed in 1540, without trial, and his severed head was displayed on a spike on London Bridge.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/opin ... annon.html



Inside Steve Bannon’s Failed Breitbart India Scheme
Before he was the president’s right-hand man, Steve Bannon was bent on world domination of a different kind.
Asawin Suebsaeng
ASAWIN SUEBSAENG

03.02.17 12:00 AM ET
If Stephen K. Bannon had had his way, there would already be a Breitbart India.
Well before he entered the Trump White House with an eye toward influencing and affecting foreign policy, Bannon was already trying to wield his Breitbart media empire to influence the politics of foreign democracies, in favor of right-wing nationalist upheavals.
Until he became President Trump’s chief strategist, Bannon was on a mission to open new Breitbart operations in several European countries. According to multiple reports, he wanted these foreign offices opened for the purpose of backing nationalist, anti-immigrant political parties such as the National Front in France.
Another country Bannon had eyed for setting up shop was India, so his right-wing news and propaganda network could lend its support to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, another nationalist, hugely controversial figure whom Bannon has come to admire greatly.
“On November 17 2015, I sat opposite Steve Bannon in [a New York City] office as he asked me if I’d be interested in starting Breitbart India,” Mumbai-based writer Amit Varma wrote in a little-noticed blog post late last year.
“A lady who was one of the funders of [Breitbart], and of certain leaders in the Republican Party, got in touch with [others] to ask if she could meet me. (It’s not fair of me to name her because she’s not really a public figure.),” Varma continued. “She’d been impressed by my speech, and thus this meeting [with her and Bannon].”
Though Varma declined to name the “lady,” two sources, who requested anonymity, with knowledge of the meeting confirmed to The Daily Beast that the woman present in the room with Bannon was in fact Rebekah Mercer, the Republican megadonor with deep ties to Trump and Bannon. Last week, Breitbart confirmed that the Mercer family does in fact co-own Breitbart.
Mercer did not respond to requests for comment on this story. Neither did Bannon.
Varma blogged that he “didn’t know much about Breitbart” or the American alt-right, though he knew right off the bat that launching Breitbart India wasn’t the gig for him. Breitbart was a conservative vehicle, both in the United States and at its offshoots abroad. Varma identifies as a pro-immigration, pro-gay-rights libertarian. Moreover, he says that he advised them that there wasn’t even a point to having a website like Breitbart colonize India.
“It’s incongruent,” he recalled telling Bannon and Mercer. “There is no analog of American conservatism in India. The Indian right is driven by bigotry and nativism, with no deeper guiding philosophy behind it. [Consider the irony of these words.] You will not find any Burkean conservatives here. Don’t come.”
“Well, we think that Modi is India’s Reagan,” Bannon replied, according to Varma.
Varma writes that he “laughed” in Bannon’s face when he said that, and had to tell them that “Modi was no Reagan.”

Subsequently, “the lady” present attempted to convince Varma that she was “actually” a libertarian, as well, before launching into “diatribes” against same-sex marriage and “immigrants in America, and how the cultural fabric of Europe was being torn apart by their immigrants.”
Following Trump’s election-night upset, Varma wrote that he is “still glad that I didn’t explore their offer further. I could have been somewhat richer, maybe even influential, if I’d taken it up—but I sleep well at night now, and that’s what matters.”
In a brief phone conversation, Varma told The Daily Beast that he did not wish to comment further than what he wrote in his original post, but added that he found Bannon to be warm and “very nice to me.”
Modi is a controversial nationalist, right-wing leader. The U.S., along with England and other Western countries, had imposed a visa ban on him after human-rights organizations implicated Modi in a 2002 slaughter of Muslims in his state. The Indian Supreme Court eventually exonerated Modi years later, but by then many witnesses had been tampered with, had died, or had been killed.
During a conference held inside the Vatican in 2014, Bannon praised Modi, a Hindu nationalist, for being at the center of a transnational “revolt.”
“That center-right revolt is really a global revolt,” Bannon said, according to BuzzFeed. “I think you’re going to see it in Latin America, I think you’re going to see it in Asia, I think you’ve already seen it in India. Modi’s great victory was very much based on these Reaganesque principles, so I think this is a global revolt, and we are very fortunate and proud to be the news site that is reporting that throughout the world.”
The intersection of pro-Modi and pro-Trump sentiments within Trump’s inner political circle didn’t stop there. The Republican Hindu Coalition (RHC), which was very supportive of Trump’s presidential campaign and was favorably covered on Breitbart multiple times, has been in close contact with Bannon, via its leader and GOP donor Shalabh “Shalli” Kumar.
In mid-October of last year shortly before the election, Kumar organized an RHC event in New Jersey featuring and celebrating Donald J. Trump. The event also included Kumar, as well as “Bollywood Stars, and major Hindu spiritual leaders,” according to the invitation.
Kumar, chairman of the Republican Hindu Coalition, told The Daily Beast this week, that Bannon worked with him to get the event planned around the Republican presidential nominee’s busy schedule.
“I have had several interfaces with [Steve Bannon] in person, as well as over the phone and over email,” Kumar said.
Kumar said that he first met Bannon in late August 2016, and that he was a “very, very nice guy”—not the the “rude, angry-type person” he had seen portrayed in the news. During his August visit to Trump Tower to plan the Bollywood-tinged, pro-Trump event, Kumar met with Kellyanne Conway and Bannon.
“Generally, we were talking about the reaching-out to Hindu Americans, and [Bannon] was all for it—I do remember him being interested in talking to the powers at be from India,” Kumar recalled. “At the end of the meeting, Kellyanne had to disappear for a moment into a different room, and I had forgotten to ask her some questions… So Steve went with me from room, to room, to room [in Trump Tower] to find her to get my questions answered.”
Kumar said he chatted with Bannon multiple times regarding the importance of a “nationalist economy,” Indian politics, and taking “tough stands against radical Islamic terrorism.”
“[Steve] had a clear philosophy that you could still be in nationalism, and still be a global power,” he continued.
The Trump megadonor and RHC chair also claims that during the campaign he had set up an active “email group” between Bannon, Conway, Stephen Miller, and himself.
The original purpose of this email thread was, according to Kumar, to coordinate planning of the Trump—Bollywood bash. The thread later, however, afforded Kumar the opportunity to simply chat with Trump’s most senior aides about current events whenever he felt like it—and they listened, he says.
“I do comment on what I see in the news, so I do comment from time to time with the group, and Steve Bannon is always the first one to respond to my comments,” he said. “When Mitt Romney was being considered [by then President-elect Trump] for secretary of state, I was appalled at that, and emailed the group [as such]. And Steve very quickly responded with ‘thank you.’ Within in a couple of hours, Kellyanne was already on TV showing her displeasure at [Team Trump] even thinking about Romney.”
Conway and Miller did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
Kumar says he is still in touch with Bannon, and communicated as recently as last month. When asked about the former Breitbart chief’s plans to try to mount a Breitbart India, Kumar said he had not heard about them, but that it “would be great” if Breitbart did do that.
“Steve Bannon is the guy who straightened out the Trump campaign in August,” the Indian-American businessman said. “He almost seemed like a military commander… One of my favorite guys in history is Gen. Patton, and—you know—he could be like Gen. Patton.”]http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/02/inside-steve-bannon-s-failed-breitbart-india-scheme.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 11, 2017 5:04 pm

REPORT: Steve Bannon Under Criminal Investigation For Florida Residency Claim


by john wright
March 11, 2017 2:59 PM

Trump's Chief Strategist May Have Provided False Information To Obtain Voter Registration
White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is the subject of a criminal investigation into whether he falsely claimed he was a Florida resident from 2014 to 2016, possibly to avoid paying state income taxes.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that state prosecutors in Miami have subpoenaed documents including Bannon's lease of a home in Coconut Grove, Florida. They've also contacted landlords, a gardener and a handyman.

The State Attorney’s Office for Miami-Dade County declined to provide further details, citing confidentiality rules for “active criminal investigative information.” But a spokesman for the State Attorney's Office said of the probe, "At this point it is not over."

Under Florida law, it is a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, to provide false information on a voter registration application. However, proving wrongdoing could be difficult because state law does not clearly define residency.

Last year, after he was hired to lead Trump's campaign, The Guardian reported that Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, was registered to vote at a then-vacant house in Miami-Dade County.

According to the Post's subsequent investigation, two homes that Bannon leased in Florida — and where he claimed residency — were in fact occupied by his third ex-wife, whom he divorced in 2009.

"The Post found that Bannon left a negligible footprint in Florida," the newspaper reported. "He did not get a Florida driver’s license or register a car in the state. He never voted in Florida, and neighbors near two homes he leased in Miami said they never saw him. His rent and utility bills were sent to his business manager in California.
http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.co ... ncy_claims


FRIDAY, MAR 10, 2017 03:59 AM CST
Steve Bannon’s betrayal of Breitbart: White House at “war” with right-wing site over immigration and Trumpcare
Breitbart may be turning against Donald Trump as its former CEO has reportedly gone soft on DREAMers and Obamacare
SOPHIA TESFAYE
Image
Steve Bannon's betrayal of Breitbart: White House at "war" with right-wing site over immigration and Trumpcare
Steve Bannon (Credit: Getty/Mandel Ngan/Salon)
There appears to be a movement afoot to create an appearance of distance between White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and the right-wing website he used to run, Breitbart News. Either that or the chaos and dysfunction that has consumed President Donald Trump’s first few weeks in office has left even his most diehard supporters willing to turn their backs on him.

A new report this week claimed that the right-wing website’s “honeymoon with [the] establishment wing of [the] Trump White House may be over,” more than a month after another report claimed Breitbart’s former CEO turned White House mastermind was “furious” with his former publication. According to Business Insider, the former Breitbart chairman is simultaneously attempting to run White House policy and strategy, while maintaining control of the site’s coverage.

But Bannon’s transition to a more professional role has reportedly been accompanied by a shift to pragmatism that has unnerved the loyal coalition of white nationalists who are the backbone of Breitbart and who helped elect Trump. On two of the foundational hardline platforms of Trump’s campaign, immigration and health care, Bannon has reportedly become a moderating force in the White House.

Buzzfeed News reported that “two administration sources pointed to chief strategist Steve Bannon as the man who preserved the current iteration of DACA,” the executive action signed by former President Barack Obama to defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. Bannon reportedly battled against other administration officials, like Attorney General Jeff Sessions and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, to slow down Trump’s promise to the end the program on his first day in office (a stark difference when compared to Breitbart’s anti-immigrant coverage).

Bannon’s effort to save the measure backed by members of both parties is less of a turn towards moderation and more of a strategic ploy to engender goodwill for future immigration battles, Buzzfeed reported. DREAMers, young undocumented immigrants granted a reprieve to attend school and work, are reportedly not a top threat to Bannon’s ethno-nationalist populism.

“They’re Americans. They understand the culture,” one unnamed source said of Bannon’s more lenient position on DREAMers.

Bannon’s former publication apparently takes a harsher view on his work helping sell House Republicans’ plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Breitbart attacked the GOP proposal as “Obamacare 2.0″ immediately after it was unveiled Monday night:


While the site has so far avoided directly criticizing Trump for championing the bill, new reports of tensions between the publication and the White House this week may suggest an impending clash — or, again, at least the appearance of one.

“This is war,” Breitbart senior Washington editor Matt Boyle wrote in an internal Slack chat obtained by Business Insider. “There are no sacred cows in war,” Boyle reportedly told others at his site. According to Business Insider’s sources, Boyle has also told Breitbart staffers that Bannon is guilty of “treason” against the online conservative media giant.

For his part, Boyle told the Hill on Wednesday the report by Business Insider is “fake news.”

Since his Valentine’s Day report casting doubt on White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus’s future in the Trump administration, citing sources close to the president, Boyle has actually been granted increased access to the administration. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer even granted him an oval office visit with Trump.

But Boyle was reportedly first chewed out by Bannon, who was upset Breitbart’s coverage appeared to be an attack ordered by him. From Business Insider:

According to the two sources, Bannon was so furious that he phoned Boyle after the story was published and unloaded on him. Boyle hadn’t sought to notify Bannon he was publishing the story in advance, the sources said.

Bannon further aggravated Boyle that week when he instructed him not to publish additional articles critical of Priebus, prompting the Washington editor to tell others that Bannon had betrayed Breitbart and was guilty of “treason,” according to a source.

The special attention Breitbart received since only kept Boyle’s target off the White House for a bit, however. This week, Boyle took Spicer to task for inaccurately stating that the GOP health care plan constituted a full repeal of Obamacare.

“[W]e are a proudly independent news organization,” Boyle later told the Hill.

“They thought they could satisfy Boyle by giving him a one-on-one interview with Trump,” one unnamed source relayed to Business Insider. “But the thing about Boyle is you can’t stop him. You can’t control him.”

Whatever the various machinations between Trumpland and Breitbart’s world may actually be, it is clear that whoever is leaking hopes to cast the impression of a fiercely independent Breitbart that won’t be cowed by its former boss or the president of the United States. It would also certainly be in Bannon’s interest to create an air of separation between himself and the right-wing media organ as he attempts to sell his nationalist policies as mainstream.
http://www.salon.com/2017/03/10/steve-b ... trumpcare/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby 82_28 » Sat Mar 11, 2017 5:51 pm

I have said it probably in this thread and I am always repeating myself about everything so I cannot keep track, but in the early 2000s, I swear Breitbart was totally neutral. My even more than me left wing friend would send me links from it all the time. Not in a can you believe this site sense, but just information. The site started out tame as fuck. I'd never heard of no Bannon before this fuck trump. Since I don't love tooting my own horn, did I not call it in the OP of TRUMP is seriously dangerous? So I just tooted it -- the horn. Like Michael Moore I knew from the beginning this would happen. I do not think this will last another several months. I hope I am right about that too.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby 82_28 » Sat Mar 11, 2017 6:07 pm

I am a total dick. But I had a blog in the early 2000s and I can only access it by wayback machine any more. Here is what I wrote in 2005:

When I read it, it is like another person wrote it. I predicted the vectors almost precisely. I never thought back then there would be a trump though. I don't know how I even found our long lost leader Mr. Wells. Anyway, here is what I wrote:

To Disobey

There must be a time during the course of a human's years that it no longer is possible to declare one "innocent". I got to thinking about children and especially the innocence that purportedly all "civilized" people believe a baby has reservoirs and reservoirs of, while twenty year olds and fifty year olds retain much less. When I think about it my mind is drawn to simple graph it draws for itself. It draws a bell curve. You can see it, when you visualize a line running in one general direction marking each year from the "inherent" innocence at birth to the relative innocence in wait should you make it into your eighties and nineties, on into death itself. You will find that there are spans of whole decades where your worth in the currency of innocence is next to nil, if not just being done with it and declaring your inherent worth at the age of 30 or so to be nothing. Especially, if you do not have children by this "late" date in the innocence scheme. It's as if an adult is able to finance him or herself a loan of innocence for the brief time they raise a child. A child, I dare say, which is more the property of the system, the state or whatever you'd like to call this existence, than she is her own, free-willed self contained living unit. This is to say nothing of the dwindlingly innocent child's parents, who find their children in capitalist systems such as this, from birth to death, in the throes of a continual pull on them to foresake the old ways of the heart, beginning with family and tradition.

In America there is no tradition, just a thinly veiled perpetual state of militarism (look at the resurging popularity of the mainstreet parade -- everybody in uniform and in concert) that requires short-attention spanned reaction and consumption (look at the resurging popularity of the mainstreet parade -- everybody in uniform and in concert). The door to our hearts, the key to understanding our families and the will to unconditionally love is perhaps better found in the frigid stripes of a barcode or the database of a credit agency. As humans, this is where it has finally come to. We are now nothing more so than ever in the history of humanity, the most worthless (as far as our innocence goes) generation who has ever roamed the globe. It is this "roaming of the globe" which has done it to us. The tourist industry could be called the vehicle within which the destruction of humanity set itself for an irreversible trend. The catalyst was our great will to discover and to experience on magnitudes never before possible.

Our need to travel, cover more ground, uncover insurgent hideouts, simulate simulated death, killing and even raping, is best manifested in the great popularity of a simulated anything that goes guise of something called videogames. Virtual reality. Relentless competition. Unfulfilling pixel sex. I don't mean just straight, no chaser "videogames", I mean videogames. Function being: VIDEO and GAMES. Whatever form they may take.

Virtual, cartonized, tagged, tracked, cellular, networked, commuting, tuned-in, passionless life is killing us -- enslaving us. We cannot keep track of the days, weeks and months which pass anymore. We ebb and flow with the announcements and "outrages" and the handpicked and national intelligence sanctioned evils we hear incessantly about. Even I, someone who is ONLY immersed in the "alternative media" if at all, is fully beholden to the overarching system in which public information is disseminated about the ears of Earth who are willing to hear. There is always something to keep secret. So I ask at this late date. A date which finds many in the great family of humanity jacked into horrible and wartorn virtual realities of systemic ignorance and blinkered intellect. I ask:

What good is a secret falling under the guise of "national security" anymore?

As chilling in sensation as this current mode of thought has gotten me, I ask because it does not feel as though Earth has any rules anymore. There is no single or a strong base of multiple ideological sources which seem able to carry any credence in any large enough swath of a population which would result in the hopeful communal gesture of a stately community debate. It is for this reason I believe the world is headed for protracted, generalized war. Yes, an always escalating worldwide war. All humans who do not assimilate with the strongest factions will be destroyed -- as there will be no need for us. A world without peace has no need for those who yearn for it.

Eventually it will become clear and the war's neccessity will enter into conventional wisdom. At that point "to disobey" will be something else entirely.

--------------------------------------------------
Again, I am sorry. I just read it some 12, 13 years later again the other day. Just read it and pretend it wasn't me. Just words on your screen.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby PufPuf93 » Sat Mar 11, 2017 7:44 pm

From: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... spartanntp

There are photos and video clips at the link.

During his political rise, Stephen K. Bannon was a man with no fixed address


In the three years before he became Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon lived as a virtual nomad in a quest to build a populist political insurgency.

No presidential adviser in recent memory has followed such a mysterious, peripatetic path to the White House. It was as though he was a man with no fixed address.

owned a house and condo in Southern California, where he had entertainment and consulting businesses, a driver’s license and a checking account. He claimed Florida as his residence, registering to vote in Miami and telling authorities he lived at the same address as his third ex-wife.

At the same time, he routinely stayed in Washington and New York as he engineered the expansion of Breitbart News and hosted a live Breitbart radio program. By 2015, Bannon stayed so often at Breitbart’s townhouse headquarters on Capitol Hill that he kept a picture of a daughter on a mantle piece, beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.
Bannon told a friend that year he was living in multiple cities, including Washington, New York, London and Miami, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.
The issue of Bannon’s legal residency has been simmering since last summer, shortly after he became chief executive of Trump’s campaign.

The Guardian reported in an Aug. 26 story that he was registered to vote at a then-vacant house and speculated that Bannon may have signed an oath that he was a Florida resident to take advantage of the state’s lack of state income taxes.

In California, where Bannon had lived and owned property for more than two decades, income tax can exceed 12 percent.

Bannon has not responded to repeated requests by The Washington Post to discuss the matter. Two Post reporters sought to independently verify his residency claims, using a wide array of publicly available information.

They obtained utility bills, court records, real estate transactions, state driver reports and the checks he wrote to pay municipal taxes in California. They interviewed neighbors, spoke with landlords and tracked his Breitbart-related activity.

In the digital age, when most Americans leave a clear footprint of their whereabouts, Bannon left a meandering trail filled with ambiguity, contradictions and questions. The Post found that Bannon left a negligible footprint in Florida. He did not get a Florida driver’s license or register a car in the state. He never voted in Florida, and neighbors near two homes he leased in Miami said they never saw him. His rent and utility bills were sent to his business manager in California. His former wife occupied the premises, according to a landlord and neighbors. At the same time Bannon said he was living with his ex-wife, she was under investigation for involvement in a plot to smuggle drugs and a cellphone into a Miami jail, a law enforcement document obtained by The Post shows.

The Post learned that state prosecutors in Miami have an active investigation into Bannon’s assertions that he was a Florida resident and qualified to vote in the state from 2014 to 2016. In late August, investigators subpoenaed Bannon’s lease of a Coconut Grove home and other documents. They also contacted the landlords of that home and another that Bannon leased nearby, and sought information from a gardener and handyman who worked at one of the homes, according to documents and interviews.
Because state laws do not clearly define residency, making a false registration case can be difficult.

California connection

A former investment banker and Hollywood producer, Bannon lived in California when he took a turn toward politics nearly a decade ago.
He had a condo in Los Angeles and a house just to the south in Laguna Beach, in Orange County. In 2010, he told Orange County election officials that he wanted to become a “permanent absentee voter” and have all ballots mailed to his Laguna Beach home.

In 2011, Bannon produced and directed a political documentary about Sarah Palin for the Victory Film Project, a company in Sarasota, Fla. He is listed as a manager of the company in Florida corporate records.

In March 2012, with the death of founder Andrew Breitbart, Bannon became executive chairman of the Los Angeles-based Breitbart News, which was expanding its operations to Washington.

Bannon was still a resident of California, records show. In the November 2012 elections, he voted in Orange County by absentee ballot. That same month, he renewed his California driver’s license for five years.

But in his subsequent travels across the country, his living situation became more complicated. The details gathered by The Post create uncertainty about where exactly he was spending the bulk of his time.

On Feb. 9, 2013, Bannon and Diane Clohesy, his former third wife, signed a lease application for a three-bedroom house on Opechee Drive in a lush Miami neighborhood with palm trees and Spanish-style homes. Bannon signed as “applicant,” and Clohesy signed as “applicant’s spouse.” The two were married in 2006, when Bannon was 53 and Clohesy was 36. They divorced in California in 2009. She had moved to Florida in 2008, “starting a new life in Miami,” Bannon said in court papers during the divorce. But the two remained in touch, and she worked on three political documentaries he directed in 2011 and 2012. Bannon told his new landlords that he would be splitting his time between California and Florida, according to interviews The Post conducted with the property owners. Bannon and Clohesy both signed the two-year lease, records show.
The lease application said Bannon was “relocating from California.” But Devin Kammerer, the real estate agent who represented Bannon and Clohesy, said he never met Bannon in person, and only sent him listings by email. “It was Diane who made the decisions about where she wanted to be, and she’d send over listings to Steve for his approval,” Kammerer said. “Diane was very clear on what she wanted.” The $4,900 monthly rent was a big jump for Clohesy, who declared on the lease application that her most recent apartment had cost her $950 a month, documents show. But by his own account, Bannon could afford it.

He stated on the application that he earned $750,000 a year as chairman of Breitbart News Network, a figure that has not been previously reported. He also earned $270,000 as executive chairman of Arc Entertainment, a film distribution company based in Santa Monica, Calif. In addition, Bannon received about $100,000 in salary that year as part-time chairman of the Government Accountability Institute, a new nonprofit charity in Tallahassee, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service. Bannon, two Breitbart writers and other conservative activists had launched the organization a year earlier and it produced reports and books that were promoted by Breitbart. Bannon claimed he worked 30 hours a week at GAI, according to IRS filings.

Just weeks after signing the Opechee Drive lease, Bannon launched “Breitbart News Sunday with Stephen K. Bannon,” a three-hour program broadcast live Sunday nights from SiriusXM studios in Washington.

In May 2013, Bannon opened an account in his name for municipal sewer and water service at the Opechee Drive residence, documents show. The utility account is one of the few public indications of Bannon’s presence in Florida. But Bannon told utility officials to mail the bills to the office of his business manager on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, Calif., according to documents obtained through Florida public records laws. Four neighbors told The Post they do not recall seeing Bannon at the house.
“I never saw him,” said Steven Chastain, who lived a few doors away on a nearby street. “He wasn’t living there,” said Barbara Pope, a longtime resident who often walked her dog on Opechee Drive. “I would have recognized him.” At the time Bannon was sharing the lease with Clohesy in Opechee, she was apparently involved with another man. Neighbors said they repeatedly saw a man they could not identify at the house.

She filed for a restraining order against Jose A. Cabana in 2012. He filed one against her in May 2013, court records show. She was granted a two-year injunction against him and his complaint was dropped after he failed to appear in court. Cabana was charged with cocaine distribution in November 2013 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He could not be reached for comment.

In October 2013, Clohesy became ensnared in an undercover investigation of a jail guard suspected of smuggling drugs and other contraband to another man, a friend of hers in the Miami-Dade County Pre-trial Detention Center, according to an arrest warrant for the jail guard first reported by the the Miami New Times.
Investigators eavesdropping on a phone call between Clohesy and the inmate heard them arrange for her to deliver a “pop tart” — code for a cellphone — along with several ounces of marijuana to a prison guard, the warrant said. Clohesy, who was under surveillance, later met with the guard in a parking lot and handed over the marijuana, the phone and $700 in cash, the warrant said.

Clohesy was confronted by authorities and agreed to cooperate. She told investigators she had known the inmate for more than a year and “maintained a relationship with him through jail visits, correspondence and telephone conversations.”

Efforts to reach Clohesy were unsuccessful. Her brother, Declan, provided The Post with a statement Friday that Bannon had provided “emotional or financial support” to help her recover from drug addiction and depression.

“Steve is a caring and compassionate man and Diane is blessed to still have him in her life,” the statement said. “We appreciate the media respecting my sister’s privacy at this early stage of her recovery.”

Neighbors of the Opechee Drive home said they remember Clohesy vividly, in part because she had a steady stream of visitors, some of them disruptive. Four neighbors told The Post that they had a community meeting with police to complain about noise at the house and cars speeding from the premises at late hours.
Police records show that officers went to the Opechee address at least three times over several months in 2014. The officers were responding to reports about disturbances, including loud music. In one case, a woman at the home called police around midnight to express fears about an ex-boyfriend who was shining a bright light into the windows. Her name is redacted in the report.

Beatriz Portela, a real estate agent who represented the Opechee landlords, said she also received a call and text messages from neighbors who were anxious about troubling incidents at the house, including speeding vehicles and a car crash. “They were super upset,” Portela said.

A roving life

On April 2, 2014, more than a year after Bannon signed the lease on the residence in Coconut Grove, he registered to vote in Florida and listed the Opechee Drive address as his legal home. Bannon did not have to show an ID to register. He provided the last four digits of his Social Security number to verify his identity.

One of the allures of Florida is its zero income tax rate for in-state residents. The Post was unable to determine what state Bannon claimed as his primary residence for the purpose of income tax. Accountants advise people who work in multiple states to carefully document the number of nights they spend in Florida and maintain records of travel, housing, even of meals. Registering to vote is considered one indication of residency, as is a driver’s license. Under state law, new residents must apply for a license within 30 days if they intend to operate a vehicle. Phillip Sroka, a partner at the accounting firm of Morrison, Brown, Argiz and Farra in Miami, said he advises clients who split their time in multiple states to take care to document their presence in Florida for more than six months. That includes airline tickets, restaurant receipts and utility bills.
In an interview with The Post, Sroka said suspicions are raised when individuals have their bills sent outside the states where they claim their residences.
“It gets a little sketchy when you accept employment elsewhere,” he said. “Where it gets a little on the line and subject to interpretation is where you have a lot of other business dealings elsewhere.”

As 2015 approached, Bannon continued his roving life. He rented out his Laguna Beach home and, in January 2015, bought a townhouse as a second home in Pinehurst, N.C. The deed lists Bannon’s mailing address at his money manager’s office in Beverly Hills. On Feb. 18, 2015, Bannon ended the water and sewer service at Opechee Drive and switched the service to Onaway Drive, less than a half mile away in Coconut Grove, records show. Five days later, Bannon changed his voter registration to Onaway Drive.

The Opechee house was left in disrepair, according to an email between the landlord and Bannon and interviews with the landlord. Padlocks had been placed on interior doors — or the doors had been removed altogether. A hot tub was destroyed.“Entire Jacuzzi bathtub seems to have been covered in acid,” the landlord wrote in the February 2015 email to Bannon. “I’m out of town,” Bannon replied. “is there any way u can talk with Diane and sort things out ???” The damage was estimated at more than $14,000, according to an accounting by the landlords, who kept the $9,800 security deposit from Bannon and Clohesy.

Kammerer, their real estate agent, said he was troubled by the damage. “I would not work with them after that,” he said. “I would not refer them again as clients of mine.”
Around this time, Bannon was becoming a fixture at the Breitbart News townhouse location in Washington, nicknamed “the Breitbart Embassy,” hosting parties, meeting with journalists and staying overnight.

In a Bloomberg Businessweek profile in October 2015, a reporter described interviewing Bannon multiple times in January and February at the Breitbart townhouse in Washington. The article, headlined “This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America,” described the building as a “14-room townhouse that [Bannon] occupies.”
“Ordinarily Bannon’s townhouse is crypt-quiet and feels like a museum, as it’s faithfully decorated down to its embroidered silk curtains and painted murals in authentic Lincoln-era details,” the article said.

On Oct. 26, 2015, SiriusXM announced that Bannon’s weekend radio show would expand its live broadcasts to weekday mornings from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. from studios in Washington and New York. Donald Trump was a guest on the inaugural show Nov. 2.

Five months later, Bannon shut off sewer and water service at the Onaway address in Miami. The house remained uninhabited for months.
Three neighbors interviewed by The Post said they were confident Bannon had not lived at the home. “I often saw Diane,” said Joseph “J.L.” Plummer, a prominent Miami resident who lived next door and was a city commissioner for nearly 30 years. “I never saw him.”

In mid-August, Bannon became chief executive of the Trump campaign. As he was assuming control, Bannon changed the address on his Florida voter registration records. On Aug. 19, he signed an oath that he now lived at the home of a longtime business associate in Nokomis, Fla., in Sarasota County.
The questions about Bannon’s residency emerged Aug. 26, when the Guardian wrote that Bannon had been registered to vote at a vacant house — the Onaway address in Miami.

The local NBC station in Miami reported that the state attorney’s office had requested Bannon’s voter records from county election officials. At least two people filed complaints about Bannon with the Florida Department of State, claiming he had committed voter fraud by asserting he was a resident, documents show. In October, the department said the complaints did not merit an investigation. That month, Bannon registered to vote in New York from a Manhattan condo overlooking Bryant Park and later cast an absentee ballot in the presidential election. Because he was registered in two places, he was later removed from Florida’s voter rolls. Under Florida law, it is a third-degree felony to provide false information on a voter registration application. It is punishable by up to five years in prison. First-time offenders are rarely given more than probation, something that could also lead to the loss of a security clearance. Officials from the State Attorney’s Office for Miami-Dade County, which is led by an elected Democrat, declined to provide details about their probe into Bannon’s residency claim. In denying a Post request for documents about the investigation, officials cited confidentiality rules for “active criminal investigative information.” Spokesman Ed Griffith said, “At this point it is not over.” But proving wrongdoing in Bannon’s case could be difficult because state law does not clearly define residency, according to an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby tapitsbo » Sat Mar 11, 2017 9:59 pm

A hot tub was destroyed.“Entire Jacuzzi bathtub seems to have been covered in acid,” the landlord wrote in the February 2015 email to Bannon. “I’m out of town,” Bannon replied.


Interesting.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 15, 2017 7:31 am

NEWS & POLITICS
Bannon and Trump Have Quietly Installed an Alt-National Security Council Operating Inside the White House
The Strategic Initiatives Group is the White House pipeline to the white nationalists of the European right.
By Jefferson Morley / AlterNet March 14, 2017

Less than a month after much-admired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster took over from Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser, Trump's alter-ego Steve Bannon appears to be more in control of U.S. foreign policy than ever.

There is little sign McMaster will be able to restore traditional U.S. foreign policy commitments to NATO and the European Union, and every indication that Bannon’s shadowy Strategic Initiatives Group, denounced by two national security experts as "dangerous hypocrisy," is driving U.S. policy.

McMaster, a lieutenant general with a reputation as an intellectual, was perhaps the last-gasp hope of Washington’s foreign policy professionals against the radical ambitions of the Trump administration. He was seen as a man who could speak unpopular truths to Trump and block Bannon’s improvisations while restoring a degree of continuity to U.S. foreign policy under Obama and Bush.

Losing Ground

No sooner had Flynn been fired over undisclosed meetings with a Russian diplomat, it was reported that McMaster would impose order on Flynn’s chaotic NSC, purging ideologues and removing Bannon from the National Security Council as urged by Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"Given the gravity of the issues the NSC deals with, it is vital that that body not be politicized, and Bannon's presence as a member of that body politicizes it instantly," Mullen said.

McMaster urged Trump not to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism,” arguing, along with virtually every other U.S. military leader, that the phrase only alienates friendly Muslims and increases the risk to U.S. personnel stationed in Islamic countries without providing any military or political advantages.

McMaster’s influence has been fading ever since. There would be no “purge” at NSC, an unnamed senior White House official told Foreign Policy. “Key NSC officials focused on the Middle East and other vital areas will keep their positions in the near term,” the official said.

Bannon remains on the NSC’s Principals Committee, while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is only a part-time participant.

Trump pointedly ignored McMaster’s advice and denounced “radical Islamic terrorism” in his address to the Congress, much to the satisfaction of deputy national security adviser Sebastian Gorka. A lightly credentialed acolyte of Bannon, Gorka seems to have more influence with Trump than McMaster, a decorated lieutenant general.

While Colin Kahl, former national security adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden, recently expressed hope that an "axis of adults" can take control of Trump’s foreign policy, all indications are that the “axis of ideologues,” led by Bannon and Gorka, are ascendant.

What SIG does

The Strategic Initiatives Group is emerging as Bannon’s conduit for aiding the populist right in Europe. Described as a "White House think tank," SIG is run by Chris Liddell, formerly chief financial officer at a Hollywood talent agency. The group's mission is described as supporting Trump administration collaboration with “private forums.”


In practice, that seems to mean Liddell will assist in marketing the message of the chauvinist European right.

Last week, Gorka signaled the ascendant ideology by endorsing a white nationalist opus by Georgetown University professor Joshua Mitchell in the debut issue of a policy journal called American Affairs.

For globalists, Mitchell writes, "political justice involved material growth made possible by global management and the identity debt-points that global elites dispensed to this or that oppressed 'identity' group as a consequence of past infractions or of the irredeemable fault of others—typically (the imaginary category of) White People."

"The dark Protestant machinations about human freedom and pride that drove President Bush and President Obama, respectively, make no appearance in the thinking of Trump," Mitchell writes. "He will ask of foreign nations, simply, are they going to be allies or not; and will America be able to win with or without them?"

In other words, Europeans who favor economic integration, ethnic pluralism and military deterrence of Russia are no longer regarded as U.S. allies.

“Trump has made clear that he’s at best indifferent, if not openly hostile to the modern European project, and Bannon has indicated that anti-E.U. populists have a friend in the White House,” writes American conservative James Kirchick in the German daily, FAZ.

Bannon approved of the visit of French far-right leader Marine Le Pen to Trump Tower in January. He published Dutch anti-immigration leader Geert Wilders in Breitbart News. And now he seems to be targeting Angela Merkel, the pro-immigration German prime minister who has emerged as the de facto leader of Europe, if not the free world. Merkel, who faces elections this fall, certainly sees Bannon's media strategy as a threat.

“We shouldn’t underestimate what’s happening on the internet,” Merkel said in a speech to the German parliament last week. “Opinions today are formed differently than 25 years ago. Fake pages, bots, and trolls can distort views.”

Not coincidentally, Breitbart.com is said to be opening a Berlin bureau later this year.

While Bannon often talks in apocalyptic terms about war between the Christian West and Islam, his initial moves in the National Security Council are more political than militaristic. Through SIG, Bannon seeks to midwife a more nationalist and Christian Europe, as a prelude to escalating a “clash of civilizations" war against Islam.


In this geopolitical gambit, Bannon and company are setting the course, while McMaster and the “adults” of the Washington policy elite look increasingly irrelevant.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politi ... ives-group
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Mar 15, 2017 3:24 pm

Imagine the cartel that's now being developed and will survive this administration.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby Rory » Sat Mar 18, 2017 11:27 am

IMG_20170318_082544.jpg
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 18, 2017 11:44 am

that's insane everyone knows John pizzagate Podesta killed Breitbart

but she was the first to report about the FISA warrants and was right about the FISA warrants :bigsmile

you know the FISA warrants that led to the take down of General Yellowkerk and will eventually led to the impeachment of trump

ask General Yellowkerk Flynn ...he's shitting his military pants right now

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Putin only kills real journalists
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just who is this lovely daughter of a Russian banker Mike?

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A picture of slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya is shown during a candlelight vigil in front of the Russian Embassy.Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Who Poisoned Alexander Litvinenko? Radioactive thallium link
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9355


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ergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor, was jailed on tax evasion charges while investigating Russian corruption. He died in 2009 after he was denied essential medical care in prison. Credit Mikhail Voskresensky/Reuters

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n 2004, an opposition journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, drank poisoned tea on a Karat flight and survived. She was shot and killed in her apartment elevator two years later, and her funeral was held in Moscow in October 2006. Credit Natalia Kolesikova/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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Boris Nemtsov speaks at a news conference on "Corruption and Abuse in Sochi Olympics."Alex Wong/Getty Images

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Boris Berezovsky wears a mask showing the face of Russia's President Vladimir Putin, as he leaves Bow Street Magistrates Court.Graeme Robertson/Getty Images
Putin's win is a hollow victory for a Russian free press

In the 12 years since Vladimir Putin has been in power, many journalists, including Anna Politkovskaya, have been killed – now, with a new term ahead, how many more will die?
Peter Preston journalists killed during Putin's regime
Khadzhimurad Kamalov, founder of the Dagestan weekly newspaper Chernovik, was killed outside his office in 2011. During Putin's 12 years of power many journalists have died. Photograph: Str/AFP/Getty Images
Saturday 10 March 2012 19.06 EST First published on Saturday 10 March 2012 19.06 EST
So, at least four more Putin years … and how many more dead journalists? Let's look back on the president-and-then-PM's first 12 years of power (using International Press Institute figures).

In 2011, three journalists dead (including newspaper editor Khadzhimurad Kamalov, shot 14 times as he left his office). In 2010, two killed; in 2009, five more (including a young reporter from Novaya Gazeta, caught in a hail of bullets). Add four for 2008, one in 2007 and then 2006 as Anna Politkovskaya, the most famous victim of them all, is murdered. But she wouldn't forget Yevgeny Gerasimenko – found in his Saratov flat with a plastic bag pulled over his head and computer missing – and nor should we.

Two Russian journalists died in 2005, and three in both 2004 and 2003; but 2002 was a wicked year, with eight lost (including Valery Ivanov, battling editor, shot in the head) and 2001 added another victim. Putin's reign of power in 2000 began with six dead reporters and editors: a grim portent, looking back, of bad things to come.

There are other countries in the world where journalists repeatedly perish in the course of duty, to be sure: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Colombia, Mexico. And Russia has terrorists and rebellions of its own to deal with as well. But the drip, drip, drip of journalists' blood, year in and year out, crimes scantily investigated and rarely brought to any conclusion, is still deeply dismaying.

Vladimir Putin is the supposed strong man at the centre of a nation that seeks to play a decisive role in world affairs. He is elected time and again. Yet a free press seems to mean pitifully little to him. You investigate? You report? You die, unavenged.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/ ... free-press


Does Vladimir Putin kill journalists?

By Linda Qiu on Monday, January 4th, 2016 at 5:42 p.m.


Trump Says Believe in Putin's Words

Donald Trump wants you to take Vladimir Putin at his word. He brushed off concerns raised by MSNBC's Joe Scarborough that Putin kills journalists.
After Russian President Vladimir Putin called Donald Trump "very talented," the GOP frontrunner has defended Putin against suspicions that Putin kills journalists who don’t agree him.

It started on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last month when host Joe Scarborough asked about it.

Trump responded, "He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have on this country. I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, so you know."

"I’m confused," Scarborough pressed. "You obviously condemn Vladimir Putin killing journalists and political opponents, right?"

"Oh sure, absolutely," Trump conceded.

A few days later, Trump defended Putin again, to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. "You're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, at least in our country. It has not been proven that he's killed reporters."

We were curious what the evidence showed about Putin and his interactions with reporters. (Trump, for his part, says he hates reporters but would never kill them.)

Overall, Trump is right that no one has proven Putin to have ordered assassinations of dissidents. However, experts say the political climate in Russia is responsible for the high volume of journalist murders in the country.

The fourth estate in Russia

Russia currently ranks 180 out of 199 countries for press freedom, behind Iraq, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the international watchdog Freedom House.

Though it has never been known for its media independence, Russia’s press freedom and ranking have continuously decreased in the past decade under Putin. Here’s a breakdown we made using data from Freedom House for the years 2002 to 2015:

Putin has been in power since 2000, when he was first elected president and when his regime began to commandeer the press. Sometimes this could mean a literal takeover. In 2000, authorities raided the offices of the major television network NTV and arrested its owner Vladmir Gusinsky for fraud. The charges were dropped once Gusinsky agreed to sell his media empire to a state-controlled company.

More often, the Kremlin makes it difficult for independent outlets to operate in roundabout ways: denying broadcast licenses, coordinating providers to dump channels, banning advertising on cable, limiting foreign ownership of media and firing journalists for "extremism."

But what about murdering them?

Reporters killed

Combining data from two nonprofits that records violations of press rights (the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists and the Moscow-based Glasnost Defense Foundation), we found that at least 34 journalists have been murdered in Russia since 2000.

(This tally only includes deaths confirmed or likely to be work-related homicides committed in Russia. It doesn’t include murders where the motives are unclear, or journalists killed in war and on other dangerous assignments, like covering the mob or riots.)

For comparison, in the same time period, two journalists were murdered in China, while three were killed in the United States (including the on-air deaths of two television reporters in Virginia this year).

Nina Ognianova, the coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Europe and Central Asia program, said journalists covering corruption, human rights abuses, organized crime, and official wrongdoing can be "slain with impunity in Putin’s Russia."

"Their killers are emboldened to act by an administration that marginalizes them, isolates them, and downplays their role in society," she said.

Of the 34 killings in Russia, many of the suspected perpetrators are military officials, government officials or political groups. The vast majority of cases remain unsolved. Here’s a breakdown:



Just one case over the past 15 years was fully adjudicated. In 2011, two ultranationalists were convicted of the 2009 double murder of a prominent human rights lawyer and Anastasia Baburova, a freelancer for the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Baburova had covered the rise of neo-Nazism and race-motivated crimes in Moscow.

The murders of two other Novaya Gazeta reporters resulted in partial justice. In 2000, Igor Domnikov died from an attack in his apartment after reporting on government corruption. Though Domnikov’s assailants, members of a criminal gang, are serving prison terms, the statute of limitations ran out before the former deputy governor suspected of ordering the attack could be convicted.

The third journalist assassination, of a journalist renowned for her critical coverage of Putin and the human rights abuses inflicted during the war in Chechnya, made waves around the the world. On Oct. 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was shot in her apartment after receiving, and narrowingly escaping, numerous death threats. The five men hired to kill her were convicted and sentenced seven years later, but the identity of the person who ordered the murder (believed to be $150,000 contract) remains unknown.

Putin’s role

Putin has denied involvement in Politkovskaya’s death, condemning it as a "hideous crime" and arguing that her murder was more damaging to the Kremlin than her reporting.

As for the other assassinations of journalists during his reign, experts say Putin isn’t directly responsible for any of them.

The editors and reporters of Novaya Gazeta do not believe Putin ordered the murders of their colleagues, according to Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the liberal magazine The Nation who spent several decades reporting from Moscow. However, she said on Dec. 21’s Morning Joe, they do believe that he "created the climate" in which the murders are possible.

The assassinations of Kremlin critics may even be desirable and don’t need to be signed off by Putin personally, suggested Harley Balzer, a government and international affairs professor at Georgetown University who specializes in Russian and East European studies.

"We know from Karen Dawisha's book (Putin’s Kleptocracy) that as deputy mayor in St. Petersburg, he never asked for a bribe. He did not need to do this," Balzer said. "He controlled a mayor's contingency fund that received 25 percent of the funds in every contract the city signed — no fingerprints."

Similarly, in cases where dissident media outlets are stifled, Putin isn’t necessarily or even probably the person who issues the command.

Ognianova of the Committee to Protect Journalists acknowledged that there’s no evidence linking Putin to the murders, but said he’s "surely lowered the cost."

The journalists

Finally, we wanted to provide more details about individual journalists murdered in Russia since 2000. Deaths marked with an asterisk (*) are not a part of our tally of 34 deaths because they are not classified as homicides by authorities or watchdog groups, but have aroused suspicions:

• March 9, 2000: Prominent investigative journalist Artyom Borovik* died in a mysterious plane crash. According to the official investigation, de-icing fluid was not applied, the plane departed without permission and take-off devices were improperly used. Many suspect these were not accidents, given Borovik’s criticism of Putin. Borovik became famous in the west for his reporting on war in Afghanistan, was a correspondent for 60 Minutes, and launched several investigative publications and TV programs that consistently criticized Putin’s regime.

• July 16, 2000: Igor Domnikov, an editor and reporter for the independent Novaya Gazeta who covered local government corruption, died after being attacked. His assailants are serving prison terms but the ex-government official who orchestrated the attack was not convicted.

• July 26, 2000: Sergey Novikov, the owner of the independent radio station Vesna, was shot in his apartment. Novikov was a vocal critic of local government corruption and received death threats prior to his murder. The case remains unsolved.

• Sept. 21, 2000: Radio Liberty correspondent Iskandar Khatloni died from an attack by an unknown assailant. Khatloni, who was also a poet and former BBC correspondent, was covering human rights abuses in Chechnya. The case remains unsolved.

• Oct. 3, 2000: Sergey Ivanov, the director of the independent and influential TV station Lada, was shot in his apartment. The case remains unsolved.

• Nov. 21, 2000: Cameraman Adam Tepsurgayev, who shot most of Reuters’ footage from the second Chechen conflict, was shot dead in a Chechen village. The Russian government contends that Chechen guerrillas murdered Tepsurgayev, but local residents were doubtful. The case remains unsolved.

• Feb. 3, 2001: Photographer Valery Kondakov was killed after the publication of photos he took of the private mansions of urban elite in the city of Armavir. The case remains unsolved.

• Sept. 18, 2001: Eduard Markevich, the editor and publisher of a local newspaper, was shot in the back after receiving threats and surviving a previous attack. Markevich frequently wrote about local corruption and the suspected perpetrators of his murder are government officials. The case remains unsolved.

• March 9, 2002: Natalya Skryl, a local business reporter, died from an attack. She was planning to publish an article on the struggle for the control of a local metal plant. The case remains unsolved.

• April 29, 2002: Valery Ivanov, editor of the independent newspaper Tolyatinskoye Obozreniye, was shot eight times in the head. His newspaper is known for his coverage of local organized crime, drug trafficking and corruption. The case remains unsolved.

• April 18, 2003: Dmitry Shvets, the deputy director of the independent television station TV-21, known for his critical reporting on politicians, was shot dead outside the station’s offices. He had been investigating a mayoral candidate’s links to organized crime. The case remains unsolved.

• July 3, 2003: Novaya Gazeta deputy editor Yuri Shchekochikhin died from an acute allergic reaction while those close to him believe he was poisoned. Shchekochikhin was working on a corruption case involving high-ranking government officials and had received threats. The government has not opened an investigation and says there’s no evidence of foul play.

• July 3, 2003: Local television reporter Alikhan Guliyev was shot in his apartment building. Guliyev had accused an influential politician of campaign violations, and had survived an attempt on his life in 2002. The case remains unsolved.

• Oct. 9, 2003: A year after the murder of his predecessor Valery Ivanov, Tolyatinskoye Obozreniye editor Aleksei Sidorov was stabbed by two unknown assailants after receiving threats. Officials initially agreed he was murdered in retaliation for his investigative work, but the case remains unsolved.

• July 9, 2004: Forbes Russia founding editor Paul Klebnikov was shot in Moscow in a contract killing. The magazine had recently published a feature on Russia’s richest people, and Klebnikov himself had written books and articles about business, crime and corruption in Russia. A decade after his death, the case remains unsolved, prompting Secretary of State John Kerry to urge Russia to bring the perpetrators to justice.

• May 21, 2005: Cameraman Pavel Makeev, while reporting on illegal drag racing, was found dead on the side of a road. Though his death was initially classified as a traffic accident, Makeev’s colleagues say his death was related to his work. The case has been reopened but remains unsolved.

• June 28, 2005: Magomedzagid Varisov, who wrote critical political columns for the weekly Novoye Delo, was shot in his car by unknown assailants with machine guns in Dagestan. Varisov had received numerous threats through years. Three suspects were killed in October 2005, and the unsolved case was closed.

• Jan. 8, 2006: Reporter Vagif Kochetkov, who wrote for the the newspapers Trud and Tulskii Molodoi Kommunar, died from an attack. Officials labeled his death the result of a robbery, though only work-related documents and his cellphone were taken, while his wallet and fur coat were not. A local businessman was charged with the attack but later said he was coerced into confessing.

• Oct. 7, 2006: Renowned journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya was shot in her apartment after receiving, and narrowingly escaping, numerous death threats. The five men hired to kill her were convicted and sentenced seven years later, but whoever ordered the murder (believed to be $150,000 contract) remains unknown.

• Nov. 30, 2006: Prominent investigative journalist Maksim Maksimov was declared dead. He disappeared two years earlier while investigating local corruption in St. Petersburg as well as several unsolved murders. The case remains unsolved.

• March 2, 2007: Defense correspondent Ivan Safronov died from mysteriously falling from a fifth-floor window while investigating the sale of Russian arms to Syria and Iran. Safronov embarrassed military officials with reports on problems with Russia’s nuclear program. His death has been officially ruled a suicide, but his colleagues and friends say he had no reason to kill himself.

• Aug. 31, 2008: Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the independent news site Ingushetia, was shot while in police custody. Officials had been attempting to close down Ingushetia for extremism; the site had covered corruption, human rights abuses, unsolved murders, and voting fraud in the 2008 presidential election. Yevloyev was detained as a witness in investigation of a local explosion, and police say the shooting was an accident.

• Sept. 2, 2008: Television editor Telman (Abdulla) Alishayev was shot by unknown assailants in Dagestan. Alishayev produced an anti-radical Islam documentary two years earlier and received death threats from radical groups.

• Jan. 4, 2009: Advertising manager Vladislav Zakharchuk* died in a fire set in the offices of the opposition newspaper Arsenyevskiye Vesti, known for its criticism of local authorities. The cause of the fire is suspected to the arson.

• Jan. 19, 2009: Anastasia Baburova, a freelancer for the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was shot by ultranationalists in a double murder. Baburova had covered the rise of neo-Nazism and race-motivated crimes in Moscow. Her murderers, members of a neo-Nazi group, have been sentenced.

• March 30, 2009: Layout designer Sergei Protazanov died after an attack by unknown assailants. Protazanov was part of the editorial staff of Grazhdanskoe sogalsie, a newspaper known for its critical coverage of the ruling party of Russia. The case remains unsolved.

• July 15, 2009: The fifth Novaya Gazeta journalist murdered since 2000, Natalya Estemirova was kidnapped and shot execution-style in Chechnya. Her colleagues believe that Chechen officials ordered the Kremlin-backed assassination, as Estemirova had reported on human rights violations committed by authorities in the region. The official investigation pinned the murder a Chechen rebel who was killed by an air strike, but her colleagues and human rights activists believe this is a cover-up.

• Aug. 11, 2009: Abdulmalik Akhmedilov, an editor for the independent news website Hakikat and editor-in-chief of the political monthly Sogratl, was shot in his car in Dagestan. Akhmedilov was critical of government efforts to curb religious and political freedom and inaction in investigating assassinations. The case remains unsolved.

• Nov. 16, 2009: Broadcast journalist Olga Kotovskaya* fell to her death from a 14th floor window. Kotovskaya, co-founder of the independent TV station Kaskad, was currently fighting for control over the station with a former vice governor. Officials ruled her death a suicide, but watchdog groups are doubtful.

• Dec. 15, 2011: Independent newspaper founder Gadzhimurad Kamalov was shot outside his office in Dagestan. His newspaper Chernovik was known for its investigations in government corruption, police abuse and Islamic extremism, and his name appeared on an anonymous hit list.

• Feb. 7, 2012: Newspaper editor Victor Aphanasenko* died after sustaining a mysterious head injury in his house. Officials say he slipped, but colleagues believe it was no accident. Aphanasenko’s paper, Prestupnost I Korruptsiya, had been investigating ground raids in southern Russia.

• Dec. 5, 2012: News anchor Kazbek Gekkiyev, who covered social issues, was shot in the head while returning home from work. Several reporters at his state-controlled station, VGTRK, had received threats allegedly from Islamist separatist fighters.

• April 8, 2013: Mikhail Beketov, founding editor of the Khimiki, died after a 2008 attack by unknown assailants that left him severely brain-damaged, amputated and unable to speak. Beketov had covered government corruption and the planned destruction of the Khimki forest to make way for a planned toll road. In retaliation for his reporting, his car had been set on fire and his dog left dead on his doorstep. He never fully recovered from the attack and died five years later in the hospital.

• May 18, 2013: Nikolai Potapov, a former government official and founding editor of the local Selsovet newspaper, was shot in the Stavropol region. Selsovet was known for its coverage of government corruption.

• July 9, 2013: Akhmednabi Akhmednabiye, deputy editor of the independent newspaper Novoye Delo, was shot dead outside his house in Dagestan. He covered government corruption, abductions, police abuse and torture and had received numerous threats for his work. His name appeared on an anonymous hit list.

• Dec. 4, 2013: Arkady Lander, editor of the opposition newspaper Mestnaya, died after an 2010 attack by unknown assailants in Sochi. He underwent operations and hospitalizations for three years after his attack, which left him amputated and with a fractured skull. Lander had covered local elections and distributed his newspaper free of charge. The statute of limitations ran out on his case.

• Aug. 1, 2014: The body of independent journalist and civil activist Timur Kuashev was discovered in the woods after he disappeared a day earlier. Kuashev was threatened by police after reporting on civil liberty and human rights violations by security forces.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/ar ... urnalists/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Mar 18, 2017 12:18 pm

seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 18, 2017 10:44 am wrote:
but she was the first to report about the FISA warrants and was right about the FISA warrants :bigsmile


Does that make her an informed analyst or someone's mouthpiece, though? Even George W. Bush knew how to answer the phone, most days.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 18, 2017 12:20 pm

nope not at all never said that but she was the first and right about the warrants and it's taking down Flynn

but hey I don't mind being personally attacked several times a day here by Rory so I can see your point

I'll learn to live with it

one link out of a hundred makes a lot of sense to constantly trash me and being so much smarter than Nordic helps

btw that was a post by Rory with no comment not me


the running count for the times he has accused me of posting propaganda just in the last few days is 5 or 6 I think and none of it has been about her
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
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