Shit gets real for Donnie

[JAFF]

Analysis: Trump's election lie becomes a big problem for MAGA Media

https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/22/media/...l?fr=operanews

. Donald Trump's Big Lie is becoming a big problem for the media outlets that comprise his powerful propaganda arm.
On the same day that the former president's scheme to remain in power was further exposed at another January 6 Committee hearing, Fox and OAN suffered legal defeats in court related to their advancement of his election lies. And last week, on Thursday, Newsmax also suffered a legal loss.
So far, the right-wing media outlets that peddled Trump's false election narratives have had little luck winning in court against the voting tech companies suing them for billions of dollars. It is early in the process, of course. But the string of defeats these media outlets have suffered indicate that these lawsuits have some teeth to them.

The cases also point toward the fact that Trump's election lies will be litigated in court, through multiple cases, regardless of whether the Department of Justice pursues charges against him or not...

The Murdochs and "malice"

The most significant legal development on Tuesday was in regard to Fox. As Bloomberg's Erik Larson and Mike Leonard reported, a judge ruled that Fox Corporation, Fox News' parent company, can be sued by Dominion "because Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch may have acted with 'actual malice' in directing the network to broadcast conspiracy theories alleging the 2020 presidential election was rigged."
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In the decision, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis cited reports that Murdoch privately expressed he knew Trump lost the election. Davis also cited editorials in other Murdoch-run outlets, such as The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, that condemned Trump and encouraged him to accept defeat.

"These allegations support a reasonable inference that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch either knew Dominion had not manipulated the election or at least recklessly disregarded the truth when they allegedly caused Fox News to propagate its claims about Dominion," Davis wrote. "Thus, Dominion has successfully brought home actual malice to the individuals at Fox Corporation who it claims to be responsible for the broadcasts."
The loss again raises the question as to whether Fox will try to settle the $1.6 billion lawsuit before it reaches the stage of discovery. And if it does attempt to settle, will Dominion allow it to do so? Or will the voting tech company, which has said it aims to clear its name through its lawsuits, want to see the case through?

>> Fox isn't commenting on the matter, though it has in the past defended its coverage and said it was "proud" of it. Bloomberg noted Fox's reps didn't respond to messages seeking comment. And when I checked in on Tuesday evening, I too didn't hear back...

OAN also loses in court
Meanwhile, the right-wing conspiracy channel OAN suffered a loss at the hands of a different voting tech company, Smartmatic. US District Judge Carl Nichols ruled against the media outlet on Tuesday, allowing Smartmatic's lawsuit to proceed, CNN's Tierney Sneed reported. OAN had sought a dismissal on grounds that Nichols' court didn't have jurisdiction. But Nichols rejected the argument...
>> OAN did not respond to my requests for comment on the matter..

"All because of lies"
BY AN PHUNG:
For years now, Trump's lies and unproven conspiracy theories have been front and center in most of the media coverage about him. Rarely do we get to see the other side — the human toll of his incessant lying. But in Tuesday's 1/6 hearing, Wandrea "Shaye" Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman "flipped the script," as Marshall Cohen, Jeremy Herb, and Zachary Cohen wrote in their recap.

The two election workers from Georgia provided troubling and tearful accounts of what it was like to be targeted by Trump and conspiracy theorists who accused them of manipulating ballots. Moss said she "gained about 60 pounds," stopped going out, and added that she "second-guess[ed] everything" that she did. "It's affected my life in a major way, in every way — all because of lies," she said. The extremely online crowd might have some idea of what it's like to be targeted in this way, but Moss and Freeman's testimony brought into sharp relief for a national TV audience what it's like to have your life turned upside down because of the former president's lies...

Who's watching?
BY BRIAN STELTER
After what Jake Tapper called an "upsetting and distressing day of testimony," full of personal stories from election officials and workers "whose lives were upended by Donald Trump, by his minions, by his mobs, and by his election lies," one had to wonder about the impacts on the intended audiences. Political junkies are paying attention, and DOJ lawyers, but many Republicans continue to argue that the Trump-aligned audience has tuned it out. Former Trump WH chief of staff Mick Mulvaney cited Tuesday's "compelling testimony" but said, "Judging by the ratings (and FB comments) people who need to see that aren't watching. If the Committee wants to change minds, they need to reach people who think Trump won. That doesn't seem to be happening."

Fox showed the hearing again, but moved on very quickly afterward. ‪"They're methodically laying out this case," Bret Baier said on Fox later in the day.‬ But his guest, Sen. Tim Scott, ‪said "I have not taken the time to watch the hearings. I feel like the best use of my time is fighting the inflationary effects." He called the hearing "made for TV" ‬and said (answering Baier's question) that if Trump is the 2024 nominee, "of course we support him.‬"

[Spike]

You keep putting out shit from CNN Jaff. The most untrusted name in so called news. Brian Stelter??? The biggest lying, hypocritical clown there is.

CNN's ratings are going down the shit hole for good reason, people aren't watching their propaganda and lies anymore. How long did CNN+ last? 3 weeks?

[Racehorse]

Originally Posted by Spike

You keep putting out shit from CNN Jaff. The most untrusted name in so called news. Brian Stelter??? The biggest lying, hypocritical clown there is.

CNN's ratings are going down the shit hole for good reason, people aren't watching their propaganda and lies anymore. How long did CNN+ last? 3 weeks?

Let him have his fun. His hatred for anything Trump is obvious. They call it Trump Derangement Syndrome. Yes, Trump is no role model, but the hate is unreal.

[rcubed]

Originally Posted by Spike

You keep putting out shit from CNN Jaff. The most untrusted name in so called news. Brian Stelter??? The biggest lying, hypocritical clown there is.

CNN's ratings are going down the shit hole for good reason, people aren't watching their propaganda and lies anymore. How long did CNN+ last? 3 weeks?

tucker carlson.

[JAFF]

Originally Posted by Spike

You keep putting out shit from CNN Jaff. The most untrusted name in so called news. Brian Stelter??? The biggest lying, hypocritical clown there is.

CNN's ratings are going down the shit hole for good reason, people aren't watching their propaganda and lies anymore. How long did CNN+ last? 3 weeks?

They have broadcasted LIVE unedited, the 1-6 committee. Fox news didnt even mention it on the first day. And its pretty hard to trust OAN or Fox since they cant produce on shred of evidence on election fraud. Both are going to trial. They voting machine companies are going to force them to show evidence of their claims of voter fraud.

Your choice of news outlets relied on a guy who makes pillows for their evidence of voter fraud.


https://www.npr.org/2022/06/10/11041...-jan-6-hearing


Fox is the nation's most highly rated cable news station and is a favorite of conservatives, Republicans and devotees of former President Donald Trump. But its live coverage of Thursday's Jan. 6 hearing was relegated to Fox Business Network, which is much more lightly viewed, and its digital sites.

To have shown the uninterrupted documentation of the concerted attack on the Capitol in January last year and the concurrent effort to thwart the November 2020 presidential elections would have been to present information that was unwelcome to many core Fox News viewers. After all, the committee's two leaders — Reps. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, a Democrat, and Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a Republican — directly blamed Trump for attempting to instigate a coup.

New revelations and 3 other takeaways from the first Jan. 6 committee hearing
POLITICS
New revelations and 3 other takeaways from the first Jan. 6 committee hearing
Liz Cheney offers a stark message to the GOP members who continue to support Trump
POLITICS
Liz Cheney offers a stark message to the GOP members who continue to support Trump
As it turned out, the hearings would also have repeatedly required Fox to have broadcast flat contradictions of what many leading Fox News personalities have told their audiences in the past year and a half — including Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. Instead, their prime-time shows continued without commercial interruption Thursday, offering an alternate reality to a hearing that showed vivid and bloody detail of a national crisis.

They also did not point viewers to Fox's coverage on the network's other platforms.

Sponsor Message

At the hearing, Thompson and Cheney called out Fox and its personalities, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly. Thompson denounced the conspiracy theories circulated to the public. In a three-part series, Carlson famously promoted the idea of a "Patriot Purge," saying honorable citizens participating in a legal protest on Jan. 6 were being wrongly persecuted by the Biden administration. His series relied on claims that had been largely discredited even before he aired them.

On Thursday night, Carlson told viewers the hearing was propaganda, even though he had not seen it. And Carlson dismissed the siege of the Capitol as mere vandalism. Many of those rioters were chanting for then-Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be brought to them in a climate of violence.

Group aiming to defund disinformation tries to drain Fox News of online advertising
TECHNOLOGY
Group aiming to defund disinformation tries to drain Fox News of online advertising
Hannity similarly minimized the harm done, even as Cheney was reading aloud the Fox host and frequent Trump adviser's texts to Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Off the air, Hannity warned that Trump shouldn't talk any more about overturning the election. Publicly, Hannity minimized the seriousness of the attacks after the first few days.

Cheney noted the admonition from William Barr, Trump's final confirmed attorney general, that the claims of election fraud were groundless and that the claims the voting machines of Dominion Voting Systems had been tampered with was "crazy stuff."

There's a good reason Fox News might not want to air that live, either — 1.6 billion reasons, to be precise. Fox had been filled with similar claims by its hosts, personalities and guests in the weeks following the 2020 elections. Dominion later sued Fox in a $1.6 billion defamation suit that is still pending. Fox's legal defense relies on the argument it was merely covering a public debate and statements of prominent figures. But not on Fox News. At least, not live, and not in prime time, on Thursday night.

[JAFF]

Here’s one from a Trump paper

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/o...tness-on-jan-6

The Jan. 6 commission and the news media, for some reason, decided to lean on hearsay instead of the firsthand accounts that show clearly how unfit former President Donald Trump is for office.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, gave the most explosive testimony to date, and it deserves attention. But the action movie moment that has excited liberal commentators, an account of President Trump supposedly grabbing a steering wheel or choking a Secret Service agent, is all hearsay, upon which subsequent reporting casts some doubt.


The other attention-grabbing detail supposedly drawn from Hutchinson’s testimony was what Trump said about men arriving at his White House rally with weapons. "They are not here to hurt me," Trump was reported to have said, waving away any need for security.


Trump’s supposed emphasis on “me” is pretty damning, as explained by a liberal NBC legal analyst:


This story is flawed, however. Hutchinson didn’t emphasize the “me” at all in her testimony. That was an addition by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). This doesn’t mean that Trump is innocent, nor that Liz Cheney is a liar. It just means that the conclusions drawn from Cheney’s presentation or the tweets repeating it are speculations upon speculations, as explained by my colleague Jerry Dunleavy.

If we are to take anything from what these hearings (and the 2021 impeachment hearings) have taught us, it is that we need to move away from the game of telephone and focus instead on the firsthand accounts of what Donald Trump said and did that day.

Hutchinson was backstage at the White House rally on Jan. 6. She had testified previously that Trump “was very concerned about the shot, meaning the photograph we would get, because the rally space wasn’t full.”

Hutchinson said she heard Trump blame the metal detectors, more formally called magnetometers, abbreviated as “mags.”

“He felt the mags were at fault for not letting everybody in,” she said. “He was angry that we weren’t letting people through the mags with weapons.” Some attendees were being turned away, while others were declining to enter the White House lawn for fear of having their weapons confiscated, Hutchinson testified.

Hutchinson testified that she overheard Trump “say something to the effect of, ‘I don’t care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me. Take the effing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the effing mags away.’”

“They’re not here to hurt me” in that context is quite different from “they’re not here to hurt me.” The latter would be an admission that his supporters, whom he would then encourage to march to the Capitol, were there to hurt someone else. But again, that interpretation is not supported by Hutchinson’s testimony, in which the “me” was un-emphasized.

But the former reading, while less damning, is still damaging to Trump. Stipulating that Trump didn’t believe that armed supporters were there to harm Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi or U.S. senators ready to ratify the Electoral College votes, this testimony still paints Trump as a reckless narcissist.

Trump wanted armed men on the White House lawn. He then wanted them to march from the White House to the Capitol, armed, in order to stop Congress from ratifying his opponent's election victory. That is not the way a leader behaves if he values peace or the functioning of democracy enough to spend a moment thinking things through.

A good shepherd, upon learning that his flock had arrived armed, would have tried to defuse the situation. For starters, he would have cared for his followers’ safety. Marching to the Capitol, with Congress in session, while armed — even if only with a spear or handcuffs or pepper spray — is a good way to ensure bad outcomes, whether arrest, injury, or death.

Of course, a morally fit leader would care about more than just his own followers. He would care also about the Capitol Police and the Secret Service. He would steer as far away as possible from a physical threat to lawmakers (even the opposition).

But Donald Trump wasn’t a morally fit leader or a good shepherd. The only downside he could imagine to an armed crowd was that it could pose a physical threat to himself. Ruling out harm to himself, he considered their weapons (and what they signified about the mindset of the gathered thousands) to be harmless. That doesn’t mean he wanted Pence or Pelosi harmed or expected his followers to try and harm Pence or Pelosi. But at best, Trump didn’t give a second’s thought to the possibility of harm to others.

This man was commander in chief of our military and wants to be so again. He was ultimately in charge of the FBI, the Capitol Police, the Secret Service, and every other federal law enforcement agency. He conducted diplomacy with implications for the life and safety of all sorts of Americans. We ought to be disturbed that he evidently disregarded peace and the safety of others, so long as his own safety was not at stake.

It’s not news that Trump was unfit to lead the federal government, but the new evidence puts that fact into better focus. Every Republican who cares about the country should work to ensure Trump is not their nominee in 2024.

[JAFF]

Jan. 6 hearings are flawed — but Republicans can’t ignore Trump’s bad behavior

https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/jan-6-...snt-excusable/

Is the Republican party starting to move past Donald Trump? A poll published this week showed that the former president remains the favorite candidate of 53% of Republican voters. But his numbers are slipping, and other candidates are on the rise.

Most noticeable is Ron DeSantis. The same poll showed almost a quarter of Republican voters putting the Florida governor up as their favored nominee. And his numbers are only rising, while Trump’s are only falling. Several polls in recent weeks have even shown DeSantis pulling ahead of Trump.

One reason is obvious. The conclusion that the Jan. 6 hearings are arriving at.

Like a lot of people, I thought at the start of the hearings that the whole thing was little more than partisan political theater. It still seems pretty disgraceful that one political side can effectively carry out a political trial of the other. The Republicans have not solicited a couple of Democrats to form a committee looking into the violence and looting across America in the summer of 2020. Or tried to find which Democrat politicians and media should take responsibility for whipping that along.

Cassidy Hutchinson
Cassidy Hutchinson accused Trump of trying to take the wheel from Secret Service agents who would not take him to the Capitol on Jan. 6.
AP
So you might say that of course the committee was going to find Donald Trump guilty. If that had been all that happened then Republicans might have been able to ignore it.

But what is very hard to ignore is the evidence that has come out from those closest to Trump — including his advisers and family. Every day of the hearings we have been able to learn exactly what the president was doing during those crucial days and hours.

Without the hearings we would not have known that Trump had been told by his closest advisers that he had lost the election and that there was no way around that. Without the hearings we might not have known how Trump and his family used the money they demanded from supporters to help “stop the steal.”

Liz Cheney
The investigation into the Jan. 6 riot has not been the political theater many expected it to be.
AP
We would not have known that Ivanka Trump heard her father on the phone telling Vice President Pence he was a “p—y” for not helping to overturn the election results.

Or that Trump was informed that some of his supporters were arriving in the capital with weapons on Jan. 6 but shrugged it off saying “They´re not here to hurt me.”

We wouldn’t have known that Trump sent out his tweet attacking Pence when he had already been told that violence had erupted at the Capitol. Or that he would respond to news that some protestors were chanting “Hang Mike Pence” by saying Pence “deserves” it. Far from being the partisan nothing-burger that some of us expected, every day of hearings has details that would shock a chronicler of the last days of Rome.

This week’s revelation that Trump had wanted to join the crowd as they marched on the Capitol was bad enough. The news that he allegedly made a lunge for the steering wheel of the presidential limo when he was told he was being returned to the White House not the Capitol is a detail that his worst critics could not have dreamed up. It may be a hotly contested claim, but nobody is denying he wanted to join the crowd.

Jan. 6 riot
Trump verbally attacked Vice President Mike Pence for not overturning the election.
AP
We now know how Trump refused to leave office, ignored everyone telling him he had lost, whipped up a conspiracy theory, drew a crowd to the Capitol and then encouraged some of them to behave utterly shamefully.

Supporters of Trump often tell me that he is the right’s best fighter — and that in order to win an election you have to send your best fighter into the ring. But the truth is that at this stage Trump is a deeply wounded fighter, who is wounding his own side while giving gift after gift to their opponents. He ignored the most basic foundations of democracy, including respecting election results and ensuring the peaceful handover of power. If that is not disqualifying it is hard to know what is.

SEE ALSO


The Jan. 6 incitement case against Trump only gets stronger
It would be understandable for Republicans to try to ignore what has come out. But it would also be disastrous. For while die-hard loyalists of Trump may have wanted to look away, the rest of the country has not.

In the coming months I would expect more and more Republicans voters to quietly come to the conclusion that this deeply tainted man cannot be their candidate. They will then begin cohering around a candidate who can thank Trump for what good things he did and then take it from there.

That may be little comfort for Republicans, so let me at least offer one bit of good news. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans have a good bench. Their front-runners aren’t all in their eighties. They’re successful — even popular.


The Republicans aren´t finished. But the Donald Trump era surely must be.

[CletusPyle]

https://rumble.com/v1ai0bm-breaking-...n-jan-6th.html

[JAFF]

You wanted trump paper news, here it is

https://nypost.com/2022/06/10/trump-...uture-instead/

. The Jan. 6 Commission is a Democratic campaign ad, a thinly veiled partisan exercise — aired in primetime, with the cooperation of a liberal press — to bolster a failed Joe Biden presidency.

But rather than ignore it or look to the future, Donald Trump, the King Lear of Mar-a-Lago, decided to tweet — er, Truth — yet another statement confirming that he refuses to accept reality. “January 6th was not simply a protest,” he wrote, “it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”

It wasn’t, of course. It was a national shame. One that neither Democrats nor Trump can stop obsessing over. It’s time for Republicans to move on.

This isn’t 2016, when the country was sleepwalking toward a Hillary Clinton coronation, and Trump was the only one pugnacious enough to say it doesn’t have to be this way.

He refused to accept that the southern border should be lawless and that China should be allowed to steal jobs. He knew, unapologetically, that the economy flourished under low taxes and little government interference. He pulled off one of the most jaw-dropping upsets in American political history, and — though the liberal media will never admit it — oversaw a term of mostly peace and prosperity.

And this:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-evi...ce-11654896141

The headline is damning

The Evidence of the Jan. 6 Committee
It’s a reminder of the violence and how Trump betrayed his supporters.

That would be you Spike

[JAFF]

https://www.newsweek.com/steve-banno...-trump-1718395

Steve Bannon Says Fox News Has 'Turned on Trump,' Favors DeSantis

Rupert Murdoch's media empire has "turned on" former president Donald Trump, according to Trump's longtime adviser Steve Bannon.

Bannon made the comments in a Gettr post responding to a Vanity Fair article that pointed out how columnists at several of the media tycoon's U.S. newspapers have been urging readers to "dump Trump" and back Republicans with a better chance of regaining the White House in 2024.

"The game's up for the Donald… It's time Republicans put their faith in the Ronald," Piers Morgan wrote in a recent column for the New York Post, referring to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.


The piece also outlined how Fox News has been giving DeSantis a national spotlight ahead of a possible 2024 presidential run.


"The Murdochs —-Australians via England—not American, have never sacrificed anything for this Country—their entire media Empire has turned on Trump — Fox News, Wall Street Journal , New York Post , Times of London , The Sun etc etc etc——all lockstep against Trump," Bannon said in a post on Gettr.


Murdoch "has zero 'feel' for America or Americans— I know this first hand —from 2015 and 2016," Bannon added. "Fear not — we've got this."

Bannon has continued to falsely claim that Trump won the 2020 election as the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds televised hearings detailing how Trump's efforts to overturn the election led to his supporters violently storming the building in a bid to disrupt Congress from certifying Joe Biden's victory.

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"Trump knew he won because he did win—and he was told and shown he did win REPEATEDLY... watch WarRoom from those days of November thru Inauguration day," Bannon said on Gettr last week, referring to his right-wing podcast, War Room.

Bannon was chief executive of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign before serving as chief strategist in the White House until August 2017.

In August 2020, Bannon was indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering connected to a crowdfunding campaign that claimed to be raising funds to help Trump construct a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Prosecutors said Bannon and three others used the funds to enrich themselves.

Bannon was pardoned by Trump shortly before he left office on January 20, 2021.


Last November, the Department of Justice announced that Bannon had been indicted on two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the committee investigating the Capitol attack.

A federal judge last week rejected Bannon's efforts to dismiss the case. He is facing trial on the charges in July.

Newsweek has reached out to Bannon, Fox News, Trump's spokeswoman and DeSantis' office for comment.