Standards have fallen so low that, whether of right or left, trolls take advantage of gullible and ignorant people on Facebook each day. Eli Saslow reports how a liberal troll tricks impressionable conservatives. The people tricking, and the people being tricked, are evidence of (respectively) ethical or educational decline. First the unethical tricksters:
He [forty-something Christopher Blair] had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends — a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.
“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”
On her [septuagenarian Shirley Chapian’s] computer the attack against America was urgent and unrelenting. Liberals were restricting free speech. Immigrants were storming the border and casting illegal votes. Politicians were scheming to take away everyone’s guns. “The second you stop paying attention, there’s another travesty underway in this country,” Chapian once wrote, in her own Facebook post, so she had decided to always pay attention, sometimes scrolling and sharing for hours at a time.
“BREAKING: Democrat mega-donor accused of sexual assault!!!”
“Is Michelle Obama really dating Bruce Springsteen?”
“Iowa Farmer Claims Bill Clinton had Sex with Cow during ‘Cocaine Party.’ ”
….
“I’m not a conspiracy-theory-type person, but . . .” she wrote, before sharing a link to an unsourced story suggesting that Democratic donor George Soros had been a committed Nazi, or that a Parkland shooting survivor was actually a paid actor.
The arrogance of trolls and the ignorance of readers brought us here. Weak reporting and too-cozy relationships brought us here. Cheap wins over valuable accomplishments brought us here.
On Friday afternoon, 50 students and about 15 staff members gathered at Milwaukee’s Rufus King High School to take a photo to spread peace. It’s a small act, but one they hope travels as far as the Baraboo photo.
The idea came from Rufus King English teacher Kelly O’Keefe-Boettcher.
“Our goal at Rufus King is to be an upstander, not a bystander,” O’Keefe-Boettcher said. “I put up the idea to take a photo, and the response was amazing. I was moved by the number of kids and staff who were there.”
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-three. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 33m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92% of its visible disk illuminated.
military tribunals held by the Allied forces under international law and the laws of war after World War II. The trials were most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, judicial and economic leadership of Nazi Germany, who planned, carried out, or otherwise participated in the Holocaust and other war crimes. The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Germany, and their decisions marked a turning point between classical and contemporary international law.
An impromptu game of base ball, as it was spelled in the early years, was played by two teams of seven at the Milwaukee Fair Ground. The game was organized by Rufus King, publisher of the Milwaukee Sentinel, and is believed to have been the first baseball game played in Milwaukee. In spite of cold weather, two more games were played in December, and by April 1860 the Milwaukee Base Ball Club was organized. View early baseball photographs at Wisconsin Historical Images, and read about baseball’s first decades in Wisconsin at Turning Points in Wisconsin.
Almost everything about the Nov. 6 midterm election bolstered Wisconsin’s status as a top presidential target in 2020, when this state has no race for governor or U.S. Senate but can expect an all-out war over its 10 electoral votes.
The state swung back to Democrats for governor and U.S. Senate after Republican Donald Trump carried Wisconsin for president two years ago.
But Democrats failed to dent the GOP’s stranglehold on the state Legislature, and they won the governor’s race by scarcely more than a percentage point.
A few quick points:
1. The governor’s race was close, but Republicans lost every principal statewide contest (gubernatorial, U.S. Senate, Wisconsin attorney general, state treasurer, secretary of state.)
Stanley Greenberg observes Trump Is Beginning to Lose His Grip. There’s much work yet to go, and sure to be painful setbacks ahead, but those of us who are Never Trump (mostly libertarians & conservatives) and so many others (Democrats, independents, former Republicans) have taken back a branch of the government with investigatory authority from a party in the grip of a bigoted, self-dealing autocrat. That’s no small achievement. Greenberg writes that
First of all, Democrats did not win simply because white women with college degrees rebelled against Mr. Trump’s misogyny, sexism and disrespect for women. Nearly every category of women rebelled.
….
In 2016, the white working class men that Mr. Trump spoke most forcefully to as the “forgotten Americans” gave him 71 percent of their votes and gave only 23 percent to Hillary Clinton. This year, the Republicans won their votes with a still-impressive margin of 66 to 32 percent. But what was essentially a three-to-one margin was deflated to two-to-one, which affected a lot of races.
….
Third, Democrats made big gains because Mr. Trump declared war on immigrants — and on multicultural America — and lost. His ugly campaign succeeded in making immigration and the border a voting issue for the Republican base, according to the postelection survey I did with Democracy Corps, which asked those voting Republican why they did. “Open borders” was the top reason given for voting against a Democratic candidate. But it backfired among other voters.
On Election Day, a stunning 54 percent of those who voted said immigrants “strengthen our country.” Mr. Trump’s party lost the national popular vote by seven points, but he lost the debate over whether immigrants are a strength or a burden by 20 points. Mr. Trump got more than half of Republicans to believe immigrants were a burden, but three quarters of Democrats and a large majority of independents concluded that America gains from immigration.
Frances Stead Sellers writes of Confederate pride and prejudice (“Some white Northerners see a flag rooted in racism as a symbol of patriotism”):
Ashort walk from where President-elect Abraham Lincoln made the last train stop in his home state before leaving for Washington on the verge of the Civil War, a Confederate battle flag flies from a home garage.
The property belongs to former mayor Greg Cler, who runs a car repair shop in this central Illinois village of 3,500 people. Cler isn’t from the South. He grew up about five miles away, in Pesotum, where his father, like most others in the region, farmed corn and soy. But Cler has long felt an attachment to the flag.
“Part of it is an act of rebellion,” he said.
The other part is tied to the national turmoil surrounding race and identity. Cler sees the flag as a fitting symbol of white people’s shared grievances, which, he says, have new resonance today.
Cler’s rebellion is like the rebellion of someone sitting in his own filth: it’s a challenge to cleanliness, of course, but that’s not a challenge worth joining.
One can see flags like this in rural Wisconsin, (sadly) occasionally even in a beautiful place like Whitewater, as banners, bumper stickers, or decals. There’s an easy response, grounded in history, to their display: that flag is a symbol of racism, oppression, and treason.
There’s another response, relevant to our time, however: Confederate symbols are emblems of socio-economic failure. Whites displaying these banners are found only in low-productivity areas. Confederate displays are first displays of bigotry and injustice, but they’re also a present-day equivalent of a sign reading: UNCOMPETITIVE & PROUD OF IT.
There’s no more reliable roadside marker of an approaching backwater than the Stars and Bars flying in someone’s yard.
A civilized, productive place will always demand more of itself.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-three. Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 35m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater School Board at 7 PM.
On this day in 1863, Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address. On this day in 1861, 4th Wisconsin Infantry reconnoiters Virginia’s Eastern Shore: “The 4th Wisconsin Infantry was among Union forces assigned to an expedition in Accomac County, Virginia. The regiment’s historian wrote, “The Fourth and a battery [of light artillery] and small cavalry force, embarked on an expedition to the eastern shore of Virginia, where they remained, encountering some severe marching through the mud and flooded roads, under the command of General Lockwood, until the 9th of December.”
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty-four. Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 37m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
U.S. and Canadian railroads implemented a version proposed by William F. Allen, the editor of the Traveler’s Official Railway Guide.[6] The borders of its time zones ran through railroad stations, often in major cities. For example, the border between its Eastern and Central time zones ran through Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Charleston. It was inaugurated on Sunday, November 18, 1883, also called “The Day of Two Noons”,[7] when each railroad station clock was reset as standard-time noon was reached within each time zone.
Recommended for reading in full — the truth about the migrant caravan, fact-checking Trump’s broken record of lies, the radical [Putin-oriented] evolution of WikiLeaks, acting A.G. Whitaker’s company hawked crackpot ideas like time travel, the hunt for Bigfoot, and fresh fruit laced with cannabis (I’ll take my fruit plain, thanks very much), and a video on turkey carving —
Saying he’s interested in people not politics, a Texas pastor is traveling with the migrant caravan in Mexico. Gavin Rogers, associate pastor at San Antonio’s Travis Park United Methodist Church, has been documenting his journey—and the relationships he’s forming—on Facebook.
Rogers writes about long days of traveling with 6,000 refugees via a wide variety of methods. Reaching Guadalajara, for example, involved covering 400 kilometers in “23 hours of walking, hitchhiking and police escorts. Walking. Car, semi-trailer, truck, police truck, dump truck, bus, shelter.”
On November 11, the pastor posted, “It is a long road. But life is good when you are with people filled with love and hospitality.” A Mexican truck driver who volunteered to drive some refugees to their next shelter site said he acted “because I’m human.” The subway in Mexico City also provided free rides to the traveling refugees.
Hoping to dispel fear and falsehoods about caravan members, Rogers is sharing photos of what the migrants and the people helping them really look like. “Kindness is all over the place,” he writes next to posts of “real images of Mexican police officers and refugees.”
The pastor criticizes people, including Christians, who are sharing images about “the supposed violence in the caravan.” When someone posted to Rogers’ Facebook page photos depicting violence, an image search revealed they were actually from 2012. One such post has been removed, probably because of its misleading nature. Local officers Rogers has talked to say the caravan has been overwhelmingly peaceful, with no police-related conflicts.
I’ve made it my mission to fact-check every word Donald Trump utters as president. That means trying to watch every speech, read every transcript, decipher every tweet. I’ve accidentally established a reputation for using Twitter to point out that he’s lying within seconds of him telling a lie.
People sometimes ask in response how I can blast out these corrections so quickly. But I have no special talent. My secret is that Trump tells the same lies over and over.
On his fifth day in office, Trump baselessly alleged widespread voter fraud. He did the same thing this past week. In his third month in office, Trump falsely claimed that the United States has a $500 billion trade deficit with China. He has said the same thing more than 80 times since.
Listen to this president long enough, and you can almost sense when a lie is coming. If Trump tells a story in which an unnamed person calls him “sir,” it’s probably invented. If Trump claims he has set a record, he probably hasn’t. If Trump cites any number at all, the real number is usually smaller.
Fact-checking Trump is kind of like fact-checking one of those talking dolls programmed to say the same phrases for eternity, except if none of those phrases were true. As any parent who owns a squealing Elmo can tell you, the phrases can get tiresome. I’m sure my Twitter followers get bored when I remind them that Trump wasn’t the president who got the Veterans Choice health-care program passed (Barack Obama signed it into law in 2014 ), that U.S. Steel is not building six, seven, eight or nine new plants (it has recently invested in two existing plants) and that foreign governments don’t force their unsavory citizens into the lottery for U.S. green cards (would-be immigrants enter of their own free will).
(Can’t recommend Daniel Dale highly enough – one can follow his excellent work on Twitter @ddale8 . Trump, himself, is a challenge in part because he’s a stunted man – intellectually & knowledgeably who speaks grandiosely of himself and responds to others mostly through crude, irritating fallacies. Normal, rational people have trouble managing outrageous liars, and usually seek to avoid them, and Trump battens on others’ discomfort.)
In the meantime, though, WikiLeaks has been accused of turning into something much worse than a mere purveyor of information, however uncomfortable—or even, some would argue, dangerous—for its subjects. For WikiLeaks’ role in releasing hacked emails stolen by Russian intelligence from the Democratic National Committee, then–CIA Director Mike Pompeo in 2017 declared it to be the agent of a “hostile intelligence service.”
In that case, too, it appeared that many of the documents released were authentic chronicles of real disputes within the DNC about the conduct of the 2016 primary contest between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Yet even true information can paint a distorted picture: The publication of a large volume of information detrimental to Clinton and not to Trump seemed to align with what the intelligence community identified as Russia’s intent to help Trump win.
Over the years, the common thread connecting WikiLeaks’ biggest stories, from Collateral Murder to the DNC leaks, is that even what’s billed as anodyne “transparency” is seldom neutral. The choice to publish anything of consequence will always have political effects. And mere “information” may be something less than the truth if it comes without context about who is wielding that information and to what end. Even a massive document dump never quite tells the full story.
The company’s Twitter account also traded in racist messaging and political outrage, and appeared to throw its support behind Trump, announcing plans in 2015 for a super PAC called Republicans Invent.
Oh, and it promoted a future where “time travel” technology was within reach.
“World-renowned physicist, author, and scholar Dr. Ronald Mallett believes time travel is possible, perhaps within the next decade…. World Patent Marketing has partnered with Dr. Ronald Mallett to make his vision a reality,” the company wrote in a caption on its Vimeo page.
….
Below are a list of some of the ideas and products World Patent Marketing promoted before a federal judge forced its closure and ordered the firm to pay $26 million in this year.
—The hunt for Bigfoot. World Patent Marketing CEO Scott Cooper offered $1 million for proof of Sasquatch’s existence, while peddling Bigfoot dolls.
—A toilet specially designed for well-endowed men. “The distance between the rim and the water surface needs to be long enough to ensure there is no risk of contact,” the press release for the “masculine toilet” said.
—A sticky-dart gun, for mounting on the grill of a cop car. “When the officer gets within range of a fleeing vehicle, they simply pull the trigger and a sticky dart shoots out and attaches itself to the criminal’s ride,” the press release says. Then the dart provides GPS coordinates of the fleeing suspect.
— An invention that combines weed with “fresh fruit,” whatever that means.
—Disposable underwear for women. A product called Kntrol Disposable Underwear was featured in a press release as “a personal care invention created for women to prevent leakage.”
— The next skinny jeans, which are apparently just big, bulky, workman jeans. “Hipster’s Skinny Jeans Are Out And World Patent Marketing’s Miller Industrial Jeans Are In For Hard Labor,” the company announced.
— Green Leaf Organic, an “alternative to smokeless tobacco and chewing tobacco,” which the company presented as a solution to a smoking habit.
Russia’s meddling in the United States’ elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. “Operation InfeKtion” reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies. Meet the KGB spies who conceived this virus and the American truth squads who tried — and are still trying — to fight it. Countries from Pakistan to Brazil are now debating reality, and in Vladimir Putin’s greatest triumph, Americans are using Russia’s playbook against one another without the faintest clue.
Governments from Pakistan to Mexico to Washington are woefully unequipped to combat disinformation warfare. Eastern European countries living in Russia’s shadow can teach us how to start fighting back, but only if our politicians decide to stop profiting from these tactics and fight them instead.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 39m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 68.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1968, NBC broadcasts the Heidi Bowl:
The Heidi Game or Heidi Bowl was an American Football League (AFL) game played on November 17, 1968, between the Oakland Raiders and the visiting New York Jets. The game was notable for its exciting finish, in which Oakland scored two touchdowns in the final minute to win the game 43–32, but got its name for a decision by the game’s television broadcaster, NBC, to break away from its coverage of the game on the East Coast to broadcast the television film Heidi, causing many viewers to miss the Raiders’ comeback.
Recommended for reading in full — Wisconsin statewide results, Trump’s ignorance about NATO, the midterm message for Republicans, How Evers defeated Walker, and video with a tasty turkey recipe —
Dylan Brogan writes No contest (“Dems sweep statewide offices in midterms but remain underrepresented in Assembly”):
….
UW-Madison journalism professor Mike Wagner says if the GOP supermajority in the Assembly seems lopsided, “that’s probably why there is a lawsuit.”
“A court-drawn map or bipartisan commission map certainly wouldn’t promise a Democratic majority,” Wagner says. “But it would be far more likely to have a more representative result given the partisan makeup of the state. Wisconsin is very competitive. That we know.”
An Assembly that more accurately represents the electorate may be in the future — Democrats will just have to wait four years. With Evers as governor, Republicans won’t have complete control of the redistricting process when new lines are drawn in 2021. In past divided governments, the courts ultimately drew the district lines.
“The hard part for us is the maps probably don’t change for 2020. I’ve talked to a lot of our potential candidates who said they are interested in running. They just want to run when there are fair maps again,” Hintz says. “But with Tony Evers winning, we at least know there is light at the end of the tunnel.”
Returning from the World War I armistice commemoration in Paris, President Donald Trump reemphasized his view of America’s European allies. “We pay for large portions of other countries’ military protection,” he wrote on Twitter, and “it is time that these very rich countries either pay the United States for its great military protection, or protect themselves.” Trump’s criticisms are, of course, nothing new—since the 2016 campaign he has routinely highlighted the ways in which free-riding allies purportedly take advantage of American largesse.
But underlying the president’s position lies an assumption that is now worthy of close consideration: that the United States defends Europe, and stations troops on the continent, based on an impulse that is either fundamentally charitable, anachronistic, or both. As a result, it follows that we’ve been played by allies enriching themselves under our protection. Trump seems to believe that such altruism merits gratitude; the French, he observed, were “starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along.”
The truth, however, is that the U.S. helps Europe because, in so doing, it helps itself. Twice in the first half of the 20th century, the United States went to Europe to end wars that had engulfed the world. These were not acts of charity, but of national self-interest. Following the Second World War, American leaders resolved not to permit such catastrophes to reoccur. Their solution was to remain in Europe, commit to its defense, and deploy troops there as a way to keep the peace. The bargain has been straightforward: America gets bases and a guarantee that we won’t have to fight alone; European allies get protection from the world’s foremost military. All get stability and peace on the continent.
(Trump is a profoundly ignorant man who gives encouragement – and receives support from – a hardcore base composed of the most ignorant of Americans.)
Whatever it augurs for Trump’s own chances, though, the 2018 results underscored how he has truncated the opportunities for congressional Republicans. So long as the party is defined by his racially infused nationalism, it will be a strong competitor in states and House districts dominated by older, blue-collar, and evangelical white voters. But at the same time, the party seems guaranteed to struggle in suburban areas. It will also face growing challenges in Sun Belt states from Democrats who can mobilize an urbanized coalition of Millennials, minorities, and college-educated whites. This year, those voters elected to the Senate Sinema in Arizona and Jacky Rosen in Nevada. And they allowed O’Rourke in Texas and Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race to run more competitively than any Democrat had in those states for decades. That same formula in 2020 could threaten Republican Senate seats in Colorado, North Carolina, Arizona, and possibly Texas.
Over the past two years, Republicans up and down the ballot could have tried to establish an identity divorced from Trump. Instead, led by Ryan and Mitch McConnell, they sent voters an unmistakable signal that they would not act in any meaningful way to restrain, or even to oversee, him. In 2018, voters in turn sent Republicans an equally unmistakable signal: that their fate is now inextricably bound to the volatile president they have embraced as their leader.
It was a 67-year-old former elementary school principal from Plymouth who indulges in Egg McMuffins and games of euchre.
Six years after Walker became the first governor in U.S. history to survive a recall election and four years after he secured a second term, state schools Superintendent Tony Evers narrowly defeated him this month by focusing on kitchen-table issues — education, roads and health care.
Both sides saw early warning signs for Walker because of his brief presidential run and the Democratic response to President Donald Trump and Republican control of Congress.
Walker made his name nationally by going to war with unions in 2011, prompting massive protests and the recall effort. By 2018, he was tacking to the middle on health care and education, which made him look like “the incredible shrinking governor,” said Democratic strategist Joe Zepecki.
“The longer Scott Walker was governor, the smaller he got,” he said.
Russia’s meddling in the United States’ elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. “Operation InfeKtion” reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies. Meet the KGB spies who conceived this virus and the American truth squads who tried — and are still trying — to fight it. Countries from Pakistan to Brazil are now debating reality, and in Vladimir Putin’s greatest triumph, Americans are using Russia’s playbook against one another without the faintest clue.
The Pizzagate playbook: Same tactics, new technologies. How the seven rules of Soviet disinformation are being used to create today’s fake news stories. Pizza anyone?
On Saturday, Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities announced that a team of archaeologists had uncovered dozens of mummified cats, along with 100 wooden cat statues and a bronze bust of Bastet, the ancient Egyptian goddess of cats. The artifacts, found in a tomb in a cemetery in what would have been the ancient city of Memphis, are about 6,000 years old.
….
Antonietta Catanzariti, a curator at the Smithsonian, said scientists have found hundreds of thousands of cat mummies over the years. The ancient Egyptians were drawn to felines’ hunting prowess and their ability to protect their young.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 41m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1896, Wisconsin’s first Rural Free Delivery route is established: “On this date the first Rural Free Delivery route in Wisconsin was established at Sun Prairie. Rural Free Delivery routes were free government mail delivery services in rural areas.”
Recommended for reading in full — Trump’s revocation of a press pass overturned, Assange secretly charged, has Whitaker already compromised the Mueller investigation, the moral and ethical rot at Facebook, and video explaining why there are rectangular icebergs —
A federal judge on Friday granted CNN’s request for a court order that would temporarily reinstate network correspondent Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, which had been suspended indefinitely in the wake of a fiery exchange between the reporter and President Donald Trump a week earlier.
The ruling from Judge Timothy Kelly, who was appointed by Trump, was the first victory for CNN in the ongoing case.
“I want to thank all of my colleagues in the press who supported us this week, and I want to thank the judge for the decision he made today,” Acosta said outside U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
“Let’s go back to work!” he added.
(There may be more litigation, but this was not a hard call, and Trump’s legal position was weak, with his staff’s justifications shifting opportunistically.)
Seamus Hughes, a terrorism expert at George Washington University who closely tracks court cases, uncovered the filing and posted it on Twitter.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to say on Thursday what led to the inadvertent disclosure. It was made in a recently unsealed filing in an apparently unrelated sex-crimes case charging a man named Seitu Sulayman Kokayi with coercing and enticing an underage person to engage in unlawful sexual activity. Mr. Kokayi was charged in early August, and on Aug. 22, prosecutors filed a three-page document laying out boilerplate arguments for why his case at that time needed to remain sealed.
While the filing started out referencing Mr. Kokayi, federal prosecutors abruptly switched on its second page to discussing the fact that someone named “Assange” had been secretly charged, and went on to make clear that this person was the subject of significant publicity, lived abroad and would need to be extradited — suggesting that prosecutors had inadvertently pasted text from a similar court filing into the wrong document and then filed it.
“Another procedure short of sealing will not adequately protect the needs of law enforcement at this time because, due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged,” prosecutors wrote.
They added, “The complaint, supporting affidavit, and arrest warrant, as well as this motion and the proposed order, would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.”
Whitaker can do great damage even if he does nothing more than read all of Mueller’s files – as he now will have the right to do – and share that information with the White House. Sure, he would be risking impeachment or even prosecution for obstruction of justice, but Whitaker is not someone who has exactly exemplified devotion to the rule of law: He believes that Marbury v. Madison, the seminal 1803 case establishing legal review of legislation, was wrongly decided, and he has said that only Christians should serve as judges.
There is already cause for concern that Whitaker may have tipped off the White House. On Thursday, Trump tweeted, “The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want. They are a disgrace to our Nation.” Trump has never used the phrase “inner workings” before. Maybe he was just spouting off. Maybe he was reacting to information shared with him by witnesses Mueller has interrogated. Or maybe he has suddenly gained a vantage point on the “inner workings of the Mueller investigation” that he did not have before Whitaker’s appointment.
As the Times reports, Zuckerberg and Sandberg were less than aggressive in addressing Russian use of the site to spread propaganda, and pushed out high-ranking executives who tried to address the issue in a more forceful way. At the same time, the company was able to successfully convince powerful politicians such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) (whose daughter — surprise! — is employed by the Facebook swamp) to pressure other politicians to go easy on the company. They also hired a Washington-based public affairs firm, which went on to aggressively take on Facebook’s opponents, including in a claim straight out of the alt-right sewer saying that boogeyman-for-all-seasons George Soros was responsible for the “broad anti-Facebook movement.” Facebook itself at one point asked Jewish advocacy groups to characterize critics of the company as engaging in anti-Semitism. (Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish.) This is the sort of stuff the Yiddish word “chutzpah” describes.
And, in what surely counts as one of the great missed opportunities of all time, the Times reported that Zuckerberg was personally horrified in 2015 about Donald Trump’s raging about Muslim immigration and asked Sandberg whether Trump could be tossed from the site for violating Facebook’s engagement rules. She turned to several Facebook executives, including a Republican lobbyist she hired named Joel Kaplan. (That would be the same Joel Kaplan who was prominently seated behind Brett Kavanaugh during his recent Senate confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court). They told her not to do it. You know the rest.
All of this was apparently done in the service of protecting Facebook’s enormous profits, and heading off the threat of increased privacy legislation out of Washington by placating Democrats, who are increasingly concerned about the power of big business over our lives, and Republicans, who are specifically concerned about less accurate complaints that Facebook is hostile for conservatives.
