Tuesday, November 29, 2016

This Is What A Professional Disinformation Campaign Looks Like

ORIGINAL LINK

Today Wikileaks published in searchable format more than 60 thousand emails from private intelligence firm HBGary. As Wikileaks reported on its website, "the publication today marks the early release of US political prisoner Barrett Brown, who was detained in 2012 and sentenced to 63 months in prison in connection with his journalism on Stratfor and HBGary. Coinciding with Mr Brown's release from prison WikiLeaks is publishing a searchable index of the HBGary emails. WikiLeaks published the Stratfor emails in 2012."

For those who missed it five years ago, the story behind the leak is fascinating.

The HBGary emails are from four email accounts of key people from HBGary and HBGary Federal. HBGary was founded in 2003 by Greg Hoglund to provide cyber security-related services to corporate clients. A separate entity, HBGary Federal, was managed by Aaron Barr to do similar work for government agencies and so had staff with security clearances and worked with companies such as Booz Allen Hamilton (one of the contractors Edward Snowden worked for).

As was reported several years ago, in February 2011 Aaron Barr stated he had been investigating the internet activist group Anonymous and claimed to have uncovered the real identities of some of what he described as the leaders of the organisation. In retaliation Anonymous penetrated Barr’s organisation and took emails from the accounts of four key people from HBGary and HBGary Federal: Aaron Barr and Greg Hoglund, but also Ted Vera (then Chief Operating Officer at HBGary Federal) and Phil Wallisch, a former Principal Technical Consultant.

These emails and revelations from them started to be published on the internet, predominantly through the work of Barrett Brown and a crowd-sourced investigative journalism project he ran: Project PM. As a result, later that month Barr was forced to step down, HBGary Federal closed and HBGary, Inc. was sold to ManTech International. This would have been little consolation to Mr Brown, who a month later on 6 March 2012 had both his and his mother’s houses raided by the FBI, seeking “Records relating to HBGary, Infragard, Endgame Systems, Anonymous, LulzSec, IRC chats, Twitter, wiki.echelon2.org, and pastebin.com.” Agents seized his laptops.

Barrett Brown’s work through Project PM was one of the first collaborative investigations into the US corporate surveillance industry. Looking into corporate firms that work hand-in-hand with the government to surveil on citizens, Mr Brown was one of the first to shed light on this unaccountable industry.

The HBGary revelations that came out through the work of Barret Brown and others showed that HBGary and related companies were involved in plans to spread disinformation and to attack watchdog organisations, including WikiLeaks and US Chamber Watch. For example, the emails revealed a plan to form a group called Team Themis with a number of companies from the industry to "ruin" WikiLeaks by submitting false documents in the hope they would be published, as well as discrediting WikiLeaks staff and supporters, including journalist Glenn Greenwald. HBGary was also bidding to fulfil a tender from the US Air Force to assist it in manipulating social media to spread propaganda about the Air Force.

As Wikileaks adds, "Barrett Brown was indicted on felony counts due to his journalistic work on the HBGary emails and other related corporations. He has been in prison ever since, often being put into solitary confinement and having his communications restricted. The HBGary emails largely disappeared from the internet. Today the HBGary emails are safe for all to search in honour of Mr Brown’s work and in celebration of his release."

* * *

While many of the leaked emails and their contents have been released previously, in light of the recent witch hunt to brand an entire swath of the media as "fake news", or just as bad "Russian propaganda", it is worth reminding readers of one of the most memorable discoveries to emerge from the hack.

One particular presentation from December 2010, titled "The Wikileaks Threat" outlined a proposal to Bank of America from Palantir and HBGary to sabotage WikiLeaks on multiple fronts, a response plan to what some believed at the time could be a release of highly damaging Bank of America’s internal documents by WikiLeaks. The powerpoint suggested launching cyberattacks on WikiLeaks servers, spreading misinformation about its insecurity, and even pressuring journalists who support the site, specifically focusing on Glenn Greenwald, the man who presented Edward Snowden to the world.

In a nutshell, the 24-slide document (presented in its entirety below), was a thoroughly developed program meant to discredit and destroy Wikileaks, through an extensive disinformation campaign. What is notable are the details that Palantir presented as part of this campaign, which are a generic framework for creating any such campaign. They are laid out on a slide titled "Potential Proactive Tactics" and are as follows:

  • Feed the fuel between the feuding groups.  Disinformation.  Create messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization.  Submit fake documents and then call out the error.
  • Create concern over the security of the infrastructure.  Create exposure stories.  If the process is believed to not be secure they are done.
  • Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters.  This would kill the project.  Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward.
  • Media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities.  Sustained pressure.  Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates concern and doubt amongst moderates.
  • Search for leaks.  Use social media to profile and identify risky behavior of employees.

wiki%20palantir_0.jpg

And there you have it: a generic disinformation campaign, in this case one prepared by Palantir and HBGary against Wikileaks, but one that is structurally the same in virtually every other instance. So the next time readers encounter a similar attempt to "destroy" a source of information, look at the slide above and ask if what you are seeing is just a rehash of an old, familiar discrediting campaign.



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How Google Tried To Tip The Scales For Clinton

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by Giuseppe Macri via InsideSources.com,

The Obama administration’s revolving door with Google has been anything but subtle over the last eight years, and a new report from a government watchdog out this week shows the Silicon Valley giant hoped to extend that relationship to what many expected would be a Hillary Clinton presidency.

According to Campaign for Accountability, a non-profit government watchdog, that door was already growing in scope while Clinton headed the State Department under Obama. At least 57 people shared affiliations with Clinton and Google or related entities at the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and her presidential campaign.

Those include Clinton campaign Chief Technology Officer Stephanie Hannon, Chief Product Officer Osi Imeokparia, Deputy CTO Derek Parham and Director of Digital Advertising Jason Rosenbaum, all of whom hailed from Google before joining the campaign.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet (the redubbed parent company of Google) who developed custom election monitoring software for the 2012 Obama campaign helped Clinton in a similar fashion. Schmidt funded Civis Analytics and The Groundwork, two data analytics and poll tracking firms that worked on her campaign.

Clinton and her super PAC Priorities USA spent almost $1.5 million on services from those companies.

“Had she won the election, Clinton would have been significantly indebted to Google and Schmidt, whom she has referred to as her ‘longtime friend,'” the report reads. “For comparison, Schmidt’s future team at Civis Analytics was credited with helping produce his five million vote margin of victory during Obama’s 2012 election, and Schmidt subsequently enjoyed extensive access at the Obama White House.”

Personal emails hacked from campaign manager John Podesta show Schmidt personally met with Podesta and Clinton State Department aide Cheryl Mills in 2014, before the campaign was officially announced, and three months later Groundwork set up shop near Clinton headquarters in New York.

“[H]e’s ready to fund, advise, recruit talent, etc,” Podesta wrote after meeting with Schmidt in Washington, D.C. in 2014. Schmidt would continue to meet consistently with Clinton advisers to advise its voter targeting effort and data management.

“Clearly wants to be head outside advisor,” Podesta added before suggesting a meeting between Schmidt and Clinton campaign strategist Robby Mook.

As with most of the tech industry, Google donated heavily to Clinton over Trump, but Google notably became Clinton’s largest corporate contributor, according to the report, with at least six high-ranking executives and other employees contributing more than $1.3 million to her campaign coffers. The next highest corporate contributor was Microsoft with over $700,000 and Apple, which had its own close relationship with Clinton advisers per more Podesta emails, putting up more than $500,000, according to OpenSecrets.org.

“Had Clinton won the election, Google would have been able to capitalize on a close working relationship stretching back to her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State,” report authors wrote. “State Department officials traveled to Silicon Valley for meetings at Google’s headquarters attended by Schmidt, where they brainstormed how new technologies could be used to address diplomatic, development, and security concerns.”

Those efforts include the former secretary of state’s Internet Freedom agenda announced amid Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East in 2010. Clinton advocated international open internet norms and encouraged the adoption of technologies like encryption and social media to protect privacy and advocate for change in repressed regimes like Egypt and Syria.

The door between the two has spun in both directions since Clinton’s tenure heading the State Department, where at least 19 officials have joined Google in recent years including Jared Cohen, a member of Clinton’s policy planning staff. Cohen and Schmidt built their own “foreign policy think-tank,” later dubbed Jigsaw, “that has carried out a wide range of missions, some in coordination with the State Department.” Cohen himself traveled to areas of conflict while working for Google “raising suspicions that he was acting as an unofficial backchannel for the State Department.”

“Had Clinton won the election, Google would have benefitted in current and new ventures from its extensive ties to her presidential campaign, her foundation, and the Clinton State Department,” the report reads. “Several of those ventures rely on government funding or would be subject to regulatory scrutiny.”

Clinton appointees at the Federal Communications Commission (charged with defending net neutrality and currently weighing rules that would let Google enter the set-top box market), at the Federal Trade Commission (looking at rules for internet of things devices, artificial intelligence and where the company has run into data privacy and anti-trust issues), and at the Department of Transportation (where standards will be set for the company’s self-driving cars), would all have likely benefitted Alphabet’s various business ventures.

“Beyond leaving its mark with Hillary Clinton, Google has proved highly adept during the past eight years at securing favorable decisions from federal agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,” Campaign for Accountability said.

Though Alphabet bet heavily on Clinton, as did most in the valley, the incoming Trump administration is showing early signs the search giant may not be shut out in the cold. The Trump transition team has welcomed some Google allies to advise its efforts.

“Having failed to back the winning presidential candidate,” Campaign for Accountability explains, “Google is now seeking to soften its opposition to Trump. Schmidt congratulated Trump following his win, calling it an ‘amazing story.’ He also praised Trump-backer Peter Thiel, calling himself a fan of the Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur.”



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Turkey Has Declared War On Syria – Does This Mean That World War 3 Is About To Erupt In The Middle East?

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fighter-jet-silhouette-public-domainTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has just announced that the only reason Turkish military forces have entered northern Syria is to “end the rule of the tyrant al-Assad”.  By publicly proclaiming that Turkey intends to use military force to overthrow the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Erdogan has essentially declared war on the Syrian government.  Of course this puts a member of NATO in direct military conflict with Russia, since Russia is working very hard to prop up the Assad regime.  If all-out war breaks out between Turkey and Russia, could that be the spark that causes World War 3 to erupt in the Middle East?  And once Turkey and Russia start fighting, would the United States and the rest of NATO be dragged into the conflict?

The big mainstream news networks in the western world are almost completely ignoring what Erdogan said on Tuesday, but without a doubt this is major news.  The following comes from a Turkish news source

The Turkish military launched its operations in Syria to end the rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Nov. 29.

“In my estimation, nearly 1 million people have died in Syria. These deaths are still continuing without exception for children, women and men. Where is the United Nations? What is it doing? Is it in Iraq? No. We preached patience but could not endure in the end and had to enter Syria together with the Free Syrian Army [FSA],” Erdoğan said at the first Inter-Parliamentary Jerusalem Platform Symposium in Istanbul.

Turkish military forces initially invaded northern Syria on August 24th, and at the time we were all told that the purpose of the invasion was to “fight ISIS”, but now Erdogan is telling us something completely different.

Breitbart is one of the few U.S. news outlets that is reporting on this story, and I want you to read the following quotes from Erdogan that come from a Breitbart article that was posted on Tuesday very, very carefully…

“Why did we enter? We do not have an eye on Syrian soil. The issue is to provide lands to their real owners. That is to say we are there for the establishment of justice. We entered there to end the rule of the tyrant al-Assad who terrorizes with state terror,” Erdogan continued, insisting his forces were not in Syria for “any other reason.”

The Daily Sabah notes that Erdogan spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Syria during two telephone calls last week. Since Russia launched a massive military operation to secure Bashar Assad in power, Putin would presumably have been interested in anything Erdogan had to say about toppling the regime in Damascus, and probably would not have kept quiet about it.

If the Turkish military is only in Syria to end the Assad regime, then presumably they will stay there until the job is done.

And this puts Turkey into a direct military conflict with Russia, Iran and Hezbollah since all three of them are already fighting very hard to help the Assad regime.

Of course there is another reason why Turkey is in northern Syria, and that is to fight the Kurds.  In fact, the Kurds and Turkey are both rushing to capture a little city northeast of Aleppo called al-Bab which is currently controlled by the Islamic State

Their immediate challenge is securing al-Bab, an Islamic State-held city northeast of Aleppo which Kurdish-led fighters are racing to take, and which lies close to the front lines of Assad’s allies.

Turkish-backed forces have made rapid gains since August, but largely through less heavily populated areas. Urban warfare around al-Bab is already taking a heavier toll. Five Turkish soldiers have been killed in the past week alone, three of them in a suspected Syrian government air strike.

“Right now the question is whether Russia will allow Turkey to seize al-Bab,” said the Muntasir Billah Brigade official.

But most people in the western world don’t know that Turkish soldiers are already dying in Syria.

Here in the United States, tens of millions of Americans are hailing a new era of “peace and prosperity” now that Donald Trump has won the election, but the truth is that one false move in Syria could easily raise tensions between the United States and Russia to the highest level that we have seen since the Cuban missile crisis back in the 1960s.

If Erdogan would have just stayed out of Syria we wouldn’t be in such a precarious situation.  Unfortunately, the president of Turkey is a narcissistic lunatic, and he dreams of a day when the old Ottoman Empire will once again be restored.

But his delusions of greatness threaten to make the Middle East even more unstable than it already has been.  In addition to his remarks above, on Tuesday Erdogan also called on all Muslims globally “to embrace the Palestinian cause and protect Jerusalem”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has urged Muslims to defend the Palestinian cause, striking a tough stance on Israel despite improved ties between the two nations.

The president of majority Muslim Turkey said Tuesday that “it is the common duty of all Muslims to embrace the Palestinian cause and protect Jerusalem” and that safeguarding the Al-Aqsa Mosque should not be left to children armed with nothing but stones. Located in the Old City of Jerusalem, the hilltop compound is sacred to Muslims and Jews.

Most people in the western world pay very little attention to Erdogan, but the truth is that he is a madman that is often referred to as “Turkey’s version of Adolf Hitler”.  He is extremely ambitious, extremely nationalistic, and he is a warmonger.  That is a very dangerous combination, and I believe that it is only a matter of time before he starts a major war in the Middle East.

Somebody needs to get this guy under control, but unfortunately the Obama administration has been very hesitant to confront Erdogan about his outrageous behavior.

When Erdogan openly stated that the Turkish military is in Syria to overthrow the Assad regime on Tuesday, that was like lighting a match in a room that has already been doused with propane.

He needs to immediately retract those comments, because his unique brand of lunacy has now brought us dangerously close to the start of World War 3.



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Martin Armstrong Exposes The Real Fake News: Did The BBC Get Caught Fabricating News To Start A War?

ORIGINAL LINK

"The press has been routinely creating fake news reports to start a war," exclaims Armstrong Economics' Martin Armstrong, pointing to a recent report exposing The BBC allegedly faking news over chemical attacks in Syria...

What follows is shocking evidence that crisis actors, green screens, CGI, and paid propagandists are being used to fake worldwide events in order to scare people into giving up liberties and sending us into war. To say this was shocking would be to put it lightly.

 

From video proof showing “dead soldiers” killed by “chemical weapons” walking around after they thought the videos stopped recording, to digitally altering sounds to add in “explosions” that never happened, this segment demonstrates some of the most damming evidence against the media ever shown on television.

 

Armstrong continues... "This is a serious issue for the press is conspiring against the people to create war, sell climate change, and rig elections. This is by no means something new."

They taught me in high school history class about how the press started the Spanish-American War by reporting that the Spanish attacked a US ship, which never happened.

We have fallen into a cycle of yellow journalism that Pulitzer began. Pulitzer created the Spanish-American War by making up shit to sell newspapers. The famous Pulitzer Prize given by Columbia University is named after the father of yellow journalism – go figure! This is why the press and the Republican elite supported Hillary. They need to rig the game.

Johnson_tonkin

 

The most fascinating aspect of war has been the government’s consistent lies to the American people to move the nation to war with every single event. This has won them the ability to wage every single war up until Obama’s attempt to invade Syria. It did not fly. This was really the beginning of the collapse in public confidence for the peak in government on our 224-Year Cycle of Political Change was 2013 — the second swearing in of Obama.

The sinking of the Lusitania is very disturbing. The U.S. was smuggling arms to Europe on passenger ships, and putting civilian lives in harm’s way for political reasons. The Germans even took an advertisement in the NY newspapers warning civilians DO NOT TRAVEL on the Lusitania. When they sank that ship, the U.S. turned and said how cruel the Germans were to attack a passenger ship.

Then there was the Operation Northwoodwhich was a proposal of the Department of Defense. The Joint Chiefs of Staff would have employed CIA operatives to commit acts of terrorism against American civilians. They would then blame the Cuban government to justify a war against Cuba. The proposals were rejected by the Kennedy administration and have long been part of the reason people support the theory that the CIA is responsible for the killing of Kennedy.

obama-nobel-Peace Prize

Obama, who has made a mockery out of the Nobel Peace Prize, attempted the standard lie to invade Syria, but the American people rejected it because they became tired of the lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack even in fake allegations. The failure of Obama to “sell” the Syrian war to the American people noted the shift in confidence from public (trust everything) to private (trust nothing).

madam-president

Wherever there is military action involved, there are lies to further another agenda. The benefit of a private wave is that people begin to distrust government. However, when the war cycle turns up it warns of a rise in civil unrest that can go as far as a new age of revolution if government does not stop trying to manipulate the people for nonsense.

Make no mistake, the political manipulations for wars and elections are pervasive. The EU staged a coup in Italy to get rid of Berlusconi because he wanted to take Italy out of the EU. Not only is the press is conspiring with government, of course the bankers are as well. The bankers all said they would leave Scotland if it voted to exit the UK. Republicans were trying to rig the primary to stop Trump. The evidence has poured in how Hillary manipulated the Republican primary to ensure Trump would win because she thought she could beat him and ran a very divisive campaign.

The movie “Wag the Dog” was based on how things really operate. They used the press as a co-conspirator to manipulate the public. This is also why this election has resulted in the collapse in public confidence in the mainstream press. True, the New York Times has admitted they were biased, but they have protected the bankers and reported fake news on Syria.



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Saturday, November 26, 2016

Media Silent as House Passes Resolution for Syrian No-Fly Zone — Provoking War with Russia

ORIGINAL LINK

Hillary Clinton’s loss was a shock to the purveyors of U.S. military hegemony, who saw in her an easier path to keep the Syria conflict going. Secretary of State Clinton was instrumental in the early days of Syria intervention, in 2010 making a series of demands for Syria to get in line behind the U.S. vision for the Middle East. When Bashar al-Assad refused to roll over, regime change became the talking point of Washington think tanks and mainstream media echo chambers. Clinton promised during her campaign to ramp up action in Syria, to the delight of the same neocons who brought the Iraq invasion. She acknowledged that many civilians would die if the U.S. set up a no-fly zone.



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The Washington Post: Useful-Idiot Shills for a Failed, Frantic Status Quo That Has Lost Control of the Narrative

ORIGINAL LINK
Don't you think it fair and reasonable that anyone accusing me of being a shill for Russian propaganda ought to read my ten books in their entirety and identify the sections that support their slanderous accusation?
I was amused to find my site listed on the now-infamous list of purportedly Russian-controlled propaganda sites cited by The Washington Post. I find it amusing because I invite anyone to search my 3,600-page archive of published material over the past decade (which includes some guest posts and poems) and identify a single pro-Russia or pro-Russian foreign policy entry.
If anything, my perspective is pro-US dollar, pro-liberty, pro-open markets, pro-local control, pro-free-press, pro-innovation, and pro-opportunities to rebuild America's abandoned, decaying localized economies: in other words, the exact opposite of Russian propaganda.
My "crime" is a simple one: challenging the ruling elite's narrative. Labeling all dissent "enemy propaganda" is of course the classic first phase of state-sponsored propaganda and the favorite tool of well-paid illiberal apologists for an illiberal regime.
Labeling everyone who dissents or questions the ruling elite's narrative as tools of an enemy power is classic McCarthy-era witch-hunting, i.e. a broad-brush way of marginalizing and silencing critics with an accusation that is easy to fabricate but difficult to prove.
Such unsupported slander is a classic propaganda technique. It has more in common with Nazi propaganda than with real journalism.
The real useful-idiot shills are the editors and hacks paid by the Washington Post, who are busy penning articles such as "Why the electoral college should choose Hillary Clinton". Isn't this fundamentally a call to over-ride the Constitutional framework of the republic's democracy?
In other words, the ruling elite's candidate lost, so let's subvert democracy to "right this terrible wrong" that was wrought by fed-up debt-serfs.
Substitution is a useful technique to reveal propaganda: if Trump had lost by a thin margin, would the The Washington Post publish an article "Why the electoral college should choose Donald Trump"?
Any site suggesting such an outlandish subversion of American democracy would of course by labeled Russian-controlled propaganda by The Washington Post. In other words, it's OK for the organs of Imperial Propaganda to call for the subversion of the Constitution, but if someone else dares to do so, you know the drill: they're labeled a tool of Russian propaganda.
Just as a reminder, this is the status quo / ruling elite's handiwork The Washington Post shills/propagandists support: a status quo of institutionalized privilege, corruption and systemically soaring wealth and income inequality:
The institutionalized impoverishment of non-elite students:
student-loans5-16a.png
The institutionalized impoverishment of the bottom 99.9%:
wealth-distribution10-15.jpg
The institutionalized impoverishment of everyone below the protected technocrat-insider class of shills, apparatchiks and professionals:
wage-inequality3-16a.jpg
This is what The Washington Post is pushing: a parasitic, predatory, exploitive, ruinously corrupt and venal ruling class and its army of apologists/lackeys/factotums.
The fundamental source of the Post's hysterical accusations is the ruling elite has lost control of the narrative. This is the source of the mainstream media's angst-tinged hysteria and frantic efforts to marginalize and discredit any dissenting narratives that undermine or question the power of a corrupted, self-serving ruling elite that has failed the nation and its citizens.
This is why Donald Trump was routinely labeled a Russian shill by the mainstream media during the campaign. Regardless of what you think of Trump or Clinton, what can we say about a supposedly responsible media that so cavalierly spews fact-free accusations of foreign control? This is the height of irresponsible propaganda being passed off as "journalism."
Free speech implicitly carries the responsibility of the reader/listener/viewer to make a critical assessment of the content, its source and its aim: who benefits if we accept the narrative being pushed?
The delicious irony of The Washington Post's hysterical campaign to smear dissenters as tools of Russian propaganda is that it only serves to discredit the Post itself. For my part, I invite you to read all ten of my books and make your own critical assessment of the content and answer these questions:
1. Did you find even a single passage in the thousands of pages that favored Russian policies?
2. Did you find any passages that favored domestic resilience and self-reliance, localized economic development, and the promotion of innovations that favored the many rather than the few?
3. Don't you think it fair and reasonable that anyone accusing me of being a shill for Russian propaganda ought to read my ten books in their entirety and identify the sections that support their slanderous accusation?
If they can't support it, then isn't their accusation the very propaganda they claim to be identifying?
Just as a reminder: here's my chart of the Ministry of Propaganda (from 2007):
propaganda-ministry.png
My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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Go to my main site at www.oftwominds.com/blog.html for the full posts and archives.


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If You Question the Establishment You Are Guilty of Espionage, Says Corporate Media — Because Russia

ORIGINAL LINK
russianWaPost's reporting on an arbitrary list of alternative media outlets as a coordinated Russian propaganda campaign is a dangerous travesty.

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Friday, November 25, 2016

In Brazil, Major New Corruption Scandals Engulf the Faction that Impeached Dilma

ORIGINAL LINK

A primary argument made by opponents of impeaching Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was that removing her would immediately empower the truly corrupt politicians in Brasília – the ones who were the driving force behind her impeachment – and they would then use that power to kill ongoing corruption investigations and shield themselves from consequences for their own law-breaking. In that regard, Dilma’s impeachment was not designed to punish corruption but to protect it. The last two weeks have produced new corruption scandals that have vindicated that view beyond what even its proponents imagined was possible.

In his short time in office, Temer has already lost three ministers to scandal, but these new controversies are the most serious yet. One major scandal involves an effort in Congress – led by the very parties that impeached Dilma, with the support of some in Dilma’s party – to pass a law that vests themselves full legal amnesty for their crimes involving election financing. In late September, a bill appeared in Congress, seemingly out of nowhere, that would have retroactively protected any member of Congress from being punished for the use of so-called “caixa dois” (second box) monies in campaigns, whereby politicians receive under-the-table contributions from oligarchs and corporations that they do not declare.

Many of Brazil’s most powerful politicians – including its Foreign Minister, a majority of members of the lower House, and installed President Michel Temer himself (pictured above) – are implicated in this scheme and are thus threatened with the possibility of prosecution. “Caixa dois” has been a key tactic used to bribe politicians. The issue has taken on particular urgency because the imprisoned billionaire CEO of the nation’s construction giant Odebrecht, Marcelo Odebrecht, is about to finalize his plea agreement, and it will identify numerous key figures as having received millions of dollars in such undeclared donations.

It has already been reported that Temer’s Foreign Minister, José Serra, received R$ 23 million ($7 million) in such illegal funds from Odebrecht, much of which was deposited into a Swiss Bank account to avoid detection (those funds were for his losing 2010 presidential campaign against Dilma, showing how those who lost democratically and are mired in serious corruption are the ones who have now seized power due to Dilma’s impeachment).

When this amnesty bill first appeared in September, it was done in such a way to prevent anyone from noticing, or finding out who was responsible. At the time, The Intercept Brasil described it as a move that “shocked even the most longtime, jaded observers of corrupt Brasília plotting.” That effort failed when two left-wing parties, PSOL and Rede, blew the whistle and impeded parliamentary efforts that would have enabled quick enactment (as disclosure: my husband, David Miranda, was elected to Rio’s City Council last month on a PSOL ticket). But as we ended our September article by noting: “Convinced of their own entitlement and ability to act without consequence, there is no doubt they will try again to lavish themselves with amnesty while nobody is looking.”

That time is now, except that they are doing it out in the open. Because virtually every party has major figures implicated by this illegal campaign scheme, most parties are openly united in support of this amnesty, on the theory that if they all act together, it won’t be pinned on any one of them and nobody can be politically punished (while most large parties are overwhelmingly behind it, PT’s delegation is split almost evenly on it, and the same two left-wing parties that impeded it the first time are fully opposed).

But the dominant group in the Congress is the one that led the impeachment battle and is now loyal to Temer, and they – composed of a huge number of members endangered by this “caixa dois” lawbreaking – can ensure that this amnesty will pass. Temer himself has signaled that he will not veto it, and his party, PMDB, is largely supportive of it. The vote was scheduled for last week but, as public pressure mounted, the vote was delayed to this coming Tuesday.

The judge leading the corruption investigation, Sérgio Moro, warned this week that this amnesty bill could seriously impede his investigation – which is, of course, its central purpose. He warned more generally that retroactive amnesty measures that benefit the politicians who enact them are exactly the sort of thing that has destroyed faith in Brazil’s political institutions.

So here we have the very same people who impeached the democratically elected president in the name of punishing corruption and upholding the rule of law, using their ill-gotten power to shield themselves from accountability for their own political crimes. From the start, this was the fraud at the heart of Dilma’s impeachment, and it is hard to put into words how clear and obvious it has now become. Even the star columnist for O Globo – the newspaper that most agitated for impeachment – is now admitting that the central anti-impeachment argument is being proven correct, tweeting yesterday: “Approval of caixa dois amnesty reinforces PT’s argument that Dilma was removed so that the Lava Jato corruption investigation could be stymied.”

A aprovação da anistia do caixa 2 reforça o discurso do PT de q Dilma foi derrubada p/q a Lava-Jato pudesse ser estancada.

— Blog do Noblat (@BlogdoNoblat) November 24, 2016

That this was the true goal of impeachment all along was beyond obvious. In May, one of Temer’s closest allies, Romero Jucá, was forced to resign as Temer’s minister after tapes were disclosed in which Jucá admitted as clearly as possible that Dilma’s impeachment was necessary in order to kill the corruption investigation, and that only once Dilma was gone would the media, the courts, the military and the public enter into a “national pact” to leave Brasília’s corrupt politicians alone.

But while Jucá was forced by the fallout to resign as minister in May, he was just named this month as leader of the Temer government in the Senate – because, obviously, Jucá’s corrupt scheme is shared by Temer and those who now rule Brazil. So Brazil’s big media outlets are only now being forced to admit what was completely clear all along: that by demanding impeachment, they were empowering Brazil’s most corrupt politicians and ensuring that the corruption investigation would be impeded.

 

But now an entirely new scandal directly threatens Temer himself. Last week, Temer’s Minister of Culture, Marcelo Calero, flamboyantly resigned, announcing he was doing so because one of Temer’s closest allies, the Minster of Government Geddel Vieira Lima, had been aggressively pressuring Calero to take action to benefit a construction project in which Geddel had a personal interest. Specifically, Geddel pressured Calero to secure approval for construction of a luxury high-rise in a historic beachfront preservation area, a building in which Geddel had purchased an apartment.

At first, Temer defended Geddel, adamantly insisting that he would not be fired. Temer’s appointee on a Congressional Ethics Committee blocked a vote to investigate whether Geddel violated ethical rules. Temer sought to downplay the controversy in every way possible in order to protect his close ally.

But that has now become impossible. Yesterday, Calero, the minister-turned-whistleblower, gave a sworn statement to the Federal Police in which he said that not only was he pressured by Geddel to secure approval for this construction project, but that Temer himself spoke with him on two occasions and similarly pressured him. As a result, the front page of every major newspaper this morning has screaming headlines that Temer himself is now implicated in this scandal, and opposition parties have already instituted impeachment proceedings against Temer himself for this.

(Geddel resigned just this morning as this article was being published: the fourth minister Temer has lost to scandal.)

All of this comes as the leading figures in Temer’s party, the centrist PMDB, are not just engulfed by political scandal but are going to prison. The House Speaker who presided over and was the driving force behind Dilma’s impeachment, Eduardo Cunha, is now in prison as he awaits trial on charges of money laundering and bribery after being discovered with millions hidden away in Swiss bank accounts, while the former Governor of Rio de Janeiro state, Sérgio Cabral, last week was arrested on charges of overseeing a massive corruption scheme. This has always been one of the towering ironies of Dilma’s impeachment: that the party most empowered by it, Temer’s PMDB (formerly in alliance with PT), not only single-handedly destroyed Rio de Janeiro through ineptitude and corruption, but is filled with the continent’s most blatantly criminal political leaders.

In some ways, to Brazil’s oligarchical class, served (as always) by its media, it does not much matter what happens to Temer. Like Cunha before him, Temer has served his purpose: he just oversaw passage of a radical austerity measure that – in the face of Brazil’s negative growth – literally amended the Constitution to bar spending increases beyond the rate of inflation for 20 years. Since entering office, he has overseen an orgy of privatization, austerity and spending freezes that Brazil’s oligarchical class has long craved. And, most of all, he was the tool used to remove Dilma.

Recall that Temer himself, when speaking in New York in September to foreign investors and foreign policy elites, admitted that Dilma’s impeachment was due in large part to her refusal to accept his party’s austerity program, a stunning admission which Brazil’s big media completely ignored. Whether he is impeached in favor of new elections or is permitted to stumble through the remainder of his term as a widely despised figure matters little to them. They got what they wanted.

Nonetheless, the true purpose of impeachment now stands so nakedly revealed that even the prime media authors of impeachment are being forced to acknowledge what, until very recently, they viciously mocked: that the real purpose was to protect and empower the corrupt. But as vindicated as they now are, impeachment opponents can feel no sense of celebration, as these latest events simply yet again mean that the Brazilian people will continue to suffer greatly from a political and elite class that has failed them through the most glaring deceit and oozing corruption imaginable. The greatest fraud of all was that Dilma’s impeachment was sold to the population as a means of ridding the country of mismanagement and corruption when, from the start, it was designed to do exactly the opposite.

The post In Brazil, Major New Corruption Scandals Engulf the Faction that Impeached Dilma appeared first on The Intercept.



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Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Startling Look At How Much Money Food Stamp Recipients Spend On Junk Food

ORIGINAL LINK

A new study just released by the USDA, offers a very detailed look at exactly how participants in the "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program" (SNAP, aka Food Stamps) spend their taxpayer-funded subsidies.  Unfortunately for taxpayers, the amount of money spent on soft drinks and other unnecessary junk foods/drinks is fairly staggering.  But, we suppose it's a nice taxpayer funded subsidy for the soda industry...so score one for Warren Buffett and the Coca Cola lobbyists.

Per the study, nearly $360mm, or 5.4% of the $6.6BN of food expenditures made by SNAP recipients, is spent on soft drinks alone.  In fact, soft drinks represent the single largest "commodity" purchased by SNAP participants with $100mm more spent on sodas than milk and $150mm more than beef.

Soft drinks were the top commodity bought by food stamp recipients shopping at outlets run by a single U.S. grocery retailer.

 

That is according to a new study released by the Food and Nutrition Service, the federal agency responsible for running the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as the food stamp program.

 

By contrast, milk was the top commodity bought from the same retailer by customers not on food stamps.

 

In calendar year 2011, according to the study, food stamp recipients spent approximately $357,700,000 buying soft drinks from an enterprise the study reveals only as “a leading U.S. grocery retailer.”

 

That was more than they spent on any other “food” commodity—including milk ($253,700,000), ground beef ($201,000,000), “bag snacks” ($199,300,000) or “candy-packaged” ($96,200,000), which also ranked among the top purchases.

SNAP

 

Even worse, when we added up all of the commodities that would typically be considered "junk food" (i.e. soft drinks, candy, cakes, energy drinks, etc.), we found that roughly $950mm, or just over 14% of the aggregate $6.6BN of food expenditures made by SNAP recipients, is spent on unnecessary, unhealthy products.

SNAP

 

As CNS News points out, the study was conducted by IMPAQ international and analyzed the sales of a single national retail chain back in 2011. 

The dollar amount that food stamp recipients spent on soft drinks and other commodities comes from data a retailer provided to a data analysis company the federal government hired to find out what kind of foods people on foods stamps—and Americans not on foods stamps—were buying.

 

“The Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) awarded a contract to IMPAQ International, LLC, to determine what foods are typically purchased by households receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program (SNAP) benefits,” the study explained. “This study examined point-of-sale (POS) food purchase data to determine for what foods SNAP households have the largest expenditures, including both SNAP benefits and other resources, and how their expenditures compare to those made by non-SNAP households.”

 

“POS transaction data from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2011 from a leading grocery retailer were examined for this study,” the report said.

It's a good thing democrats re-branded Food Stamps as the "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program"....otherwise we would have confused it for a blatant waste of taxpayer money on sodas and energy drinks.



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Kellogg paid 'independent' breakfast experts to promote cereal, according to a copy of a contract and leaked emails obtained by The Associated Press

ORIGINAL LINK

On its website, Kellogg touted a distinguished-sounding “Breakfast Council” of “independent experts” who helped guide its nutritional efforts. Nowhere did it say this: The maker of Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes paid the experts and fed them talking points, according to a copy of a contract and emails obtained by The Associated Press.



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"Ed-Exit" - Ron Paul Urges Americans To Secede From The Centrally-Planned School System

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan recently signed an executive order forbidding Maryland public schools from beginning classes before Labor Day. Governor Hogan’s executive order benefits businesses in Maryland’s coastal areas that lose school-aged summer employees and business from Maryland families when schools start in August. However, as Governor Hogan’s critics have pointed out, some Maryland school districts, as well as Maryland schoolchildren, benefit from an earlier start to the school year.

Governor Hogan’s executive order is the latest example of how centralized government control of education leaves many students behind. A centrally planned education system can no more meet the unique needs of every child than a centrally planned economic system can meet the unique needs of every worker and consumer.

Centralizing education at the state or, worse, federal level inevitably leads to political conflicts over issues ranging from whether students should be allowed to pray on school grounds, to what should be the curriculum, to what food should be served in the cafeteria, to who should be allowed to use which bathroom.

The centralization and politicization of education is rooted in the idea that education is a right that must be provided by the government, instead of a good that individuals should obtain in the market. Separating school from state would empower parents to find an education system that meets the needs of their children instead of using the political process to force their idea of a good education on all children.

While many politicians praise local and parental control of education, the fact is both major parties embrace federal control of education. The two sides only differ on the details. Liberals who oppose the testing mandates of No Child Left Behind enthusiastically backed President Clinton’s national testing proposals. They also back the Obama administration’s expansion of federal interference in the classroom via Common Core.

Similarly, conservatives who (correctly) not just opposed Clinton’s initiatives but called for the abolition of the Department of Education enthusiastically supported No Child Left Behind. Even most conservatives who oppose Common Core, federal bathroom and cafeteria mandates, and other federal education policies, support reforming, instead of eliminating, the Department of Education.

Politicians will not voluntarily relinquish control over education to parents. Therefore, parents and other concerned citizens should take a page from the UK and work to “Ed-Exit” government-controlled education. Parents and other concerned citizens should pressure Congress to finally shut down the Department of Education and return the money to American families. They also must pressure state governments and local school boards to reject federal mandates, even if it means forgoing federal funding.

Parents should also explore education alternatives, such as private, charter, and religious schools, as well as homeschooling. Homeschooling is the ultimate form of Ed-Exit. Homeschooling parents have the freedom to shape every aspect of education — from the curriculum to the length of the school day to what their children have for lunch to who can and cannot use the bathroom — to fit their child's unique needs.

20161123_education.jpg

Parents interested in providing their children with a quality education emphasizing the ideas of liberty should try out my homeschooling curriculum. The curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes courses in personal finance and public speaking. The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize Austrian economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. However, unlike government schools, my curriculum never puts ideological indoctrination ahead of education.

Parents interested in Ed-Exiting from government-run schools can learn more about my curriculum at ronpaulcurriculum.com.



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When It Comes to Fake News, the U.S. Government Is the Biggest Culprit

ORIGINAL LINK
“We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.”—Former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg Let’s talk about fake news stories, shall we? There’s the garden variety…

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Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Post-Truth and Fake News

ORIGINAL LINK

Yes, by all means, do something about the fake news that is propagating through Facebook and Twitter. But let's not forget that we have been in the post-truth era for some time (indeed, one wonders whether we ever entered the truth era in the first place).

After all, the rise of the post-truth era is made possible by the failures of the education system to prepare people to identify truth for themselves, and the failure of traditional media to present the news in an honest and forthright manner.

It's true, Facebook could easily cut down on the torrent of fake news stories circulating through social media simply by blocking access to a few sites. We could begin with the obvious: the

Beaverton

, the

Onion

, the

Manatee

. That would prevent sites like

Infowars

from portraying their parody as

fact

. And we could also cut off blatant miscreants like

the Rightists

.

Some of the more prominent election memes were instigated by

abcnews.com.co

for example: "I was paid $3000 to protest a Trump Rally"). No, it's not the ABC network. That's

abcnews.go.com

- the 'go.com' is in there because the news was lumped in with Disney's other properties for cross-promotion purposes.

But these 'fake news' sites are actually pretty funny. And it would be a shame to censor them. And if people can't tell the fake news from the real news, it's mostly because the real news does such an excellent job of parodying itself.

We would

like

to believe the real news can be trusted. But time and again it proves the opposite. Let's look at exactly the sort of thing we are faced with when truing to fine the 'truth' in traditional media:

  • Polls and Surveys. Yes we all love 538 (and in Canada, 308). But that doesn't make up for the plastering of almost-daily poll results in every media outlet in the country (along with the usual made-up 'expanations' of why the polls went up or down). Polls are not news; punditry about pools is barely disguised fiction.
  • Anniversaries. How much of traditional media 'news' content is filled with the observation that it was '50 years since...' or '100 years ago on this day...' and so on. We have holidays for that! But of course, the traditional media also reports that it's a holiday, same time, every year, as though it's news.
  • Endorsing the corporate candidate. In an article quoting Barack Obama as criticizing fake news the Providence Journal does not even not the irony of its lede: "Hillary Clinton was the choice of nearly every American newspaper editorial board. It didn't matter." In Canada, we had a similar case where every newspaper endorsed former prime minister Stephen  Harper. These newspapers are looking out for their corporate owners - and their readers see it plainly.
  • Uncritical reporting. It's not just Donald Trump who was allowed to say pretty much anything without correction. The news media is full of people making preposterous claims. Where is the filter that allows us to screen out claims that Mexico will pay for the wall, or that corporate tax cuts will create jobs? 
  • Reliable sources. They aren't. When factcheck.org analyzed the election, it found that the sources of most of the lies weren't the campaigns themselves, but the supposedly trustworthy institutions like the parties' national committees. We have to learn that institutions lie, they lie frequently, and they lie very well, and the traditional media actually helps them do this.
  • Media hype. Why do we even have a hype cycle?  It's driven by the traditionmal media's propensity to make (or repeat) outlandish claims for often dubious technologies. Even inventions of some value fall victim (and are therefore unfairly criticized). The hype has a predictable pattern than should make it clear it's not news: "a hotbed topic; a sexy, futuristic, ‘cyberpunk’ technology; and the potential for financial returns."
  • Fear. Irrational fear. I just got email from Forbes saying "what are you going to do when you lose your job in 6 months?" Never mind that this will happen to a small percentage of us (and that Forbes readers are generally able to bounce back). The purpose here is to make us terrified and afraid. Just as are the crime stories, the immigrant stories, etc.
  • Supermoon and other misleading trivia. To read the traditional media, it was a once-in-a-lifetime event to see a 'supermoon'. Not counting the supermoons of 2011, 2013, and 2014, to name a few. Glorifying even the most trivial (non-controversial) thing seems to be what the traditional media do. Even then, they get many of the details wrong. But it's far easier than reporting the news.
  • Advertorial - not to be confused with advertisements that look like news stories, these are news stories that are advertisements. You see them on your evening television news every day - a promotion for a new restaurant, a plug for a movie, a story about the next new Christmas toy 'craze'. Or those Black Friday stories (which are really odd coming from Canadian television).
  • Obsessively chasing non-scandals. For example, spending more time talking about Hillary Clinton's emails than all policy issues combined.Even it it were a scandal (and it genuinely wasn't) it wouldn't have deserved this much coverage. What wasn't covered? Anything to do with policy.
  • Unnamed sources. As Jeff Jarvis says, "the source matters". Yet in so many cases, the source in the traditional media is not named. We don't know whether it's a campaign insider or someone posing as a campaign insider.
  • The echo chamber. We hear many complaints about social media being an echo chamber. But traditional media are the biggest echo chamber of them all. We hear from the same sources, the same spokesmen, the same suits and the same pundits. 
  • Fake experts. Who are the experts called upon by traditional media? Often, they are sources provided by lobbyists and speakers' bureaus. As this article notes, "Being published in the media sometimes provides commentators with “expert” status even if they lack expertise on the subject matter being discussed and have no relevant research on the topic." 
  • Reposting press releases - when I ran the Moncton Free Press I would see the exact same content coming from the local newspaper site and Canada NewsWire. There's nothing inherently wrong with a press release, but the newspaper was attributing it to 'STAFF' and passing it off as news, which is blatantly dishonest. The practice never slowed, not even when they were called out on it.
  • Sloppy sloppy sloppy reasoning. The traditional media commits logical fallacies on a regular basis. Surprisingly, when I pointed this out to them, they changed nothing.
  • Poor design. We get reams of old articles shared through social media pretending to be articles from today. OK, sure, it was wrong of the conservative news site to promote this article on changing the electoral college vote in Maryland. But if NBC News made the date much more prominent, it would be impossible to fool people. But that would cut down on archive views.
  • Nationalism. Being Canadian, I am exposed to a lot of nationalism in media - not only our home-grown nationalism, but also from the U.S. (of course) and even from places like Britain, China and Russia. It just underlines to me how far at odd are nationalism and truth.And just how much it is relied upon by traditional media.
  • Think tanks. These supposedly 'independent' voices are not. They are funded by various interests (historically from the far right but now from across the spectrum) to spead misleading research and (sometimes) outright lies. In Canada we have the Fraser Institute, the C.D. Howe Institute, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies and many more. These should never be given an uncritical platform. But this is what the traditional media gives them every day. 
  • Institution envy. There are a few sources that make the traditional media go gaga. Thus we get 'The Harvard Study...', the 'Oxford report...', a 'Yale analysis...' and so on. There's nothing about the source of these items that makes them more likely to be true, nor more important, yet traditional media can't get enough of them, even though they collectively exhibit a pronounced slant.

As Jessi Hempel

writes

, "In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, (Snopes managing editor Brooke) Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer"

We won't solve our problems with the truth by suppressing fake news. We see this in less democratic regimes, and it's never successful. We solve the problem only by having some news agencies that

get it right

- that are trustworthy, and can be

known

to be trustworthy.

And note: it's not enough to create a news media that

I

think can be trusted. The disaffected inhabit all sides of the political spectrum. The media needs to win back the Sanders supporters, the Trump supporters, and sceptical readers in Moscow and Beijing.

Yes, the failure of education and growth of inequality have been reported elsewhere. As Ben Williamson writes, " the statistics from the EU referendum indicate that the vote for leaving the EU was concentrated in geographical areas already most affected by growing economic, cultural and social inequalities, as well as by physical pain and mental

ill-health

and rising mortality rates."

And as he notes, "

Jamie Bartlett and Carl Miller

of the think tank Demos wrote a report 5 years ago that highlighted a need to teach young people critical thinking and scepticism online to ‘allow them to better identify outright lies, scams, hoaxes, selective half-truths, and mistakes.’"

But let's not blame the less-educated. The most educated people in society have

made

this the environment we're living in.

Reading

Backchannel -

According to Snopes, fake news is not the problem

Code Acts in Education -

Social media and public pedagogies of political mis-education

Digital Digs -

Pluralism and the nonmodern, nonliberal society

FactCheck.org -

How to spot fake news

Fast Company -

How We Got to Post-Truth

Fast Company -

Fake U.S. News is a Global Problem

Medium -

A Call for Cooperation Against Fake News

Quartz -

Oxford Dictionaries declare 'Post'Truth' the word of the year

.

the Conversation (

Andina Dwifatm)

-

Everyone’s an expert: in the digital era, fakes need to be exposed

Washington Post.

Donald Trump is crashing the system. Journalists need to build a new one


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Breitbart is really mad at Donald Trump for his “broken promise” to pursue criminal charges against Hillary Clinton

ORIGINAL LINK

Trump-breitbart.jpg

Trump breitbart

(Credit: Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast)

The chants of “Lock her up” were a familiar refrain at Donald Trump’s campaign rallies, as his right-wing demanded to see criminal charges against former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server. But now that Trump’s defeated his opponent and is set to take the White House, in an apparent shock even to himself, he is already signaling that he fully intends to break that campaign pledge.

This is not going over well with the base.

Broken Promise: Trump ‘Doesn’t Wish to Pursue’ Clinton Email Charges,” reads the headline at Trump’s most loyalist website, Breitbart:

Screen Shot 2016-11-22 at 9.13.27 AM

 

Despite its former executive chairman, Steve Bannon, serving as CEO of Trump’s campaign and recently being named as a senior advisor in his White House, Breitbart finally broke away from its unwavering support to slam Trump’s sudden change of heart.

And it’s not just Breitbart that’s mad at Trump. Judicial Watch, the conservative watchdog agency that sued to get more of Clinton’s State Department emails released, ,was swift to react to Team Trump’s shift. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton urged Trump on Tuesday to “commit his administration” to investigating Clinton, saying a refusal to do so “would be a betrayal of his promise to the American people to ‘drain the swamp’ of out-of-control corruption in Washington, DC.”

“President-elect Trump should focus on healing the broken justice system, affirm the rule of law and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton scandals,” the statement read.

Whoa! I thought we elected @realDonaldTrump president. Did we make him the FBI, & DOJ? His job is to pick those guys, not do their jobs. https://t.co/8JCQOO0dSF

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 22, 2016

@realDonaldTrump
No to put Clinton in jail in YOUR FIRST MISTAKE!
You ran on that, & some of us voted on it. LOCK HER UP!

— wendy r lacy (@wendylacy3) November 22, 2016

@KellyannePolls ITS NOT TRUMP'S DUTY TO HELP CRIMINAL CLINTON TO HEAL!! #LOCKHERUP

— BLS Adam (@bls_sdmf_77) November 22, 2016

Earlier Tuesday, former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway went on MSNBC, where she indicated Trump was going to back off his pledge.

“Look, I think he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign aren’t among them,” she said. “I think when the President-elect, who’s also the head of your party, tells you before he’s even inaugurated that he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone, and content. And I think Hillary Clinton still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her to be honest or trustworthy, but if Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that’s a good thing.”

Even top Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani, who was perhaps most fervent in his insistence that Clinton should be held criminally liable even though the FBI declared it found no actual law breaking, backed off his hardline stance Tuesday.

“Look, there’s a tradition in American politics that after you win an election, you sort of put things behind you,” he told reporters inside Trump Tower after Conway made her comments. “And if that’s the decision he reached, that’s perfectly consistent with sort of a historical pattern of things come up, you say a lot of things, even some bad things might happen, and then you can sort of put it behind you in order to unite the nation.”

 



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