the SC office had no comment when Buzzfeed asked them for comment before running the story, but after running the story has come out with this very intentionally worded statement. I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
It's not odd that they didn't respond to questions initially, because they never do, but it is odd that they're actually responding to a media report. The testimony is 3 weeks away so maybe they just didn't want to deal with the circus from now until then.
I mean "Peter Carr said 'no comment'" is a literal meme at this point, but if they were going to break pattern and dispute a story, you'd think the time to do it would be before it goes to print rather than after. They're doing this for a very specific reason and I don't know what it is.
Maybe they don't want the Dems to kick off a legal investigation that might interfere with Meuller? Because it is out of character for Meuller to comment on erroneous reports... they've never corrected one before, they've just said, "no comment" and let it sort itself out. This is atypical behaviour for them.
It could also serve to give Cohen a little cover right now before his testimony. Could take some heat off him with regards to the threats he said he’s been getting. The right will use this to try to call into question all news coverage in general. And continue to bang the fake news drum. But major news sources reporting on the Buzzfeed story were quite deliberate in their “if true” caveats and specifically said that they could not confirm the story independently. The Carr statement also doesn’t actually deny what was said, but just the characterization. That’s different. It was specific.
Well Buzzfeed is toast, that was fast. I mean, that’s literally the definition of “fake news” so they have every reason to pound that drum. I was getting suspicious yesterday when the New York Times was barely touching it. I don’t think they bought it from the start. Well he hadn’t needed to, the Democrats weren’t in power before. They were gearing up to use this for grounds for impeachment. If they voted to impeach and then it gets shot down by the Senate before his report is released, that would probably destroy any power his report has if there was anything substantial in it. Plus, based on some of the issues members of his team have had with bias, (Peter Strzok, etc.), he needs to maintain the credibility of the SC office at all costs and avoid the media from further contaminating it. Nixon almost destroyed the trial of Charles Manson by publicly forming an opinion on it.
Buzzfeed is a horrid, morally bankrupt place with utter pieces of shit working for them. They are Gawker with a different name, and the sooner everyone there is unemployed the better. Nothing would hive me greater pleasure than seeing Ben Smith finally disgraced and out of a job. That fat, lying fuck shouldn’t be allowed to publish coffeehouse newsletters.
“Yeah but they have Pulitzer Prizes!” Please. And Obama has a Nobel Peace Prize. The story isn’t just about Buzzfeed writing bullshit, it’s how the rest of the media ran with it. They can say, “Buzzfeed reports...” all they want as a qualifier, they (except for a few) still ran with the story without real question. CNN had a segment of what 2020 Democratic Nominee hopefuls think about a Trump impeachment based on that story, featuring Cory Booker. With so much stuff to nail Trump on, I can’t understand how they keep fucking up their own integrity along the way. All it does is solidify the so-called Alt Right’s position on media bias and instill distrust and wariness in everyone else. I think part of it is an overzealous response to a fear that not only Trump survives whatever Mueller has, but he will beat the character and message of whomever he runs against so badly, that he gets re-elected.
I think the problem is they have so much stuff on him and if this were anyone but the president, they would be like, “well yea he did this shit. Who is innocent and continues to act like this?” We’ve seen him openly intimidate witnesses, and obstruct justice. There’s also obvious abuses of power. The problem is, no one in power cares. No one in power puts the shoe on the other foot to think once, “gee, if Obama has done x, y, or z, we would have begun impeachment hearings last year.” They are trying to see what gives out first, Ginberg’s hourglass or Bob Mueller’s report.
This is just more bullshit theorycrafting. The media has spent the last 24 hours talking nothing but impeachment based on lies. Lies. This is the very definition of fake news and I struggle to understand how to take any of you or the media seriously right now. You people have been in a fever dream for over two years now - touting shit that at times was the complete opposite of the day previous reports. Mueller will have his final report out within a month or so; do you think during this time perhaps we could return to facts and reality? By the way, in other news, testimony into the FBI/DOJ probe continues to leak. Remember? Regarding how this whole Trump investigation began? Something that we can all agree definitively happened. More and more, I wonder who will go to jail first Justice personnel or Trump. We shall see.
What you are saying right now is as I predicted earlier when the story from Buzzfeed was unspecfically and only in part, refuted. You are trying to take what might be an error from Buzzfeed and attempt to throw the entire thing out as bullshit. I guess I was in a fever dream when Paul Manafort was thrown in jail. I was also in a fever dream when the president's personal attorney plead out to lying to congress and will spend 3 years in prison. I must have also been dreaming when Cohen named Trump in his pleading indicating that he committed campaign finance violations at Trump's(individual 1) request. You think it will just stop there? Telling people that what they are seeing in reality as merely a figment of their imaginations is called gaslighting. Telling me and the other people watching this whole shitshow unfold that WE are the crazy ones is entirely predictable. It's also what this administration does every day. You think his final report will be done in a month? I don't.
I know it's important, but I'm so sick of the Mueller probe being talked about 24/7 so I'm going to throw a couple other things out there. Tulsi Gabbard announced that she's going to run for president in 2020. This took me by surprise as I had seen it tossed around, but never expected that she actually would given her age. I really like her. She resigned from her position as vice chairwoman of the DNC due to their fuckery in the primaries. That's huge for me, and she's also very against corporate money influencing politics, and unlike other candidates is actually believable. She has a mostly non-interventionist foreign policy, but isn't blinded by a need to cover up radical Islam in euphemisms and bullshit. She's pro public health care, was against TPP, was against bringing in Syrian refugees, has a good stance on the environment, wants small business regulations rolled back, and all that good stuff. In 2004 she skipped her second term in state legislature to serve in Iraq, in combat zones. The only thing that concerns me is I'm worried she has started to veer too far left on some of the economics. She supports a $15 min wage for example, which is a pretty terrible idea at the national level. I hope her platform doesn't get too nutty on issues like this as it becomes more comprehensive and fleshed out. When the media has mentioned her running, most outlets have been all out in trying to smear her. Eg, she has pretty homophobic parents so if you go back to comments from her early/mid 20s she isn't all that gay friendly. It's really stupid to me because she has a 100% rating from LGBT groups for her voting record in the house and she supported same sex marriage around the same time Obama did, and also supported it before Hillary Clinton. The outlets that have really gone after her are the Hillary worshiping ones like Vox and Huffpo. Presumably because they're still pissy she wouldn't back that fucking disaster of a candidate. On a totally separate matter, has anybody else followed the grievance studies scandal? 3 professors submitted fabricated papers to top postmodernist (read: identity politics) journals and basically wrote the most absurd, batshit insane nonsense they could think up using identity politics academic jargon. Topics included things like rewriting passages from Mein Kampf, and understanding rape culture based on how pet owners reacted to dogs humping each at park. Not only were 7 papers accepted, one of the 'feminist geography' journals even honored one of the hoax papers on it's 25th anniversary list(out of 12 selected pieces). You know, because it was such outstanding scholarship. I don't know how anyone can defend this crap as a serious academic field. This little snippet from the link I posted sums it up. To really grasp how incredible this is, I would encourage anyone to look up the papers that got accepted. It's not like they're trolling a teensy bit. They are so, so blatantly idiotic and mocking, it would be hard for even the most cynical post modernist critics to think they would have been that oblivious. Then you look at some of the real papers, which write about things like "the sinister history of milk" (spoiler: it's white!) and yeah, you really can't tell the difference.
It's basically the Sokal Affair redone. Which is good because repeatability is a hallmark of any good experiment.
Btw, there's a viral video coming down the hatch that checks more viral boxes than I even thought possible. It's going to be everywhere soon. I'm trying to fit it all into one clickbait title here and even then I think I'm leaving out pieces: Private high school MAGA teens attending anti-abortion protest stop to mock Native American Vietnam War vet at Indigenous Peoples March. Top that Buzzfeed.
Really interesting take on the Mueller/Buzzfeed business: https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/01/19/peter-carr-speaks/ tl;dr: theory goes that Mueller and the SDNY have different views of Cohen's actions because they need different things from him, Buzzfeed's reporting is accurate to the SDNY version of those actions, and that Mueller's motives in publicly disputing it relate to the necessities of his own cases down the road.
I read that one too. It’s interesting and makes legal sense if you remember the sentencing memos from both offices during Cohen’s sentencing. The SDNY, was WAYYY more harsh on Cohen and Mueller’s office acted like he was a good little boy scout. If I’m not mistaken, Mueller only charged him with lying to Congress (IIRC) and the SDNY let him plead out to criminal tax evasion and campaign finance violations. I don’t recall if Mueller’s plea agreement with Cohen specifically spoke about Trump. Mueller’s office has every reason to let people know that whatever buzzfeed reported on didn’t come from them. So they don’t compromise their whole investigation.
If Buzzfeed got its information from sources deeply familiar with the Mueller investigation, how could they report on something that only corroborates the SDNY version? That’s the part that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Because the sources may not have been lawyers for the government but people more familiar with Cohen’s side of things. The common denominator is Cohen. A lot of shit was redacted from the documents and Mueller may not want the lying to Congress thing to be known right now that it was at the behest of Trump. I’m also just speculating. But people reading into Carr’s line as a total denial of the article, I think, are mistaken. It was super carefully worded and designed to protect the SCO, not Trump.