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    Murdoch’s TikTok? Trump offers allies another lever of media control

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    Donald Trump revealed last week the US and China are close to inking a deal to let TikTok continue operating in the US. Details are not final, but should the agreement go through as has been reported, the owners of the US’s most powerful cable TV channels may soon also steer the nation’s most influential social network. The arrangement would gift Trump’s billionaire allies a degree of control over US media that would be vast and unprecedented.Here’s what we know. Under the known terms of the deal, which Trump declared has the tentative buy-in of Chinese president Xi Jinping, TikTok in the US would get a new group of US investors, led by the US software giant Oracle, which would license TikTok’s vaunted recommendation algorithm and take over its security.Among the other investors, Trump said in a Fox News interview on Sunday, are media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the CEO of Fox Corporation. Trump said Michael Dell, the CEO of the computer maker Dell, would also be involved.TikTok would get a new seven-member board of directors, six of them Americans. It is a distinct possibility that Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance and Larry’s son, will occupy some of those seats.The MurdochsLachlan Murdoch, the 54-year-old son of 94-year-old Rupert, is executive chair and chief executive officer of Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News. The Murdoch scion took control of the company following a September legal settlement with his siblings, one of whom, James, reportedly no longer wants anything to do with his father’s conservative empire. The deal for TikTok will likely involve Fox’s parent company investing, rather than Rupert or Lachlan individually, CNN reported.“I hate to tell you this – a man named Lachlan is involved. You know who Lachlan is? That’s a very unusual name, Lachlan Murdoch,” Trump said. “Rupert is probably gonna be in the group, I think they’re gonna be in the group, a couple of others. Really great people. Very prominent people. And they’re also American patriots, they love this country, so I think they’re gonna do a really good job.”Asserting supervision of TikTok would offer the elder Murdoch a mulligan for his abortive ambitions in tech. News Corp purchased Myspace in 2005 for a then-whopping $580m. Three years later, it peaked, becoming the most-visited site in the US. However, the insurgent social network Facebook soon dethroned it, and Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth today amounts to 10 times that of Rupert Murdoch’s, per Bloomberg’s billionaires index.The EllisonsTrump seems to have a fondness for father-son pairs. At the other end of TikTok’s American boardroom may sit Larry and David Ellison, 81 and 42, the founders of Oracle and Skydance Media, respectively.The elder Ellison is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Oracle, an enterprise software and cloud-computing company worth nearly $900bn. Ellison himself, who holds roughly 40% of Oracle’s shares, briefly dethroned Elon Musk as the richest person in the world after the company reported superlative earnings earlier this month. He’s a longtime Silicon Valley fixture and Trump donor who hosted a fundraiser for the president at his southern California estate in 2020. He’s known for a jet-setting lifestyle of multiple mega-yachts and the deed to almost all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai.The younger Ellison’s company has become an entertainment industry vacuum, sucking up Paramount – which operates CBS, BET, Nickelodeon, Paramount+ and the UK’s Channel 5 and which produces the Mission: Impossible franchise – in August. Hot off the heels of its corporate consummation, Paramount Skydance is now reportedly preparing a majority-cash offer to take over Warner Bros Discovery, owner of CNN, HBO, DC Comics, the Discovery Channel, HGTV and the Food Network, to name a few.In the months leading up to the merger, CBS News made a series of Trump-friendly moves like settling a lawsuit against 60 Minutes, appointing a Trump ally as an ombudsman and courting “anti-woke” former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss as a potential leader of a changed version of the channel. The moves may serve as a roadmap for how David Ellison would helm TikTok.How powerful would they become?The power centralized in the Murdoch and Ellison families would be enormous should the TikTok deal and David Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros Discovery go through. They would command media outlets that reach both young and old audiences, with high degrees of authority and influence. The only age groups perhaps immune to their sway would be gen X, so suspicious of their parents’ viewing habits, and millennials, just too old for TikTok.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWould this type of consolidation be legal? The Federal Communications Commission’s website is blunt in its anti-monopoly rules when it comes to broadcast television: “FCC rules effectively prohibit a merger between any two of the big four broadcast television networks: ABC, CBS, Fox [Broadcasting Company], and NBC.” The regulation does not pertain to Fox News Channel or CNN, as they require paid subscriptions to view.Still, the rule is instructive. What if the owners of the US’s most powerful cable channels also steer the nation’s most important social network? Would that violate monopoly laws?The answer may lie in a rule change the commission made eight years ago when it eliminated a prohibition on owning both a broadcast station and a daily newspaper in the same region. The reason: “the growth in the number and variety of sources of entertainment, news and information in the modern media marketplace”.If a person can have a town’s TV station and its newspaper, why can’t a billionaire take control of a social network used by hundreds of millions and the president’s favorite channel?Parsing the letter of the FCC’s rules likely does not matter as much as the current currency of high-level US government decisions: Trump’s favor. The president’s takeover of the FCC has already been incredibly successful, establishing a fiat over deals that allows him to pressure networks not under his allies’ control. The supreme court ruled earlier this week that Trump’s firing of the lone Democrat on the commission could stand. Though he denies it, head commissioner Brendan Carr seemed to play a leading role in Disney’s brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from ABC’s airwaves with threats against the network.The landscape of American media is looking very red as Trump’s TikTok deal takes shape. The largest owner of local TV stations in the US, Nexstar, declared fealty to Trump with its decision to no longer air Kimmel’s show, as did local TV titan Sinclair. Now two of the nation’s marquee news networks, CBS and CNN, may follow Fox’s rightwing lead. Online, X has turned from a heterogenous feed into a conservative social network. TikTok may go the same way under its Maga-approved board.At the moment, the Murdochs and the Ellisons must be savoring Trump’s favor. More

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      New allegations against Smartmatic executive in company’s voting machine contract with LA county

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      The justice department is alleging in a new court filing that three Smartmatic executives who were indicted last year on bribery and money-laundering charges transferred money from a 2018 voting machine contract with Los Angeles county into slush funds that were originally set up to pay bribes to election officials in Venezuela and the Philippines between 2012 and 2016 to obtain and retain lucrative election contracts.Prosecutors say one of the executives transferred an undisclosed amount from the $282m LA county contract into the slush funds in 2019 but did not say if anyone actually received bribes from the county’s money at that point. The government is seeking to prove the funds were part of a long pattern of bribing election officials by Smartmatic, the voting machine company, which sued Fox News for defamation after the 2020 election.A separate court filing in a lawsuit brought by Fox News against LA county to obtain records about Smartmatic’s relationship with Dean Logan, LA county’s registrar-recorder and county clerk who oversees elections and the Smartmatic contract, Fox News asserts that Logan may have received inappropriate gifts from the company in the form of business-class travel and upscale restaurant meals. Logan is supposed to report vendor gifts above $50 on annual disclosure forms, but records obtained by Fox News and included in the court filing show he did not report some gifts from Smartmatic. Logan maintains he was not required to report the travel or a meal that Fox highlights in its filing. Fox News is seeking the records from LA county to support its defense against a defamation suit filed against it by Smartmatic in 2021.Last year, prosecutors in Florida filed corruption charges against the president of UK-based Smartmatic, along with two other current and former executives, for allegedly operating a years-long bribery and money-laundering scheme that paid bribes to an election official in the Philippines. The justice department has since said that the scheme involved payments to officials in Venezuela as well, where the company obtained its first elections contract in 2004.US election integrity activists have long been concerned about Smartmatic’s contract with LA county, due to the company’s controversial history, the founders’ ties to Venezuela and a lack of transparency over company ownership. The company first tried to get into the US elections market in 2006, but a federal investigation into its ownership and potential ties to the Venezuelan government at the time put a halt to its US ambitions until it obtained the contract with LA county in 2018. Concerns about the company and its role in US elections increased last year when the justice department indicted its executives.The new revelations about the LA county money raise even more questions about the county’s contract. Prosecutors allege that the Smartmatic executives conspired for years with the owner of Jarltech International, a hardware maker in Taiwan that manufactured voting machines for Smartmatic, to overcharge customers for the systems it built then used the excess money to pay bribes to election officials in the Philippines and Venezuela. Prosecutors do not say if they overcharged LA county as well or if any LA county money actually got paid out in bribes to anyone – only that some of that money made it into slush funds that had been used in the past to pay bribes. The justice department declined to answer questions about the case but said in a court filing that it has documents and witness testimony to support its claims about LA county’s money.Smartmatic itself has not been accused of wrongdoing, only the three executives. But a Smartmatic spokesperson says the justice department allegations are “filled with misrepresentations” and also says the company operates “ethically” and abides “by all laws always, both in Los Angeles county and every jurisdiction where we operate”.The new allegations are not part of charges the justice department brought against the Smartmatic executives. Prosecutors are only asking a Florida court to allow evidence about the LA county money to show a pattern in how the executives managed their alleged bribery and money-laundering scheme.After news of the indictments broke last year, the county barred the three executives from any further association with its Smartmatic contract but did not “debar” the company itself, something it can do if a contractor shows a lack of “business integrity or business honesty”. The county can also terminate a contract if a vendor gives any county officer or employee “improper consideration” in the form of travel, entertainment or tangible gifts to secure favor. But Logan’s office says it stands by its work with the company. With regard to the implication that LA county money that got into the slush funds might have come from overcharging the county, Logan says the county’s contract with Smartmatic uses fixed pricing.“The alleged actions in the federal matter are unrelated to the work performed under contract by Smartmatic for Los Angeles County,” according to a statement sent by Logan in an email. “The County has no knowledge or visibility into how Smartmatic USA used proceeds from that contract; however, the County does validate work performed and deliverable requirements aligned to the fixed price structure of the contract prior to making any payments.”The contract runs through March 2027, but has three, two-year extension options that, if exercised, would stretch the agreement to 2033. It also does allow for changes in pricing up to 10% of the contracted amounts.The three indicted executives include company president and co-founder, Roger Alejandro Piñate Martinez Jr; Jorge Vasquez, former vice-president of hardware development for Smartmatic’s US division; and Elie Moreno, who oversaw the company’s contracts. According to a company bio, Piñate, who goes by Roger Piñate, played a “critical” role in winning the LA county contract and was chief operating officer until becoming president in 2018, the year Smartmatic won the Los Angeles contract.Piñate is a Venezuelan citizen and permanent US resident, and Elie Moreno is a Venezuelan-Israeli. The company put Piñate and Moreno on administrative leave after the announcement of their indictments last year, and currently Ruliena Piñate, Roger’s cousin, oversees Smartmatic’s LA contract with another employee. She was co-president with her cousin before his indictment. Vasquez, a US citizen, left Smartmatic in 2021 in the midst of the justice department investigation. The justice department accuses him of receiving direct kickbacks for his role in the alleged scheme.Controversial beginningsSmartmatic has been dogged by controversy almost since its founding in Florida in 1999 by Piñate and two fellow Venezuelan engineers – Antonio Mugica and Alfredo José Anzola – as a network applications developer.The company shifted to voting machines in 2004 when then-Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez was threatened with a recall referendum. Months before the recall election, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council announced it would replace the country’s six-year-old voting machines with new ones under a $91m contract awarded to Smartmatic, Bizta – a small software firm owned by Mugica and his father – and the state-run telecom CANTV. Smartmatic and Bizta got the contract despite having no experience in voting machines or elections. There were other concerns about the deal as well: the Venezuelan government owned 28% of Bizta through a $200,000 investment in the firm, a close associate of Chávez was on Bizta’s board, and two of the five members of the electoral council denounced the contract, citing irregularity with the bidding process.Chávez survived his recall battle, though not without additional controversy: he and his supporters were accused of rigging the election based on an outcome that differed from an exit poll. However, after an audit of the results, the US-based Carter Center, which monitors overseas elections, supported the outcome, as did the US state department.Riding its success in Venezuela, Smartmatic tried to enter the US elections market in 2006 by using money from the Venezuela contract to buy the California-based Sequoia Voting Systems, whose voting systems were used across the US. The purchase caught the attention of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which launched an investigation into Smartmatic’s ownership and possible ties to the Venezuelan government. But rather than cooperate with the federal inquiry, Smartmatic quickly sold off Sequoia.The company then turned to Europe and other election markets, moving its headquarters to the UK in 2012. It won a contract worth more than $180m to supply the Philippines with more than 90,000 voting machines for its 2016 elections, with Jarltech International on board to manufacture the machines. But the company became embroiled in more controversy almost immediately after the election when Philippine authorities charged the head of Smartmatic’s technical support team and two subordinates with accessing a system on election night used to transmit unofficial results and making an unauthorized change to code. The case was later dismissed.Two years after the Philippines election, Smartmatic won the Los Angeles contract. Smartmatic hoped to parlay this win to expand across the US. But after its machines were used for the first time in the 2020 presidential primary and general election, Donald Trump, who lost the election, falsely accused Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems of manipulating the results to give the election to Joe Biden.These claims were amplified by Fox News and other media outlets sympathetic to Trump, and in 2021, Smartmatic filed a series of defamation lawsuits against media outlets and Trump supporters who they say encouraged and amplified the vote-rigging assertions, including a $2.7bn defamation suit against Fox News. Smartmatic claims Fox News reporting decimated its US business prospects, causing other election jurisdictions to shun it. But Fox News says it simply covered newsworthy claims made by Trump and others.Last year Smartmatic settled a similar suit against Newsmax for $40m and against One America News for an undisclosed sum and seemed to be on path to win or settle the Fox News suit as well until the indictment of its executives. Fox News has used the indictments and alleged bribery scheme to support its defense in the defamation suit, saying in court documents that if the company has had trouble expanding its business in the US, it’s due to these allegations and the company’s troubled history, not Fox News reporting.The chargesProsecutors from the southern district of Florida allege that the three Smartmatic executives and Jarltech owner Andy Wang engaged in a years-long conspiracy to overcharge the Philippines government for voting machines, then used the fraudulently obtained funds to pay more than $1m in kickbacks to Juan Andres Bautista – chair of the Philippine elections commission at the time – to win and retain a contract to supply systems for the 2016 elections there.Jarltech allegedly overcharged the Philippines government $10-$50 per voting machine in “extra” or “rush” fees, amassing about $6m in a slush fund to pay the bribes. Wang allegedly managed the funds in Hong Kong bank accounts, and Smartmatic executives directed the payments, using bogus purchasing agreements, shell companies and banks in Europe, Asia and the US. Bautista passed the money to a family member who then bought a condo in San Francisco, prosecutors say.Wang did not respond to questions from the Guardian.The justice department investigation began after Bautista’s estranged wife told Philippine authorities in 2017 that her husband had $20m in “unexplained wealth” and provided them with 35 passbooks for offshore bank accounts in Bautista’s name. Bautista resigned as chair of the election commission two months later, and in 2023, news broke that the justice department had filed charges against him and was investigating unnamed Smartmatic executives as well.But the scheme didn’t start with the Philippines. Prosecutors say the conspirators had also inflated the cost of voting machines sold to Venezuela to amass $4m for bribes paid to unnamed Venezuelan officials between 2012 and 2014 , showing a pattern of illegal activity. In 2019, prosecutors say Piñate also transferred ownership of an upscale home in Caracas to Tibisay Lucena Ramírez, then president of the Venezuelan National Electoral Council, to secure her assistance with its business interests in that country.A Smartmatic spokesperson calls the house claim “untethered from reality”. She says Smartmatic “ceased all operations in Venezuela in August 2017 after blowing the whistle on the government and has never sought to secure business there again”.In 2017, Smartmatic accused the Venezuelan electoral council and the Nicolás Maduro regime of manipulating voter turnout numbers and election results and ceased business in the country. But prosecutors say Piñate hoped to repair the relationship with Venezuela with Ramírez’s help and gave her the Caracas home as a bribe. Ramírez died in 2023.Los Angeles countyThe federal case against Smartmatic executives and the company’s lawsuit against Fox News have now become intertwined due to the new allegations about the LA county money and questions about whether the executives used bribes to win favor around the county contract. Fox News says in its recent filing against LA county that it “does not yet have evidence that slush fund payments or real estate title transfers were made to any L.A. County official”, but it says that gifts Logan received from the company follow “patterns of misconduct” that prosecutors have alleged occurred in other countries, and that Logan cultivated an unusually close relationship with Smartmatic executives that went “well beyond typical business relationships.”Logan took a nine-day trip to the Maldives and Taiwan in July 2019 that was partially funded by Smartmatic, including business-class air fare, accommodations and meals, according to text messages obtained by Fox News and included in its court filing. The Maldives portion was covered by an organization that invited Logan to speak there, but Smartmatic paid for Logan’s travel to Taiwan. Based on another text message not included in the court filing but seen by the Guardian, Smartmatic played a role in coordinating the conference invitation to Logan as well.Logan’s wife accompanied him on the trip, but the text messages indicate he gave his credit card number to Smartmatic to cover her $5,000 air fare. Logan and his wife tacked on tourist activity to the Taiwan portion of their trip, and it’s not clear how much Smartmatic paid for the entire excursion. Under California Fair Political Practices Commission regulations, gifts to state and local officials from a single source were limited to $500 a year when Logan took the trip. Smartmatic would not say how much it paid for the Taiwan trip, citing ongoing litigation.An LA county spokesperson said in an email that the Taiwan trip was not a gift but a work trip to conduct oversight of the manufacturing process – the trip included a visit to Jarltech, the subcontractor that was making the hardware for LA county’s machines. The spokesperson wrote: “the lead from the County’s VSAP design contractor was also part of the trip, which included detailed reviews and presentations of products that required approval prior to manufacturing, and onsite visits to multiple product and manufacturing assembly plants/operations.”Approval of the manufacturing process was required as part of the contract, he says, and “protocols for notification and approval of the travel were followed and are documented in the responsive records provided [to Fox News]”.Asked why the project manager for the contract, whose job is “inspecting any and all tasks, deliverables, goods, services, or other work provided by or on behalf of the Contractor” didn’t visit the Jarltech facilities instead of Logan, spokesperson Michael Sanchez said that as chief elections official “Logan had and continues to have clear responsibility for ensuring contract compliance.”Fox News disputes that the travel was covered under the contract, noting that the contract only mentions paying travel expenses if county officials are auditing financial records related to Smartmatic’s contract with the county and have to travel outside the county to view the company’s financial records. Sanchez says the paragraph addressing travel expenses “is not limited to the inspection of financial records for a financial audit” but includes travel to “examine … any pertinent transaction, activity, or record” relating to the contract.In addition to the Taiwan travel, Fox News says Smartmatic paid for an unknown number of meals in upscale restaurants for Logan, at least one of which Logan did not report on annual disclosure form in 2022. In a deposition in the lawsuit Fox has filed against LA county to obtain Logan’s records, Logan disputes that he was required to report the meal because he says it was a personal meal with a Smartmatic employee.He also rejects the suggestion that Smartmatic won its contract out of favoritism.“The contract between Los Angeles County and Smartmatic USA was competitively bid, evaluated, and awarded in compliance with the County’s open competitive public procurement processes,” Logan wrote in an email. More

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      Trump nominates ex-Fox commentator Tammy Bruce for deputy UN ambassador

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      Donald Trump said on Saturday he was nominating Tammy Bruce, the state department spokesperson, as the next US deputy representative to the United Nations, which would make the former Fox News commentator an ambassador.The president made the announcement on Truth Social, where he praised Bruce as a “Great Patriot, Television Personality, and Bestselling Author”.She has been serving as the chief spokesperson for the state department since Trump took office this year.Trump said Bruce, who had no prior foreign policy experience before being named state department spokesperson in January, “will represent our Country brilliantly at the United Nations”.Bruce is a former radio host who was a commentator on Fox News for more than 20 years, where she also served as an occasional guest host of Trump favorite Sean Hannity’s show. She served as the president of the National Organization for Women’s Los Angeles chapter from 1990 to 1996. Before her political conversion to conservatism, she hosted a radio show where her outspoken views were broadcast widely on Los Angeles station KFI, and she was one of the few radio commentators representing the progressive movement at that time.Bruce was fired from her radio job after she vocally protested OJ Simpson’s 1995 acquittal and later became a critic of progressive feminism.She rose to national prominence thanks to her conservative TV appearances and writing. In 2002, Bruce published her book The New Thought Police, in which she claimed to “expose the dangerous rise of Left-wing McCarthyism”. She was also briefly a contributor to the Guardian’s opinion pages.Bruce, a lesbian who was given an award by the Log Cabin Republicans at a Mar-a-Lago gala in 2022, has been outspoken in her opposition to transgender rights. She has shared articles that spread misinformation about the trans community, including pieces featuring anti-trans “detransitioner” activist Chloe Cole.As a spokesperson, she has defended the Trump administration’s foreign policy decisions, ranging from its mass deportation policies to its handling of the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, which Trump had promised on the campaign trail he would quickly end.If Bruce is confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, she could be in post before the man nominated to be her boss, Mike Waltz. The former national security adviser’s Senate confirmation for US ambassador to the UN has reportedly been stalled by Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who clashed with Waltz over his prior support for keeping US troops in Afghanistan. More

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      Has the Epstein affair strained Trump’s cozy relationship with the Murdoch media empire?

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      In the wake of new revelations regarding the friendship of Donald Trump and disgraced and deceased billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has both poured gasoline on to the story and come to Trump’s loyal defense. Experts say that, much like the broader Maga movement, the Epstein affair is testing Trump and Murdoch’s mostly chummy relationship.To think, only months ago, at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were laughing together in the pews.But in Trump’s latest attempt to deny and deflect when faced with controversy, he’s calling for his first predecessor’s prosecution over trying “to rig the election” against him in 2016. Of course, Fox News, the crown jewel in Murdoch’s wallet of media properties, has followed suit: in one of the days following the fallout from Epstein, mentions of Obama’s name reportedly drowned out that of the convicted pedophile and suspected spy, by a score of 117 to two.But there is trouble in paradise. Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ) broke the story that Trump allegedly penned a seedy birthday message to Epstein in 2003. The president then did what he does best: filed a libel suit for billions in damages.“The Trump-Murdoch media dynasty has traditionally been a cozy one,” said Margot Susca, an assistant professor of journalism at American University and the author of Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy. “Murdoch-owned Fox News serves up what amounts to state-owned television for Trump.”At the outset of his second presidency, Trump named several Fox News personalities to his stable of figures in the administration, namely Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense who was a weekend host of Fox & Friends and has taken on his role at the Pentagon with the vigor expected of a veteran talking head.“I’d like to believe the $10bn defamation lawsuit Trump filed against the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch for its Epstein coverage will serve as a wakeup call that Murdoch is not immune to Trump’s press bullying,” she said, referring to the legion of ways Trump has imposed his will against the fifth estate. “They should have favored press freedom and picked the press’s role in democracy over access and cronyism.”The White House, thus far, has had a direct line to the most influential broadcaster in the country.Susca admitted that though the WSJ is a “bright spot” among the “lapdog coverage” for the president in the list of other Murdoch properties, Fox, the highest-rated news network in America, could easily be holding the government accountable day to day. But on the one hand, as Susca pointed out, Fox has “barely mentioned” the defamation suit, while on the other, the WSJ “still has its Epstein story posted”.Trump, eager to escape the myriad and legitimate questions surrounding his well-documented former friendship with Epstein, has rallied all of his media and congressional troops to distract his associations with a conspiracy theory that he himself has stoked among his Maga disciples for years.“Clearly, Trump wants to distract from the fact that he had a close and intimate friendship with Epstein, a billionaire pedophile that seemed to have set up a global trafficking ring,” said Edward Ongweso Jr, a senior researcher at Security in Context, an international project of scholars housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “And he wants to distract from the obvious implication of his about-face here (going from insisting the Epstein files will be released to insisting they never did and were invented by Democrats to take him down): that he’s in them.”Ongweso did note that Trump’s continued ability to dodge becoming a casualty of the news cycle is unmatched: “It is hard to imagine how any of his tactics will work, but then again he has gotten out of almost every single situation that would’ve doomed anyone else, hasn’t he?”But there’s help already on the way for the president.Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, issued a convenient end to the congressional session to avoid a vote on the floor for the release of all the Department of Justice files relating to Epstein, while Mike Flynn, former Trump national security adviser (turned QAnon peddler) and former general, has told followers Obama needs to go to jail over the years-old Mueller report of 2019.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The entire corrupt investigation was based on a fabricated lie that was part of a COUP by [Obama] to overthrow the United States,” he posted on X, before calling on the FBI and justice department to investigate and arrest the former president. “EVIL PERSONIFIED!” he said in another post with hundreds of thousands of views. Flynn’s endorsement of the Obama conspiracy was a sharp turn away from days of breathlessly begging for the release of the Epstein files.But while the WSJ, a more independent and centrist publication in comparison with the rest of Murdoch’s media empire, cast a stone against the president, Fox News is more than making up for it. Perhaps, that is, to avoid the fates of Paramount and ABC, which paid off Trump in large sums to settle suits that ultimately involved freedom of the press issues. Both networks stood to beat Trump on the facts of the cases, but avoided more litigation in what many have seen as a veritable bribe to a suit-happy and powerful president.“I think this is more about caution than falling in line, but I can’t see how it will last,” Ongweso said, referring to Fox and its coverage of Obama over the more salacious and Maga topic of Epstein. “He’s been able to get Paramount and ABC to settle even though their cases were winnable.”Last year, Murdoch’s Fox decimated CNN on election night, scoring millions more viewers and having their hosts fawning over Trump, a far cry from when the network enraged him by declaring Arizona for Joe Biden in 2020 – ultimately ruling on who won the presidency.Murdoch himself is rumored not to be a personal fan of Trump, reportedly backing Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, for the presidency in the lead-up to the 2024 election, before switching sides again. Even his own immediate family has enjoyed cozy relationships with media companies that were firmly in the Democratic orbit.Still, Ongweso believes WSJ reporters might smell blood in the water for the president and report on him accordingly.“There has been a trickle of additional Epstein-Trump material, most recently the resurfacing of photos showing Epstein at Trump’s 1993 wedding to Martha Maples,” he said. “There is certainly more that WSJ reporters will uncover and unless there’s editorial interference, I can’t see how Murdoch’s empire can stop itself from uttering his name again.” More

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      Newsom ready to pursue lawsuit against Fox News host despite on-air apology

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      The California governor, Gavin Newsom, and Fox News host Jesse Watters have locked into a political tit-for-tat after the network figure admitted to mistakenly claiming that Newsom lied about a phone call with Donald Trump during June’s anti-immigration enforcement protests in the state.On Thursday, Watters issued an apology on his program stemming from a $787m defamation lawsuit filed by Newsom against the host and Fox News, as the Los Angeles Times and other outlets reported. Newsom’s lawsuit claimed that Watters lied on air about the timeline of the governor’s conversations with the president during the peak of the anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) protests across Los Angeles.Newsom contended that Watters intentionally manipulated his reporting to make it seem as though the governor had lied about a phone call he had with Trump.On 10 June, Trump publicly said that he had spoken to Newsom “a day ago”, adding that he had called the governor to tell him “you’ve got to do a better job, you’re doing a bad job”. Trump’s comments implied that the two leaders had spoken to each other on the same day that the president ordered several hundred US marines to be deployed to Los Angeles – a decision that was met with widespread opposition from California leaders.After Trump’s comments, Newsom pushed back on social media against the president’s narrative. Newsom had publicly said that he spoke to Trump after midnight on 7 June, during which there was no discussion of deploying any marines.In a post on X, Newsom wrote: “There was no call. Not even a voicemail. Americans should be alarmed that a president deploying marines onto our streets doesn’t even know who he’s talking to.”Trump in response sent a screenshot of his 7 June call log to the Fox News anchor John Roberts. Watters then proceeded to show the screenshot on his program, as well as a video clip of Trump’s comments on 10 June about his call with Newsom. In the video clip, the part where Trump said he had spoken to Newsom “a day ago” was omitted, the Los Angeles Times reported.The outlet, which reviewed the clip, further added that the bottom of the screen said: “Gavin lied about Trump’s call.”View image in fullscreenAs part of the defamation suit Newsom subsequently filed against the network, the governor’s lawyers said that they would dismiss the case if Fox admitted to falsely misrepresenting the timeline of the phone call with Trump.“We expect that you will give the same airtime in retracting these falsehoods as you spent presenting and amplifying them,” Newsom’s lawyers said in a letter to Fox, which the Los Angeles Times reviewed. “Further, Mr Watters and Fox News must issue a formal on-air apology for the lie you have spread about Governor Newsom.”On Thursday, Watters issued a lukewarm apology on air, saying: “‘Not even a voicemail’ – we took that to mean there was no call ever … We thought the dispute was about whether there was a phone call at all when he said without qualification that there was no call.“Now Newsom’s telling us what was in his head when he wrote the tweet,” Watters added. “He didn’t deceive anybody on purpose, so I’m sorry, he wasn’t lying. He was just confusing and unclear. Next time, governor, why don’t you say what you mean.”In response to Watters’s comments on air, Newsom provided a statement to the Los Angeles Times suggesting he would forge on with his lawsuit.“Discovery will be fun,” the statement reportedly said. “See you in court, buddy.” More

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      So big, so beautiful: Fox News ignores the critics and champions Trump’s bill

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      Donald Trump’s mega-bill has been widely criticized in the press. News outlets and Democrats have warned that millions of people could be stripped of their health coverage through cuts to Medicaid, that cuts to food programs would see children go hungry, and that the legislation would cause the deficit to balloon.Fox News sees it differently.“This legislation is packed with massive, huge, important wins for you, the American people,” Sean Hannity told viewers on Monday, as US senators debated the bill in Washington.“Here’s what the bill doesn’t do. It does not decrease Medicaid, Medicare, Snap or social security benefits,” Hannity continued, a claim that completely contradicted the assessment of the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates the bill will cut Medicaid across the US by 7.6 million to 10.3 million people.Hannity had more.“The big, beautiful bill also does not increase the deficit. Instead, the deficit will go down around a little shy of $2tn – that’s to begin with, according to estimates,” he said.“Because guess what? That’s what happens when you cut taxes. It stimulates the economy, creates jobs, gets people off the welfare rolls. Guess what? People are working, now they’re paying taxes.”It was unclear where Hannity got his $2tn number from, because he didn’t say. But the CBO says the bill would add at least $3.3tn to the national debt over the next nine years, while the tax cuts will benefit high earners more than others.Hannity held up Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 as an example of how the deficit will be reduced – a take that ignored that those tax cuts saw an increase of the deficit, and had to be reversed over the rest of Reagan’s presidency.Still, Hannity was sold.“The American people are on the verge of a level of prosperity they have never experienced before,” he said.Hannity’s interpretation was starkly different from the one many Americans were seeing.Even Republican senators have been dubious about the bill’s benefits, with three voting against it in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and House Republicans wavering on Wednesday.Yet, on Tuesday, Laura Ingraham largely ignored the bill – framing it only as Democrats losing a battle to “derail” the legislation before going on a minutes-long riff about a “slide in patriotism” in the US.She went on to offer complaints that there were “more foreign flags waving” in America’s streets and that leftwing politicians believe that “America can only be redeemed when she’s totally dismantled and then remade, with millions of new people from other countries”.Elsewhere, there were occasional, albeit small, concessions that the “big, beautiful bill” might not quite be the masterly piece of legislation the White House would have people believe.“It’s not perfect, but it does need to pass if we want this tax cut,” Ainsley Earhardt said on Fox & Friends at the start of the week. Her co-host Brian Kilmeade at least presented some of the negative points in an interview with Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, on Tuesday, challenging him to address the claim that “this is a tax break for the rich”. But Bessent didn’t even attempt to address that, and Kilmeade was unwilling or unable to press him further.Later that day, the theme continued. Trace Gallagher pulled up data from the Tax Foundation and the Tax Policy Center during his show, with a series of bullet points claiming that if Trump’s bill failed it would lead to tax increases for families and small business owners.Gallagher left out the part of the Tax Foundation’s analysis where the organization said the bill would reduce incomes by 0.6% and result in a nearly $3.6tn deficit increase, and ignored the Tax Policy Center’s verdict that most of the tax cuts in the bill would go “to the highest-income households”.His guests seemingly overlooked those bits, too, as they kept up the ruse.“No bill is perfect,” Elizabeth Pipko, a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, told Gallagher, as she claimed “the Democrats seem to have forgotten that” before accusing the mainstream media, with no irony, of not accurately representing the bill.Pipko added: “I think it will pass, and I think it’ll go down in history as again another false alarm from the legacy media, from the Democrats, and another victory for President Trump.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump is waging war against the media – and winning

      by

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      As military is deployed to LA, rightwing media decry protesters as ‘invaders’

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      There were unsavory scenes in Los Angeles over the weekend, as police used teargas and “less-lethal munitions” on thousands of people gathered to protest against the arrest of undocumented immigrants.The events playing out on rightwing TV channels and in the conservative podcasting realm were almost as miserable, as excitable media figures decried protesters as “invaders”, called for both the mass arrest of elected officials and the invocation of a two-century old laws and used the chaos to push racist conspiracy theories.It came as the Trump administration said the military will remain on the ground in LA for two months, after Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. About 700 US marines deployed to the US’s second largest city on Tuesday, after LA’s police chief effectively said their presence would complicate law enforcement’s efforts.The clamor for arrests mainly focused on Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, as rightwing media followed the lead of the US president, who first made the suggestion over the weekend. Trump didn’t seem to know under what law Newsom should be arrested, and the conservative commentariat wasn’t sure either. Still, it didn’t stop them crying for the California governor to be placed in handcuffs.Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, claimed Newsom “should be arrested for obstructing US immigration law”, even as Tom Homan, the border czar, said Newsom hadn’t done anything to warrant detention. Wayne Root, a host on the rightwing channel Real America TV, suggested Newsom should be charged with “treason” and be detained at Guantánamo Bay while he awaits trial. “Be sure he showers with MS-13,” Root added, a take that, even for the rightwing media cesspool, was particularly macabre.But the right wasn’t just calling for the caging of Newsom. Some wanted Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, to be arrested too, including Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist adviser-turned-podcast host.“Right there, LAPD,” Bannon announced on Monday, apparently under the impression that the entire LA police force was listening to his War Room show.“The mayor is involved in this and having the stand down [sic]. She ought to be arrested today. Immediately.”Bannon went on to call for “hard actions,” whatever they are, adding: “Not even question we’re on the side of the righteous.”The bad takes were everywhere. Chris Plante, a host at rightwing TV channel Newsmax, said on air: “The Democrats are just – I mean, at what point are they declared to be a terrorist organization – with all of the affiliations and all the violence and the shootings and the fire-bombings and the targeting Jews and on and on?”Laura Ingraham, who often seems to be trying just a bit too hard to be offensive, went further. On her Fox News show she accused Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas, the former secretary of homeland security, of having “opened the border” and given “benefits to 10 million illegal aliens”.“The goal was to resettle America with new people in order to transform it completely in ways that you really can’t do at the ballot box, at least when you’re that radical,” Ingraham said.She was referring, not very subtly, to the concept of “great replacement”, a racist conspiracy theory that falsely claims there is an ongoing effort by liberals to replace white populations in current white-majority countries. It’s a concept that started on fringe websites before making its way to Fox News.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOthers were upset by more prosaic matters, including the sight of people at the protests flying flags other than the stars and stripes. It really set off Charlie Kirk, with the influential rightwing declaring that the US has “a parasitic relationship with Mexico, and we have for quite some time”.He added: “If you loved the promise of America, you wouldn’t wave a Mexican flag when American police tried to remove criminals. This should be a wake-up call. If you did not realize it before, guess what? Pat Buchanan and President Trump were right. We are a conquered country that has been invaded by a force in certain areas.”Kirk is uniquely placed to comment on such matters. His Turning Point USA organization sent 80 busloads of people to Washington on the day that hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, and Kirk has celebrated Trump’s mass pardon of people who attacked police officers that day.When it came to the treatment of people protesting in LA, however, Kirk was of a different mind, as he called for US troops to be used in policing US civilians.“Los Angeles does not feel like a protest, what’s happening there. It’s an entire city that’s declaring open rebellion to American sovereignty and authority,” he said. “We must be unafraid to declare the Insurrection Act of 1807.” More

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      in US Politics

      Why is Maga-land so obsessed with Kai Trump turning 18? Do you really need to ask? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Kai Trump, the president’s granddaughter and the eldest of Donald Trump Jr’s five children, has just turned 18. To be clear, I do not have a list of Trump family birthdays on my fridge. But it has been forced upon my consciousness because an awful lot of people in Trumpworld are being weird about it.Fox News, for example, decided to post both an Instagram message (which got more than 87,000 likes) and a tweet wishing Kai a very happy 18th birthday. Which is a little odd considering that the high school student is not a public figure. Kai, who has a large social media following, did briefly speak at the Republican national convention last year and has posted support for her grandfather, but that doesn’t seem to justify a birthday announcement by a major media network.Especially, by the way, as Fox News doesn’t appear to have been so excited about Barron Trump when he turned 18. (Although it did put up an Instagram post on Barron’s 19th birthday, with a quote from Donald calling him a “a very smart guy”.) It’s almost – and bear with me here – as if they have some sort of weird interest in the fact that a teenage girl has turned 18.Am I accusing the folk at Fox News of being a bunch of creeps? Absolutely not! I’d never do that. Although if you look at the reactions to the Fox News posts or the comments attached to a New York Post Page Six piece about Kai’s birthday, there are plenty of people out there who should be on some sort of watchlist or registry. Particularly the people who have read far too much into the fact that Kai recently posted a TikTok video of her and three friends dancing to Promiscuous by Nelly Furtado and Timbaland with the caption: “last day being 17″.While things have moved on somewhat, there’s also a very depressing history of media figures counting down to young girls turning the age of consent. Look at British singer Charlotte Church, who got a record deal as an opera singer when she was just 12. There was a media frenzy in 2002 when she turned 16 (the age of consent in England). On her birthday, Chris Moyles, a BBC radio DJ who was 28 at the time, publicly announced he wanted to “lead her through the forest of sexuality now she had reached 16”. Making this disgusting comment didn’t ruin Moyles’s career, by the way. Just like 38-year-old Jerry Seinfeld dating a 17-year-old high schooler hasn’t hurt the billionaire comedian’s career at all either.Harry Potter star Emma Watson has also talked about being sexualized by the media when she was a teenager. Watson has said the paparazzi even took photos up her skirt, and published them in an English tabloid, the moment she turned 18 and it was “legal”.It was a similar story with twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who have been on TV since they were tiny. In 2004 numerous websites started counting down to their 18th birthday including the “Olsen Twin Jailbait Countdown Clock” run by radio shock jocks Lex Staley and Terry Jaymes. The New York Post also crowed about the twins being “legal”.More recently, in 2018, a radio host called Patrick Connor called Olympic athlete Chloe Kim, then just 17 years old, a “little hot piece of ass”. Conner then referenced Wooderson, a character in the film Dazed and Confused who pursues high school girls. “Her 18th birthday is 23 April, and the countdown is on baby, ’cause I got my Wooderson going,” said Connor. “‘That’s what I like about them high school girls.’” In a sign that some progress has made when it comes to mainstream misogyny, Connor was forced to apologize for the remark and fired.Since we live in litigious times I would like to reiterate, once again, that while some people (not me!) have accused Fox News of being creepy about Kai, I’m sure they meant nothing sinister by their post. After all, unlike depraved liberals, the Maga crowd are an extremely wholesome bunch who live and die for family values.I will concede, however, that it is sometimes hard to wrap one’s head around the Maga definition of “family values”. The president, for example, is a legally defined sexual predator who has also been accused, by Miles Taylor, a staffer in Trump’s first administration, of sexualizing his oldest daughter Ivanka.In a book published in 2023, Taylor writes: “[Trump] said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that once led [former chief of staff] John Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter.”Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson also seems to have a strange definition of family values. I’m sorry to remind you of this if you’ve wiped it from your memory but last year Carlson made an extraordinary (even by Maga standards) speech at a Trump rally in which he likened the now president to an angry father spanking his daughter.“I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me,” Carlson said. “And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. You’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did. It has to be this way.’” The crowd then erupted into chants of “Daddy Don”!Maga also seems to adopt different values, depending on what sort of family they’re looking at. Conservative influencers were vile about Ella Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter, when Harris was running for president. Newsweek senior editor Josh Hammer wrote: “Doug Emhoff’s daughter is like something out of a horror film,” for example. Podcast host Benny Johnson also called Emhoff and her father “creepy” for having their arms around each other in a video. The right seems eager to scrutinize the family of politicians when they don’t agree with their politics. They went on the warpath, however, when a former NBCUniversal executive joked about Barron being “fair game” (meaning that it was OK for the press to criticize him) when he turned 18.Anyway, happy birthday to Kai Trump. At 18 she is still very young – but it would seem like it’s the Maga adults who have the real growing up to do. More