September 2012: Barrett Brown threatens an FBI agent in video
Missed this news earlier: There was apparently a hearing Wednesday in which an attorney for former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown, who had been scheduled to stand trial later this month and in April on federal charges, was granted a continuation pushing the trial back to September. It’s important to make the point this delay was at the request of Brown’s own lawyer, because here’s the inflammatory headline:
This makes it seem like it’s the government’s fault, which it’s not, nor is it the government’s fault that nobody will go Barrett’s bail.
Doug Morris, a public defender appointed to serve as Brown’s defense counsel, asked for an extension in order to evaluate the evidence against his client, the Associate Press reports. US District Judge Sam Lindsay obliged on Wednesday this week.
The AP adds that Brown’s trial for one indictment is now slated for September 3, 2013, with trials for his second and third indictments scheduled to start on Sept. 23. Brown was arrested on Sept. 12 last year and has been in law enforcement custody for the nearly six months since.
I’m not sure what Barrett’s bail would be, but he might be considered a flight risk, given that “Commander X” (Christopher Doyon) jumped bail and is now a fugitive, and other members of Anonymous have reportedly fled the United States.
Anybody who’s seen the immortal YouTube rant in which Barrett threatened to “destroy” an FBI agent (and it helps to read the indictment that mentions an unnamed co-conspirator who helped “dox” the agent) knows that the feds have got Brown dead to rights on that charge, even if they can’t make anything else stick. The logical thing would be for Barrett to cop a plea, but apparently the U.S. Attorney’s office in this case isn’t in a mood to let Brown off with a wrist-slap, so he’ll sit in jail and wait for his trial while his lawyer from the public defender’s office “evaluates the evidence,” and good luck with that, eh?
Something else: Barrett was in custody for more than four months before the court determined he was sane enough to stand trial — just barely, perhaps — and it’s certainly not the government’s fault that Barrett Brown is crazy, unless . . .
Look, I hate to feed into anyone’s paranoia here, but everybody knows about how Neal Rauhauser helped push Barrett over the edge. And there are those who have long suspected that Rauhauser wasn’t just bragging about having FBI connections. If you had a conspiratorial worldview (as many Anonymous members do), and you knew about that unindicted co-conspirator (“another person known the grand jury“), wouldn’t you be tempted to suspect maybe Rauhauser was part of some kind of elaborate set-up, an agent provocateur who helped the feds bust Barrett?
Not that I believe that myself, you understand. But if some crazy paranoid Anonymous types believed it, who could really blame them? Because why has the unindicted co-conspirator not been indicted?
That was the headline on Schmalfeldt’s debut as the self-described “Brain-Damaged Troll” columnist at Technorati in January 2011. Bill’s theme was, as usual, completely wrong — the exact opposite of truth. Even as Schmalfeldt was ranting on about the Tea Party, “Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly” as the culprits in the Tucson massacre, actual reporters were quietly working to determine the nature of the madness behind Jared Loughner’s bloody crimes.
Loughner was not a Republican, not a conservative, not a Tea Party activist. He was a paranoid schizophrenic. Once a promising young musician — he had played saxophone in a high-school jazz group — Loughner got involved with drugs:
Some friends have traced the start of his decline to his sophomore year of high school in 2005, when he broke up with a girlfriend. He dropped out of high school after his junior year and thereafter lost touch with many of his former friends, including Caitlyn Parker. On the day of the shooting which targeted Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, Parker was one of the first of the accused gunman’s acquaintances to push back against speculation that the crime had been perpetrated by a right-winger. No, Parker said in a series of Twitter messages, the Jared Loughner she remembered was “quite liberal,” even “radical” in his politics.
Ah, so the dope-addled crazy was not a Rush Limbaugh listener, not a Glenn Beck fan, not a Fox News viewer. Well, what set him off?
The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” —parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist.
The first disclosure of the movie’s influence on the mass murder suspect’s beliefs came in an interview Wednesday with ABC News. “I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”
So, the belief that Bill Schmalfeldt expressed in his Technorati column on Sunday, Jan. 9, 2011 — that the Tea Party and conservative media personalities were directly at fault for the Tucson massacre, and that the Right was dishonestly attempting to “reassign blame” — was 180 degrees opposite of the truth. In fact, insofar as the crimes of a madman can be said to have a political motive, Loughner’s motives were those associated with the radical Left, including 9/11 Trutherism, anti-Christianity and anti-capitalist beliefs not unlike those of the “Occupy” movement.
The account of the Tucson gunman’s madness cited above is my own American Spectator column, “Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist Obsession” (Jan. 17, 2011), and regular readers will recall how much coverage of the Loughner/Zeitgeist phenomenon I provided here:
So, while I covered Loughner’s actual motive every day for seven consecutive days (Jan. 12-18), Schmalfeldt lost interest in Loughner’s motives as soon as evidence emerged proving Schmalfeldt’s original “pin-the-tail-on-the-famous-right-wingers” smear was false.
And here’s the thing: Bill Schmalfeldt never owned up to the falseness of his accusation. He continued being published at Technorati until November 2011 without ever once acknowledging that his very first column for Technorati was a big, fat, evil lie.
There are many faults and personal shortcomings that can be tolerated in journalism. Deliberate malicious dishonesty is not one of them.
Have you ever hit Da Tech Guy’s tip jar? I have and you should. Have you ever contributed to the Protein Wisdom monthly fund drive? I have and you should. And how about hitting Jimmie Bise’s tip jar? Are you some kind of Commie bolshevik pinko sympathizer, or are you gonna do something to help these guys in the fight?
Well, I could go on and on suggesting bloggers who could use your contributions. It is the general idea that matters. As I once remarked, the world is divided into two kinds of people: Good people, and sons of bitches who never hit a blogger’s tip jar.
The spectacle of “MalaysiaGate,” about which I have written much already and plan to write more soon, brings to mind the subject of generosity and cooperation. Cynical sarcasm is my stock in trade. I’d be shortchanging my own tip-jar hitters if I didn’t make wisecracks like this:
Brutal dictatorships are bad things, and so are Republican bloggers who score fat consulting contracts and don’t cut me in on the action.
The self-deprecating humor is sincere. If powerful Malaysian interests had been willing to pay $400,000 to obtain the services of a natural-born smartass, how quickly would I have cashed that check? Immediately.
Let’s not kid anybody. Honesty is a virtue, and it would be dishonest to present myself as morally superior to Josh Treviño, Ben Domenech and their friends, simply because I have never sought the kind of reputation that would make my services valuable to the ruling regimes of foreign nations. My intentional clownishness is a way of preventing myself from ever being tempted with such an offer, and also to prevent becoming the kind of self-important Serious Person whose colleagues laugh at him behind his back as the pompous douchebag he really is.
Please, laugh at my face, not behind my back.
And my face is mighty damned laughable, we must admit.
Being the court jester is a fun gig, and involves little responsibility, but I try to do my part as a member of the team, understanding that my success is dependent on the team’s success, and membership on the roster requires that I do work that is of value to the team’s common project. And this is just a 350-word preamble to an excerpt from an e-mail I sent in reply to a friend who had written to me about the MalaysiaGate story:
Ambition is a good thing. No one would get out of bed in the morning unless they had some expectation that their day’s labor would advance their own well-being. But unless ambition is wedded to morality — a sense of honor and duty — it will inevitably become a purely selfish thing. The sense of rat-race competition, the insatiable desire to exceed the fame and fortune of one’s peers, creates the idea that “everybody does it,” and that the only difference between winners and losers is that losers are insufficiently ruthless.
Loyalty must be a two-way street, and success requires teamwork. The selfish hot dog, who attempts to monopolize all the prestige of an organization by derogating his potential rivals and denying them credit for their share of the work, is seeking rewards he has not truly earned. Afflicted with narcissism, however, such people generally have the view that they are entitled to all they can get their hands on, that their personal excellence is such that they are born to rule over others, rather than to serve in any humble or obscure station. From the perspective of that worldview, the backstabbing and cronyism and conflicts of interest are just the way of the world, and anyone who criticizes those who succeed by such methods is merely envious at having been beaten at a game they were too stupid to play well. . . .
I understand that I’m playing a team sport. My success is not an isolated achievement, and I owe much to the assistance of others. Having been helped, I am obligated as a matter of duty to help others.
Generosity is not merely a moral obligation, but is necessary to the success of any cooperative enterprise. However great our personal qualities, however tireless our labors, none of us can succeed without the willing assistance of others. And such assistance is hard to obtain unless people are recognized and rewarded for their help.
Cynthia Yockey just called to tell me she wants to come to CPAC, but needs money to hire someone to watch her ailing father — for whom Cynthia is sole caregiver — for two or three days. I didn’t have time to listen to all her problems, much less to solve them myself, but I told Cynthia, “Don’t worry about the money. We’ll take care of that.”
Thor Halvorssen is, so far as I can tell, not one of the bad guys, although I don’t remember ever hearing of him until Monday night, when I was on the phone with a MalaysiaGate source who said, “It’s this Thor Halvorssen guy who’s really pushing it.”
OK, you got my attention there, Mr. Source.
What had happened was that I’d said to my source what any experienced reporter knows about this story. To borrow a favorite saying of James Carville, “When you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you know it didn’t crawl up there by itself.”
Reporters don’t spend their workdays randomly scrolling through the Federal Agent Registration Act database to see if any bloggers are getting paid by foreign dictators. That’s not how a story like this gets reported. Journalists are just too damned lazy.
“How do you spell ‘Halvorssen’?” I asked my source. Then I wrote down the name and looked up the guy on Google.
Journalism: It ain’t rocket science.
HUMAN RIGHTS FOUNDATION
Thor Halvorssen – President and CEO
A human rights advocate and film producer, Thor Halvorssen founded the Human Rights Foundation in the spring of 2005. Thor began advocating for human rights in 1989 in London by organizing opposition to South African apartheid. After completing his secondary education in the United Kingdom, he attended the University of Pennsylvania; there he became a judicial advisor for students charged inside the college judicial system. Thor’s advocacy of individual rights earned him an Ivy Day Award from the university president for “protecting freedom of speech on campus.” Having witnessed countless violations of freedom of speech and due process on United States college campuses, Thor was instrumental in creating and developing the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, serving as its first executive director and then CEO from its founding in 1999 until 2004. Under his decisive leadership, FIRE became the nation’s pre-eminent student rights organization.
OK, then: A professional do-gooder.
And this was the guy who was all up in Josh Treviño’s face on Twitter, using words like “whore” and “shill” and “corrupt” and “crimes,” because the Malaysian dictatorship is, well, a dictatorship.
Dictatorship = BAD.
Fluffy kittens = GOOD.
Being anti-dictator is a pretty easy gig, if you’re living in an affluent democracy on the other side of the world from the brutal regime. Vicious dictators usually don’t send their thugs to kill do-gooders in their offices on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
What’s that kind of anti-dictator work pay, Thor? Because this “journalism” racket barely pays the bills and, while I had been considering signing up at the temp agency for some light industrial work — driving a forklift, maybe — there’s no reason why I couldn’t pursue a new career as an International Human Rights Advocate.
Update the resumé, get a haircut, put on my good suit — where do I apply for a job like that? And, most importantly, what’s it pay?
Does it include health insurance? A 401(k)? What about travel expenses, paid holidays, sick leave and vacation?
For about $100,000 a year or so, I wouldn’t mind spending 40 hours a week denouncing foreign dictators.
“Kim Jong Un is a big fat sissy-pants!” “Alexander Lukashenko’s mother dresses him funny!” “Eat my shorts, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!” “Down with — wait. Oh, sorry. It’s three o’clock on Friday. I’ve got a dentist appointment, and next Monday’s a holiday, so I’ll be back here Tuesday at 9 a.m. to denounce dictators, expose the abuses of authoritarian regimes, and support human rights everywhere.”
Let me tell you something I figured out a long time ago, Thor: Just because it’s “non-profit” doesn’t mean people aren’t getting paid. The entire environmentalist movement exists because, in the 1970s, a bunch of hippies figured out that protesting against pollution — everybody hates pollution, right? — could be a full-time job, if the hippies could convince a lot of big-money “philanthropic” foundations to cut them a check every year.
It worked out pretty good for those hippies, some of whom have long since retired in luxury after successful careers as professional (non-profit) environmental activists, having never done an honest day’s work in their entire worthless lives.
Damn, I hate hippies. There’s a reason why, whenever I see a “peace” protest, I get nostalgic memories of the Ohio National Guard.
Something those hippies figured out about the non-profit hustle was conferences. Years ago, I did a story about how the “AIDS prevention” racket had become an excuse for government officials to fly off to tropical resort destinations — ideally, on a Caribbean island, although Hawaii and Miami were also popular — to attend conferences about AIDS prevention. There were all kinds of non-profit AIDS prevention outfits at these conferences, with seminars and discussion panels and receptions sponsored by major pharmaceutical companies.
You might not think “How to Convince Horny Dudes to Wear Rubbers” would require an annual three-day conference at a swanky hotel, but then again, you’re not employed by the National Institutes of Health or the Department of Education or a tax-exempt AIDS prevention group. And a lot of those people attend several such conferences every year.
If cynicism were a charitable cause, I’d be rolling in the green. Maybe I should apply for a Ford Foundation grant and set up a Society for the Advancement of Enlightened Cynicism.
As non-profit rackets go, the “human rights” racket ain’t bad. And I don’t think Thor Halvorssen is a bad guy. But I’m not sure “nagging people on Twitter” is a philanthropic endeavor.
Also, how about renaming your 501(c) something a bit more honest? Like, for example, “Belaboring the Bloody Obvious.”
Human rights, good. Dictatorship, bad.
Yours isn’t exactly a nuanced and complex message, is it, Thor? Is it truly a charitable activity to tell people stuff they already know, or to advocate opinions nearly everybody shares?
Don’t hate me for saying this, Thor. Hate is a bad thing, and I’m a victim — afflicted with Random Sarcasm Syndrome.
It’s genetic. I was born this way. Been a smartass my whole life.
“It’s for the children! Won’t somebody please think of the children?”
Here’s the deal, Thor: I’m determined to tell the whole truth of this MalaysiaGate scandal, and let the chips fall where they may. Brutal dictatorships are bad things, and so are Republican bloggers who score fat consulting contracts and don’t cut me in on the action.
And our old buddy Jerome “Vis Numar” Armstrong is all up in this Malaysia deal, so I’d be kind of interested in learning how much Jerome was paid by the regime in Kuala Lumpur.
What I’m trying to say, Thor Halvorssen, is that Josh Treviño and his pay-for-play pals are likely to catch a lot of grief from a lot of people by the time this thing is said and done. Your ranting at them on Twitter is really kind of redundant. Also, really annoying.
I got nothing against you, Thor. Never really heard of you until Monday night and don’t want to start a grudge now.
But the holier-than-thou Pious Pharisee act doesn’t usually lead to good results, because a Pious Pharisee is never happy just to tithe his mint and cumin. No, indeed. Sooner or later, he’s gonna find himself a scapegoat who ends up getting nailed to a cross.
Gray reported Friday that Treviño filed his disclosure in compliance with the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), listing $389,724.70 he collected as part of the Malaysia deal, reportedly brokered by Internet consultant David All.
Treviño and All, both aligned with the Republican Party, were partners with Democrat campaign consultant Jerome Armstrong in a now-defunct Web site, MalaysiaMatters.com, that was part of the paid P.R. operation. Treviño also disclosed that he paid 10 “independent contractors” to provide “opinion writing” about Malaysia in 2009 and 2010. Those payments totalled $130,950, including $36,000 to Ben Domenech, $30,000 to Rachel Ehrenfeld, $24,700 to Brad Jackson, $11,000 to Christopher Badeux and $9,500 to Rachel Motte. Minus those payments to subcontractors, Treviño’s net share of the Malaysia deal amounted to more than $250,000 over the course of three years, from May 2008 to April 2011. His FARA disclosure, filed Jan. 24 this year, described Treviño’s clients:
Government of Malaysia, its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either, acting through one or more of APCO Worldwide and the David All Group (May 2008 through September 2008), and FBC Media (February 2009 through April 2011), with whom registrant had its relationship.
The Malaysian P.R. campaign generated online articles in a number of publications including Red State, National Review, Huffington Post and the Washington Times. An October 2010 article Domenech wrote for the San Francisco Examiner (“The search for moderate Muslims“) included these paragraphs:
Yet one example of a call for moderate engagement that may prove quite profitable for our relationship with the Muslim world can be found in the Malaysian example. While on a trip to New York last month, during which he called for a “global movement of moderates” to retake the center of the international conversation, I asked Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak about the experience in his country.
“We have always taken the position that Islam is an integral part of public policy in Malaysia. By doing so, we have taken the wind from the sails of the extremists. There is no contradiction between being moderate and being Muslim,” Najib told me. “Being moderate, taking the middle path, is fundamental to Islam. It is one of the pillars of Islam. Muslims have rights, but it’s also enshrined in the teachings of Islam to safeguard non-Muslims in your midst. It’s wrong for Muslims to even be unkind to non-Muslims.”
One prominent example in recent months has been the jailing of two Muslims convicted of church arson during a series of religiously motivated attacks earlier this year. They were given five year jail sentences.
“We want to show that we are fair. If you desecrate a church, or a mosque, or a temple, the punishment is and should be the same,” Najib said.
Armstrong, who worked on former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s failed 2004 Democratic presidential primary campaign, runs the Webstrong consulting firm whose site describes its business:
WebStrong provides integrated communications solutions to help you to connect with your audience, be part of the conversation, influence the debate, build a community, and organize and empower your supporters. We help you create buzz, change public policy, win elections, find your audience, and mobilize them into taking action.
Our strategic consulting services services include public relations, reputation management, coalition building, advertising, social media management, and online advocacy for political, entertainment, sports and issue-based clients.
Our technology services include an integrated organizing platform (Netroots DNA), as well as traditional CMS, CRM, broadcast email, social media integration.
Armstrong’s firm lists numerous elected Democrats among its current or former campaign clients, including Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, as well as Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and former Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, recently confirmed as U.S. Secretary of State.
The Web site of Armstrong’s consulting firm, whose client list also includes the powerful left-wing labor union SEIU, also specifically cites “political leaders in Malaysia” among its international clients.
Webstrong site describes its Malaysian busiess
Jerome Armstrong’s involvement in the MalaysiaGate deal was reported by Ben Smith at Politico in 2011, but Gray’s BuzzFeed article Friday about Treviño’s report to DOJ did not mention Armstrong’s role in the lucrative P.R. campaign, creating the impression that it was strictly a Republican operation. Not only did this inspire partisan sneering by liberal bloggers (Daily Kos said it proved the GOP “really is just an astroturf operation from top to bottom”), but it also influenced other media coverage, including a commentary on CNN’s Reliable Sources by media critic Howard Kurtz:
Some American journalists it turns out have been secretly taking money from the government of Malaysia. One of them according to “Buzzfeed” is conservative commentator Joshua Trevino who was paid $390,000 over a three-year span and paid out smaller sums to other right leaning journalist was to write about Malaysia.
Now Trevino who lost his column in London’s “Guardian” for not coming clean about the payments lied to “Politico” in 2011 saying I was never on any Malaysian entity’s payroll and I resent your assumption that I was.
Trevino now tells “Buzzfeed” the payments were part of a fairly standard PR operation and when “Buzzfeed” editor Ben Smith asked him about them, quote, “I ought to have come clean with him at the time.”
The “Huffington Post” has deleted Trevino’s posts for his violation of its ethical guidelines. By the way, taking money from a foreign government without not disclosing it, is not some typical PR operation, it is outright deception.
Two of the main players in the campaign funded by the Malaysian government that placed undisclosed propaganda in the American press did not file with the Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), an omission that lawyers say could place them in legal jeopardy. . . .
Trevino, who last week belatedly filed his own foreign agent registration, told BuzzFeed on Sunday that Armstrong was hired to be his liberal counterpart on MalysiaMatters. . . .
Click here to read the rest of the article. Gray’s account includes quotes from an e-mail Armstrong sent to Ben Smith in 2011, basically dismissing his work for the MalaysiaMatter.com site as an insignificant “temp contract,” neither secretive nor sinister, but without saying how much he got paid for doing it. The fact that Treviño says he was advised by a lawyer that he was required to file a FARA report with DOJ, however, raises the question of whether Armstrong’s failure to register as a foreign agent was a violation of federal law.
Gray writes tersely: “Armstrong did not reply to repeated requests for comment.” Thus, the merchant of “integrated communications solutions” is not communicating. Gray also reports that it appears, because David All’s project was under the aegis of APCO Worldwide, it would have been APCO’s responsibility to report its Malaysian-funded advocacy to the government under FARA. However, this does not explain the Malaysian amnesia that makes it difficult for David All to remember how much he or Armstrong were paid:
“It’s so long ago,” All said when reached by phone on Monday. . . .
“I’m sort of gathering more information and looking into this a little bit more,” All said.
This is certainly quite convenient: Having scored a deal that enabled him to pay nearly $400,000 to Treviño and an undisclosed (but probably not insignificant) sum to his good friend Jerome Armstrong, now David All needs to gather more information and look into this in order to recall who got paid what. And while All can’t tell Rosie Gray how much cash he or his Democrat partner Armstrong collected, All was apparently willing to leave Josh Trevino, Ben Domenech and other conservatives twisting in the wind — as disgraced and humiliated scapegoats — even as the Malaysian pay-to-play operation he organized was portrayed everywhere as a strictly Republican scandal.
What next in MalaysiaGate? Well, while David All rummages through dusty file boxes full of cancelled checks and invoices in his desperate search for the impossible-to-remember dollar figures on the deal he brokered for his buddies, I expect Rosie Gray will do more of her thorough reporting. And perhaps other reporters will be able to remember the phone numbers of people on Capitol Hill and at the Department of Justice who might care to comment — hey, can’t hurt to give it a shot, right? — on the news about the work done on behalf Malaysian interests by people who (allegedly) failed to comply with the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
Is it possible that any members of congressional committees dealing with Foreign Relations are considering investigations? Is the watchful eye of Attorney General Eric Holder examining whether federal laws are being adequately enforced? Is there a snowball’s chance in hell that liberal bloggers will take further notice of MalaysiaGate now that the involvement of a Democrat political consultant is part of the story?
UPDATE: I regret my previous omission of credit to former Raw Story editor Ron Brynaert, whose research turned up many of the facts about Armstrong’s consulting business, including the photo of Armstrong and Trevino in Malaysia.
Armstrong’s Twitter account has been silent since Thursday, and his MyDD.com site was offline last time I checked. Meanwhile, Brynaert pointed out, it appears that Armstrong tried to scrub from MyDD a July 2008 post he wrote called “Crazy Times in Malaysia.” Ah, but the cache is still online and, even if Jerome could find some way to delete the cache, too late — screencapped that, too.
My plan had been to do a whole new article about all this, but then the phone started ringing with sources wanting to discuss the story, so the full article will have to wait until tomorrow. However . . .
It appears that, while Rosie Gray of BuzzFeed focused her Friday article on the nearly $400,000 that was reported to the Justice Department by conservative blogger/consultant Josh Trevino (in compliance with the Foreign Agent Registration Act), Trevino’s slice of the Malaysia P.R. action may have been substantially less than half the pie.
In other words, Trevino appears to have been a subcontractor to consultant David All, who was in turn paid by the D.C.-based firm APCO Worldwide. A source familar with online consulting practices — but with no specific direct knowledge of David All’s operation — guessed that if Trevino got about $400,000, All’s contract with APCO Worldwide was probably worth at least $2 million.
“Money trickles down,” this source said.
And here’s the big thing: There is reason to believe that Jerome Armstrong was involved with David All’s Malaysia P.R. operation before Trevino was brought in. When I shared that information with my online consulting source, he immediately speculated that Armstrong’s cut of the action must have been larger than the amount paid to Trevino. “That’s just how this s–t works,” my source said, i.e., the second guy brought in on the deal would normally be paid more than the third guy in.
But that’s just speculation, and so far neither David All nor Jerome Armstrong have said anything about what they were paid in the Malaysia P.R. deal. The only reason we know the details of Josh Trevino’s involvement is that Trevino filed his F.A.R.A. compliance form with the Justice Department and, so far as I’ve been able to learn, neither All nor Armstrong have filed a F.A.R.A. report.
Cashing in and Crashing the Gate: Markos Moulitsas
and Jerome Armstrong sign their book, April 2006
“At 1:11 AM, Monday March 21st, Bush signed into law an order that vacates the state of Florida from having jurisdiction over the case involving Terri Schiavo. Of course, Mercury is retrograde, so at first indication, it’s unlikely that this will stand. . . . In the chart, we find Jupiter exactly conjunct the MC, in Libra, and opposite Mercury in [Aries] at the IC, with both planets retrograde. Meanwhile Pluto is conjunct the ASC. . . .
“What’s notable about the Jupiter-Mercury oppositions of retrogrades in the law passed by Bush, is that they exactly T-square the Sun of the Republican Party and the USA chart. . . . The Republican Party does well when it deals with Neptunian issues . . . but when it comes to issues surrounding Pluto, the sexual and the bodily emerge from shadows, and they go toward excess.”
— “Vis Numar” (Jerome Armstrong), March 2005
If taken at face-value, Trevino’s statement would mean that it’s “fairly standard” for shady foreigners to funnel $36,000 to Ben Domenech and $24,700 to Brad Jackson for favorable coverage. And so “Hunter” at DKos chortles with delight:
Every time we think we begin to understand what it is the conservative movement is going on about, yet another thing happens to remind us that no, there really aren’t any principles there at all — it really is just an astroturf operation from top to bottom. Lobbyists paying lobbyists paying lobbyists, all the way down. We’re terrified of majority-Muslim countries, unless their governments are paying us not to be.
Just think — all it would have taken during this whole period of time is just one rich guy willing to pay these conservative bloggers to change their minds, and they could have spent the last four years praising Barack Obama as the greatest president who ever lived. We could probably have gotten it for no more than $10,000 a pop.
The financial arrangements that the Malaysian story alleges between Trevino, another blogger, and a Malaysian party aren’t possible to pin down, but after I posted the item, a source forwarded some 2008 correspondence between Trevino and a group of American political bloggers, from Ezra Klein to Mary Katharine Ham offering them a free “once-in-a-lifetime” Malaysian junket, paid for, he said in an email at the time, by business interests associated with Malaysian politics; the trip fell apart before he could fulfill a promise to specify the sponsors, but he mentioned in a May, 2008 email that he was “running” Malaysia Matters, which he described as educational and neutral. . . .
The Malaysia Matters site is now effectively down, but an archived “about” page says it was “sponsored by individuals who share an interest in Malaysia, and were willing to help bring Malaysia Matters to fruition.”
“Those working on this project include David All, Jerome Armstrong and Joshua Treviño,” the page says. “The three of us gave birth to this blog, but there are also others who have agreed to contribute along the way. While we might not always agree politically, we all have various interests in Malaysia that are reflected in this blog.”
Wait, did he say “Jerome Armstrong”? Founder of the progressive blog MyDD, who in 2003 co-founded the political consulting firm Armstrong Zuniga with Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga? The same Jerome Armstrong who co-authored with Markos the 2006 book, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics?
Are we to suppose that Jerome Armstrong participated in this pay-for-play project out of the goodness of his heart? Was Jerome Armstrong motivated by altruistic philanthropic concern for human rights on the Malay peninsula?
Give me a freaking break: Jerome cashed a check, too.
How much was Jerome Armstrong paid to pimp for the Malaysian regime? We don’t know. Why don’t we know how much Jerome Armstrong was paid? Because, unlike Josh Trevino, Jerome apparently hasn’t filed a report with the Justice Department about it.
Lefties who imagine that consultant/blogger types like Jerome Armstrong are motivated entirely by fervent devotion to the progressive cause should have been disabused of such naïveté long ago.
Jerome Armstrong pretty much pioneered pay-to-play progressive blogging, so his willingess to join forces with Republican consultants David All and Josh Trevino in promoting the interests of the Malaysian regime shouldn’t really surprise anyone. But we don’t know how much Armstrong was paid, nor do we know whether Armstrong subcontracted any of his pro-Malaysia flack-work to other bloggers, as Trevino did.
Perhaps reporter Rosie Gray can get some answers to those questions from noted astrology expert Vis Numar.
UPDATE: Linked by Bill Quick at Daily Pundit, who has been blogging long enough to remember the “Vis Numar”/”JeromeGate” kerfuffle of 2006. Bill praises my reporting, but this story was a piece of cake once two things happened:
A commenter pointed out that Jerome Armstrong had been named as a “Malaysia Matters” participant; and
Many conservative bloggers seem to have forgotten that era, when the progressive Netroots were insurgents fighting to overthrow the eeee-vil Bush/Cheney/Halliburton regime, but I remember it well, as it was my first opportunity to engage in blogging.
The most important lesson I learned early was, “No blog is an island.” Blogging is fundamentally a collaborative effort, and if you are not aggregating — linking your readers to other bloggers and news sources — you aren’t really part of the community.
The hat-tip courtesy and the ethos of CWCID (“Credit where credit is due”) are absolutely essential to making the blogosphere a more valuable resource than traditional media.
Too many of bloggers, I fear, have either forgotten what can now, in 2013, be called the Old School team spirit of blogging as collaboration, or in the case of newcomes to the ‘sphere, never realized that such a spirit once existed. This isn’t about some kind of gooey feel-good altruism. It’s really a matter of understanding the (perhaps counter-intuitive) insight that generosity is more successful than selfishness.
The customer-service attitude — “How can I help you, sir?” — is simply good business. In the news business (and bloggers are certainly now part of that business) anyone who tries to hog up all the credit will eventually come to grief.
P.J. O’Rourke encounters Andrew Breitbart at the
Manchester, N.H., Radisson Bar, Saturday, Jan. 7, 2012
In May 2007, I interviewed Andrew Breitbart while he was working — doing his shift as an editor at the Drudge Report — at the D.C. offices of Reason magazine, and described how he worked and why he did it:
His computer pings with every new e-mail. His cell phone rings with calls from friends. Distractions surround Andrew Breitbart. Yet he remains focused on the latest happenings from around the world, flowing into his laptop computer via a half-dozen wire services and other news sources.
A self-described “news addict,” the 38-year-old Californian sips a Mountain Dew as he scans the latest headlines and talks about his journey from being a stereotypical Generation X slacker to being on the cutting edge of the 21st-century information revolution. . . .
“I’m a news addict, news aficionado who, instead of watching ‘Sesame Street’ growing up, would watch the local news. And I’d watch the 4:30 news, then I’d watch the 5 o’clock news, then I’d watch the 6 o’clock news, then I’d watch the national news at 6:30. . . . I was such a voracious news consumer.”
It’s important to remember, I think, that Breitbart was a self-professed “news addict” — not a politics addict or still less a Republican Party addict, which is what his enemies would very much love to demonize him as having been.
Any intelligent “news addict” (and Breitbart was extraordinarly intelligent) who approaches the business from an outsider’s perspective cannot help but observe the herd instinct of the media, and resent it: “Hey, look, big media — over here! There’s an interesting story you missed because it doesn’t fit your prefabricated template!”
That’s really what it’s about. The fact that the big media’s herd instinct, insofar as it touches politics, is demonstrably about 90% partisan Democrat or ideologically liberal — that’s the niche Breitbart was filling, and also the source of his Righteous Indignation. But it’s wrong for the animals in the media herd to make that political difference a motive to smear Breitbart as they did during his life and as they have continued to do after his death.
Whose bias is the real problem here?
To assert that Breitbart’s liberal critics hated him for something other than politics is to tell a lie, just as it was a lie for liberals to smear the Tea Party as “racist.”
At some point, the cumulative weight of such dishonesty becomes a negative verdict on the credibility of those who tell these lies. And the Democrat-Media Complex, by its incessant partisan cheerleading, becomes responsible for the policy failures of the party whose propaganda it delivers as if it were Neutral Objective Fact.
Well, I need to hurry up and post this before midnight, and I’ll come back later to extend it with updates and links to other tributes, but I just had to get that off my chest first. Right now, frankly, I’m kind of depressed by this news:
A range of mainstream American publications printed paid propaganda for the government of Malaysia, much of it focused on the campaign against a pro-democracy figure there.
The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers.
According to Trevino’s belated federal filing, the interests paying Trevino were in fact the government of Malaysia, “its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either.” . . .
Like Andrew said at CPAC last year, “If you’re not in that bunker because you’re not satisfied with a certain candidate, more than shame on you! You’re on the other side!”
This is a point that I’ve certainly come to appreciate — and I think all of us should appreciate more — in the past year. During the long primary campaign, some conservatives got so into the “Anybody But Mitt” mindset that they simply couldn’t let it go. In the four months since Election Day, there has been an endless round of finger-pointing and told-ya-so’s that haven’t done anything useful toward organizing victory or, at least, staunching the bleeding.
So, yeah — get in the fight, or you’re on the other side.
UPDATE II: At the annual CPAC Blog Bash last year, the National Bloggers Club awarded Andrew Breitbart the “Changing the Narrative” Award — the only award he ever received for his work as a journalist. This year and henceforth it will be known as Andrew Breitbart’s Changing the Narrative Award.
It was easy to be brave with Andrew around. People drew from his courage when theirs had dissipated. He likened himself to a rodeo clown, of all things. I want to share something for which I’ve never gotten to thank him, which has really bothered me. . . .
