This post comes to you from the “Heal Thyself” department.

This morning, Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” opened the show with a segment on how the press should cover the growing ranks of Democratic presidential wannabes.  He began the discussion by asking, “Are we giving this the attention it deserves considering the number of firsts in the field?”  He referenced the unprecedented number of women, people of color with African, Latino and mixed backgrounds and the entry of a member of the LGBT community.

To cover the topic, Stelter introduced three panelists:  David Zurawik, media critic for the Baltimore Sun, Juana Summers, a political analyst with CNN and NPR, and Ruby Cramer, political reporter for BuzzFeed.  One is an older white male, one is an African-American woman, the other is a white woman.  Anyone want to guess who Stelter called on first to give an opinion on the historic nature of the most diverse field of presidential candidates in the nation’s annuls?

You guessed it.  Zurawik.  If you want to understand the significance of the presidency being open to citizens other than old, white men just ask the old, white guy.

The more things change the more they seem to stay the same.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

The  ongoing  case of Trump v. BuzzFeed v. Mueller v. Cohen over the last 48 hours provides just one more example which proves one of the basic principles of not just journalism, but almost every profession.  It is more important to understand WHY than WHO, WHAT, WHERE and WHEN.

To recap.  Thursday night BuzzFeed reported it had sources who claimed the special counsel’s office (SCO) had evidence Donald Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress concerning the timing of negotiations with Russians over a Moscow Trump Tower.  Although other media outlets reporting on the BuzzFeed story prefaced their coverage with comments such as “If true,…” or “We have not yet confirmed the story,” the feeding frenzy was on.  Last night, the SCO issued the following statement.

BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.

Unwilling to take the statement at face value, the lead in the Washington Post’s coverage begins:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s office on Friday denied an explosive report by BuzzFeed News that his investigators had gathered evidence showing President Trump directed his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about a prospective business deal in Moscow.

Did they really?  There is a big difference between flat out saying Trump did not direct Cohen to lie and letting us know reporting on the evidence which may or may not lead to that conclusion was inaccurate.  I am not going to take sides on this one, which is why I continue to urge followers of this blog to wait until Mueller and his team present the whole story.  But no one asked the most basic question, “Is it possible both parties are right?”  I’m not saying this is the case, but the BuzzFeed story characterized (SCO’s term) the evidence as “internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents.”

At first glance, that does NOT make sense.  If you want to prove Trump personally directed Cohen to lie, the last place you would see that is in emails and text.  Trump does not use either.  But we do know Cohen recorded conversations with Trump.  Isn’t that how Cohen confirmed Trump was lying about the hush money to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal?  What if the SCO questioned the characterization of evidence by BuzzFeed because it does not want anyone to think they would rely on secondary sources?  That would hardly be ironclad proof of a felony.  An email from someone within the organization other than Trump which says “Mr. X told me Mr. Trump is putting pressure on Michael to tell Congress they dropped the Moscow project in January,” can be dismissed by the White House legal team as gossip or hearsay.  I have no doubt if Mueller plans to charge Trump with suborning perjury, it will be based on something more than second-hand information.

Every story about the Trump organization, campaign and tenure in the oval office is beginning to have a common theme.  If nothing else, Trump and his abettors are consistent.  They know only one way to do business, thus the title of today’s post.  Take example number two, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report on Wednesday about payments by Cohen to James Gauger, CIO at Liberty University, to rig on-line polls beginning in 2015 to raise Trump’s image and brand prior to the 2016 election.  Consider the following.

• Gauger’s results were dismal.  In the CNBC poll of most successful American businessmen, Trump did not crack the top 100.  So much for hiring the best people.
• Dissatisfied with the results, the Trump Organization paid Gauger much less than the contract called for.  Where have we heard that before?
• One of Gauger’s tasks was to create a Twitter account for #womenforCohen.  This morning, former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks could not understand why anyone would do that.  This is why lawyers should stick to lawyering.  This was a beta test of the algorithms and messaging Gauger would later use to rig polls in Trump’s favor.  Using Trump’s name would have signaled something they were not ready to air publicly.

The only person who seems to get this is frequent Morning Joe panelist Donny Deutsch an advertising executive who has known both Trump and Cohen for years.  (How close?  Last January, New York Magazine reported Deutsch was dating Mrs. Trump #2 Marla Maples.)  Deutsch consistently points out Trump’s management style in the White House should come as no surprise.  It is an extension of Trump Organization “business as usual,” which explains a lot.  It also explains why the media continues to make the same mistakes over and over.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

~Edward R. Murrow

I know, this may be the fifth or sixth time I have opened a post with this quote.  But there is a reason.  It is the only thing which explains how an obvious fact can so easily be ignored or dismissed by the mainstream media.

This morning the Wall Street Journal reported the following:

In early 2015, a man [John Gauger] who runs a small technology company showed up at Trump Tower to collect $50,000 for having helped Michael Cohen, then Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, try to rig online polls in his boss’s favor before the presidential campaign.

However titillating this latest chapter of the 2016 election might seem, it was paragraph four of the story which caught my attention.

Mr. Gauger owns RedFinch Solutions LLC and is chief information officer at Liberty University in Virginia, where Jerry Falwell Jr., an evangelical leader and fervent Trump supporter, is president. (Emphasis added.)

While both CNN and MSNBC covered the Journal’s report, neither made the connection to Liberty University. One can imagine Cohen paraphrasing Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca, “Of all the IT firms, in all the towns, in all the world, I chose this one.”  (From the Duh Department, Fox News did not cover the story at all preferring to inform its viewers how an Indonesian woman was mauled to death by her pet alligator.)

Why does this matter?  Go back to the Deprogramming101 post from December 11, 2018 titled “J. Edgar Cohen,” in which I questioned whether Donald Trump’s fixer had blackmailed Falwell to obtain his early support for Trump’s presidential run.  It’s not like Falwell did not have his choice of kindred spiritualists including three Southern Baptists–Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham–and two nondenominational evangelicals–Rick Perry and Scott Walker.  In what I’m sure is just one more “coincidence” in the Trump campaign timeline, the payment to Gauger occurs around the same time Cohen confidently claims Falwell’s endorsement is forthcoming.  In what must surely be a second “coincidence,” the link to “TEAM” on the RedFinch Solutions web site is no longer active.

I have no doubt Robert Mueller will get to the bottom of this.  The question is who will hold the media, especially the cable news networks, accountable for their inability to see the forest for the trees.

POSTSCRIPT/An Already Broken New Year’s Resolution

Remember Mitt Romney, the Senator from Utah, who rolled into DC and made waves with a January 1 opinion piece in the Washington Post titled “The president shapes the public character of the nation.  Trump’s character falls short,” which included the following:

The world needs American leadership, and it is in America’s interest to provide it. A world led by authoritarian regimes is a world — and an America — with less prosperity, less freedom, less peace.

His New Year’s resolution?

I will act as I would with any president, in or out of my party: I will support policies that I believe are in the best interest of the country and my state, and oppose those that are not. I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault. But I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.

Yesterday, Romney voted with 42 other Senate Republicans to uphold Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s lifting sanctions against Russian companies partly owned by oligarch Oleg Derispaska, a Putin ally who had a relationship with convicted felon Paul Manafort.

So much for Mitt being the new John McCain.  More like Cain in the Book of Genesis.

GOD: Where is your conscience, Mitt?
ROMNEY: Am I my party’s keeper?

Obviously NOT.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

Some readers may recall a February 15, 2017 post titled, “The Old Switcheroo,” in which I chronicled the role NBC played in positioning Donald Trump’s run for president.  From the “Too Little, Too Late,” department, many news outlets have devoted their reporting during this final week of 2018 on the unhinged behavior of the oval office occupant.  How hypocritical can one be to talk about Trump revising history, when the media is equally guilty?

For example, MSNBC shared the news first reported by McClatchy News that a mobile phone belonging to Michael Cohen connected to a cell tower near Prague in the summer of 2016.  Cohen claims he has never been to Prague, which is one piece of information Trump’s defenders have used to discredit the Christopher Steele dossier.  (NOTE: Both Cohen and his attorney Lanny Davis continue to deny he was in Prague, but there is a theory the phone, bought in Cohen’s name, may have been given to another campaign official to use while in the Czech Republic.  The New York Post previously reported the FBI seized as many as 16 phones during its raid of Cohen’s office, home and hotel room.  We may soon know if this theory holds water, as Cohen yesterday tweeted, “#Mueller knows everything.”)

While every detail in the Steele dossier has not been corroborated, neither have they been discredited.  Yet, neither NBC nor Chuck Todd, in particular, issued a mea culpa for his accusation that Buzzfeed News, which published the dossier, was trafficking in fake news.  In a January 17, 2016 interview with Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith, Todd said:

I know this was not your intent. I’ve known you a long time, but you just published fake news. You made a knowing decision to put out an untruth.

I Googled, “Chuck Todd Apologizes to Ben Smith” before writing the above paragraphs.  Crickets.

Now the team that brought you “The Apprentice” is trying to revise history.  The January 7, 2019 issue of The New Yorker magazine carries a story titled, “How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success.”  While Patrick Radden Keefe’s reporting  focuses on how the show’s producer Burnett decided to add Trump to his growing stable of reality television programs, he interviewed several members of the show’s production crew.  A video editor Jonathan Braun, who worked on the show’s first six seasons, summed it up this way.

Most of us knew he was a fake.  He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.

As I read the article, I learned something of more value.  “The Apprentice” saga explains Trump’s approach to policy-making and why it will fail.  During Keefe’s interviews with Burnett, the producer “boasted that, for each televised hour, his crew shot as many as three hundred hours of footage.”  In other words, it’s all in the post-production editing.

Does this sound familiar?  Burnett conceded Trump would often make unexpected, spur of the moment decisions that made little or no sense.  The editors would go back to the hours of video and piece together a story line which somehow justified the decision.

If you recall, during the presidential campaign, especially following release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, questions arose whether “Apprentice” outtakes contained equally damning exhibits of Trump’s character and behavior.  (NOTE:  The raw video now belongs to MGM which purchased rights to the show.  MGM claims they cannot release the video because of contractual restrictions.)  And there lies the rub.  Since announcing he would run for president, there are hours and hours of Trump on video.  Except this time, he does not have the luxury of controlling their use or editing.

For example, MSNBC compiled a montage of campaign video related to the border wall.  Over and over again  he told his supporters Mexico would pay for it, “every penny of it.”  Last night, Chris Hayes played this video for Michael Burgess, a Republican congressman from Texas, who claimed Trump was not reneging on a campaign promise by asking U.S. taxpayers to cover the cost. Burgess reverted to the latest falsehood that the costs would be captured on “month by month installments” as a result of the renegotiated NAFTA provisions.

Congressman Burgess may not get it, but an overwhelming majority of Americans do.  A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted December 21-25, shows only 35 percent support building the wall (Trump’s base), but only 25 percent supported Trump shutting down the government to get his way.  And how will Trump respond?  Again, “The Apprentice” experience provides some guidance.

During the show’s first season (2003-2004), the Nielsen rating for the treasured 18-49 age group was 10.1, which translated into an impressive 20 million plus viewers.  But as we have learned over the past three years, Trump does not wear well over time.  Within four years, his ratings dropped to 3.1 with an audience of 7.5 million.  So much for the master deal-maker tutoring potential proteges.  Pivot to “Celebrity Apprentice,” returning to the days when Trump was more likely to be covered by the tabloids than Fortune magazine.  When Trump doesn’t get his wall, when he becomes mired in lower ratings, get ready for the next pivot.  But from his experience on television, he should know he will NEVER regain his lost audience.  He should, but my money is on he won’t and will point the finger at everyone but himself (maybe even Arnold Schwarzennegger.)

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

NOTE:  I drafted this post at 2:00 p.m. yesterday, immediately following the initial reports out of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C.  This morning many of the sentiments expressed below were raised by legal analysts, especially Joyce Vance, former federal district attorney in Alabama, and Chuck Rosenberg, former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

They call it Occam’s Razor because, among other things, it cuts through the bull**it!  Too bad journalists and pundits cannot do the same.

With all the coverage of Judge Emmet Sullivan’s sentencing hearing for Michael Flynn, the media once again missed the obvious.  Clearly, Sullivan was angry for the last minute crapola offered by Flynn’s attorneys that a three-star general would not know lying to the FBI was a crime unless he had been explicitly reminded of it by his interviewers.  But that hardly justifies Sullivan’s characterization of Flynn’s behavior.

All along, you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the National Security Adviser* to the President of the United States. That undermines everything this flag over here stands for. Arguably you sold your country out…I am not hiding my disgust, my disdain for your criminal offense.

And even though Judge Sullivan has warned no one should read too much into it, he asked prosecutors, “Could he have been charged with treason?”

On MSNBC and CNN, pundits and legal analysts seemed shocked that a judge would stray so far from a joint recommendation that the defendant’s guilty plea and subsequent cooperation be rewarded with no jail time.  But here’s the obvious point every one of them missed.  Judge Sullivan has seen an un-redacted version of all the filings and supporting documentation.  You don’t tell someone “you sold out your country” simply for lying to the FBI.  While he backed off the term “treason,” he did not yield on his assessment that Flynn had betrayed the United States.

Semantics aside, there is only one reason Judge Sullivan would raise the points he did.  Even if Flynn’s actions do not meet the formal definition of “treason,” when faced with the choice of supporting sanctions against Russia imposed by the sitting president–Barack Obama–or sending a message to Vladimir Putin they would be lifted, he chose the latter.  He sided with a foreign adversary who had interfered in the 2016 presidential election.  Call it what you will, but it was both wrong and unprecedented.

The bigger question is whether Judge Sullivan is setting the stage for the Mueller report.  One of the  things we know from Flynn’s guilty plea is he placed several calls to Mar-a-Lago on or about December 29, 2016, the day he told Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to advise Putin not to overreact to newly imposed sanctions.  If and when we find out which members of the transition team were on the other end of those calls, from Sullivan’s perspective, we might be looking at a conspiracy to sell out the country.

Justice may be blind, but judges are neither blind nor deaf.  More importantly, they are human.  And it does not take a rocket scientist to realize officers of the court can only tolerate attacks on their domain for so long without fighting back.  I am willing to bet the farm, any member of the transition team who talked to Flynn during this period is hoping they never have to face Emmet Sullivan in court.

Footnote:  It is just a matter of time before Donald Trump tweets something about Judge Sullivan.  After all he is an African-American appointed to the federal bench in 1994 by Bill Clinton.  In the spirit of the holiday season, even I am willing to do whatever I can to stop Twitter-Man from making a fool of himself.  Psst, Donald, he was first appointed to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in 1984 by Ronald Reagan and elevated to the D.C. Court of Appeals in 1992 by George H. W. Bush.  Not holding my breath he will make the connection.

*Sullivan later corrected himself.  Flynn was not yet national security advisor when he talked to Kislyak about U.S. sanctions.  However, Trump had publicly announced Flynn was his choice for the position.

POSTSCRIPT: The Company You Keep

How did some Trump supporters respond to Judge Sullivan’s rebuke.  Here is today’s headline in the neo-Nazi publication The Daily Stormer, whose editor Andrew Anglin celebrated Trump’s election victory with, “Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor.”

MSNBC and CNN have done a pretty good job in the last 24 hours exposing Fox News for what it is, delusion thinking Sullivan would crush Mueller, not Flynn.  If only they would occasionally share coverage like this and ask viewers if they really want to be associated with these “patriots.”

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP