Recent Appearances...

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Recent Appearances...

Government Corruption

Catherine Herridge Says It Was ‘Journalistic Rape' When CBS Locked Her Out of Office and Seized Her Files

2024-04-12

[American Greatness] Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge testified Thursday that CBS News locked her out of her emails and her office when it seized her reporting files, which included confidential source information pertaining to an investigation into government corruption.

"I can only speak for myself. When my records were seized, I felt it was a journalistic rape," Herridge told House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) during a House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government hearing.

The seizure of her files back in February alarmed many current and former CBS employees, as the move was said to be unheard of in the news business. SAG-AFTRA, the media’s largest labor union, immediately got involved, and several days after the news shocked the reporting world, Herridge’s materials were returned.

Herridge, formerly the Chief Intelligence correspondent for Fox News, was one of four witnesses testifying before the subcommittee hearing, titled "Fighting for a Free Press: Protecting Journalists and their Sources." The purpose of the hearing was "to examine the federal government’s infringement on the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press, as well as federal shield law proposals."

Also testifying Thursday were Mary Cavallaro, Chief Broadcast Officer of SAG-AFTRA News & Broadcast Department; Sharyl Attkisson, Investigative journalist and managing editor of "Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson;" and Nadine Farid Johnson, Policy Director for Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

All four witnesses strongly supported the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (PRESS) Act, which passed the unanimously in the House back in January and is currently being considered in the U.S. Senate.

The PRESS Act prohibits the federal government from compelling journalists and providers of telecommunications services to disclose "sources, records, contents of a communication, documents, and information obtained or created by journalists in the course of their work" except in limited circumstances involving terrorism or imminent violence. The legislation also prevents federal law enforcement from abusing its subpoena power.

"As you know, I was held in contempt of court for upholding the basic journalistic principle of maintaining the pledge of confidentiality to my sources," Herridge said in her opening statement. "I have complete respect for the district court and the judicial process and I am not here to litigate the merits of that case. It will play out before the appellate court in Washington D.C."

Emphasis added first para.

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Government Corruption

The Curious Truth About the Ex-FBI Agent Who Was Just Sentenced for Colluding With Russia

2023-12-16

BLUF:
[PJ] Isn't that interesting? Charles McGonigal

...who spent 22 years working with the FBI...

played a role in the investigation of Trump for bogus Russian collusion but ended up colluding with Russia himself after leaving his role in the FBI.

In a post on X/Twitter, investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson revealed that in 2016, there was a bunch of "DOJ personnel hirings and firings surrounding the operation against @realDonaldTrump," and "McGonigal was one of the flurry of changes/ placements around the campaign."

"To me it looks like a group of folks were put in place in DC and NY to carry out the operation," she wrote.

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Government Corruption

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Funding Biden Admin Jobs

2022-12-26

[Breitbart] The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who has acquired a reputation for his incessant attempts to extend his influence into the U.S. federal government, particularly in the areas of science and defense, is helping fund the salaries of several employees in the Biden administration, according to reporting by Politico.

Breitbart News has reported extensively on Schmidt’s attempts to influence successive presidential administrations, beginning with Barack Obama.

Via Breitbart News:

Google has deeper ties to the Democrat party than perhaps any other technology company, which is perhaps why some executives were caught on camera tearing up after Hillary Clinton failed to win the presidency in 2016.

An investigation by the Intercept found that hundreds of individuals either moved from Google to the White House or from the White House to Google during the Obama administration.

Eric Schmidt, who was executive director of Alphabet Inc during the presidential campaign, pitched himself as “head outside adviser” to the Clinton campaign in 2014, according to emails leaked by WikiLeaks. Schmidt — then still executive director of Google-parent Alphabet — was also pictured at Hillary Clinton’s NYC “victory” party wearing a badge marked “campaign staff.”

Schmidt is deeply tied to the Department of Defense, a relationship that began during the Obama administration. He is currently Chairman of the DoD’s Defense Innovation Advisory board. Schmidt’s relationship with top U.S. politicians has also paid off in New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo has asked him to “re-imagine” the state post-coronavirus.

Earlier this year, another Politico report exposed Schmidt’s attempts to influence the Biden administration’s science policy. According to the latest report, those efforts are ongoing, with Schmidt indirectly funding the salaries of “more than two dozen” Biden administration officials via an external group, the Federation of American Scientists.

Via Politico:

A POLITICO investigation found that members of the administration are well aware that a significant amount of the money for the salaries of FAS’s fellows comes from Schmidt’s research and investment firm, Schmidt Futures, and that the organization was critical to the program to fund administration jobs. In fact, the influence of Schmidt Futures at FAS is such that they are sometimes conflated.

Thus, some close observers of AI policy believe that Schmidt is using the program to enhance his clout within the administration and to advance his AI agenda.

“Schmidt is clearly trying to influence AI policy to a disproportionate degree of any person I can think of,” said Alex Engler, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in AI policy. “We’ve seen a dramatic increase in investment toward advancing AI capacity in government and not much in limiting its harmful use.”

In statements to Politico, both the White House and Eric Schmidt denied any impropriety in the relationship.

“Neither Eric Schmidt nor the Federation of American Scientists exert influence on policy matters,” said a White House spokesperson. “Any suggestion otherwise is false. We enacted the most stringent ethics guidelines of any administration in history to ensure our policy processes are free from undue influence.”

A spokesperson for Schmidt did not deny that the former Google boss’s motivations are tied to his interests in the future of American AI, but framed this goal in a positive light.

“Eric, who has fully complied with all necessary disclosure requirements, is one of many successful executives and entrepreneurs committed to addressing America’s shortcomings in AI and other related areas,” the Schmidt representative told Politico.

“While it is appropriate to review the relationship between the public and private sectors to ensure compliance and ethics oversight, there are people with the expertise and experience to make monumental change and advance our country, and they should have the opportunity to work across sectors to maintain our competitive advantage for public benefit.”

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-Lurid Crime Tales-

Update: Exclusive Summary: Covid-19 Vaccine Concerns

2022-11-03

[Sharyl Attkisson]

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Government Corruption

Sharyl Attkisson reveals how low the FBI will go

2022-08-21

[American Thinker] The forty-two seconds of the Rumble video embedded below are truly shocking. Courageous journalist Sharyl Attkisson testifies to a congressional hearing about the depths to which the FBI has sunk in its attempts to discredit one of its most effective critics.

In case you don't know, while she was working as a reporter for CBS, Ms. Attkisson's work and home computers were invaded and taken over by the FBI, evidently because she had incurred their ire over her reporting. You can watch the CBS report on the incursion here:

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-Great Cultural Revolution

Google billionaire Eric Schmidt has PAID the salaries of staff inside Biden's science office and has been quietly lobbying on policy since the Obama administration

2022-03-29

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OTSP) helps formulate AI policy and steer funding toward the technology

Eric Schmidt, who stepped down in his role at Google's parent company Alphabet in 2020, now serves on the board of numerous tech companies

Schmidt even indirectly paid the salaries of OTSP employees, the report states

Former OTSP general counsel Rachel Wallace repeatedly raised concerns over Schmidt's influence, Politico reported

She believes her concerns were the source of the wrath she faced from OTSP's former head Eric Lander, who stepped down recently for bullying

Lander and Schmidt are close associates

More than a dozen in the 140-person White House office are current or former employees of Schmidt

In a statement, Schmidt Futures said he had no authority to make any policy decisions and did not do so through OSTP

They also said the government and OSTP has used pooled philanthropic funding to ensure proper staffing across agencies for over 25 years

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-Great Cultural Revolution

Fact-Checkers Are Used To Confuse The Public: Sharyl Attkisson

2022-01-27

[ZeroHedge] Five-time Emmy award-winning journalist Sharyl Attkisson said she has seen an increased effort to manipulate the public to appreciate censorship and disapprove of journalism. One of the strategies that has been employed is the use of third-party fact-checkers, she said.

“Nearly every mode of information has been co-opted, if it can be co-opted by some group, [and] fact-checkers are no different,” Attkisson told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”

“Either they’ve been co-opted, in many instances, or created for the purpose of distributing narratives and propaganda,” said Attkisson.

“This is all part of a very well-funded, well-organized landscape that dictates and slants the information they want us to have.”

Attkisson said she first started to notice news being controlled in the early 2000s when the media company she was working for was actively trying to suppress certain stories.

“The pushback came to be more about keeping a story from airing or keeping a study from being reported on the news, not just giving the other side, not just making sure it was accurately reported,” she said of pharmaceutical company stories she was covering at the time.

In 2016 Attkisson heard former President Barack Obama say news needed to be curated, after which mainstream media outlets started to consistently use the term fake news to describe mostly conservative news stories that they deemed untrue.

“And I remember thinking that was such a strange thing to say, because there was no big movement among the public, that people needed to have their information curated, that someone needed to step in and tell us what to think, curate what was online. But … after that, if you look at the media, day after day, there were headlines about fake news and curation of what should and shouldn’t be reported.”

Attkisson was referring to Obama’s comment at the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October 2016.

“It’s relevant to our democracy, citizenship. We’re going to have to rebuild, within this wild, wild west of information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to,” Obama said.

Because Attkisson was curious about this idea of curating news, she researched the topic of misinformation, which led her to a non-profit called First Draft, which was funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

“And if you looked at the nonprofit’s website when they said fake news, they meant entirely conservative-base fake news and their viewpoint; there was no liberal version of fake news. And then within a matter of weeks, President Obama gives the speech, the media takes off and runs with it.”

Attkisson said the fake news phrase was actually started by the left but was effectively turned on its head by former President Donald Trump and now most people think he coined the phrase.

“But it’s actually well documented as an invention of political activists on the left during the time period I described,” Attkisson said.

For her book “Smear” she interviewed people who work to spread misinformation and propaganda with the goal of confusing the public. “And they explained to me that, if they do nothing more than confuse the information landscape, maybe you don’t totally buy what they say, but they’ve done enough to make you not sure of anything.”

CENSORSHIP DURING THE PANDEMIC
Attkisson criticized large news outlets for being a “mouthpiece” of the government or other special interest groups instead of challenging them or holding them accountable, particularly as it relates to the pandemic.

She said that soon after the pandemic began, she spoke to many scientists, government as well as private, about the virus and the course it was taking before she formed an opinion. She asked some of the scientists to speak out but they were afraid.

“They said they dare not speak out for fear of being controversial, and for fear of being called coronavirus deniers, because that phrase was starting to be used in the media. And secondly, they feared contradicting Dr. Fauci, who they said had been kind of lionized or canonized in the press for reasons that they couldn’t understand.”

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-Great Cultural Revolution

Media Mistakes in the Biden Era: the Definitive List

2021-11-13

[Sharyl Attkisson]

hit the title link

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-Signs, Portents, and the Weather-

They did it without masks, mandates or vaccines - PA Amish community reaches Herd Immunity - VIDEO

2021-10-17

[CommonCentsBlog] The Pennsylvania Amish may have beaten COVID without use of masks, mandates or vaccines!

When it comes to actions taken to address the Covid-19 threat, hindsight is still very much underway. For your consideration: a story and outcome you probably aren’t hearing much about anywhere else. It takes place in the heart of Amish country.

Full Measure is a weekly Sunday news program focusing on investigative, original and accountability reporting. The host is Sharyl Attkisson, five-time Emmy Award winner and recipient of the Edward R. Murrow award for investigative reporting. She is backed by a team of award winning journalists.

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Government Corruption

What happened when Trump tried to stop U.S. funding for the Communist Chinese Wuhan Lab

2021-06-23

[Sharyl Attkisson via Rantingly] Listen to top scientists and editors from esteemed medical journals and you can’t help but conclude there is such a thing as a "scientific establishment." And it’s been as corrupted by politics and misinformation as many in politics and the media.

This phenomenon was never more important than during the Covid-19 pandemic when so many voices are shouting "Follow the science!" and when perfectly valid opinions and scientific findings are being censored, silenced and controversialized by Big Tech and some in the media.

All of this helps explain what happened last year when President Trump took what seemed to many to be the perfectly reasonable step of ordering a halt to U.S. taxpayer funding of the Communist Chinese research lab in Wuhan that could have been the source of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In April 2020, the Chinese had refused to provide samples, allow an inspection of the Wuhan lab, or otherwise cooperate on steps necessary to help figure out the pandemic and its origins. When Trump got word that the U.S. was sending taxpayer money to the lab and its scientists, he ordered it stopped. Funds were blocked to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance that was responsible for dispensing some U.S. taxpayer money to the Wuhan lab.

What happened when the funding stopped?

The scientific establishment kicked into action.

Scientists told the press— which dutifully reported it— that the funding cuts were political in nature. Uncalled for. Going to cost lives.

The backlash was so strong that most people probably don’t know this, but not long after the funding was cancelled, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reinstated the grant to EcoHealth Alliance.

At least there were some conditions this time. Under orders from Trump, the China bat coronavirus part of the grant was suspended pending the Wuhan Institute of Virology granting a request for an outside inspection.

NIH also made the project contingent upon getting responses from the Chinese to outstanding inquiries regarding the lab's practices and the Covid-19 outbreak. NIH also wanted EcoHealth Alliance to obtain a virus sample from the Wuhan lab.

EcoHealth Alliance and its leader Peter Daszak criticized the commonsense conditions saying they made their crucial research "impossible." The press covered the story in lockstep, in a one-sided on-narrative fashion. Here’s what NPR said: "The U.S. government has suddenly terminated funding for a years-long research project in China that many experts say is vital to preventing the next major coronavirus outbreak."

As for the theory that Covid-19 could have originated at the Wuhan lab, the same NPR story dismissively wrote: "As noted in an NPR story published last week, many scientists have discounted that theory as nearly impossible."

But as I’ve reported, many scientists did not discount the theory as "nearly impossible." Numerous scientists directly involved in the genetic analysis, and in related projects, had already concluded the Chinese lab was the most likely culprit, and genetic analysis by U.S. government scientists had already revealed hallmarks of man's intervention within the virus. You just didn’t hear about it much on the news or online because the discussion wasn’t allowed.

Of course, the "experts" the media were citing were often the very conflicted scientists involved in controversial research with the Chinese to begin with. This was not disclosed in most of the news reports.

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-Lurid Crime Tales-

'Samantha Power Claimed She Never Tried To Unmask Michael Flynn, But Records Show She Unmasked Him 7 Times

2020-05-14

[The Federalist] Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power testified to Congress in 2017 that she never sought to unmask records containing information about former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Newly declassified documents from the National Security Agency (NSA), however, show that her name appeared on at least seven separate requests to unmask Flynn’s name between Nov. 30, 2016, and Jan. 11, 2017.
Shanty-Irish Willem Dafoe double
Power was asked explicitly during sworn 2017 testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) whether she had ever attempted to unmask information related to Michael Flynn, a retired general and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who later briefly served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump.

"The number of unmasking requests by yourself began to go up dramatically in 2014," Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., noted during his questioning of Power to explain why the topic of unmasking had been raised. "[L]et me then ask you about, sort of, maybe the gravamen of how this came about. And I think it came about over a concern about the leaking of Mike Flynn’s name."

"So, to your knowledge, did you ever make [redacted]?" Schiff asked, likely referring to intercepts of Flynn’s conversations.

"I don’t recall making such a request," Power said.
No recollection
"And I just want to be clear that there’s no indication you ever made a request or that there necessarily was even a report on the subject. But I did want to get you on the record on that, because at the end of the day that’s sort of where this came from," Schiff said.

"Yes, I have no recollection of making a request related to General Flynn," Power again claimed.
No recollection
"Okay," Schiff said. "And I take it you never leaked Mr. Flynn’s name in any way, General Flynn’s name?"

"I have never leaked classified information," Power said. "I have never leaked names that have come back to me in this highly compartmented process. I have, in fact, never leaked, even unclassified information."
Luckily she's already married to Cass Sunstein, so she has a lawyer
According to NSA documents declassified last week and released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, Power made seven separate requests to unmask Flynn’s name over a six-week period between the end of November 2016 and Jan. 11, 2017. The list of unmasking requests shows that Power requested unmaskings of information related to Flynn on Nov. 30, 2016; Dec. 2, 2016; Dec. 7, 2016; two separate requests on Dec. 14, 2016; Dec. 23, 2016; and Jan. 11, 2017.

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-Lurid Crime Tales-

Flynn's Lawyer: FBI Agents Wrote Flynn Didn't Lie, We Have Eyewitness

2020-01-21

[Epoch Times] Sidney Powell, lawyer of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, said the FBI excluded crucial information from a report on their interview of her client. The report, an FBI 302 form, was used to charge Flynn with lying to the FBI, but the original draft of the 302 stated that Flynn was honest with the FBI, according to a witness who saw the draft, Powell said.

Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, pleaded guilty on Dec. 1, 2017, to one count of lying to FBI agents during a Jan. 24, 2017, interview.

A 302 report summarizing the interview was supposed to be filed within five days. But the earliest draft Flynn’s lawyers were provided was from Feb. 10, 2017‐more than two weeks after the interview.

Powell, who took over Flynn’s defense in June 2019, has for months asserted that an earlier 302 must exist. Prosecutors have said they don’t have it, stopping short of saying it doesn’t exist.

In an Oct. 24, 2019, court filing (pdf), Powell rejected the suggestion that the 302 draft was "missing," saying neither the bureau nor its digital document system "loses the most important of its reports that is supposed to support the federal felony of the President’s National Security Adviser."

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