Connect with us

COMMENTARY

‘Bluetooth-Phobic’: Experts Blast Attack on VP Harris – From a News Giant Owned by a Million-Dollar Trump Donor

Published

on

Security experts and many Americans alike are blasting an attack by the mainstream media giant Politico against Vice President Kamala Harris, an attack that comes amid revelations of a study in The Washington Post showing just how unfairly negative the press has been in its coverage of President Joe Biden and his administration. As it turns out, Politico, a major player in DC politics, is effectively owned by a million-dollar donor to Donald Trump.

The anger which spread through social media late Monday night was fueled by a tweet from Politico’s White House reporter Alex Thompson, who shows Vice President Harris in four different images using corded headphones instead of wireless ones. According to Thompson, co-author of the piece, the Vice President has a “Bluetooth phobia,” and co-wrote a story titled, “Kamala Harris is Bluetooth-phobic.”

Outrage was swift, with many asking how this could even possibly rate as a valid “news” story amid a nation whose democracy is crumbling as it battles a global pandemic, rising fascism, an attempted coup, a decades-long plot to curtail reproductive, voting, minority, and sexual minority rights, climate change, inflation and massive wealth inequality, in a political climate that some fear may lead to actual civil war.

Others, especially intelligence and national security experts slammed Politico and the article’s authors, noting just how potentially dangerous Bluetooth headphones actually are from a security perspective.

But Thompson was undeterred, defending the article at every turn.

“Former aides say that VP has long been careful about security — w/ some describing it as prudent & others suggesting it’s a bit paranoid,” he tweeted Monday. “A former aide from AG days said when a person arrived for a meeting, staff were instructed not to allow them to wait in Harris’ office alone.”

Politico in October was sold to the German media conglomerate Axel Springer, reportedly for about $1 billion. Axel Springer, which has been described as “conservative” and by casual observers “right wing,” is majority-owned by the U.S.-based investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), whose founders are known for historic, massive leveraged buyouts.

Henry Kravis is a million-dollar Trump donor, according to Forbes.

Dana Milbank is the author of the Washington Post piece that exposes just how poorly the mainstream media has covered the Biden administration. On Sunday he happened to tweet about Politico:

Chad Loder has been described by The Intercept as “a tech company founder and cybersecurity expert from Los Angeles who posts meticulous, open-source investigations of local right-wing extremists on a Twitter feed with more than 100,000 followers.” He’s also  written articles like “Should you hold employees accountable for cyber security?” (yes, in short, by the way.)

Here’s how he responded to the Politico piece:

Byron Tau, who writes about national security for The Wall Street Journal, explained why Bluetooth is a security risk:

“Bluetooth peripherals are a security risk. If they don’t rotate their unique identifier, they can easily be sniffed and tracked. If there are flaws in the security, they can be compromised. Most people don’t have to worry about these things but high level federal officials should,” he said via Twitter.

Magdi Semrau, a journalist who writes about science, politics, and culture, responded to Thompson and his co-author Ruby Cramer, pointing to an article titled: “Sorry, readers. Your Bluetooth device is a security risk.”

A former chief of staff for the White House National Space Council offered some anecdotal evidence of Bluetooth use curtailment, and asked, “what is the point of this article?”

Referring to Hillary Clinton, former Media Matters senior fellow Jamison Foser asked Thompson and Cramer: “Did you consider including for context in this piece the fact that another high-profile woman was the subject of years of obsessive media coverage about supposed security risks in her communications practices as a high-ranking government official?”

Sherrilyn Ifill, the highly-respected President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) asked what many were thinking:

 

Related Topics:
Continue Reading
Click to comment
 
 

Enjoy this piece?

… then let us make a small request. The New Civil Rights Movement depends on readers like you to meet our ongoing expenses and continue producing quality progressive journalism. Three Silicon Valley giants consume 70 percent of all online advertising dollars, so we need your help to continue doing what we do.

NCRM is independent. You won’t find mainstream media bias here. From unflinching coverage of religious extremism, to spotlighting efforts to roll back our rights, NCRM continues to speak truth to power. America needs independent voices like NCRM to be sure no one is forgotten.

Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Help ensure NCRM remains independent long into the future. Support progressive journalism with a one-time contribution to NCRM, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you. Click here to donate by check.

COMMENTARY

‘Don’t Fall for This’: Vance’s ‘Normal Gay Guy Vote’ Claim Mocked, Criticized as ‘Gross’

Published

5 months ago

on

November 1, 2024

By

Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance’s claim that he and his running mate, Donald Trump, will likely win the votes of the “normal gay guy” is being mocked, with some pointing to his stated opposition to same-sex marriage protection legislation. But in full context, it’s being called out as divisive against the LGBTQ+ community, and “gross.”

“And I think that frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote, because, again, they just wanted to be left the hell alone, and now you have all this crazy stuff on top of it,” Vance says in a short clip from his interview Thursday with podcaster Joe Rogan.

Democratic strategist Matt McDermott weighed in, writing, “Not sure what a ‘normal’ gay guy is, but speaking as a fairly typical gay guy I can confirm that myself, my husband, and literally every gay guy I know will proudly be voting for Kamala Harris and rejecting your grotesque bigotry.”

READ MORE: ‘How Dictators Destroy Free Nations’: Trump Slammed for Suggesting Firing Squad for Cheney

Author and activist Chasten Buttigieg, who is married to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, appeared to mock Vance’s remarks:

“Sorry wasn’t on here to see JD Vance’s latest gaffe. My husband and I were taking our kids trick-or-treating. In our minivan. With costumes from Target. Anyway, have you made a plan to knock doors for Kamala Harris this weekend?”

CNN’s Anderson Cooper led a panel Thursday night and mocked Vance’s remarks, saying, “I guess gay people are now accepted,” and called it “sort of progress.”

Mark McDevitt, Chief of Staff to U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA) wrote: “It’s rich to hear JD Vance try to talk about ‘normal gay guys’ as if he hasn’t spent years pushing the idea that being gay alone is abnormal and immoral. Now he wants to move the goal post to create divisions within our community. It’s gross.”

“A good reminder that solidarity is so important,” McDevitt added. “They will not spare the so called ‘normal gay guys’ when they come to dismantle the rights of the LGBTQ community. Don’t fall for this crap.”

READ MORE: ‘Embarrassing’: JD Vance’s Story About How He Responded to Trump Shooting Sparks Concerns

Author Lucas Schaefer noted, “What Vance is actually saying by ‘normal gay guy,’ from what I can tell, is ‘not trans’ but as anyone with a sense of history knows, after they destroy trans lives they’re coming for the rest of us. The acronym is fitting; we rise or fall together.”

Indeed, in context, according to a transcript, Vance’s remarks are exceptionally divisive and destructive.

He goes from talking about “the Nashville shooter,” who “went in and murdered a bunch of children at a Christian school because he or she, like whatever, was motivated by some very radical trans ideology. And that is something we should talk more about as a country,” to “these signs that are in super woke neighborhoods, I’m sure there’s plenty of them in Austin, like, ‘in this house, we believe science is real,'” to someone who is a “pro-gay rights guy,” who “sort of made the observation that when you get into the really radical trans stuff, you actually start to notice the similarities between a practiced religious faith and what these guys are doing.”

As the conversation continues, Vance says, “I’ll never forget,” a gay friend of his, “sent me something like six or so years ago. And it was Elizabeth Warren when she was running for president and she was like, ‘we stand for all non-binary two-spirit’ and all of the like, the LGBTI plus. She was talking about all the plus and she was codifying it. And he sent me this text message with this Elizabeth Warren tweet. And he’s like, I don’t know what the hell two-spirit is. We just wanted to be left the hell alone. And I think that, frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote, because again, they just wanted to be left the hell alone, and now you have all this crazy stuff on top of it that they’re like, we didn’t wanna give pharmaceutical products to nine-year-olds who are transitioning their genders.”

The Harris campaign took a swipe at Vance by posting the Rogan clip and Vance’s remarks at a debate where he says he’s “come out against” a marriage equality bill.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Nauseous’: Trump’s Refusal to Grasp ‘Consent’ Revives ‘Access Hollywood’ Scandal

Continue Reading

COMMENTARY

‘Easy Mark’: Why Trump’s $464M Bond Failure Makes Him a ‘Massive National Security Risk’

Published

1 year ago

on

March 18, 2024

By

National security, legal, and political experts are lining up to sound the alarm about the potential national security risks swirling around Donald Trump, and those warnings are getting stronger.

One month after Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 to announce his run for president, CNN reported on the real estate mogul’s repeated claims of great wealth. At one point Trump told supporters he was worth “well over $10 billion.” At other points Trump says, “I’m very rich,” and “I’m really rich.” CNN’s John King noted, “some voters see this as a virtue, in the sense that they think politicians are too beholden to special interests.”

Days later Politico ran with this headline: “Donald Trump’s new pitch: I’m so rich I can’t be bought.”

Fast forward nearly a decade later.

Donald Trump’s attorneys declared in court documents Monday that 30 companies all refused to secure a $464 million bond for Trump, which he owes the State of New York after losing his civil business fraud trial.

The sirens are now wailing.

READ MORE: ‘How Fascism Came to Germany’: Historian Warns Trump ‘Knew Exactly What He Was Saying’

Citing a Washington Post report, MSNBC’s Steve Benen writes, “it’s now ‘expected’ that Manafort will be hired” to work on the Trump 2024 presidential campaign, “at least in part because the former president is ‘determined to bring Manafort back into the fold.'”

Manafort is Paul Manafort, Trump’s former 2016 campaign chairman who in 2017, “surrendered to the F.B.I. and pleaded not guilty to charges that he laundered millions of dollars through overseas shell companies,” according to a New York Times report in October of 2017.

The Times also noted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had “announced charges … against three advisers to President Trump’s campaign,” including Manafort, “and laid out the most explicit evidence to date that his campaign was eager to coordinate with the Russian government to damage his rival, Hillary Clinton.”

In 2019, NPR reported, almost as a footnote, that “a court filing that was inadvertently unsealed earlier this year, revealed that Manafort shared polling data with a business associate who has ties to Russian intelligence services.”

In his MSNBC report, Benen noted, “the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Manafort ‘represented a grave counterintelligence threat‘ in 2016 due to his relationship with a Russian intelligence officer.”

“’The Committee found that Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign,’ the Senate report added.” Benen also reported: “When the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report literally pointed to a ‘direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services,’ it was referring in part to Manafort ‘directly and indirectly’ communicating with an accused Russian intelligence officer, a Russian oligarch, and several pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine.”

Benen reinforced his thesis, writing on social media: “When the Senate Intelligence Committee pointed to a ‘direct tie’ between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence services, it was referring in large part to Paul Manafort — who’s reportedly now headed back to Team Trump.”

Add to all that this plea from The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a retired U.S. Naval War College professor and expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs.

READ MORE: ‘Next Up – Property Seizures’: Experts Analyze ‘Unbankable’ Trump’s $464 Million Bond Crisis

“According to reports last week, the U.S. intelligence community is preparing to give Donald Trump classified intelligence briefings, a courtesy every White House extends to major-party candidates to ensure an effective transition. An excellent tradition—but not one that should be observed this year,” Nichols wrote at The Atlantic in a piece titled, “Donald Trump Is a National-Security Risk.”

“Indeed, if Trump were a federal employee, he’d have likely already been stripped of his clearances and escorted from the building.”

After discussing “Trump’s open and continuing affection” for authoritarian dictators, Nichols notes, “even if Trump could explain away his creepy dictator crushes and clarify his byzantine finances, he is currently facing more than half a billion dollars in court judgments against him.”

“That’s a lot of money for anyone, and Trump’s scramble to post a bond for even a small portion of that suggests that the man is in terrible financial condition, which is always a bright-red light in the clearance process.”

Political strategist Simon Rosenberg on Monday warned: “If Trump is given access to national security briefings he will now have someone with a proven history of selling stuff to the Russians on his team to help facilitate the movement of our intel to our adversaries.”

Also on Monday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote on X: “We cannot emphasize this enough: Trump’s mounting court fines make him a massive national security risk.”

“After multiple losses against E. Jean Carroll and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Donald Trump is facing judgements that could end up costing him upwards of $600 million,” CREW reported February 29. “But these rulings are more than a financial headache for Trump, they are an unprecedented opportunity to buy influence with a leading presidential candidate and a sitting president should he be re-elected.”

Diving deeper, CREW notes, “Trump left the presidency with at least $1.1 billion dollars in debt tied to the COVID-weakened commercial real estate market, the vast majority of which would come due in a hypothetical second term in office. These rulings would make that number 50% higher.”

“Giving the highest and most powerful office in the land to someone deeply in debt and looking for ways to make back hundreds of millions of dollars he lost in court is a recipe for the kinds of corruption that aren’t theoretical when it comes to Trump. There’s a reason that you can’t get a job in the military or the financial services industry, or even referee a major sporting event, if you have a massive amount of debt. And you certainly aren’t getting a security clearance because you become too big of a target for corruption.”

Bloomberg Opinion senior executive editor Tim O’Brien, an MSNBC political analyst and author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” observed, “Trump’s financial trap — he can’t come up with the cash to appeal his $454 million civil fraud judgment — may ravage his business. More directly: It intensifies his threat to national security by making him an easy mark for overseas interests.”

“There’s no reason to believe that Trump, whose businesses collected millions of dollars from foreign governments and officials while he was president, won’t have a for-sale sign out now that he’s struggling with the suffocating weight of court judgments,” O’Brien continues at Bloomberg. “Trump is being criminally prosecuted for allegedly misappropriating classified documents and stashing them at Mar-a-Lago, his home in Palm Beach, Florida. Without a trial and public disclosure of more evidence, Trump’s motivations for taking the documents are unknown, but it’s reasonable to wonder whether he pondered trying to sell them. Monetizing the White House has been something of a family affair, after all. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been busy trading financially on his proximity to the former president, for example.”

O’Brien concludes, “the going is likely to get rough for Trump as this plays out, and he’s likely to become more financially desperate with each passing day. That’s going to make him easy prey for interested lenders — and an easy mark for overseas interests eager to influence US policy.”

READ MORE: FBI Agent Furious Over MAL Search Thought Trump Would Return Classified Docs if Just Asked

 

Continue Reading

COMMENTARY

Trump’s New RNC Chair Flubs With a ‘Four Years Ago’ Gaffe

Published

1 year ago

on

March 15, 2024

By

Pro-Trump Republicans over the past two weeks keep asking Americans if they are “better off today” than they were four years ago, and many Americans keep responding “yes.” The latest to serve up an affirmative answer, surprisingly, is Donald Trump’s new hand-picked chair of the Republican National Committee, Michael Whatley.

Appearing on Fox News Friday morning, Whatley gave the Reagan refrain a twist:

“At the end of the day, this comes down to a very simple contrast between President Trump and President Biden. Were you better off four years ago than you are today? The answer for this entire country is ‘no.'”

Trying to immediately clean up his comment, Whatley continued: “I mean, yeah, we are better off today – or we will be.”

For some, Whatley’s double flub served as yet another reminder of just how bad life was four years ago.

READ MORE: Legal Experts Hail ‘Best Ruling’ for Willis in Trump Prosecution Case

“Four years ago, I was hitting the grocery store at 5 am, hoping there’d still be toilet paper and face masks there, then coming home and trying desperately to supervise my kids’ remote schooling in between my own Zoom conferences,” wrote jazz critic and journalist Michael J. West in response to Whatley’s remarks.

The resurgence of the “four years ago” question appears to have been kicked off by House Republican Conference chair, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) on March 6, when she stood before the cameras at a GOP press conference and told Americans, “As Ronald Reagan famously asked us, ‘Are you better off today than you were four years ago?’ The answer for hard-working Americans across the country is a resounding ‘no.’”

Her remarks were met in some corners with tremendous anger, with some seeing it as an affront to the more than one million Americans who would be dying from a COVID pandemic critics and medical experts say was worsened by then-President Donald Trump’s actions.

As NCRM wrote last week: On March 6, 2020, CNN had reported: “8 cases of coronavirus confirmed in Colorado,” “Kentucky confirms 1st coronavirus case,” “Son of nursing home resident with coronavirus describes fight to get mother tested,” “California’s Santa Clara County confirms 4 new coronavirus cases,” and, “Cruise passengers not told about coronavirus test results prior to Pence announcement.”

There may be a reason pro-Trump Republicans keep asking the question despite the answers they’re getting.

“Republicans don’t actually want you to remember 4 years ago,” Public Notice‘s Noah Berlatsky on Friday wrote. “It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that March 2020 was among the worst months in the history of the American republic.”

Pointing to Stefanik co-opting Reagan’s query, Berlatsky adds, “Lara Trump, the new co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said virtually the same thing to Sean Hannity on Tuesday. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott echoed that sentiment on Fox News as well, saying, ‘We have to go back to that future, 2017-2020. We want those four years one more time.'”

READ MORE: Fox News Host Claims Trump ‘Not Charged With Obstructing’ Despite Multiple Counts

To claim Americans actually were better off four years ago, he continues, “requires a bizarre form of political, social, and economic amnesia.”

“Four years ago, in March 2020, the covid pandemic was rampaging across the world and country as the president desperately tried to wish it away. People were getting sick, many were dying, and the economy was shutting down as a result. It’s not a time to look back on with nostalgia.”

“It wasn’t just covid,” Berlatsky adds, reminding Americans who have forgotten.

“2020 was the year police in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, sparking nationwide protests against police brutality and racism. In response, Trump told police and military leaders that they should ‘beat the fuck out’ of protesters and encouraged authorities to ‘just shoot them.’ In line with those sentiments, National Guard troops tear-gassed protesters in DC’s Lafayette Square while Trump staged a photo-op at a nearby church.”

Have Americans forgotten?

The New York Times apparently thinks so.

“Do Americans Have a ‘Collective Amnesia’ About Donald Trump?” The Times’ asked March 5 – one day before Stefanik invoked Reagan’s “better off” question – before observing, “memories of Mr. Trump’s presidency have faded and changed fast.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

READ MORE: Red Flags Raised Over Ex-Trump Official’s TikTok Bid

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © 2020 AlterNet Media.